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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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

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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I enjoyed this book since it gives a panorama of those days, desciribing attitudes, hardships and tragedies which affected the small village.

This was a largely Catholic village at the time, the most southern village in Germany, a farming community which became a tourist destination thanks to the mountains and with the first concentration camp of Dachau close by. I had read about this programme before, in the context of its being the forerunner of the Final Solution, whereby the Nazis practiced the methods they eventually used on the Jews, and other "racial undesirables" such as Gypsies. Boyd using unpublish diaries is able to follow the lives of the villagers and their day to day encounters with the rise of the Nazis, through to the end of the war when the village was occupied first by the French and then the Americans. Assisted by Oberstdorf resident Angelika Patel, she gives us the finest of fine detail to demonstrate how village residents defied the regime when and where they could. 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.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. The Bavarian schoolboy had penned his words as part of his primary school’s “Front and Home” assignment, which asked children to send morale-boosting letters to servicemen. It is a tale of conflicting loyalties and desires, of shattered dreams, despair and destruction – but one in which, ultimately, human resilience triumphs.

Also revelatory are the chronicles of those without privileged status, who perished over the course of the 12 years the Nazis were in power. It is impossible to keep all the villagers clear in one’s head, and the book just goes on and on and on. Self-interest clearly featured in Fink’s rescue of his son, but many of his other actions were remarkably selfless.From the author of the Sunday Times 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. Rather than harp on the famous bluff manner of speaking, for example, he points out that it has a dreamy twin found in the likes of Alan Bennett, as well as his own father. On top of all that, evacuees from bombed cities and, later, refugees fleeing the Russians more than doubled the village’s prewar population. Oberstdorf was a village where food was scarce and people poor after WWI, until tourism became a growing source of income. The uncomfortable moral of Travellers in the Third Reich is that people see and hear only what they already want to see and hear.

The result is a remarkable moral drama, a miniature epic that is subtle in characterization, gripping in detail, and shocking in its brutal ordinariness. Among the crowd, there was a palpable sense of anticipation as everyone, warmly wrapped against the cold night air, waited for events to unfold.

However, for the most part I had some trouble following who was who, despite the list of townspeople at the back of the book, and this kept me from getting too emotionally invested. Numerous aspects of Oberstdorf’s Third Reich history make it an absorbing study, but one is particularly surprising. Drawing on all these sources, it has been possible to create a remarkably intimate portrait of Oberstdorf during the period between 1918—the end of World War I—and the granting of full sovereign rights to West Germany in 1955.

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 . Through the unpublished diaries of a lieutenant and a sergeant who served alongside Oberstdorf’s soldiers in the 99th Regiment of the First Mountain Division, we followed the young men as they fought in Poland, France, the Soviet Union and the Balkans, right up to the final months of retreat and defeat.Anyone who stepped out of line or criticized the regime risked “protective custody” in the newly established camp for political prisoners at Dachau. 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. 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.



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  • EAN: 764486781913
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