A Village in the Third Reich
A Village in the Third Reich by Julia Boyd (2022)
Most history is told from the perspective of great men, powerful nations, world-changing ideas. In A Village in the Third Reich Julia Boyd shows us a more humble point of view: that of Oberstdorf, a village in the Allgäu Alps of southern Germany, following the everyday struggles of its people before and during the Second World War. She does this with great sensitivity and attention, drawing on a mixture of town archives as well as diaries and testimonies. It is a fantastic concept that is pulled off well.
Like other villages in its region, Oberstdorf was deeply insular, Catholic, and traditional. Its people were thrifty mountain men and women for whom agriculture was the default condition of life. To master nature required one to work year-round to earn his bread. He was not otherwise especially politically motivated: he probably had opinions on what he heard and read about what was happening far away, but he was loyal above all to his convictions and duties, those things which placed him in relation to everyone else in his community. Blinkered by the love of home, the rest of the country hardly seemed to matter.
Oberstdorf opened up in the 1920s when it became a kind of resort town, complete with a sanatorium, movie theatre, orchestra, sporting facilities, guesthouses, and fancy hotels. People were drawn to its beautiful surroundings and pristine air. They came to convalesce or to ski and hike in the mountains.
Feeding the visitors was always a struggle. Money was tight and food was scarce in the aftermath of the Great War. The presence of strangers in town was not always appreciated, but so long as they came and spent money, they were tolerated. While there had always been an anti-Semitic undercurrent in the suspicious-minded traditionalism of small German towns, those brawling Nazi loudmouths were just as repulsive to the fabric of the village as the Socialist Bacchanalia of Golden Twenties Berlin. When anti-Semitic posters appeared in the village in 1920, its newspaper, the OGF (Oberstdorf Village and Tourist News), condemned “these outsiders who have nothing better to do but damage other people’s property.”
The relative stability of the Stresemann years was of little consolation to Oberstdorf. They viewed what was happening in the capital as inevitable proof of the nation’s moral decline, and when everyone alike was ravaged by the return of hyperinflation, it seemed like a biblically ordained punishment. Everyone became poor overnight. In one stroke the “traditional virtues of industry, thrift and diligence had been swept away.” They saw “profiteers and debtors making fortunes out of their wretchedness.” (31) Oberstdorf’s council had to resort to paying its wages in milk and selling its electricity for bread.
Economic collapse gave the Nazis an opportunity to grow from their original circle of town eccentrics. Incumbent councillors denied that there could be any easy solutions to the hardships ahead, while the Nazis eagerly directed rage and frustration towards their usual scapegoats. Their ability to embolden people to march in step towards a world which rightfully had them at its centre was, for a spiritually defeated nation, uplifting. We see this in the Horst Wessel song, which Nazi stormtroopers would sing while marching in formation in Oberstdorf’s main square:
Es schau’n aufs Hakenkreuz voll Hoffnung schon Millionen.
Der Tag für Freiheit und für Brot bricht an!Millions look upon the Swastika, full of hope.
The day of bread and freedom dawns!
Critics were silenced on 27 February 1933 when the Reichstag went up in flames. What actually happened that night is still unknown, but what matters is that the Nazis successfully framed it as an act of Communist terrorism. The editors of the OGF now saw Hitler as their man. Only he could save the nation from becoming another Soviet Union: “the burning of the Reichstag has taught the sceptical and gullible an urgent lesson regarding the communist threat to Germany... after all these elections, political life will calm down and the economy be given the opportunity to develop and consolidate.” (64-5)
There were numerous warning signs, but Oberstdorf’s leaders chose to ignore them. The regime cracked down on its opponents and started to integrate every organisation in the country into the Nazi chain of command. This process, which was called Gleichschaltung, was devastating for towns like Oberstdorf. It trampled over “generations of tradition and subtle social contract.” (71) Every institution, organisation, and club was now stacked with Nazis, and had to report to Nazis. A new council was appointed. Two thirds of its members were Nazis, and they got to select the mayor behind closed doors.
