I had read and enjoyed Julia Boyd's previous book, 'Travellers in the Third Reich', and so was eager to read her new offering, which looks at the Third Reich from the perspective of those living in the small Bavarian village of Oberstdorf. This proves to be a very effective prism through which to consider some of the most challenging questions about the Third Reich, in particular about how much ordinary German citizens knew - or cared - about the true atrocities of the Holocaust.

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.There are anti-Nazi grumblings for sure, but there are no anti-Nazi heros, at least not until the very end of the war. As Julia Boyd emphasizes, too many people allowed reverence for a nation’s glorious past to warp their judgment about its morally repugnant present. Also included are the eyewitness accounts of the 99th mountain troops divisions - young, experienced climbers and skiers from Oberstdorf, - men used to harsh outdoor activities. Indirectly, the book also reveals the social change brought about not only by Nazism and war, but also by other factors.

even in this farthest corner of Germany, National Socialism sought to control not only people’s lives but also their minds. Resistance to Zettler came from an unexpected quarter: Oberstdorf’s long-standing Nazi Party members resented Zettler’s ascendance because he was newly arrived in the village and a recent convert to fascism. This one is a stunningly evocative portrait of Hitler’s Germany through the people of a single village. 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. Boyd, Julia and Angelika Patel, A Village in the Third Reich: How Ordinary Lives Were Transformed By the Rise of Fascism (2022).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. I really enjoyed getting to know the many characters and due to the unbiased narration I can draw my own conclusions.

Hitler had stated, in a speech, that it would benefit the German people if something like eighty thousand of the million or so babies which were born in the Reich each year were to die. Among them are Julia Boyd’s newest book and her Travelers in the Third Reich: The Rise of Fascism: 1919– 1945 published in 2017 and reviewed here by Roger I. 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.A brilliant propaganda idea, the idea was that on selected Sundays (usually once a month) every person in Germany would eat stew instead of his regular meal and then contribute the difference in cost to the Nazi Volk-Welfare Society (NSV).

narfna on “What the stories never said: at the end of the day, if a man wants to kill you, he kills you. Respondents aren’t asked to say which policies they support, merely how many of the four items they support. From the author of the bestselling Travellers in the Third Reich comes A Village in the Third Reich: an extraordinarily intimate portrait of Germany under Hitler, shining a light on the lives of ordinary people. I found this a compelling and moving read which gave me a fresh understanding of this period of German history.

To Franz, German soldiers were noble warriors fighting for a just cause, not indiscriminate killers dropping bombs. 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.