A Village in the Third Reich: How Ordinary Lives Were Transformed By the Rise of Fascism – from the author of Sunday Times bestseller Travellers in the Third Reich

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This is not to imply that Oberstdorf lacked dedicated Nazis, many of whom remained passionately loyal to Hitler to the end. In its pages we meet the Jews who survived – and those who didn’t; the Nazi mayor who tried to shield those persecuted by the regime; and a blind boy whose life was thought ‘not worth living’. She stated as a part of her purpose the desire to create "a narrative that allowed readers to live and breathe Oberstdorf's history; to sense what it had actually been like to be alive in this particular village at this particular time. But more memorable is his portrait of a place making the painful transition from a communal, industrial culture to one based on leisure, services and individuals.

Men like Fink were rare, but Boyd’s book does remind us that even the most brutal regimes cannot extinguish all semblance of human feeling. She is the author of Ein Dorf im Spiegel seiner Zeit (A Village in the Mirror of its Time): Oberstdorf 1918–1952. The account it gives is all the more powerful for being told though the voices and experiences of ordinary people. The book is very detailed and in some cases, such as the account of infighting among the local Nazis, becomes a bit too much so and drags a bit. As Julia Boyd emphasizes, too many people allowed reverence for a nation’s glorious past to warp their judgment about its morally repugnant present.After so many books have been, and are being, written about this period, it’s amazing that there are still so many new stories to tell. Her previous books include A Dance with the Dragon: The Vanished World of Peking's Foreign Colony; The Excellent Doctor Blackwell: The Life of the First Woman Physician;and Hannah Riddell: An Englishwoman in Japan. Such a detailed analysis was possible due to vast archives preserved and to memoirs, letters and memories of those whose ancestors lived in the village before the WW2 and through it. Martin is a journalist and novelist with splendid observational skills and a warm, comic touch, and he spots regional characteristics others have missed. DuBois—who should have been particularly attuned to race-baiting and prejudice—stopped short of demonizing the regime.

I am grateful for the opportunity to read this book pre-publication through the publisher and Netgalley in exchange for my honest review. Nevertheless it does get a little relentless in places, and the nature of the archive is such that it favours dates, arrests and official actions and the authors are loathe to fill in additional speculative colour if they can help it. Biography: Julia Boyd is the author of the Sunday Times bestseller Travellers in the Third Reich: The Rise of Fascism through the Eyes of Everyday People. Germany during the Third Reich needs to be focused on the people not just the military and political leaders. A Village in the Third Reich by Julia Boyd review — how a Bavarian community experienced the rise and fall of Hitler".

We get a detailed account of a small thriving village tucked away near the Alps and how its inhabitants were manipulated and adapted to a power beyond their control . Within its pages we encounter people from all walks of life – foresters, priests, farmers and nuns; innkeepers, Nazi officials, veterans and party members; village councillors, mountaineers, socialists, slave labourers, schoolchildren, tourists and aristocrats. Julia Boydis the author of Travelers in the Third Reich: The Rise of Fascism through the Eyes of Everyday People. It’s not been deliberate but I seem to be constantly reading both fiction and non-fiction about the Second World War and the Holocaust.