His name was Ernest Zettler, a so-called “Septemberling” who had joined the party after its electoral success in 1931. Everyone disliked him. The “Old Fighters” (Alterkämpfe) found him an arrogant upstart, a Johnny-come-lately who was only interested in advancing his career. The more traditional-minded Oberstdorfers blamed him for the state’s infringement on their ancient rights and traditions. It seemed they wanted to believe that all this was the fault of a corrupt local politician, so they could retain an overall faith in Hitler’s quest for national renewal. But even after Zettler was hounded out of his job, it was clear that things weren’t going back to how they were.
To capture people’s loyalty, the Nazis had to claw them away from the influences of family, church, and school. Mass-produced radios brought everyone into earshot of government propaganda. The mass-produced Volkswagen could be used to take the family on vacation via the new Autobahn. The Nazis succeeded in expanding to working families a world of leisure and entertainment that had previously only been accessible to a small slice of the upper-middle class.
Children were lured over to the Hitler Youth and its female equivalent, the League of German Girls, with fun activities. For kids who had only ever known strenuous lives on the family farm, it must have been exhilarating to spend the weekends camping, playing games, riding horses, picking plants, singing songs, and telling stories around the campfire. Boys who had proven themselves in sports or exercise were given colourful epaulettes, which they proudly pinned to the breast of their uniform. They were given tickets to go watch Nazi films, which were sometimes intentionally scheduled to run at the same time as mass.
The Nazis also meddled with the education system. They made race science a compulsory subject. A 1934 exam contained the following question: “Having a great leader in turbulent times is the finest benefit for a nation (to be proven with examples from recent and especially very recent German history).” (118) Parents begrudged what the Nazis were doing to their children, but were largely powerless to do anything about it: “...it became increasingly difficult, even dangerous, to resist the intense pressure put on children to join these youth organisations.” (112)
Catholicism was still too deeply ingrained to fight head-on, but the Nazis made life as difficult as possible, hounding out priests who resisted them, and appropriating religious ceremonies to spread their own ideas. They harassed the town’s Franciscan nuns, who ran a primary school, a weather station, and a care home for the disabled. Their salaries were cut, their piano was seized, they were forbidden from sewing or giving music lessons. Sympathisers did what they could to shield them: thanks to the intervention of master craftsman Josef Schratt—famous for having made the world’s largest shoe—the nuns were placed on the town’s register of craftsmen, which enabled them to continue making clothes for the poor and disabled.
In 1934 it had become compulsory for socially undesirable people to be sterilised. This included the disabled, the terminally ill, gay people, the homeless, alcoholics, epileptics, and the “feeble-minded”, a term so broad it could be used to medicalise basically any kind of errant or rebellious behaviour. From 1939 onwards such people were put on a register. A panel of 3 doctors would evaluate the case, determining if they should live or die. If someone was to die, he would be put in the special ward of a paediatric clinic, with known Nazi doctors, who would either starve them to death or overdose them with sedatives. His family would then receive a fictitious death certificate, usually sent a few weeks after the fact so the clinic could continue to pocket their money.
The euthanasia program was mostly ideological, but there were also logistical justifications. It struck doctors like Hermann Pfannmüller as unjust that food and care should be wasted on unproductive and incapable people when Germany’s soldiers were fighting an existential conflict: “The idea is unbearable to me that the best, the flower of our youth must lose its life at the front in order that the feeble-minded and irresponsible asocial elements can have a secure existence in the asylum.” (180)
The logistical challenge of killing large groups of people saw the establishment of the first gas chamber at Posen Gestapo Headquarters, where carbon monoxide was pumped into a room full of mentally ill asylum inmates. Once they were dead, any gold teeth they had would be pulled. Their bodies were then burnt at the crematorium. The ash was kept in case the family wanted the remains of their loved ones, which they could buy for an exorbitant price, probably receiving a random mix of whatever ash was lying around.
