The love story and life stories of Roland and Hilde Nordhoff, who lived in the then independent town of Oberfrohna, not only describe their personal relationship – they also open a window onto the everyday experiences of people in Saxony between 1938 and 1946. There are more than 2,600 letters written between May 1938 and February 1946, which have now been digitised up to April 1943.

The letters impressively document the challenges, hopes, fears and dreams of a young couple during the Second World War and the immediate post-war period. At the beginning of their correspondence, they wrote to each other once or twice a week. During the Second World War, however, the two exchanged letters several times a day. They discuss a wide range of topics, such as family and friends, religious beliefs, art and culture, living and working conditions, but also Nazi politics and developments associated with the Second World War.

Roland Nordhoff was born in 1907 in Kamenz, a rural village in eastern Saxony. After giving up his music studies, he worked as a teacher in Oberfrohna near Chemnitz until he was transferred to Lichtenhain in Saxony in the spring of 1938. Around this time, he also joined the NSDAP. On the 13th of July in 1940, he finally married Hilde Laube.

In August 1940, Roland Nordhoff, like his brothers Hellmuth and Siegfried, was drafted into the German Armed Forces and sent to Barkelsby near Kiel for basic military training. He was trained as a petty officer in Schleswig-Holstein to serve as a clerk in the Navy. He was then transferred to Plovdiv in Bulgaria in 1941 and finally to Thessaloniki in Greece, where he was still stationed in 1942. He also spent time in Sofia, Bucharest and the Crimea before returning to Bulgaria. He served in the Navy until the end of the war, when he was taken prisoner by the Red Army. The correspondence ends when he returned from captivity to Hilde Nordhoff in February 1946.

Hilde Nordhoff was born in 1920 as Hilde Laube into a working-class family in Oberfrohna, a small town in Saxony. She worked in a domestic servant for a year, continuing in a knitwear factory afterwards.

She knew Roland Nordhoff from the choir in Oberfrohna. After Roland Nordhoff had to move away from Oberfrohna, she wrote him her first letter on the 4th of May in 1938, in which she revealed her love for him.

The correspondence shows Hilde Nordhoff to be a strong, courageous, ambitious and romantic woman who wanted more from life. She was a devout Christian, and although she may have been naive when it came to political issues, she also asked critical questions about important topics of the day.

She continued to live in Oberfrohna throughout the entire period of their correspondence, where she helped her parents with housework during the war and looked after a “group of children” from the Deutsche Kinderschar (DK), a sub-organisation of the National Socialist People’s Welfare Organisation (NSV).

The project ‘Everyday Life and War’ is being implemented by young people from the Limbach-Oberfrohna region and is part of the Saxon Youth Foundation’s annual ‘Spurensuche’ (Searching for Traces) programme. As part of the project, the young people are independently dedicated to documenting this extensive correspondence as historical source material. In doing so, they combine insights into the biographies of the two protagonists and local contemporary events with the European history of the Nazi era. The aim is to provide an insight into the lifes of Roland and Hilde Nordhoff – as an example of how individuals deal with crises, ideology and the transformation of their hometown.

At the same time, the project brings to life a piece of the history of Limbach-Oberfrohna, an industrial town that has developed from a former forest village to an elegant glove and knitwear production center to a modern city within Saxony.