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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Wilhelm Steiner walked 200 miles from Alsace to get to Oberstdorf and found the mayor struggling to feed the expanding population on rations that extended to one weekly egg per person. The Party was never designed to REPRESENT its members, but to be a tool by which The Leader controlled the membership and through them the Reich. The education system was so subsumed to Nazi ideology that one teacher confessed to a friend that he’d choose imprisonment in a concentration camp to teaching students such garbage, except that his family members would also be punished. Boyd cleverly shows through the recollections of the residents just how a nation could support, or just accept, the Nazi regime when it is unfathomable to the rest of the world how that could happen.

One of the most important things to point out to any wood-be reader, is that this is not so much a novel as a recount of life in a village in Germany before, during and after WW2. It gives a paragraph talking about each person or family mentioned in this book and what happened to them from after the war to present day or until their natural death. The neutral tone of the narration is a huge plus because otherwise, it can be really easy to generalize people and make a judgment. Boyd, Julia and Angelika Patel, A Village in the Third Reich: How Ordinary Lives Were Transformed By the Rise of Fascism (2022). Before tourism arrived, Oberstdorf survived chiefly on farming, cheese production and small deposits of iron ore; it thrived on tourism since the 1920s, and in 1930 the Nebelhorn car made her maiden voyage and became the longest cableway in the world.

There are anti-Nazi grumblings for sure, but there are no anti-Nazi heros, at least not until the very end of the war. Boyd and Patel also had access to diaries and letters from private collections and documents preserved in various national, state, and church archives, giving her a unique insight into the day-to-day challenges of life under the Nazis and a real sense of how ordinary Germans supported, adapted to, and survived a regime that after promising them so much, in the end delivered only anguish and devastation. The local focus of books was a sensation, as most history was at that time still written from the traditional power perspectives. Some joined the party and became ‘Hitlars’, some conformed because they had to for fear of denunciation, loss of employment or worse, being sent to Dachau, some privately and quietly continued to support the few remaining Jewish villagers and others threatened by the regime. Maybe Oberstdorf was just like countless other German villages where self-interest and disinterest simply manifested itself in a willful moral blindness.

The town had a particularly well-maintained archive, containing a wealth of detail on almost every feature of village life under the Nazis. These don’t appear to have been rival factions so much as different groups of people who had joined The Party for different reasons at different times and who held different priorities. We get a detailed account of a small thriving village tucked away near the Alps and how its inhabitants were manipulated and adapted to a power beyond their control .The national NAZI leadership never, in fact, managed to turn even the opinion of some local NAZI officials completely against the strangers in their midst, never mind that of the general population. What are we to learn about the appeal and rise of Nazism by examining one small village in Bavaria, or Saxony, or anywhere for that matter, when it is a phenomenon repeated throughout Germany? He stopped short of openly saying that he was going to kill them all, but he did in fact directly and personally set in motion the killing of eighty-thousand-odd of the most handicapped or “feeble minded” people.

I often find books of this nature too large in scope to really connect with - they feel like just facts. Turns out there is, and Julia Boyd is distinguishing herself in a crowded field thanks to her unusual approach to the history of the era. But there’s nothing new about totalitarian minions sparing their friends and neighbors from the worst excesses. It certainly has a cast of villagers who could populate a great story: a Dutch aristocrat who smuggles Jewish children out of Germany; the daughter of one of the conspirators who plotted to assassinate Hitler; ‘good’ Nazis; members of the German resistance, to name but a few and, oh, not forgetting the man who made the largest shoe in the world! Still, even for this small, remote village, the new regime changed all aspects of their lives, from education through to religion.A Village in the Third Reich is an engrossing work of social history which approaches well-known historical events through unusual viewpoints. Everyone imagines they’d be brave resisters had fate placed them in Nazi Germany (and there are some dark corners of the internet where people fantasize about wearing the SS runes) but history suggests the great majority of us would simply go along to get along. One of the major philosophical and moral questions linked to Nazi Germany is how much ordinary people were aware of the injustices suffered by Jews and minorities at the hands of the regime. Even churches were forced to incorporate the swastika and Nazi rhetoric into their services, resulting in a schism between German Christians who went along with this and those who bravely resisted. 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.