Among those murdered was Theodor Weissenberger, a gentle and sensitive 7 year old boy from Oberstdorf, beloved by his family for his silky blonde hair. He was killed at the euthanasia centre in Grafeneck. Despite attempts to keep the program secret, word travelled. Townsfolk at nearby Hadamar noticed how the crematorium chimneys worked all through the night every time a busload of patients arrived. Staff themselves must have at least occasionally unloaded on friends or spouses about the stress and guilt of a difficult day’s work. The program then came to national attention thanks to the courageous efforts of the Bishop of Münster, Clemens August von Galen. He delivered sermons against the program and spread awareness of it through his illegally distributed writings. Public discontent swung against what was going on in the care centres, but by that time Hitler had already achieved his goal of 70,000 dead, and the program was quietly wound down.
It is pretty much impossible that the people of Oberstdorf could have been unaware of the Nazi’s atrocities. Hundreds of them fought in the 1st Mountain Division, which was involved in two massacres in August 1943, one of Greek civilians and the other of surrendered Italian soldiers. Those who came back to the town, whether on leave or with injuries, must have brought with them stories of such warcrimes, though listeners may well have chosen to discredit or downplay or forget such tales: it is always easier to cope with loss and sacrifice by choosing to remember someone in the light of their noblest ideals.
Yet in certain moments of solitary reflection, people must have realised what was going on, even if they only allowed themselves to think this thought briefly. Some townsfolk had shortwave radios and could listen to the German-language broadcasts from the UK and Switzerland, which detailed Hitler’s plans for the extermination of Jews. They also dropped leaflets explaining the same thing. Even if you were to discredit such things as foreign propaganda, two subcamps of Dachau were established only a few miles away from Oberstdorf, which brought SS members into the village pubs. They must have discussed their assignments every now and then over a beer or two. “Rumours, clues, and odd bits of information did not necessarily add up to the kind of hard evidence that would have presented the public with unequivocal facts. Nevertheless, it is fair to say that by the end of 1942, knowledge of the mass killing of Jews was widespread throughout Germany.” (278-9)
Even if you are repulsed by genocide, the fact that it is happening somewhere else, rather than here and now when you are just trying to get by in the middle of a war, probably goes some way to explaining the almost contradictory attitude of ordinary people towards the regime. It was still possible, at the beginning of the war, to fool yourself that everything was normal. Sure, there was rationing, but that had happened before, and even if chocolate and coffee were scarce, beer and cigarettes were not. Everyone had their creature comforts. Even if the schools were teaching funny ideas and the prices in shops were going up and your loved ones were fighting in faraway lands, the Wehrmacht’s lightning victories against France did much to disperse everyday anxiety. There was still a reason for everything.
Life became more desperate as the war dragged on. There was a labour shortage on the homefront, and women and prisoners had to plug the gap. In August 1940 every 18 year old Oberstdorf girl had to report for duty at the Hotel Hirsch in nearby Sonthofen, carrying documents proving her Aryan ancestry and membership in the League for German Girls. It had become very difficult to keep a child out of the Nazi youth groups, and from 1939 onwards those who did not sign up were prosecuted. Even if you somehow managed to avoid joining, you would find yourself blacklisted from jobs.
Education also deteriorated. All the good teachers were conscripted, sent to work in factories, or forced to teach Nazi slogans. Only a third of the old curriculum was covered, with the sudden drop in standards perhaps likened to the situation during Covid. A special qualification called the Notabitur had to be introduced, which had fewer requirements; it also gave the state a way to funnel teenagers out of school and into the army, to replace those now dying rapidly in the East.
Just hours after the announcement of a war with Stalin, news arrived in Oberstdorf that Ludwig Vörg had been killed in action. Vörg was a local legend, a famous mountaineer who had been in the first group to scale the North Face of the treacherous Eiger Mountain in Switzerland. People affectionately called him the Bivouac King for his ability to sleep soundly in a hammock strapped to the side of a pretty much any mountain. A larger than life figure, his death was a sign of the crushing reality to come.
