A Village in the Third Reich: How Ordinary Lives Were Transformed by the Rise of Fascism

by Julia Boyd, Angelika Patel

Overview

An intimate portrait of German life during World War II, shining a light on ordinary people living in a picturesque Bavarian village under Nazi rule, from a past winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History.

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. Yet even this remote idyll could not escape the brutal iron grip of the Nazi regime.

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. 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.

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. 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."

This is a tale of conflicting loyalties and desires, of shattered dreams—but one in which, ultimately, human resilience triumphs. These are the stories of ordinary lives at the crossroads of history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781639363780
Publisher:	Pegasus Books
Publication date:	04/04/2023
Pages:	480
Sales rank:	150,160
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.70(d)

About the Author

Julia Boyd is the author of Travelers in the Third Reich: The Rise of Fascism through the Eyes of Everyday People. Her previous books include A Dance with the Dragon: The Vanished World of Peking's Foreign Colony; The Excellent Doctor Blackwell: The Life of the First Woman Physician; and Hannah Riddell: An Englishwoman in Japan. As the widow of a former diplomat, she lived in Germany from 1977 to 1981. She now lives in London.

Angelika Patel was born into an old Oberstdorf family. She studied History and German Literature before taking an MBA at INSEAD at Fontainebleu. She is the author of Ein Dorf im Spiegel seiner Zeit (A Village in the Mirror of its Time): Oberstdorf 1918–1952. She lives in London and Oberstdorf.

Editorial Reviews

02/27/2023

Historian Boyd (Travelers in the Third Reich) and Patel, a native of Oberstdorf, Germany, recount in this nuanced history how the rise and fall of Nazi Germany affected Patel’s hometown. Located in the Allgäu, a region in Swabia known for “the beauty of its mountains and the toughness of its people,” Oberstdorf is the southernmost village in Germany. Detailing the “swift and ruthless” transition from the political tumult of Weimar Germany to Nazi totalitarianism, the authors note that by 1934, the atmosphere in Oberstdorf “had changed profoundly. Shop windows that had once displayed quilts now flaunted swastikas and brown shirts.” A turning point came in 1940, when Hitler’s sinister new “racial hygiene” law led to the euthanization of a blind 19-year-old whose family who had been in Oberstdorf for generations. By 1943, Oberstdorf was overrun with evacuees from Allied bombing campaigns, refugees from the Soviet invasion, and wounded soldiers, putting a heavy strain on the village’s infrastructure and food supplies. While crediting Mayor Ludwig Fink, a “moderate Nazi,” and others with shielding local Jews and Jewish refugees from persecution, Boyd and Patel pose difficult questions about ordinary Germans’ complicity in the horrors of the Holocaust. Making excellent use of Oberstdorf’s “particularly well-maintained” archive, this richly textured chronicle offers valuable insights into “the most far-reaching tragedy in human history.” (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Travelers in the Third Reich:

Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History

From the Publisher

"While there have been countless books written about the rise of Hitler, Travelers in the Third Reich relies on firsthand accounts by foreigners to convey what it was really like to visit, study or vacation in Germany during the 1920s and ’30s. As Julia Boyd emphasizes, too many people allowed reverence for a nation’s glorious past to warp their judgment about its morally repugnant present. That’s a lesson still worth thinking about.

Michael Dirda

"Far fewer travelers were free to move about the country during those years, and the accounts they left behind are, as Boyd puts it, ‘both horrifying and touching.’ Those terms apply intensely to the whole of Travelers in the Third Reich, and readers will likely share Boyd's quiet outrage that more Germans didn't see—or weren't willing to admit—what was happening right in front of their eyes."

Christian Science Monitor

"Extraordinary and absorbing. These firsthand glimpses of a dark time in Germany show us the complexity of appearances, and Boyd’s book should be widely read."

BookPage

"Exceptional. Boyd's book reminds us that even the most brutal regimes cannot extinguish all semblance of human feeling.

The Mail on Sunday

Gripping. Vividly depicted. A humane and richly detailed book.

The Spectator

"An utterly absorbing insight into the full spectrum of responses from ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances.

The Times (London)

"These vivid, moving stories leave us asking, 'What would I have done?’"

Professor David Reynolds

"Laying bare the tragedies, the compromises, the suffering and the disillusionment. Exemplary micro history.

Roger Moorehouse

"Fascinating. You’ll learn more about the psychological workings of Nazism by reading this superbly researched chronicle than you will by reading a shelf of wider-canvas volumes on the rise of Nazism.

The Daily Mail

"Boyd's fresh and instructive look at 1930s Germany as described in contemporaneous travel narratives reveals a tourist destination that continued to attract visitors even as the true intentions of the Nazis became obvious."

Booklist

"Conveys how challenging it must have been to forecast the dimensions of the impending tragedy. Boyd notes that, in 1936, even so astute and well-intentioned an observer as the African-American educator W.E. B. DuBois—who should have been particularly attuned to race-baiting and prejudice—stopped short of demonizing the regime.

The Boston Globe

2023-01-11
How a storied, seemingly idyllic Bavarian town gradually embraced Nazi ideology.

Working with Patel, a local historian who was designated the task of writing a history of Oberstdorf covering the years of Nazi rule. Boyd, author of the award-winning Travelers of the Third Reich, delved into this project almost reluctantly, knowing little about the place. Yet it soon become apparent that this story of a small town in Germany served as a microcosm for the entire nation, which ultimately succumbed to Nazi rule. As a Catholic-majority village of about 4,000 near the Austrian border, with few Jews living there in the late 1930s and many tourists and skiers lured to its spectacular mountains, Oberstdorf boasted a vigorous municipal government—until March 5, 1933, when the populace voted in the Nazi Party. Following the “political chaos of the Weimar Republic,” Boyd shows how the Nazis gained favor, after which immediate directives from Berlin—in the form of the Enabling Act, providing “the Nazis the legal means to eliminate their political opponents swiftly and brutally,” and other edicts—changed everything for the local government, which was immediately replaced by Nazi functionaries. The “new men” had arrived in town, and any local opposition was repressed. Nazis corralled the town’s youth into clubs and organizations and filled school curricula with race lessons and antisemitism. Then the Nazis looked toward abolishing religious practices and neutralizing their authority. Boyd looks carefully at the role of the local mountain troops in the Eastern Front, especially Operation Barbarossa, and the tribunes of final reckoning by the French and Moroccan invaders, followed by the Americans. The author effectively portrays the horrific toll of the war on one small town, personalizing it among the perpetrators, but readers may find it difficult to sympathize with some of the characters she introduces.

A thorough, chilling social history of how Nazi ideology took hold at the local level.

Kirkus Reviews

"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."

Air Mail

"An illuminating look at Hitler's rise to power and how it played out in one Bavarian village. The prose is clear, confident and measured, connecting national events to Oberstdorf as often as possible, a device that never feels forced — only human."

Star Tribune

"A remarkable moral drama, a miniature epic that is subtle in characterization, gripping in detail, and shocking in its brutal ordinariness.

The Wall Street Journal Dominic Green