A thorough, chilling social history of how Nazi ideology took hold at the local level.
How a storied, seemingly idyllic Bavarian town gradually embraced Nazi ideology.
Working with Patel, a local historian who was designated the task of writing a history of Oberstdorf covering the years of Nazi rule. Boyd, author of the award-winning Travelers of the Third Reich, delved into this project almost reluctantly, knowing little about the place. Yet it soon become apparent that this story of a small town in Germany served as a microcosm for the entire nation, which ultimately succumbed to Nazi rule. As a Catholic-majority village of about 4,000 near the Austrian border, with few Jews living there in the late 1930s and many tourists and skiers lured to its spectacular mountains, Oberstdorf boasted a vigorous municipal government—until March 5, 1933, when the populace voted in the Nazi Party. Following the “political chaos of the Weimar Republic,” Boyd shows how the Nazis gained favor, after which immediate directives from Berlin—in the form of the Enabling Act, providing “the Nazis the legal means to eliminate their political opponents swiftly and brutally,” and other edicts—changed everything for the local government, which was immediately replaced by Nazi functionaries. The “new men” had arrived in town, and any local opposition was repressed. Nazis corralled the town’s youth into clubs and organizations and filled school curricula with race lessons and antisemitism. Then the Nazis looked toward abolishing religious practices and neutralizing their authority. Boyd looks carefully at the role of the local mountain troops in the Eastern Front, especially Operation Barbarossa, and the tribunes of final reckoning by the French and Moroccan invaders, followed by the Americans. The author effectively portrays the horrific toll of the war on one small town, personalizing it among the perpetrators, but readers may find it difficult to sympathize with some of the characters she introduces.
A thorough, chilling social history of how Nazi ideology took hold at the local level.Pub Date: April 4, 2023
ISBN: 9781639363780
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Jan. 10, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A rousing, suspenseful adventure tale.
A harrowing expedition to Antarctica, recounted by Departures senior features editor Sancton, who has reported from every continent on the planet.
On Aug. 16, 1897, the steam whaler Belgica set off from Belgium with young Adrien de Gerlache as commandant. Thus begins Sancton’s riveting history of exploration, ingenuity, and survival. The commandant’s inexperienced, often unruly crew, half non-Belgian, included scientists, a rookie engineer, and first mate Roald Amundsen, who would later become a celebrated polar explorer. After loading a half ton of explosive tonite, the ship set sail with 23 crew members and two cats. In Rio de Janeiro, they were joined by Dr. Frederick Cook, a young, shameless huckster who had accompanied Robert Peary as a surgeon and ethnologist on an expedition to northern Greenland. In Punta Arenas, four seamen were removed for insubordination, and rats snuck onboard. In Tierra del Fuego, the ship ran aground for a while. Sancton evokes a calm anxiety as he chronicles the ship’s journey south. On Jan. 19, 1898, near the South Shetland Islands, the crew spotted the first icebergs. Rough waves swept someone overboard. Days later, they saw Antarctica in the distance. Glory was “finally within reach.” The author describes the discovery and naming of new lands and the work of the scientists gathering specimens. The ship continued through a perilous, ice-littered sea, as the commandant was anxious to reach a record-setting latitude. On March 6, the Belgica became icebound. The crew did everything they could to prepare for a dark, below-freezing winter, but they were wracked with despair, suffering headaches, insomnia, dizziness, and later, madness—all vividly capture by Sancton. The sun returned on July 22, and by March 1899, they were able to escape the ice. With a cast of intriguing characters and drama galore, this history reads like fiction and will thrill fans of Endurance and In the Kingdom of Ice.
A rousing, suspenseful adventure tale.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-984824-33-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 29, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
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