A Village in the Third Reich: How Ordinary Lives Were Transformed By the Rise of Fascism

Whitley Bay Book Group discussed A Village in the Third Reich in April 2023.

Oberstdorf is a beautiful village high up in the Bavarian Alps where ordinary people had to deal with the extraordinary times of the Nazi years. The author was given access to the village archives and other original sources, and interviews with survivors and their families to help the present day villagers confront and examine their past, resulting in this book, a work of microhistory.

The book describes how ordinary people responded to the rise of Hitler and how their attitudes changed as the war progressed. Initially politics and the war seemed a long way away but this changed as the Nazi edicts affected people’s everyday lives and young men were called up to fight. The fear of being denounced meant that most people colluded and kept their heads down, but there were some acts of resistance and some people quietly helped Jewish villagers leave the country.

Some of us found the book quite a challenge to get into initially, especially those who don’t read much non-fiction. There is a large list of characters, who can be difficult to keep track of, although an index of characters at the end does help, and characters do tend to come around again. However, most of us liked the style of writing, and thought it was well written and researched, an interesting idea and worth persevering with.

The big question for author, and for the readers, is what would we have done in the circumstances.

Within the group there were a wide range of reactions to the book, some finding it fascinating (“like being on a bus looking into people’s living rooms”), some boring (“like the minutes of Blyth Valley council meetings with Nazis”), and all points in between. We gave it between 1 and 4 stars, with an average of 3.