LITERARY REVIEW

Intro: A forensic history of a Bavarian village vividly illustrates how ordinary Germans were ruthlessly bullied into accepting the new, brutal Nazi order. The village of Oberstdorf is the focus of attention

UNDERSTANDING micro-history is invaluable when analysing how a whole country can be swept up in a tidal wave of dictatorial evil and madness, as happened with Germany and the Third Reich.

Readers of this historical account will learn more about the psychological workings of Nazism than by reading a shelf of wider-canvas volumes on the rise of Nazism in general. It’s a superbly researched chronicle of one small village in the Bavarian Alps called Oberstdorf.

For instance, many will know of Hitler’s T4 euthanasia programme, so-called because decisions on whether mentally or physically ill citizens should live or die were made at the Berlin headquarters, Tiergarten 4.

This narrative, however, introduces us to a young resident of Oberstdorf, Theodor Weissenberger, a sensitive, curly-haired blind boy (probably blinded by a nurse who gave him the wrong eye-drops just after birth), adored by his mother and sisters.

Aged 19 in 1940, Theodor was “collected”, taken to a psychiatric hospital, put inside a “charity ambulance” and gassed. German doctors chose meningitis from a list of convincing diseases to put on his death certificate. This young man was one of 70,272 people with so-called disabilities to be murdered at six killing centres across Germany.

How could this happen in a civilised country? As it turns out, there are quite a few doctors in this book. Some are benign; others are clearly a revolting inversion of what a medical doctor should be. One kind village doctor diagnosed a young villager, 16-year-old Franz Noichl, with flu in February 1945, prescribing “bed-rest”, thus exempting him from joining the Volkssturm, Hitler’s army of teenaged cannon fodder about to be mown down in a crazed, last-ditch attempt to win the war, as Franz’s best friend was.

Another doctor in the village refused to exempt a young Jewish villager, Eva Noack-Mosse, from being sent to the murderous place of Theresienstadt.

INDOCTRINATED PROPAGANDA

One villager with the august name of Lieutenant Heinz Schubert – a descendant of the composer – supervised the shooting of some 800 gypsies in the Crimea in 1941. The whole country was indoctrinated into racist propaganda which led to bestiality on the Eastern Front.

Later, at the Nuremberg Trials, Schubert would defend himself by saying: “We did not set out to kill, but to defend Western civilisation.” What perverted version of “civilisation” did he think he was living in, and how did he get there?

Oberstdorf was such a peaceful, agricultural and devoutly Catholic village – a picture-postcard of a place –that when, after World War I, the locals started a small militia to guard against possible looting caused by the deteriorating economic situation, that their main concern was to make sure its meetings didn’t clash with Mass or milking.

The village was a favoured tourist destination for mountain walkers and many of its regular patrons were Jews.

In 1920, just after the Nazi party was born amid the unrest and misery of a country defeated in the Great War, its renowned newspaper the Volkischer Beobachter published a piece railing against Jews holidaying in Oberstdorf. The rhetoric used in the article was inhumane and unspeakably disgusting, but, the next day the local Oberstdorf newspaper responded robustly with the words: “No one can deny Jews the right to holiday where they want.”

Through the 1920s and 1930s, however, we see how, one by one, villagers went over to the dark side. In 1923, in the days of hyperinflation caused by the mass-printing of cash, the wedding of two locals cost an astronomical 380 billion marks.

That married couple would be typical of those ripe for conversion to Nazism – the Wall Street Crash meant their pay was cut in half. They sensed and believed that Hitler would bring a new dawn and help Germany to believe in itself again.

One female Oberstdorf journalist wrote, “We need a dictator like Mussolini . . . blessed with his ruthlessness, energy and recklessness”.

The Versailles Treaty imposed on Germany was economically crippling. The locals were all ears when a Nazi politician, Theo Benesch, spoke in the village tavern, promising “beauty, freedom and dignity” if the audience put their trust and faith in the Fuhrer.

A farmer who’d been sceptical hung a swastika from a tree in front of his farmhouse.

THE ENABLING ACT

Within the space of just three months of Hitler being voted to power in 1933, the Enabling Act allowed all state and local authorities, associations and societies to be dissolved and re-formed in the Nazi image. That was how Nazism extended its tentacles into every tiny area of German society.

The chairman of the Oberstdorf Fishing Society resigned the moment a motion was passed banning Jewish members, and there was a lot of muttered loathing of local Nazis who were suddenly strutting about in positions of power.

As the Third Reich took hold, though, small gestures of defiance would be acts of great rashness.

Eavesdroppers were ubiquitous. The school bully, Margot, the daughter of a prominent Nazi, was on the lookout. Woe betide you if you so much as grumbled about the regime.

One mother became acutely anxious in the village square when her young son started singing a jingle he’d heard on French radio; you could be sent to prison for listening to a foreign radio station.

Keeping your head down by trying not to be noticed had become common practise, for fear of the knock on the door in the night.

Getting children on board was a propaganda masterstroke. The authors depict a vivid picture of summer youth camps and Nazi songs round the camp fire.

“My father was utterly disgusted that his children had to join the Hitler Youth,” recalled Franz Noichl, “but any protest would have been useless and dangerous.”

Franz had to give up being an altar boy: you had to make it clear that in the battle between God and Hitler, you chose Hitler.

Meanwhile, at school, the science syllabus included racial theory. One girl, a committed Nazi, took her own life on discovering that her mother was half-Jewish. So it was a toxic mixture of indoctrination and the sheer terror that kept the show on the road. Then, as Germany started losing the war, the regime became even more hysterical. You could be imprisoned for merely voicing pessimism about the Russian campaign.

The heroes of this fascinating and historical book are the ones in positions of power, torn between what they were expected to do and what they knew was morally right.

Werner Fink, for example, the fundamentally decent mayor, continued to offer residents’ permits to Jews, and did not enforce putting the obligatory generic Jewish identifiers “Sara” and “Israel” on their identity cards – at great personal risk to himself.

When the village was liberated by the French in 1945, the reckoning began. Civilian tribunals were set up, grading public officials’ involvement in Nazism. It was amazing how many of them denied all involvement, or somehow vanished into thin air.

Schubert was sentenced to ten years for his evil and wicked acts, released after just six, and lived happily ever after. It leaves you feeling quite sick.

– A Village in the Third Reich by Julia Boyd and Angelika Patel is published by Elliott & Thompson, 456 pp