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 a book full of interesting insights, but it is not a book which sets out to reinforce the received “wisdom” about the NAZIs or anything else and it may well prove controversial because of this. Boyd finds numerous examples of humanity and heroism which illustrate the complexities and contradictions of this period - perhaps most strikingly embodied in Oberstdorf's mayor, Ludwig Fink, a committed Nazi who nonetheless protected several Jews living in the village.

It is provides a unique perspective as most literature on the Third Reich looks at its rise from an urban perspective, and also does not go into the same level of detail regarding people's lived experiences of this period as Boyd does. Boyd finds examples of humanity, sometimes in the most unexpected of places – a case in point is Oberstdorf’s mayor who, despite being a committed Nazi, also protected several Jews living in his village. It was on the strength of this that I picked up this book, for that is its purpose – seeing how the Third Reich unfolded in an ordinary Bavarian village. Making sense of this story is perhaps helped by first reading Boyd and Patel’s short back story introductions beginning on page 383. Julia Boyd (assisted by Angelika Patel) explores this question by zooming in on a single Alpine village, Oberstdorf.

Later came William Sheridan Allen’s 1965 book The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town 1930–1935 whose subject matter was the town of Northeim in Lower Saxony. It's very informative and even though it occasionally becomes a little confusing, it's still worth a read. Even technical education, something which Germany had once been very good at, was massively dumbed down in favour of tighter control. even in this farthest corner of Germany, National Socialism sought to control not only people’s lives but also their minds. Other villagers - many of them social outcasts who leapt at the chance to lord it over their colleagues - went all in on supporting the Nazis, some actively resisted, but most just kept their heads down and tried to carry on as usual, without attracting too much attention.

The Jewish Holocaust is the most obvious example, but less celebrated and in some ways even more sinister was the extermination, completed before most of the Jews were touched, of pretty well all the handicapped and disabled from the ethnic German population. There are anti-Nazi grumblings for sure, but there are no anti-Nazi heros, at least not until the very end of the war. The Nazi regime didn’t go out of its way to advertise what was happening in the camps and euthanasia clinics, but the word got around nonetheless. Russia is now more isolated from the rest of the world than at any time since the Brezhnev era, and the Putin regime has become increasingly repressive and Margarita Simonyan’s propaganda machine increasingly strident and intense.Having previously written about visitors to Germany during the 1930s and their opinions about the rise of Hitler and Nazis in Travellers in the Third Reich (excellent!

The German people struggled to get even the basic things or couldn’t afford them at all because of hyperinflation.

The neutral tone of the narration is a huge plus because otherwise, it can be really easy to generalize people and make a judgment. Then we learn that this Oberstdorf “resistance” movement only became active in February 1945 as Germany was near its final collapse. For anyone with even a passing interest in the Inter-war years and World War Two, this is a very worthwhile read. 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. The last chapters address the consequences for the village and its inhabitants in the aftermath of the War.

Indeed Ukraine features in the book and it’s heart breaking to think that that country is again in hell thanks to one man and his ambition.The book gave me a whole new perspective into the life of the German people after the First World War and during the tumultuous times of the Nazi regime. Boyd makes a convincing case for Oberstdorfers' awareness of the Final Solution (even if not all supported it), and the most poignant aspects of the book deal with the treatment of Oberstdorf's small number of Jewish residents. This is a tale of conflicting loyalties and desires, of shattered dreams—but one in which, ultimately, human resilience triumphs.