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 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. 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. 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.

A Village in the Third Reich: How Ordinary Lives Were

This non-fiction depicts the cultural, social and political changes over the 40 years in a village whose life focused around sheep breeding, some farming and tourist industry as Obersdorf became more and more popular in the covered period. Such a detailed analysis was possible due to vast archives preserved and to memoirs, letters and memories of those whose ancestors lived in the village before the WW2 and through it. I really enjoyed (although, enjoy is not quite the right word - appreciated?) this book. 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. Are there are a lot of characters, yes of course. I found it fascinating even if I didn't quite remember all the time who was who.It was during the 1920s that Oberstdorf started to develop a substantial tourist trade as a holiday resort. Oberstdorf was in the main an observant Catholic village with a small Protestant church. In politics the village supported the centre-right Catholic Bavarian People’s Party. Oberstdorf was doing quite well in the 1930s and many of its were wealthy and they also had distinguished Jewish visitors.

A Village in the Third Reich by Julia Boyd review — how a

On the other hand, in a 1973 Bryn Mawr College review, Barbara Miller Lane wrote, "Scholars have observed so many gaps in his account of the operation of his ministry as to shed considerable doubt on the whole." [4] Martin Kitchen's 2015 biography of Speer comes to much the same conclusion. [5] First 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 of the year. Fascinating, compelling account of one tiny village's journey through the rise of fascism in Germany. 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. 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. Working with Pope, Battsek, co-producer Riete Oord and the editor, Stefan Ronowicz, Holland had to whittle a lean, 90-minute film out of almost 600 hours of footage, comprising around 300 interviews. These ranged from one-off half-hour conversations to those spanning 16 separate encounters. “He was insatiable,” Pope says. “If he was still around, he’d probably still be looking for more. He was doing it for his grandparents, but it took on a larger significance when he screened some material for survivors. One said that to hear it coming from the mouths of those who were responsible confirms your own suffering.” In A Village in the Third Reich Julia Boyd creates a fascinating account of the impact of the Third Reich on Obertsdorf, a small German village in the Bavarian Alps. The book, on which she has collaborated with local historian Angelika Patel, is based on meticulous local archives, diaries, newspaper stories and letters and other contemporary sources. The account it gives is all the more powerful for being told though the voices and experiences of ordinary people.A study of Nazi Germany from the end of WWI to the end of WWII told through the lives of people in one Bavarian village in the Alps. Pope, who grew up in Ditchling, had known Holland since he was six. 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 raw power of it leapt off the screen and I wanted to be a part of it,” he says. “None of this was easy. But he’d set a mission for himself.” Jewish organisations said: ‘Herr Holland, we’re not going to pay for you to speak to old Nazis’ Sam Pope At the end of the war a list of the Nazis in the village was completed from various sorts. From an incomplete list it was found that there were 455 names on the list, roughly 10% of the village, which also happened to mirror the Nazis membership across Germany.

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Lane, Barbara. "Review of Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs, by Albert Speer" (PDF). Semantic Scholar. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. S2CID 56399040. Archived from the original (PDF) on 3 March 2019 . Retrieved 24 August 2019. Holland was diagnosed in 2013 and lost a year to chemotherapy. At one point he was given just days to live, before a successful course of stem-cell treatment. He recovered enough to see the film through to its final stages, but didn’t live to see it find an audience. In a horrible coincidence, Weyermann died of lung cancer in October 2021. “Diane’s vision and courage are 100% the reason this film got made,” Battsek says. “Nobody else would have done that.” While due to geography Oberstdorf is not often at the centre of events, the village and its inhabitants are exposed to many of the major threads of Nazi history. This includes the rise of the party and Hitler’s ascent to power, the triumphs of the early years of the War, the killing fields of the Eastern Front, the persecution of the Jews and of disabled people and the hunger of the post War period and the process of de-Nazification.The unseen footage survives in the archive, which is available to researchers via three institutions in London and Paris, with more to come. That may ultimately prove to be a more enduring legacy than Final Account itself. “There were three founding pillars for this project: education, research and memorial,” Pope says. “Perpetrator – as opposed to survivor – testimony is a relatively new field, so we’re taking great care that it’s properly contextualised.” It is a tale of conflicting loyalties and desires, of shattered dreams, despair and destruction – but one in which, ultimately, human resilience triumphs. Toland, John (23 August 1970). "Inside the Third Reich". The New York Times . Retrieved 24 August 2019.