Julia Boyd

Writer Julia Boyd tells the story of a sleepy Bavarian village and its people caught in the iron grip of the Nazi regime.

Boyd draws on personal archives, letters, interviews and memoirs to show how the village of Oberstdorf, a place where people usually lived ordinary leaves away from historic events, was impacted by the Third Reich. It is a story or brutality, love, courage, weakness, apathy, grief, hope, pain, joy and despair, but ultimately one of the triumph of human resilience. Boyd describes among others the Jews who survived and those who didn’t, the Nazi mayor who tried to shield those persecuted by the regime, and the blind boy whose life was judged not worth living.

Boyd is author of the bestselling Travellers in the Third Reich: The Rise of Fascism through the Eyes of Everyday People and 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.