Saxony was the most densely populated Gau (around 5.2 million inhabitants in 1939) of the ‘Third Reich’. Within the NSDAP the Gau had numerically the greatest weight, and Gauleiter Martin Mutschmann was undoubtedly one of the most powerful regional party leaders. As the area was out of reach of Allied bombers in the early years of World War II, beginning in 1942-1943 some arms production was relocated there from all over Germany. Saxony accordingly gained economic importance and eventually evolved into the ‘armoury’ of the German Reich. Until the end of 1943 conditions resembling peace-time still prevailed in the region. But the devastating attack on Leipzig in December 1943 brought the war to Saxony. The bombing of Dresden, Chemnitz and Plauen in 1945 were among the heaviest bombardments immediately before the end of the war. In the spring of 1945 both Soviet and American troops entered Saxony, making the state one of the last battlegrounds on German soil. The rapid changes occurring between 1943 and 1945 make the Gau of Saxony – geographically identical to the Reichsland – a good subject for social history. The chronologically structured study will bring together the processes of political, economic, social and cultural development in an overall social perspective. Taking ‘domination as a social practice’ and ‘claims to power versus social reality’ as points of departure, the study will yield an agent-based description focussing on people as well as social groups and their interactions within the late war-time society. These approaches can shed light on, among other things, the question of the respective roles of persons or groups of people in maintaining the functionality of the Nazi regime during the final years of the war.