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 Oberstdorf, Nazism was initially slow to catch on, and Jews (and other future undesirables) were readily welcomed as part of the village's tourist trade. Boyd and Patel unfortunately does not explore the concept of the Volk which is foundational to Nazi philosophy.

As Germany began to take a more prominent global role under Angela Merkel, its first chancellor born after World War II, interest in the “good Germans” from the Nazi era grew. Allen drew attention to the most spectacular Nazi device for raising funds and justifying their rule, the Eintopfgerichtsonntage or “Stew Sundays. Boyd, Julia and Angelika Patel, A Village in the Third Reich: How Ordinary Lives Were Transformed By the Rise of Fascism (2022). And although villagers objected to the behaviour of some Party members, there was a growing sense that “Hitler himself might really be the great leader Germans had been waiting for” (58) -

But Fuhrerprinzip or the “leadership principle” meant that it was considered actually offensive for anyone in a leadership position to be seen to consider the opinions of anyone who wasn’t. I think it’s even better than its predecessor, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this one also wins prizes. There’s not a tangible person to follow, instead it’s a whole village and becomes confusing and hard to follow. There have been a number of long and comprehensive reviews of this book with a wide variety of opinions expressed. And, coming from a country where the war always seems to have been won by English speaking people, it was refreshing to see how the French (aided by the Moroccans) liberated the village.

Travellers in the Third Reich was an excellent book (and a previous Waterstones Book of the month) and this is equally if not more excellent. Of course, there were many Germans who, for various reasons, embraced the novel, evil ideology of their leader. All the German Volk—social, political, and cultural organizations—were to conform and merge with Nazi ideology and policy. There is even a tale at the end about the resistance whose names are still being protected seventy five years on.As someone who has wondered how the Nazis managed to achieve what they did, I found this book to be absolutely fascinating.

Having read, and enjoyed, Julia Boyd’s previous book, “Travellers in the Third Reich,” I was eager to read her new title, which looks at the Third Reich from the viewpoint of the Bavarian village of Oberstdorf. 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. I would thoroughly recommend this book, which arrested my interest from the outset and held it throughout. Those who joined simply to further their own interests could easily be incentivised to do anything Hitler wanted them to do. Even in wartime when villagers were listening to banned radio broadcasts from outside the Reich in the hopes of finding out what was really going on, it was to a Swiss station that they tuned.Boyd notes that, in 1936, even so astute and well-intentioned an observer as the African-American educator W. In fairness, the pointillist approach taken by the authors in their microhistory doesn’t necessarily mean a full picture emerges as it might from the broad-brush strokes of a macrohistory, but the attempt is valiant and the book interesting for the patient reader. Contrariwise to the book’s title, much of the story presented is devoted to events in Germany at the time and to the larger context whereby the reader can better understand where Oberstdorf lies within the wider picture. As it is a historical text its not a novel but for me, I found it rather a historical text that I dipped in and out chapter by chapter, but this did not make my enjoyment of the book any less. This policy wasn’t publicly proclaimed, but local NAZI officials in Oberstdorf knew it was coming and the NAZI Mayor Fink brought his own handicapped son back from an institution, to the village where he was less likely to be selected and killed.

Russians, at least those in our sample, clearly hide their true attitudes towards the war,” they said. While the Empowerment Act proved a terrifying piece of legislation for so many individual Germans, it was the Equalisation Act that was to have the most immediate effect on towns and villages throughout the country.Chapter 12 begins thusly: “Between 20 January and 13 December 1940, the Nazis gassed 9,839 people at the Grafeneck euthanasia center.