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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In every dictatorship, people rush to join the ruling party for any number of reasons - legitimate belief in its ideology, the make connections and get ahead in society, or to try changing the system from the inside. What Julia Boyd and Angelika Patel have done is nothing short of remarkable: they’ve documented in detail how villagers, at first slowly and then rapidly, came to embrace Nazism. We rarely think or hear about the resistance in Germany, except perhaps with regards to the protection of Jewish families. A Village in the Third Reich is an engrossing work of social history which approaches well-known historical events through unusual viewpoints. The study of Julia Boyd, based on earlier work of Angelika Patel, questions how far Nazism and World War II influenced village life.

The authors have used a multiplicity of facts, historical documents, including letters and newspapers, and eye-witness accounts from during the period covered by the book and in hindsight, to tell the reader a plethora of interesting stories about the lives and adventures of the village’s many inhabitants: committed Nazis, members of the Resistance, and the large number of those in-between, who, perhaps fearing the oppressive power and many cruelties of the Nazi regime and brainwashed by propaganda, enabled, though their silence and inaction, the many atrocities committed by those in positions of power and influence at that time.But it’s non-fiction and with copious extracts from contemporaneous newspapers and documents, it’s the worst type of non-fiction for me (I stress, it’s me, not the fault of the book). The population of the village increased from around 4000 at the beginning to more than 8000 at the end of the War.

Julia Boyd and her collaborator Anjelika Patel paint a compelling picture of how every aspect of life changed over the course of two decades within this community.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. We are in the habit of viewing history through the lens of our own culture, with little thought or insight into the lives of those on 'the other side'. Put in a nutshell, this act set out to ensure that every aspect of German life – social, political and cultural – conform to Nazi ideology and policy.

In the Village in the Third Reich What author succeeds in depicting normal daily live in Germany before and during the Second World War. Moderate Nazi” is the ultimate contradiction in terms, and there is no indication that Fink was trying to destroy the whole system from within. Oberstdorf had a negligible Jewish population, but one resident did covertly provide assistance to Jews. Those who had joined out of a sense of victimhood, particularly in the early years of The Party, were utterly committed to the persecution of those they saw as persecuting themselves, and were furiously opposed to those, often more senior than them, who seemed to have other things to care about! The German people struggled to get even the basic things or couldn’t afford them at all because of hyperinflation.

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 judged ‘not worth living’. Knowing nothing about the rise of Nazism, I felt I learned that as well as the end of it – denazification and rehabilitation. This book provides a thorough look at what it was like before, during, and after the war years for the people of Oberstdorf. There’s not a tangible person to follow, instead it’s a whole village and becomes confusing and hard to follow.