Hitler’s promise of an easy victory evaporated when the German Army failed to capture Moscow. Over a million Germans died in the grinder at Stalingrad. Together with America’s entry into the war, Germany’s defeat now seemed assured. Marianne von Kretschmann—later the wife of Richard von Weizsäcker, President of West Germany—remembered when she came to Oberstdorf as a refugee at the age of 8. It was bitterly cold and the bathroom floor of the house she lived in was insulated with newspapers, on which were printed seemingly endless columns of the names of dead soldiers.
Confidence in the regime had gone, but the people were not yet openly rebellious. The regime intensified its crackdown on political opponents, with the death penalty being handed out for even minor infractions. In these circumstances, it became natural for people to close-off to those around them. A threat hung over every word exchanged with a stranger. If you even inadvertently said the wrong thing to someone desperate enough, or someone who was a fanatical Nazi—or even just a petty Karen who didn’t like you—you might be dragged before the Nazi courts (the Volksgerichthof) and executed for spreading defeatist propaganda.
Some in the town wanted to follow the Nazi orders to fight to the death. Others wanted to end the war, but weren’t willing to risk making overtures to the Allies. One group of Oberstdorfers, a resistance movement known as the Heimatschutz (Homeland Protection), took things into their own hands. When an SS convoy passed through town they seized its machine guns and artillery which they hid in mountain huts. On April 30 they launched a coup to seize control, arresting Nazi officials in the surrounding villages. They then reached out to André François-Poncet, a French diplomat who had been under house arrest in the nearby town of Hirschegg. He drafted a letter explaining the situation to the Allies, who came rumbling through the town in their tanks on the afternoon of May 1st.
Earlier that morning, an altercation had occurred between a Heimatschutz informant, Hans Stadler, and a policeman, Josef Berghuber. Stadler’s role with the Heimatschutz was an open secret. Each man knew where the other stood. What happened next is, to this day, still contested in Oberstdorf. It seems that Berghuber attempted to arrest Stadler, who ignored his instructions. Berghuber shot and killed him.
A few days after the coup, some of the boys from the Heimatschutz caught wind of Berghuber’s whereabouts. Unlike the other Nazis who they had peacefully taken in, Berghuber was clubbed to death. This act of needless brutality once more shocked and divided the townsfolk. They were split not so much on their allegiance towards the Nazis, but based on their personal relation to those involved on either side of the murder. Repressed for a decade, the old family-based way of life was once more reasserting itself as the fundamental driver of village politics.
Those who sided with Berghuber asserted that the Heimatschutz had devolved into a band of robbers. They controlled all the roads in and out of town, stood people over for what they had, and hoarded precious food and supplies for themselves. Now they arrogated for themselves the power to determine who was and was not a Nazi, sometimes based on nothing more than petty vengeance, and at thsi critical hour when the Allies were rolling into town.
Was Berghuber simply doing his duty as a policeman in confronting an outlaw? Or had he gotten what he and the rest of the Nazis deserved? What emerges from this book is that the line between the two is not always certain. Some joined the Nazi party because they believed in its vision of the world. Others thought they could work within the new system, lessening its worse parts while contributing to its better parts. Others joined as a matter of survival. And others simply went along with it.
There may have been an end to the fighting, but hunger, extrajudicial violence, and unfair judgements were still widespread. Millions of Germans had been expelled from Eastern Europe (many of them had lived there for centuries) and began to flood small towns like Oberstdorf. The process of denazification was not—could probably never be—a smooth and complete one. It punished some people who only did what they had to to survive; and it allowed others to walk free who had committed numerous crimes.
There is a desperation and difficulty to the lives of everyone in this book. Julia Boyd wonderfully relates the difficult decisions they had to make from day-to-day. Without books like this, we tend to think of wars and history only in abstract terms, such as the ideas that are in conflict. World War II is too often reduced to a simple morality fable about the triumph of liberal democracy over fascism, of good over evil. By showing us in very personal, relatable terms just how ordinary people navigated these convulsions, Julia Boyd succeeds in capturing the humanity of those who fought on the “bad side”, and reminds us above all of war’s unnegotiable collateral cost.