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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As it is, there are a huge number of people mentioned and I referred to the index and the list of people at the back quite frequently to remind myself who was who. If Oberstdorf’s story has much to tell us, it also leaves many questions unanswered—questions that will forever remain part of the legacy of the Third Reich. For those not already in the know, it was soon apparent that this man was the village’s new National Socialist leader. By closely following these people as they coped with the day-to-day challenges of life under the Nazis, there emerges a real sense of how ordinary Germans supported, adapted to and outlasted a regime that, after promising them so much, in the end delivered only anguish and devastation.

A Village in the Third Reich by Julia Boyd review — how a

Under his mayoralty, Oberstdorf became a relatively safe haven for Jews fleeing persecution elsewhere in Germany.Let Churchill and Chamberlain taste our German bombs,” 11-year-old Max Müller wrote in a letter to a local Luftwaffe pilot deployed during the Battle of Britain.

A Village in the Third Reich by Julia Boyd, review: An

The book is very good at describing the spectrum of fears, beliefs, hopes and indifference which allowed the Nazis to stay in power.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. It takes the reader inside Nazi Germany on four different levels: Hitler's inner circle, National Socialism as a whole, the area of wartime production and the inner struggle of Albert Speer.

VILLAGE IN THE THIRD REICH - AbeBooks 9781783966561: VILLAGE IN THE THIRD REICH - AbeBooks

But documents show how their morale plummeted in the months following the failed invasion of the Soviet Union, when, apart from depressing reversals on the battlefield, the villagers also feared receiving news that a loved one was missing or had been killed or wounded. But if this is primarily a tale of political tragedy, it is also one in which human resilience triumphs. A historical work is most easily followed when tightly centered around a main figure or a few main figures and one can see how they have done over time. Some tremble on the precipice of acknowledging their guilt before retreating into denial or excuses.

And so it went on in the village of Oberstdorf throughout the 1930s and 1940s, with the rise and fall of Nazism an undercurrent all along – except it was one that swelled in a way that even a quiet little village couldn’t ignore. This is a wonderful micro-history of the Third Reich using the village as an exemplar of the ordinary German in those fateful years. John the Baptist, its spire visible for miles around, the marketplace was also where the largely Catholic Oberstdorfers came to remember their fallen soldiers at memorials to the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and 1871 and to World War I, the latter housed in a small chapel next to the church. Important figures however, such as the Mayor and local Nazi party administrators reoccur, and they do their best to give everyone with a story justice.