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. Nazi history began in the village in 1927 when a postman, Karl Weinlein transferred into the village from Nuremberg. Weinlein had a better NSDAP party membership number than Goebbels. A low party number conferred on Weinlein hallowed status within the Party. The villages were reluctant to join, but the Wall Street crash did offer fertile ground even in Oberstdorf. 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.

Village in the Third Reich by Julia Boyd — Emma Finnigan PR A Village in the Third Reich by Julia Boyd — Emma Finnigan PR

When Holland embarked on the project in 2008, he wrote a mission statement in the form of a semi-haiku: “My grandparents were murdered / I want to shoot old Nazis / I am a film-maker.” His Jewish mother had fled Austria for England just before the German annexation in 1938; her parents had not. Holland had previously explored the period in his films Good Morning Mr Hitler! and I Was a Slave Labourer. Now he wanted to build an archive of interviews with perpetrators, coaxing often reluctant men and women in their 80s and 90s into unearthing uncomfortable memories. “The main driver was: ‘If we don’t get these voices now, soon we won’t have the opportunity to do so,’” says Sam Pope, an associate producer of Final Acccount. Drawing on archive material, letters, interviews and memoirs, A Village in the Third Reich is an extraordinarily intimate portrait of Germany under 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. What emerges is a picture is how some supported the Nazis other adapted to survive and how some knew it was best not to say what they thought out aloud. 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. Today the only visible scars of the war and the Nazi years can be found in the memorial chapel, where the names of the 286 Oberstdorfers killed in the Second World War are carved in stone. Some families never forgave their neighbours for what happened, while others tried to forget. But what cannot be seen is the invisible scars of the Third Reich which will always remain part of the village’s history.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.

How the Nazi Regime Upended the Lives of These Bavarian

Their canvas is large, even a village has thousands of residents, and sometimes the sheer weight of names and stories can overwhelm. Important figures however, such as the Mayor and local Nazi party administrators reoccur, and they do their best to give everyone with a story justice. There is even a tale at the end about the resistance whose names are still being protected seventy five years on. Nevertheless it does get a little relentless in places, and the nature of the archive is such that it favours dates, arrests and official actions and the authors are loathe to fill in additional speculative colour if they can help it. There are a few eyewitness accounts which fill those memories in but there is a tendancy for it to be a little dry in places.The most harrowing chapter is a case study of a young man blind from birth who was one of the victims of the "euthanasia" programme which was designed to get rid of the disabled, seen by the Nazis as a burden and a blot on the perfect master race. 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. The book possibly does fall down in not making that connection especially as the chapter on how village Jews were affected doesn't convey the full horror - some were helped to commit suicide before deportation, some managed to leave the country, and some were hidden, or shielded by the mayor, a "good Nazi". As far as I recall, only a couple of people were actually deported to camps and they managed to survive and return to the village after the war. The Jews always formed a tiny minority in the village so that part of the book isn't really representative of a lot of other, often more urban, communities. 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.” Having read, and enjoyed, Julia Boyd’s previous book, “Travellers in the Third Reich,” I was eager to read her new title, which looks at the Third Reich from the viewpoint of the Bavarian village of Oberstdorf. 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. As such, this detailed look at what happened from the end of the First World War to the devastation of the end of the Second World War gives the reader a very personal view of events from a number of the village’s inhabitants. 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.