A Village in the Third Reich: How Ordinary Lives were Transformed by the Rise of Fascism, by Julia Boyd and Angelika Patel

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'A Village in the Third Reich' by Julia Boyd

The small Bavarian village of Oberstdorf is a case study of Hitler’s rise and Nazi rule. A Village in the Third Reich is not the first book of its kind to examine the era’s politics within a small, confined locality, but every locality is as different as the people who live inside its borders.

Oberstdorf was set in the Alpine vistas of rural, conservative Bavaria and had become a resort. Most of the tourists were from Germany’s north and were, according to the authors, more inclined to Nazism than the locals. But there were also Jewish tourists, whose presence encouraged some entrepreneurs to discourage overt displays of antisemitism. 

The Nazis had little support in Oberstdorf during the 1920s as Germany recovered from defeat in World War I and the brief civil war that followed; today, we’d call the townsfolk swing voters. Even those who shared the anxiety and resentment the Nazis played upon kept distant from their raucous bullying. But when the Great Depression hit Germany and the economy tumbled, many of them swung toward Hitler as the only politician—an outsider like themselves, they thought—who understood their concerns.

Germany’s Protestants with several notable exceptions (Martin Niemöller, Dietrich Bonhoeffer) marched in step with the Nazis, but the Catholics were always problematic from Hitler’s point o view. German Catholics looked less to Berlin and more to Rome; the more enlightened members of the flock became ingenious at outward shows of loyalty to the Third Reich while committing covert acts of resistance and noncompliance. Sometimes resistance came from dedicated Nazis, including Oberstdorf’s mayor, who turned a blind ear to grumbling against the regime and pointedly ignored the Jews who found refuge in his village, saving their lives