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 fresh perspective on a familiar subject.
The American Revolution reframed as “a world war in all but name.”
The struggle of 13 North American colonies for independence from Great Britain quickly turned into a global conflict, writes Bell, a professor of history at the University of Maryland. Patriot leaders cultivated the support of England’s major rivals, France, Spain, and the Netherlands, which began by covertly supplying the rebels with weapons and by 1779 were engaging in open warfare. French and Spanish fleets turned the Caribbean into a major battlefront, forcing England to send troops from North America to protect its precious “sugar islands,” while American privateers inflicted huge losses on British merchant ships and boosted the rebel colonies’ economy. A separate Spanish-British war in Florida and South America also weakened England’s attempt to suppress the independence, as did French efforts to incite revolts in India against British rule. The repercussions after Americans won their independence also extended beyond the Eastern seaboard. Spain and Britain both tightened their controls over remaining colonies. Native American tribes lost what little protection England had provided against white settlers’ incursions on their lands, which grew increasingly aggressive after independence. Enslaved African Americans who fought for Britain on the basis of promises of freedom were resettled first in Nova Scotia and then in Sierra Leone; their odyssey is the subject of a particularly fascinating chapter. Bell’s international emphasis occasionally leads him to overreach, as when he claims that the 1780 anti-Catholic Gordon Riots in London were “also an expression of popular opposition to the American war,” but his basic argument is sound (and there was considerable antiwar sentiment in England). Based on solid and deep research, his book is written in clear, accessible prose—with entertaining minutiae such as the fact that the minutemen at Lexington and Concord fired guns made in Spain—that will appeal to general readers with an interest in history.
A fresh perspective on a familiar subject.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593719510
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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