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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By following the villagers of Oberstdorf throughout the decades, Julia Boyd hammers home a brutally effective way of detailing the horrors of Nazism and the humanity of those who suffered at its hands. It was not quite five weeks since January 30, when Adolf Hitler had been sworn in as Germany’s new chancellor, but it was clear to everybody—even in this far-off Alpine village—that the political landscape had changed. When they reconnected in 2011, Holland showed him some of his interviews, and Pope had the same reaction as Battsek would seven years later. The final blow for the local fascists was not the defeat of their cause with the arrival of the Allies in the village, but rather that soon after, the victorious forces billeted black Moroccan troops in Oberstdorf.

Fresh air and fascism in the Bavarian Alps | The Spectator

When it came to the end of the war the propaganda machine which they had lived under for the previous 12 years, they were fearful for their lives.A Waffen-SS training camp operated six miles south of the village, while a Nazi stronghold visited regularly by such leading figures as Heinrich Himmler lay only ten miles to the north.

A Village in the Third Reich by Julia Boyd | Goodreads

Speer first heard Adolf Hitler speak during an address to the combined students and faculty of Berlin University and his institute. This is a piece of history while that was part political investigation and part discussion of a (now past) future. He died on 10 June 2020 at the age of 71, shortly after Weyermann visited him in hospital to tell him that Final Account had been selected for the Venice film festival. The account it gives is all the more powerful for being told though the voices and experiences of ordinary people. Why did Germans respond to Hitler in the manner that they did How did their attitudes change as the war progressed And when all hope was gone and their country lay in ruins, how did they pick themselves up and start again Drawing on archive material, letters, interviews and memoirs, A Village in the Third Reich is an extraordinarily intimate portrait of Germany under Hitler, of the descent into totalitarianism and of the tragedies that befell all of those touched by Nazism.Germany during the Third Reich needs to be focused on the people not just the military and political leaders. After the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, sparking World War II, the villagers’ anxiety largely faded, as Germany’s military successes appeared to underpin Hitler’s promise of a quick and total victory. Oberstdorf was a village where food was scarce and people poor after WWI, until tourism became a growing source of income. It is a tale of conflicting loyalties and desires, of shattered dreams, despair and destruction – but one in which, ultimately, human resilience triumphs. In its pages 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 thought ‘not worth living’.

Travellers in the Third Reich by Julia Boyd | Goodreads Travellers in the Third Reich by Julia Boyd | Goodreads

When in 1927, a postman tried to establish a branch of the Nazi Party in the village’s staunchly Catholic community, it was, as he later complained to propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, an uphill struggle. There are various moments when someone will say, ‘I wasn’t there’, and he will very gently ask questions that enable them to make it crystal clear that they’re lying and they were there. The most harrowing chapter is a case study of a young man blind from birth who was one of the victims of the "euthanasia" programme which was designed to get rid of the disabled, seen by the Nazis as a burden and a blot on the perfect master race. Boyd] lets her voices, skilfully orchestrated, speak for themselves, which they do with great eloquence.Like others I have often wondered about where to find the bridge between the atrocious events perpetrated by the Nazi regime and the ordinary people who lived in Germany at the time and who, to greater or lesser extents became complicit in what was going on. surreal scenes pepper Boyd’s deep trawl of travellers’ tales from the scores of visitors who were drawn to the ‘new Germany’ in the 1930s. A Village in the Third Reich shows how that story can be told in new and illuminating ways which remind us as the Angelika Patel says in her dedication that peace, freedom and justice cannot be taken for granted. There are a lot of tragic stories here, though there are reconstructions of the willing Nazi's there are also big questions about Good Germans and perhaps the unthinkable, Good Nazis. Self-interest clearly featured in Fink’s rescue of his son, but many of his other actions were remarkably selfless.

A Village in the Third Reich by Julia Boyd, Angelika Patel

We've been 'fed' many overarching stories over the years, and it was really interesting to see what Nazism was like from the perspective of a small village. Oberstdorf’s new Nazi mayor, Ludwig Fink, did not subscribe to official strictures around these murders. It’s not been deliberate but I seem to be constantly reading both fiction and non-fiction about the Second World War and the Holocaust. Once journalists get their hands on them,those curt, day-to-day messages can be just a tad embarrassing — as this week’s expletive-laden evidence to the UK Covid Inquiry confirms. Drawing on the unpublished experiences of outsiders inside the Third Reich, Julia Boyd provides dazzling new perspectives on the Germany that Hitler built.Julia Boyd has once again written an enticing history of Germany, coming at it from a different perspective than usual histories. i’ve often wondered what german village life must have been like as the dark clouds of nazism rolled across.