Volksgemeinschaft () is a German expression meaning "people's community",Peter Fritzsche. Life and Death in the Third Reich. President and Fellows of Harvard College, 2008. p. 38.Norbert Götz. Ungleiche Geschwister: Die Konstruktion von nationalsozialistischer Volksgemeinschaft und schwedischem Volksheim. Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2001. "folk community",Richard Grunberger, A Social History of the Third Reich, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971, p. 44. "national community",Timothy W. Mason. Social Policy in the Third Reich: The Working Class and the National Community. Berg Publishers, 1993. Editor's Note, p. xvii. or "racial community",Joseph W. Bendersky. A Concise History of Nazi Germany. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2014. p. 32. depending on the translation of its component term Volk (cognate with the English word "folk"). This expression originally became popular during World War I as Germans rallied in support of the war, and many experienced "relief that at one fell swoop all social and political divisions could be solved in the great national equation". The idea of a Volksgemeinschaft was rooted in the notion of uniting people across class divides to achieve a national purpose,Fritzsche, p. 39. and the hope that national unity would "obliterate all conflicts - between employers and employees, town and countryside, producers and consumers, industry and craft".
