The most harrowing chapter is a case study of a young man blind from birth who was one of the victims of the "euthanasia" programme which was designed to get rid of the disabled, seen by the Nazis as a burden and a blot on the perfect master race. I had read about this programme before, in the context of its being the forerunner of the Final Solution, whereby the Nazis practiced the methods they eventually used on the Jews, and other "racial undesirables" such as Gypsies. The book possibly does fall down in not making that connection especially as the chapter on how village Jews were affected doesn't convey the full horror - some were helped to commit suicide before deportation, some managed to leave the country, and some were hidden, or shielded by the mayor, a "good Nazi". As far as I recall, only a couple of people were actually deported to camps and they managed to survive and return to the village after the war. The Jews always formed a tiny minority in the village so that part of the book isn't really representative of a lot of other, often more urban, communities. When Holland embarked on the project in 2008, he wrote a mission statement in the form of a semi-haiku: “My grandparents were murdered / I want to shoot old Nazis / I am a film-maker.” His Jewish mother had fled Austria for England just before the German annexation in 1938; her parents had not. Holland had previously explored the period in his films Good Morning Mr Hitler! and I Was a Slave Labourer. Now he wanted to build an archive of interviews with perpetrators, coaxing often reluctant men and women in their 80s and 90s into unearthing uncomfortable memories. “The main driver was: ‘If we don’t get these voices now, soon we won’t have the opportunity to do so,’” says Sam Pope, an associate producer of Final Acccount. I recently read Julia Boyd's Travellers in the Third Reich which gave outsider impressions of pre war Germany which was good but this one was in another league. Their canvas is large, even a village has thousands of residents, and sometimes the sheer weight of names and stories can overwhelm. Important figures however, such as the Mayor and local Nazi party administrators reoccur, and they do their best to give everyone with a story justice. There is even a tale at the end about the resistance whose names are still being protected seventy five years on. Nevertheless it does get a little relentless in places, and the nature of the archive is such that it favours dates, arrests and official actions and the authors are loathe to fill in additional speculative colour if they can help it. There are a few eyewitness accounts which fill those memories in but there is a tendancy for it to be a little dry in places.

Third Reich: The Rise of Fascism Through Travellers in the Third Reich: The Rise of Fascism Through

At the end of the war a list of the Nazis in the village was completed from various sorts. From an incomplete list it was found that there were 455 names on the list, roughly 10% of the village, which also happened to mirror the Nazis membership across Germany. Boyd makes full use of memoirs, local newspapers, letters, and other research to tell the story of one, rural community, during a time of national change. She takes us from soldiers returning from the trenches of WWI, through the political turmoil of hyperinflation and the Weimar Republic, to the regime of the Third Reich, which promised so much but delivered devastation. While due to geography Oberstdorf is not often at the centre of events, the village and its inhabitants are exposed to many of the major threads of Nazi history. This includes the rise of the party and Hitler’s ascent to power, the triumphs of the early years of the War, the killing fields of the Eastern Front, the persecution of the Jews and of disabled people and the hunger of the post War period and the process of de-Nazification. This non-fiction depicts the cultural, social and political changes over the 40 years in a village whose life focused around sheep breeding, some farming and tourist industry as Obersdorf became more and more popular in the covered period. Such a detailed analysis was possible due to vast archives preserved and to memoirs, letters and memories of those whose ancestors lived in the village before the WW2 and through it. The book finishes with the collapse of the Third Reich in 1945 and Allied occupation along with the De-Nazification tribunals that very imperfectly attempted to punish the guilty.First 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 of the year. Fascinating, compelling account of one tiny village's journey through the rise of fascism in Germany. By following the villagers of Oberstdorf throughout the decades, Julia Boyd hammers home a brutally effective way of detailing the horrors of Nazism and the humanity of those who suffered at its hands. I enjoyed this book since it gives a panorama of those days, desciribing attitudes, hardships and tragedies which affected the small village. It is a well-researched book which offers a good insight into the period. On the other hand, in a 1973 Bryn Mawr College review, Barbara Miller Lane wrote, "Scholars have observed so many gaps in his account of the operation of his ministry as to shed considerable doubt on the whole." [4] Martin Kitchen's 2015 biography of Speer comes to much the same conclusion. [5]

Village in the Third Reich: How Ordinary Lives Were A Village in the Third Reich: How Ordinary Lives Were

Having read, and enjoyed, Julia Boyd’s previous book, “Travellers in the Third Reich,” I was eager to read her new title, which looks at the Third Reich from the viewpoint of the Bavarian village of Oberstdorf. This was a largely Catholic village at the time, the most southern village in Germany, a farming community which became a tourist destination thanks to the mountains and with the first concentration camp of Dachau close by. As such, this detailed look at what happened from the end of the First World War to the devastation of the end of the Second World War gives the reader a very personal view of events from a number of the village’s inhabitants. It’s not been deliberate but I seem to be constantly reading both fiction and non-fiction about the Second World War and the Holocaust. After so many books have been, and are being, written about this period, it’s amazing that there are still so many new stories to tell. a b c d e Speer, Albert (1995). Inside the Third Reich. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. pp.29–48. ISBN 9781842127353. Working with Pope, Battsek, co-producer Riete Oord and the editor, Stefan Ronowicz, Holland had to whittle a lean, 90-minute film out of almost 600 hours of footage, comprising around 300 interviews. These ranged from one-off half-hour conversations to those spanning 16 separate encounters. “He was insatiable,” Pope says. “If he was still around, he’d probably still be looking for more. He was doing it for his grandparents, but it took on a larger significance when he screened some material for survivors. One said that to hear it coming from the mouths of those who were responsible confirms your own suffering.” Julia Boyd has once again written an enticing history of Germany, coming at it from a different perspective than usual histories. Boyd the author of the author of Travellers in the Third Reich which was a best-selling history will once again make the charts with this book. This time looking at the Third Reich through the picturesque village of Oberstdorf in the mountains of Bavaria.One day in 2018, the prolific documentary producer John Battsek received a call from Diane Weyermann of Participant Media, asking him if he would travel to the East Sussex village of Ditchling to meet a 69-year-old director named Luke Holland. Weyermann said that Holland had spent several years interviewing hundreds of Germans who were in some way complicit in the Holocaust, from those whose homes neighboured the concentration camps to former members of the Waffen SS. The responses he captured ran the gamut from shame to denial to a ghastly kind of pride. Now he wanted to introduce these testimonies to a mainstream audience, and he needed help. Persico, Joseph (1995). Infamy on Trial. New York: Penguin Books Reprint Edition. ISBN 0-14-016622-X. Dachau was to the north of the Oberstdorf, but the villages were already aware of some of the Nazi round-ups of its citizens, especially the Jews. By 1941 most were well aware of the roundups that had been undertaken in the East in their name. This leaked out via the Feldpost, or when soldiers were on leave at home. It is a tale of conflicting loyalties and desires, of shattered dreams, despair and destruction – but one in which, ultimately, human resilience triumphs.