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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Masterly… [an] important and gripping book… [Boyd is] a leading historian of human responses in political extremis.’ The Oldie 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. I enjoyed this book since it gives a panorama of those days, desciribing attitudes, hardships and tragedies which affected the small village. It is a well-researched book which offers a good insight into the period.

A Village in the Third Reich: How Ordinary Lives were Transformed by the Rise of Fascism, 2022. Cowritten with Angelika Patel. We learn that many of the younger members of the Village when war came were members of the 98th or 99th Mountain Battalions part of the 1st Mountain Division, which was an elite division. It also committed war crimes in the later war in Greece. But also other members of the village were part of the suppression of partisans and Jews in Ukraine. One also supervised the killing of 700 Jews in Ukraine. A Village in the Third Reich tells a tale of conflicting loyalties and desires, of shattered dreams – but one in which, ultimately, human resilience triumphs. The Times called A Village in the Third Reich , authored with Angelika Patel, a "fascinating deep dive into daily life", [5] and The Scotsman, "a masterpiece of historical non-fiction". [6] Publishers Weekly wrote, "Boyd and Patel pose difficult questions about ordinary Germans’ complicity in the horrors of the Holocaust". [7] Personal life [ edit ] Last month, the famous historian Natalie Zemon Davis died. I remember how her the Return of Martin Guerre together with Montaillou written by Emmanuel Bernard Le Roy Ladurie caused a ripple of excitement throughout the history communities in the 1980s. Both were studies of medieval villages meticulously reconstructing the lives of ordinary people within the limited space of one small place. At the same time, the authors made the readers aware that their writings presented a generic historical presentation of ordinary village life during these times. The local focus of books was a sensation, as most history was at that time still written from the traditional power perspectives.

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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 Buy

Exceptional... Boyd's book reminds us that even the most brutal regimes cannot extinguish all semblance of human feeling' Mail on Sunday The Oberstdorf Hitler Youth Troop, photographed at the 1935 Nuremberg rally, when Jews were deprived of their citizenship Julia Boyd has once again written an enticing history of Germany, coming at it from a different perspective than usual histories. Boyd the author of the author of Travellers in the Third Reich which was a best-selling history will once again make the charts with this book. This time looking at the Third Reich through the picturesque village of Oberstdorf in the mountains of Bavaria.

a b "Julia Boyd's schedule for LA Times Festival of Books 2019". LA Times Festival of Books . Retrieved 2023-04-13. This is a tale of conflicting loyalties and desires, of shattered dreams – but one in which, ultimately, human resilience triumphs. I recently read Julia Boyd's Travellers in the Third Reich which gave outsider impressions of pre war Germany which was good but this one was in another league. In the village archive, we encountered foresters, priests, farmers and nuns; innkeepers, Nazi officials, veterans and party members; village councilors, mountaineers, socialists, forced laborers, schoolchildren, Jews, entrepreneurs, tourists and aristocrats. We met Theodor Weissenberger, a blind teenager condemned to die in a gas chamber at age 19 because he was living a “ life unworthy of life.” A Village in the Third Reich: How Ordinary Lives Were Transformed by the Rise of Fascism by Julia Boyd, Angelika Patel". Publishers Weekly. 2023-02-08 . Retrieved 2023-04-13.

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.’ Daily Mail And as we got to know the villagers better, it came as no surprise to learn that their response to these cataclysmic events was driven as much by practical everyday concerns, the instinct to safeguard their families—from threats both real and imagined—and personal loyalties and enmities as by the great political and social issues of the time.

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A Village In The Third Reich is a fascinating and often very sad portait of forty years in the life of the Bavarian village Oberstdorf from 1915 to 1955. Nestled in the Alps, Oberstdorf was a burgeoning tourist town, relatively cosmopolitan and affluent enough, and yet like all of German slowly got swamped by the rise of National Socialism. Boyd and Patel have done a very deep dive on what seems to be a hugely comprehensive archive to tell the story of how the village adapted and changed, but also to follow the villagers as they themselves escaped, got sent to camps or went to war. 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.

Oberstdorf, despite its remoteness, was by no means isolated from the war. Not only did the villagers receive firsthand news of conditions—and atrocities—on the various battlefronts from their soldiers returning home on leave, but Dachau sub-camps and forced labor camps were also located close by. Before the Nazis ramped up their persecution of Europe’s Jews in the early 1940s, Dachau mainly housed prisoners who had told anti-regime jokes, made “defeatist” war comments or illegally slaughtered farm animals. The book finishes with the collapse of the Third Reich in 1945 and Allied occupation along with the De-Nazification tribunals that very imperfectly attempted to punish the guilty.Dutch aristocrat Agatha Maria Henriëtte Laman Trip-de Beaufort (center) and close friend Elisabeth Dabelstein with former inmates of the various labour camps situated around Oberstdorf Wars come and go, but life goes on. And so it went on in the village of Oberstdorf throughout the 1930s and 1940s, with the rise and fall of Nazism an undercurrent all along – except it was one that swelled in a way that even a quiet little village couldn’t ignore. Oberstdorf is a beautiful village high up in the Bavarian Alps, a place where for hundreds of years ordinary people lived simple lives while history was made elsewhere. Yet even here, in the farthest corner of Germany, National Socialism sought to control not only people’s lives but also their minds. Many of the children are shown to have been indoctrinated into total belief and a lots of Obersdorf residents are killed during WW2 fighting with the Mountain Division or in the death camps. For the most part I found this an interesting read. The book is well-researched and delves into many aspects of life during the Third Reich, showing how the government pervaded every part of one’s daily activities. I liked that the chapters were organized thematically rather than chronologically, which made it easier to follow.