Travellers in the Third Reich: The Rise of Fascism Through the Eyes of Everyday People: The Rise of Fascism Seen Through the Eyes of Everyday People

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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. The book ends with chilling accounts of life in Germany during the war, as shortages gave way to terror and constant bombing raids. The Americans bombed during the day and the British at night, and slowly Germany industry was destroyed, and its cities – some of which were among the great cultural jewels of civilization – were reduced to piles of rubble. By the end of the war anything, even communism, would have been better than freezing and starving in the cellars of bombed-out cities. To modern eyes, the failure of many of these correspondents to recognise the dangers of Nazism is galling. The complacency and the wilful blindness to sinister truths are plain to see, though it became impossible to maintain as the Nazis started openly persecuting the Jews and annexing surrounding territories. For who could sensibly fail to understand the implications of cities festooned in massive Nazi banners flapping above state-sanctioned, anti-Semitic graffiti – the writing, literally, on the walls? Anii au trecut, Germania a reușit să se stabilizeze și la putere venise partidul naționalist-socialist, cu Hitler în frunte. Străinii nu mai veneau doar ca să vadă o țară bucolică, ci și pentru studii și mediul cultural. Însă totul era înșelător, iluzia s-a spart destul de repede odată cu Anchluss, anexarea Austriei. Cu toate astea, oamenii si-ai văzut mai departe de viețile și concediile lor. Liniște a fost și la anexarea Cehoslovaciei. Abia în Noaptea de Cristal, când sunetul vitrinelor sparte, a strigătelor de spaimă și durere, când persecuția evreilor a devenit evidentă, când nu se mai puteau închide ochii la uciderea acestora, la existența lagărelor în care erau închiși, abia atunci situația reală a început să devină zgomotoasă.

Drawing on the unpublished experiences of outsiders inside the Third Reich, Julia Boyd provides dazzling new perspectives on the Germany that Hitler built. Her book is a tour de force of historical research”– Dr Piers Brendon, author of The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s We learn that many of the younger members of the Village when war came were members of the 98th or 99th Mountain Battalions part of the 1st Mountain Division, which was an elite division. It also committed war crimes in the later war in Greece. But also other members of the village were part of the suppression of partisans and Jews in Ukraine. One also supervised the killing of 700 Jews in Ukraine. Added to this was the fact that many in Europe and American disliked the French more than the Germans. The French were seen as arrogant, chaotic, and ungrateful for the aid they had been given in the First World War, and were thought to have been the driving force behind the harsh peace terms that devastated Germany. For many people it seemed obvious that the future of Europe lay with the alliance of the Germanic peoples in Britain and Germany, an alliance which would dominate the rest of the world politically, economically, and militarily. British Admiral Sir Barry Domvile (whose support for Hitler’s regime was so enthusiastic the British government interned him at the start of the war), was a true believer in this kind of alliance, and a visit to Germany “confirmed a deep belief, shared by so many men who had fought in the Great War, that without a strong alliance between England and Germany there could be no world peace.” (p. 181) This non-fiction depicts the cultural, social and political changes over the 40 years in a village whose life focused around sheep breeding, some farming and tourist industry as Obersdorf became more and more popular in the covered period. Such a detailed analysis was possible due to vast archives preserved and to memoirs, letters and memories of those whose ancestors lived in the village before the WW2 and through it.Oberstdorf is one of the most famous places in Bavaria owing to ski jumping competitions and magnificent scenery for tourists to admire both in summer and winter. Ms Boyd's idea to describe life in a village during the inter-war period sounds interesting as most of the books cover towns or cities whereas countrylife is rather obscure. The book has a wide range of viewpoints; academics, oversea students, members of the British aristocracy, diplomats, journalists, politicians, and ordinary travellers, are all represented. There are those who, like Unity Mitford, staked out Hitler and infiltrated his inner circle out of fanaticism, through Virginia and Leonard Woolf, who were unimpressed, to those who immediately spotted the danger of the emerging National Socialist Party and those who, without the benefit of hindsight, were unquestioning and uncritical - even when visiting book burnings and labour camps. Persuasive propaganda and the distortion of truth, or simple politeness, led to some visitors remaining uncritical of a country not their own.

