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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From the author of the international bestseller Travelers in the Third Reich comes A Village in the Third Reich, shining a light on the lives of ordinary people. The villagers had long since become accustomed to the presence of these noisy brownshirts on their streets, even if they did not necessarily approve. There are a few eyewitness accounts which fill those memories in but there is a tendancy for it to be a little dry in places. We met Theodor Weissenberger, a blind teenager condemned to die in a gas chamber at age 19 because he was living a “ life unworthy of life.

Drawing on personal archives, letters, interviews and memoirs, it lays bare their brutality and love; courage and weakness; action, apathy and grief; hope, pain, joy, and despair.By putting one village under the microscope, this book evocatively portrays the momentous period of Nazism in Germany. In A Village in the Third Reich Julia Boyd creates a fascinating account of the impact of the Third Reich on Obertsdorf, a small German village in the Bavarian Alps. Book talk: Julia Boyd: A Village in the Third Reich: How Ordinary Lives were Transformed by the Rise of Fascism".

Fink granted them residence permits and did not enforce full registration of their ethnicity, which meant their presence was less obvious to higher authorities. Oberstdorf was doing quite well in the 1930s and many of its were wealthy and they also had distinguished Jewish visitors. It’s through their records that historians understand how the genocidal dictatorship of Hitler’s Nazi Germany happened, how fascism gains power and how attacks on the most vulnerable populations eventually affect the most comfortable.At times I had to put the book down as it packed such a punch with individual reflections and observations. He also supported other inhabitants who found themselves on the wrong side of the Nazi legal system. On the night of March 4, 1933, the local Nazi Party emblazoned the Himmelschrofen with a giant flare swastika. 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.

As an academic, I would have loved to see the sources for the information, but that's a problem of the audiobook format, not the author's fault. 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. In the election of 1930 on a village turnout of 70% the NSDAP won more votes than any other of the Parties which had stood. Today the only visible scars of the war and the Nazi years can be found in the memorial chapel, where the names of the 286 Oberstdorfers killed in the Second World War are carved in stone. 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’.There is even a tale at the end about the resistance whose names are still being protected seventy five years on. Similarly, he contrasts the parsimonious asceticism with a sweet tooth that meant the region had far more confectionary manufacturers than any other: Yorkshire gave us chocolate oranges, Pontefract cakes and Kit-Kats. Julia Boyd’s exceptional new book gets to the root of the matter by focusing exclusively on the inhabitants of one small village.

The result is a remarkable moral drama, a miniature epic that is subtle in characterization, gripping in detail, and shocking in its brutal ordinariness. 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. Boyd the author of the author of Travellers in the Third Reich which was a best-selling history will once again make the charts with this book.You have to hand it to the Scottish government: the deletion of WhatsApp messages is good preemptive news management, whether accidental, by default or deliberate. Like others I have often wondered about where to find the bridge between the atrocious events perpetrated by the Nazi regime and the ordinary people who lived in Germany at the time and who, to greater or lesser extents became complicit in what was going on.