A Village in the Third Reich

The new book from the author of Travellers in the Third Reich – the Sunday Times Top Three bestseller and Waterstones Book of the Month – which has sold more than 75,000 copies in the UK. It was a book of the year in the Telegraph and Guardian and won the LA Times Book Prize for History 2018.
A meticulously researched, revealing and insightful narrative based on numerous unpublished sources

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. Yet even here, in the farthest corner of Germany, National Socialism sought to control not only people’s lives but also their minds.

By putting one village under the microscope, this book evocatively portrays the momentous period of Nazism in Germany. Why did Germans respond to Hitler in the manner that they did? How did their attitudes change as the war progressed? And when all hope was gone and their country lay in ruins, how did they pick themselves up and start again?

Drawing on archive material, letters, interviews and memoirs, A Village in the Third Reich is an extraordinarily intimate portrait of Germany under Hitler, of the descent into totalitarianism and of the tragedies that befell all of those touched by Nazism. 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’. It is a tale of conflicting loyalties and desires, of shattered dreams, despair and destruction. But if this is primarily a tale of political tragedy, it is also one in which human resilience triumphs. These are the stories of ordinary lives at the crossroads of history.

Autorentext

Julia Boyd is the author of the Sunday Times bestseller Travellers in the Third Reich: The Rise of Fascism through the Eyes of Everyday People. Her previous books include A Dance with the Dragon: The Vanished World of Peking's Foreign Colony, The Excellent Doctor Blackwell: The Life of the First Woman Physician and Hannah Riddell: An Englishwoman in Japan. As the widow of a former diplomat, she lived in Germany from 1977 to 1981. She lives in London.

Klappentext

A stunningly evocative portrait of Hitler's Germany through the people of a single village.