Political history literature is the genre I always return to when I am not reading memoirs or apocalyptic fiction ( I know). I am a big fan of oral history as it speaks so much about “real life” at a given historical moment. Today’s book review hits those two spots — it’s about how people’s lives were changed forever by the rise of fascism in this small Bavarian village of Oberstdorf.
For quite some time, I’ve wondered about the human-level changes in German society and the wide and continuous support Hitler has received within the country. As we know, the rise of Nazism and the tragedies of the Holocaust was not an overnight change. The growing support of Hitler among regular Germans in the 1930s was indeed a process that came from all directions — big cities, small towns and rural areas.
I was interested in discovering how local life changed and what was the response, particularly in small communities, to the unthinkable tragedies of the Holocaust. Why did so many stay indifferent to the suffering of the Jews and others?
This is where I believe the latest book by Julia Boyd and Angelika Patel titled “A Village in the Third Reich: How Ordinary Lives Were Transformed By The Rise of Fascism” does a great job of uncovering the changes and transformation of a single micro-community in Hitler’s Germany, the small Bavarian village of Oberstdorf.
In the first part of the review, I will discuss the book and my thoughts on it. The second part will discuss the author’s approach to researching local history.
While there’s been plenty written, researched and documented on the main drivers for the rise of Hitler, the war itself and the aftermath, these micro-stories of ordinary lives and communities play an important part in further uncovering the tragic trajectory of events. Oberstdorf is used as a case study to examine these changes at the fine level.
No one was immune to the rise of Nazism as Hitler’s ideology penetrated everywhere, including this remote Alpine village of Oberstdorf. As we know, sadly, some got on board with this twisted ideology and took a direct part in the Holocaust.
Boyd and Patel capture well how the local villagers or the Oberstdorfers reacted to the big political changes in Germany and Europe at the time. The book starts with the aftermath of WW1 and the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, which, for many, including the villagers, meant a humiliating position for Germany, which also further antagonised their relationship with the French.
The authors of the book capture well the micro-level decisions by locals and more importantly, their interaction with the new ideology in the 1930s
“…[B]y closely following people as they coped with the day-to-day challenges of life under the Nazis, there emerges 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.”
The book ends with the dismantling of Nazism and the end of the war, giving us a quick preview of life after.
The main author, Julia Boyd, published the book on Oberstdorf in 2022 after her success with the 2018 Sunday Times bestseller: “Travellers In The Third Reich” which is another highly talked about and praised book analysing various aspects of Hitler’s Germany through first-hand accounts of travellers visiting Germany including diplomats, musicians, tourists, celebrities and others.
I read these two books in reverse order. I first read the 2022 book on Oberstdorf, and afterwards, I read the 2018 book. Being interested in politics and local history combined with the large-scale oral histories research undertaken with the most recent book, I lean towards the Oberstdorf case study. I appreciate its research design, the local accounts and the sole focus of the single village as it allows for a greater understanding of the local attitudes, their evolution, and how the Nazi-sponsored propaganda penetrated every part of society, including this far-off Alpine village.
Oberstdorf started gaining traction in the aftermath of WWI and has become a popular resort place for holidaymakers across Germany, including politicians, aristocrats and celebrities. The village was also popular among the Jewish community, and many came to visit. Some decided to stay and call it a home.
Centrally, the book follows life under the Nazis and shows us how the locals, including priests, farmers, nuns, nazi officials, local government representatives, tourists, schoolchildren and others who happened to be at the time in the village, adapted and adopted the new reality. There are a lot of characters, but what helped me was the list of villagers and a short summary of their main stories at the end of the book, which I found quite useful.
Being a popular holiday destination meant the village was gradually exposed to different influences. Boyd and Patel write that despite the inflow of tourists from other parts of Germany, including the progressive north, the village at its core remained a very traditional place.
The authors write clearly and vividly not only about the political but also the cultural and societal changes in the fabric of this small German village. They show us how the propaganda swept and infected regular Oberstdorfers.
The micro-level analysis of the everyday life of the village is based on different primary sources, allowing us to assess and get closer to the painful subject of the everyday decisions that were being made by the village residents and the uncomfortable question that Boyd asks at the end of the book about who was and who was not a Nazi?
