A Village in the Third Reich

February 27, 2023
Historian Boyd (Travelers in the Third Reich) and Patel, a native of Oberstdorf, Germany, recount in this nuanced history how the rise and fall of Nazi Germany affected Patel’s hometown. Located in the Allgäu, a region in Swabia known for “the beauty of its mountains and the toughness of its people,” Oberstdorf is the southernmost village in Germany. Detailing the “swift and ruthless” transition from the political tumult of Weimar Germany to Nazi totalitarianism, the authors note that by 1934, the atmosphere in Oberstdorf “had changed profoundly. Shop windows that had once displayed quilts now flaunted swastikas and brown shirts.” A turning point came in 1940, when Hitler’s sinister new “racial hygiene” law led to the euthanization of a blind 19-year-old whose family who had been in Oberstdorf for generations. By 1943, Oberstdorf was overrun with evacuees from Allied bombing campaigns, refugees from the Soviet invasion, and wounded soldiers, putting a heavy strain on the village’s infrastructure and food supplies. While crediting Mayor Ludwig Fink, a “moderate Nazi,” and others with shielding local Jews and Jewish refugees from persecution, Boyd and Patel pose difficult questions about ordinary Germans’ complicity in the horrors of the Holocaust. Making excellent use of Oberstdorf’s “particularly well-maintained” archive, this richly textured chronicle offers valuable insights into “the most far-reaching tragedy in human history.”

March 1, 2023
Utilizing research gathered from archival materials, personal interviews, diaries, and memoirs, Boyd and Patel examine the effect of the Nazi party on the small Bavarian village of Oberstdorf, presenting a microcosm of the effects of Nazism on Germans. Initially, the villagers, far from Munich, discounted what they considered loud, brash members of the Nazi party, but when elections of 1933 resoundingly supported the Nazis, the villagers knew times were changing. This would be the last multi-party election for Germans until 1946. There was a resistance, though, with aid from a Nazi mayor who helped save Jews and others (Dachau is not far from there). The final chapters relate the villagers' bloodless coup and arrest of Nazi leaders and sympathizers, the occupation by the French and then the Americans, and lastly the post-war reconstruction and the challenge of removing Nazis from all aspects of German life. But it is the tales of day-to-day life and struggles of the villagers that help the reader understand how people either wholeheartedly believed the Nazis' agenda, resisted it, or pretended to follow in order to get by.

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