Did anything change in the attitudes of the travelers after their experience? It doesn’t appear so in most cases. People saw what they wanted to see and ignored the things that might have troubled them. It was common early in the 30s for NAZI’s to give tours of work camps such as Dachau. Most travelers were untroubled. Of course they were getting a much sanitized tour in which guards were dressed as prisoners and were not experiencing abuse. a b "Julia Boyd's schedule for LA Times Festival of Books 2019". LA Times Festival of Books . Retrieved 2023-04-13. A Village in the Third Reich: How Ordinary Lives Were Transformed by the Rise of Fascism by Julia Boyd, Angelika Patel". Publishers Weekly. 2023-02-08 . Retrieved 2023-04-13. With an almost novelistic touch, [Boyd] presents a range of stories of human interest … The uncomfortable moral of Travellers in the Third Reich is that people see and hear only what they already want to see and hear."Many visitors went with preconceptions and saw what they wanted to see however, as the 1930s rolled on, it became clear that it was only the most rabid Hitler supporters who could not perceive the regime in its true colours. Boyd's fresh and instructive look at 1930s Germany as described in contemporaneous travel narratives reveals a tourist destination that continued to attract visitors even as the true intentions of the Nazis became obvious" At the end of the war a list of the Nazis in the village was completed from various sorts. From an incomplete list it was found that there were 455 names on the list, roughly 10% of the village, which also happened to mirror the Nazis membership across Germany. In the 1930s the most cultured and technologically advanced country in Europe tumbled into the abyss. In this deeply researched book Julia Boyd lets us view Germany's astonishing fall through foreign eyes. Her vivid tapestry of human stories is a delightful, often moving read. It also offers sobering lessons for our own day when strong leaders are again all the rage." And what were ordinary Germans thinking at the time? And what about the MULTITUDE of tourists, journalists, students, scholars, political figures and even entire happy families doing visiting Germany right up and to the very day the war began?)

Kol kultūros žmonės puotavo ir žavėjosi kita Vokietijoso dalis beveik badavo ir antisemitizmas visi augo. Julia Boyd has written what has to be one of the most fascinating books of the using new material for private collections and archives around the world. She also asks the poignant question of without the benefit of hindsight, how do you interpret what’s right in front of your eyes? Clearly not an easy question to answer, but one Julia Boyd sets out to do with Travellers in the Third Reich. Galėčiau dar rašyti ir rašyti, bet tiesiog labai rekomenduoju. Stilius tikrai nesudėtingas, knyga įtraukia labiau nei koks trileris ir labai įdomiai nuspalvina tokią didingą ir paslaptingą trečiojo reicho Vokietiją. The number of different perspectives is dizzyingly diverse. Indeed sometimes I found it too detailed and repetitive.

This might be because of the nature of such books, in which, of late, heavy editorial commentary seems to have become unfashionable. Or it could be because of the Anglophone slant of the reports selected and reported. But it remains a slightly jarring note in an otherwise fascinating and admirable book. It almost seems that there are many in the Anglophone world who are still not willing to face up to its complicity in the rise of fascism. Kay Smith, wife of US military attache Colonel Truman Smith, after a visit to the now infamous "Degenerate Art" exhibit in Munich had a reaction which fell in with the intentions of the exhibit's organizers: 'The continuous viewing of ugly distorted faces and forms, with blood and vomit spewing from them - vulgar disgusting scenes - produced a definite physical reaction.' ... Kay, who had been reading articles in the American press condemning Nazi philistinism, was now, on this issue at least, entirely in sympathy with the F� Anti-Semitism is seldom an issue, probably because, as Boyd notes, it is often shared by other foreigners too. Some foreign visitors who find it offensive, nevertheless often distinguish between the refined “European” Jew and the bad, detestable Jew, who is always from eastern Europe, and hence, though I do not think Boyd comments on it, this fits into a larger framework of racism. Such foreigners fail to notice, until it is too late, that Nazi thugs do not distinguish between these “good” and “bad” Jews. Like others I have often wondered about where to find the bridge between the atrocious events perpetrated by the Nazi regime and the ordinary people who lived in Germany at the time and who, to greater or lesser extents became complicit in what was going on. The book is very good at describing the spectrum of fears, beliefs, hopes and indifference which allowed the Nazis to stay in power. We all know hindsight is 20/20. It’s always been a mystery post WWII why intelligent people could not grasp the threat that NAZI’s posed to the world. Boyd’s book does not give a definitive answer to the question but lays out massive amounts of first person books, letters, diaries and speeches reported by people, primarily British and American, who traveled in Germany beginning just after WWI through the beginning of WWII.