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. 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. Pope, who grew up in Ditchling, had known Holland since he was six. When they reconnected in 2011, Holland showed him some of his interviews, and Pope had the same reaction as Battsek would seven years later. “The raw power of it leapt off the screen and I wanted to be a part of it,” he says. “None of this was easy. But he’d set a mission for himself.” Jewish organisations said: ‘Herr Holland, we’re not going to pay for you to speak to old Nazis’ Sam Pope It was during the 1920s that Oberstdorf started to develop a substantial tourist trade as a holiday resort. Oberstdorf was in the main an observant Catholic village with a small Protestant church. In politics the village supported the centre-right Catholic Bavarian People’s Party. Oberstdorf was doing quite well in the 1930s and many of its were wealthy and they also had distinguished Jewish visitors. Wars come and go, but life goes on. And so it went on in the village of Oberstdorf throughout the 1930s and 1940s, with the rise and fall of Nazism an undercurrent all along – except it was one that swelled in a way that even a quiet little village couldn’t ignore.

Inside the Third Reich - Wikipedia Inside the Third Reich - Wikipedia

This is brilliantly done. If you have an interest in history and looking for a captivating read that doesn’t shy away from discussing ordinary people’s potential culpability then read this book. There is something disarming about reading this book too as it makes one question one’s own culpability when we know terrible things are happening in the world around us. Boyd using unpublish diaries is able to follow the lives of the villagers and their day to day encounters with the rise of the Nazis, through to the end of the war when the village was occupied first by the French and then the Americans. What emerges is a picture is how some supported the Nazis other adapted to survive and how some knew it was best not to say what they thought out aloud.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. a b c d e Speer, Albert (1995). Inside the Third Reich. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. pp.29–48. ISBN 9781842127353. 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. 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.

Village in the Third Reich’ Review: When Fascism Came to ‘A Village in the Third Reich’ Review: When Fascism Came to

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.Are there are a lot of characters, yes of course. I found it fascinating even if I didn't quite remember all the time who was who. The manuscript led to two books: first Erinnerungen ("Recollections") (Propyläen/Ullstein, 1969), which was translated into English and published by Macmillan in 1970 as Inside the Third Reich; then as Spandauer Tagebücher ("Spandau Diaries") (Propyläen/Ullstein, 1975), which was translated into English and published by Macmillan in 1976 as Spandau: The Secret Diaries. 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. Drawing on archive material, letters, interviews and memoirs, A Village in the Third Reich is an extraordinarily intimate portrait of Germany under Holland was diagnosed in 2013 and lost a year to chemotherapy. At one point he was given just days to live, before a successful course of stem-cell treatment. He recovered enough to see the film through to its final stages, but didn’t live to see it find an audience. In a horrible coincidence, Weyermann died of lung cancer in October 2021. “Diane’s vision and courage are 100% the reason this film got made,” Battsek says. “Nobody else would have done that.”

How the Nazi Regime Upended the Lives of These Bavarian

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.I really enjoyed (although, enjoy is not quite the right word - appreciated?) this book. We've been 'fed' many overarching stories over the years, and it was really interesting to see what Nazism was like from the perspective of a small village. A study of Nazi Germany from the end of WWI to the end of WWII told through the lives of people in one Bavarian village in the Alps. 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]