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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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.

Making sense of this story is perhaps helped by first reading Boyd and Patel’s short back story introductions beginning on page 383.Military camps were built; wounded soldiers were tended to, and people arrived as evacuees from the bombed German cities and as refugees from Eastern Europe. The last chapters address the consequences for the village and its inhabitants in the aftermath of the War. An enjoyable read to learn the other side of the story of a small community in Germany during that period.

Both were studies of medieval villages meticulously reconstructing the lives of ordinary people within the limited space of one small place. This is the period when National Socialism used all manner of devious and divisive methods of influencing the lives and opinions of citizens. 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!Those who joined simply to further their own interests could easily be incentivised to do anything Hitler wanted them to do. In Oberstdorf, support for Hitler and the Nazis declined as the numbers of dead and wounded increased.

For most inhabitants, they feared war, disliked the fact that Nazi ideology changed their lives and often took the line of least resistance and hoped to come through unscathed.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? Choosing the beautiful German resort of Oberstdorf as a small village representing a microcosm of everyday life in Germany under the Nazis, this book is a very readable and (as much as anything set during those awful times can be) very enjoyable read.