The book also gives examples of village dissidents who found many creative ways to criticise the regime and support fellow Jews. The threat of protective custody in the Dachau camp for political prisoners was also a reality in the village. By reading the different chapters, we get to know the villagers better, and the fine-level analysis gets us straight into the reasoning for some in their support of Hitler’s national socialism. Boyd and Patel come to a polemical conclusion that, for example, the mayor of Oberstorf should be seen as a committed Nazi and a decent human being.
The authors make it clear that Oberstdorfers were far from misinformed or isolated from what was happening around them. Being a remote village in Bavaria could not shield them from the awful things the Nazi machinery did to the Jewish population and other groups. Its residents were aware of the concentration camps. As Boyd and Patel write, many of Oberstdorf’s soldiers who came back on leave from the war were witnessing and were probably committing crimes themselves. Considering the large-scale mechanics of the Holocaust, it would be impossible to think that villagers would not be aware of what was happening. One chilling example which brings the horrors of Nazism and places it in the everyday context of village life is their writing that “SS guards from the nearby Dachau sub-camps may have discussed the Final Solution over their beer in the local pubs…”
The story of Theodor Weissenberger, a young teenager of Oberstdorf with visual impairment was particularly painful to read. He is described in the book as one with a happy childhood who was deeply musical and sang beautifully. The regime killed Theodor because of his disability and Hitler’s racial hygiene policy that involved killing people with (so-called) weaknesses, including people suffering from alcohol addiction, gay men, people with disabilities, etc.
Boyd and Patel follow the journey of Eva Noack-Mosse, another Oberstdorfer who received an invitation from the Gestapo and was sent to Theresienstadt, 40 miles north of Prague, which served as a transit camp. Eva worked an administrative job filling out index cards for the new arrivals. Ultimately Eva managed to return to the village. She wrote in her memoir that her only hope was to stay alive during the Third Reich. Eva’s testimonies were published in a book based on her observations and documentation of the horrors of Theresienstadt. It is available on Amazon as it was recently translated into English.
The first-hand accounts the book relies on bring many tragedies closer to the reader. Ultimately, as one would expect, this is far from a light reading but an important addition to the local responses and attitudes in Hitler’s Germany.
How was it researched?
I couldn’t find exactly how Oberstdof has become the case study in Boyd’s work. What probably explains it is that the co-author of the book, Angelika Patel, is a native of the village whose family have lived in the village for five generations.
As with other books, one can learn much about the research and writing process from the acknowledgement page. Researching archives in a foreign language can be very challenging. The book’s main author, Julia Boyd, underlines the importance of help from the local archivist who worked on the municipal archives relevant to the time period the book covers. For these types of projects, one would also benefit greatly from the support of the local government bodies that could act as gate openers and gatekeepers for various reasons.
Without such help and approval for the book project, I would say that Boyd’s book idea would have suffered great uncertainty as there would have been many obstacles on the way to acquiring the materials and access to the archives for the book.
Boyd talks a bit about her research experience in a YouTube video and underscores the importance of Angelika as a co-author of the book. She says it would have been practically impossible to write a book about a village looking into its Nazi history on her own.
After reading the book, it becomes clear that it is a well-researched historical case, getting a lot of data from first-hand resources. This includes published and unpublished letters, memoirs, diary entries, and journals of several individuals Julia writes about. The first-hand accounts described in the unpublished diaries of soldiers allow us to follow their fighting in Poland, France, and the Balkans.
The access to these diaries allowed for vivid writing and reflection on what these soldiers were witnessing and doing simultaneously. Boyd was given access to these diaries by family members, and due to the sensitivities around them, they had to change the names of some of the soldiers. The book also involved interviews with some of the villagers’ children whose stories were told in the book.
The authors sourced a lot of material from the village newspaper Oberstdorfer Gemeinde und Fremdenblatt (OGF). The newspaper played quite an important role in the shaping of villagers’ opinions in the period between 1920 and 1935. Boyd and Patel manage to capture well, for example, the influence of the new editor of OGF, the 30-year-old Charlotte Stirius.
The book is also rich with photographs, bringing the reader closer to Oberstdorf and life in the 1930s and 1940s. They are a powerful addition, helping to portray the village in those days and the faces of the people discussed in this book.
AB
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