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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Yet most of the German villagers only really come to life at two points, firstly as the Allies draw closer and secret groups form to try and surrender Oberstdorf without destruction of life and property – in direct opposition to the Nazi directive and second, in the aftermath, the privation they suffered with the influx of refugees, displaced persons and Allied troops to accommodate and feed.

What Julia Boyd and Angelika Patel have done is nothing short of remarkable: they’ve documented in detail how villagers, at first slowly and then rapidly, came to embrace Nazism. If we agree that some Nazis were worse than average - the sadistic Oskar Dirlewanger and his SS Brigade of rapists and murderers come to mind - it stands to reason that others might have been less evil. Then we learn that this Oberstdorf “resistance” movement only became active in February 1945 as Germany was near its final collapse. It gives a paragraph talking about each person or family mentioned in this book and what happened to them from after the war to present day or until their natural death. It is clear that Fink and some even higher-ranking colleagues didn’t think that this sort of policy held any benefits at all.

Boyd and Patel also had access to diaries and letters from private collections and documents preserved in various national, state, and church archives, giving her a unique insight into the day-to-day challenges of life under the Nazis and a real sense of how ordinary Germans supported, adapted to, and survived a regime that after promising them so much, in the end delivered only anguish and devastation. even in this farthest corner of Germany, National Socialism sought to control not only people’s lives but also their minds.

The delicacy of his position as a moderate Nazi mayor is illustrated by an anecdote that recounts how during the war he publicly reprimanded a woman for criticising the regime but then privately advised her just to be careful not to say such things to him when others were present. This book is an interesting read, and it is different than the historical fiction of the time I have read before.Set in Oberstdorf, a village in the Bavarian Alps known for simple living and winter sports, life was initially little changed by political events elsewhere. 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 judged 'not worth living'. In other instances, he quietly advised Jews and perhaps others how to register their residency in a way that made it less likely they would be “selected” for any sort of special measures.