The most important thing about the terrible events of the Third Reich is that we should not forget them.

Mr Martin Sr emerges as a dry, original man with some unique rules for living (‘Smokers are the best people; they’ll always look after you,’ he advises little Andrew early on) and the sort of decent, working-class-made-good, job-for-life man that has all but disappeared from British life. The focus on Oberstdorf also shows the chaos that was the norm of the Nazi State and how much the implementation of the 'Jewish question' was dependent on individuals in power.

There is even a tale at the end about the resistance whose names are still being protected seventy five years on.

But more memorable is his portrait of a place making the painful transition from a communal, industrial culture to one based on leisure, services and individuals. There are a few mistakes – the suggestion that Hull is on the southern rather than northern bank of the Humber, which would put it in Lincolnshire.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. It was found that Protestants were more likely to vote for the Nazis, but all the same they received a substantial vote from the Catholics. I expected something else entirely, more like a romanticized retelling of Oberstdorf's history and place in the Third Reich. The account it gives is all the more powerful for being told though the voices and experiences of ordinary people. 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.

The author told the history of Oberstdorf, a village in the Bavarian Alps, the community as well as the young men as they fought across Europe and the Eastern Front, from the end of World War I to 5 May, 1955, when the Federal Republic of Germany was granted the full authority of a sovereign state. 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. Even with a constant influx of Germans from the north, bringing with them new ideas and a fresh outlook on the world, the village’s rural roots and religious values remained at the heart of its identity.It also showed how petty the Nazis could be amongst themselves, especially when the first two Nazi mayors were “moved” rather quickly.

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.Hidden deep in the Bavarian mountains lies the picturesque village of Oberstdorf—a place where for hundreds of years people lived simple lives while history was made elsewhere. Julia Boyd is the author of the Sunday Times bestseller Travellers in the Third Reich: The Rise of Fascism through the Eyes of Everyday People. Diaries and letters from private collections and documents preserved in various national, state and church archives enrich our understanding as well. Also this book very much minimized what happened to the Jews, just by picking a town that didn’t have a lot of Jews in the first place. How was it possible that the people of her country—parents and grandparents—dragged the world and itself into a murderous abyss of war and genocide?