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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I can thoroughly recommend it as a contribution to knowledge and an absorbing and stimulating book in itself. Oberstdorf, Germany’s southernmost village, sits in Alpine meadows beneath the Himmelschrofen mountain. The focus on Oberstdorf also shows the chaos that was the norm of the Nazi State and how much the implementation of the 'Jewish question' was dependent on individuals in power. I had read about this programme before, in the context of its being the forerunner of the Final Solution, whereby the Nazis practiced the methods they eventually used on the Jews, and other "racial undesirables" such as Gypsies.

From an incomplete list it was found that there were 455 names on the list, roughly 10% of the village, which also happened to mirror the Nazis membership across Germany. This was a largely Catholic village at the time, the most southern village in Germany, a farming community which became a tourist destination thanks to the mountains and with the first concentration camp of Dachau close by.Its an obvious companion to Milton Sanford Meyer's 'They Thought They Were Free', looking at the lives of ten Nazi party members in another German small village. Plenty of context with a decent amount on the Weimar period and the lead up to the Nazis taking over. In the village there are die hard early supporters of the Nazis, a small Jewish community living in fear and many folk who are persuaded by Hitler's early successes to go along with the Nazi project. Some of those gradually experienced doubts once the Nazis dragged the country into a second world war. On the evening of March 5, 1933, the inhabitants of Oberstdorf, a Bavarian village some 100 miles southwest of Munich, began making their way to the marketplace, eager to hear what their mayor had to say about the federal election held earlier that day.

Hidden deep in the Bavarian mountains lies the picturesque village of Oberstdorf – a place where for hundreds of years people lived simple lives while history was made elsewhere. But a system that forced everyone to conform or risk imprisonment, torture or death makes it challenge for historians to accurately assess why so many Germans—including Oberstdorfers—appear to have been complicit in the Reich’s crimes against humanity.This absorbing and beautifully organised book is full of small encounters that jolt the reader into a historical past that seems still very near. The author told the history of Oberstdorf, a village in the Bavarian Alps, the community as well as the young men as they fought across Europe and the Eastern Front, from the end of World War I to 5 May, 1955, when the Federal Republic of Germany was granted the full authority of a sovereign state. It was not quite five weeks since January 30, when Adolf Hitler had been sworn in as Germany’s new chancellor, but it was clear to everybody—even in this far-off Alpine village—that the political landscape had changed. It is impossible to keep all the villagers clear in one’s head, and the book just goes on and on and on. This is a piece of history while that was part political investigation and part discussion of a (now past) future.

In the village archive, we encountered foresters, priests, farmers and nuns; innkeepers, Nazi officials, veterans and party members; village councilors, mountaineers, socialists, forced laborers, schoolchildren, Jews, entrepreneurs, tourists and aristocrats.She is the author of Ein Dorf im Spiegel seiner Zeit (A Village in the Mirror of its Time): Oberstdorf 1918-1952. Oberstdorf’s new Nazi mayor, Ludwig Fink, did not subscribe to official strictures around these murders. Julia Boyd has once again written an enticing history of Germany, coming at it from a different perspective than usual histories. We hear of Karl Richter a soldier who leads a local coup to protect Obertsdorf the village at the end of the war from Allied attack but who then becomes deeply unpopular in the village.

The book has opened my eyes to the idea that all of Germany throughout those years being split into good and evil is perhaps too simplistic. A Village in the Third Reich,” adapted by Julia Boyd from the town’s official history, shows how and why a sober, traditional Bavarian village roped its fate to fascism.Many of the villagers viewed Hitler with distrust and Bolshevism with fear, but the villages new mayor, Ernst Zeitler, was unpopular as he expected the villagers to conform to Nazi ideology and policy. When armed conflict began, casualties among Oberstdorf’s men were low, but they spiralled upwards when the campaign in the east began. 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. Their canvas is large, even a village has thousands of residents, and sometimes the sheer weight of names and stories can overwhelm. 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.