A VILLAGE IN THE THIRD REICH

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.