Ms Boyd's idea to describe life in a village during the inter-war period sounds interesting as most of the books cover towns or cities whereas countrylife is rather obscure. Oberstdorf is one of the most famous places in Bavaria owing to ski jumping competitions and magnificent scenery for tourists to admire both in summer and winter. These are the stories of ordinary lives at the crossroads of history. It is a tale of conflicting loyalties and desires, of shattered dreams, despair and destruction – but one in which, ultimately, human resilience triumphs. In its pages we meet the Jews who survived – and those who didn’t the Nazi mayor who tried to shield those persecuted by the regime and a blind boy whose life was thought ‘not worth living’.

Hitler, of the descent into totalitarianism and of the tragedies that befell all of those touched by Nazism. Yet even here, in the farthest corner of Germany, National Socialism sought to control not only people’s lives but also their minds.ĭrawing on archive material, letters, interviews and memoirs, A Village in the Third Reich is an extraordinarily intimate portrait of Germany under Oberstdorf is a beautiful village high up in the Bavarian Alps, a place where for hundreds of years ordinary people lived simple lives while history was made elsewhere. New from the author of Travellers in the Third Reich – the Sunday Times Top Three bestseller and Waterstones Book of the Month: a stunningly evocative portrait of Hitler’s Germany through the people of a single village.

Travellers in the 3rd reich