This is one of those books that is hard to rate because the content has such a somber air around it. This richly textured chronicle offers valuable insights into 'the most far-reaching tragedy in human history. But there’s nothing new about totalitarian minions sparing their friends and neighbors from the worst excesses.

By the early 1920s it was a favoured tourist spot: its population of 4,000 was swelled to 9,000 by visitors who came for health cures and winter sports. Famous for Alpine sports, it’s a traditional, picturesque village and an interesting microhistory subject for several reasons. I would like to think I would join the resistance, but the costs could be high, not only your own life, but that of your loved ones are at stake.for anyone who understands the concept that ‘it takes a village to raise a child,’ will understand the concept ‘it takes an Auschwitz to understand a nation. Of course, there are acts of defiance and bravery, those who worked for the regime but retained their humanity towards others, such as the new Mayor, who was moderate and generally bent the rules as far as he was able. The ‘original’ inhabitants were used to accepting tourists as they formed an income stream to the village through skiing but when refugees fleeing the allied bombing offensive later in the war arrived, it was a different matter. The early war victories caused general happiness, but after Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union the atmosphere changed.

As Julia Boyd emphasizes, too many people allowed reverence for a nation’s glorious past to warp their judgment about its morally repugnant present. I don’t often review non-fiction but I loved the premise of this book; to follow the life of a single village in Germany from the end of the First World War, and all through the Second.

As Oberstdorf's leaders had never shown much sympathy for left wing politics they had little reason to fear persecution. While there have been countless books written about the rise of Hitler, Travelers in the Third Reich relies on firsthand accounts by foreigners to convey what it was really like to visit, study or vacation in Germany during the 1920s and ’30s. The picture is never black and white and even in a relatively small village there a multiple and nuanced responses to these questions. Because all over Europe there are political parties which wouldn’t be seen dead supporting anything that might be perceived as a NAZI policy or ideology, but which are none-the-less well-honed instruments for implementing their leader’s will rather than representing that of their membership or the wider electorate. Both were studies of medieval villages meticulously reconstructing the lives of ordinary people within the limited space of one small place.