Men like Fink were rare, but Boyd’s book does remind us that even the most brutal regimes cannot extinguish all semblance of human feeling. About the village of Oberstdorf in southern Bavaria (which the author chose due to there being a lot of sources available). It also begs the question: Would people today conform to Nazi ideals under such circumstances as the subjects of this book were exposed to?

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.We are shown Ernst Fink, the village’s Nazi Mayor but at the same time responsible for many acts to protect local Jews and other inhabitants who fall the wrong side of the regime. But also other members of the village were part of the suppression of partisans and Jews in Ukraine. Oberstdorf was a village where food was scarce and people poor after WWI, until tourism became a growing source of income. Leeds United are back in the Premier League and, until recently, a Yorkshireman was England’s cricket captain.

We meet the Jews who survived – and those who didn’t; the Nazi mayor who tried to shield those persecuted by the regime; and a blind boy whose life was judged "not worth living. Despite the madness of hyperinflation caused by the punitive measures put forth by the Treaty of Versailles, Oberstdorf had, by the late 1920s, been transformed into a flourishing vacation resort. Within its pages we encounter people from all walks of life – foresters, priests, farmers and nuns; innkeepers, Nazi officials, veterans and party members; village councillors, mountaineers, socialists, slave labourers, schoolchildren, tourists and aristocrats. Go back to what your mother taught you': TV presenter Susannah Constantine on the six money-saving hacks that helped her cut energy use on laundry by a THIRD!Many of the children are shown to have been indoctrinated into total belief and a lots of Obersdorf residents are killed during WW2 fighting with the Mountain Division or in the death camps. Julia Boyd’s exceptional new book gets to the root of the matter by focusing exclusively on the inhabitants of one small village. Julia Boyd is the author of A Dance with the Dragon: The Vanished World of Peking's Foreign Colony, The Excellent Doctor Blackwell: The Life of the First Woman Physician and Hannah Riddell: An Englishwoman in Japan. Other important sources include local newspapers, unpublished memoirs and interviews given by the villagers themselves.