This was such an interesting, thought provoking and heartbreaking read that I think everyone should experience. We have all been taught about the Nazi regime and everybody knows about the horrific final solution that was part of that, however, not many people will know what it was actually like to live through that as a German citizen and experience the rise of the Nazis and the horrific antisemitism that occurred, as well as the aftermath of WW2.
This is one that I will definitely be recommending to everyone

Through interviews of people who lived under the Third Reich we learn of what life was like for the Germans under the Nazi rule. The people admit they had no idea what the Jews were experiencing at that time and were horrified when they found out the truth. In this book they described the changes to the government which at first seemed to be benevolent but soon changed into a police state under authoritarian rule.
With the invasion of the Allied forces they experienced bombing and having to flee to bomb shelters, to torturing of women and even genocide. Through it all they did see human kindness especially from the Black American soldiers.

There are trigger warnings throughout the book because it can be disturbing. This book is an excellent edition to a World War II historian or fans library as it gives you an insight to life for the German civilians under the Third Reich. As a World War II junkie I have an interested learning about life under Hitler and aftermath. I enjoyed this short book filled with emotional interviews from people reliving what they experienced during that time period.

This was an excellent book. It was well-written.
At times it was hard to read but it's worth reading.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for the ARC.

Thanks to NetGalley for letting me read this book! It was fascinating - hundreds of personal accounts of every day Germans who had lived through the war. Some were few pages long, some a mere paragraph. So many left me wanting more - so many stories that could be told! Some had had mundane experiences where the war had barely touched them. Some had experienced heavy bombing, a lot of women mentioned the terror of what the Russians could and would do.

There was however not much mention of how evil the Nazis were - it seemed very few people interviewed had any first hand experience. Which I guess in a way is interesting in itself. It shows that so many people were just civilians whose lives were suddenly living in fear of being bombed by the British; that was their war. One girl was nearly strafed by a British plane - just a young girl out on a bike ride! It’s so easy to read so much WWII content and think of the Germans as either the resistance fighters or the enemy, but this really shows that the majority were by far just normal people who had the same war experience as the folks in the London Blitz - they’re just trying to get on with their lives while other people fight it out and they get caught in the cross fire.

This was a very interesting read but overall it’s a bit dry, which is probably due to the people being interviewed rather than the author. Some people repeated themselves a lot and others change their train of thought midway, so some stories were a bit hard to follow.

Brief vignettes, often emphasizing “It was horrible. Horrible.” Many are so short; I want to know more. Ones I found especially interesting included the interpreter at a POW camp with English prisoners; getting children to sing–their songs calmed the panicky; the German surgeons who preferred “stomach matter,” long critical surgeries rather than small operations with shrapnel wounds.

Good book, a must read in this current climate in America. Sadly, it came 10 years too late.

Disclaimer: this book was given to me for free from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Any opinions given are my own.

Thank you to Pen and Sword and NetGalley for providing this ARC. In return, this is my honest review.

I am deeply interested in history, particularly as someone whose professional and academic work centers on understanding how a given society decides who is deviant and who is normal. Because so many modern social conflicts (such as antisemitism, anti-trans, and anti-LGBTQIA+ activities) are rooted in ideas that first gained ground during the Third Reich, I was eager to read this book. Unfortunately, it doesn't actually answer any of the questions I suspect a typical reader would want to know.

This book will not tell it's readers...

- What ordinary people thought about Hitler's policies. (At least one interview talks about how nice he and his senior leaders were, however)

- How German families with disabled relatives navigated living in a eugenicist state.

- How the Aryan spouses of non-Aryan partners responded to the Third Reich.

- What it was like for Germans who may have been active in resisting Hitler. Or, conversely, what everyday Germans thought about the resistance.

- What non-Jews thought of the expulsion of their Jewish neighbors, and how those who acquired confiscated Jewish property and homes rationalized those choices.

- How teachers, doctors, and professors felt about implementing exclusion policies.

- How ordinary German civilians adapted to having hundreds of thousands of their neighbors just... disappear.

- What women in the Lebensborn program thought and felt about their experiences.

- How people working around deportation points (such as train stations, city squares, etc.) thought about the movements of people they observed.

... or literally anything else of interest.

To be fair, the author does state clearly in the beginning that this would not be a book about Jewish deportations. But somehow, he manages to write an ENTIRE book about life in the Third Reich that completely erases the presence of Jews entirely... with two exceptions, notable only for how the experiences of Jewish Germans were downplayed. In one instance, the author records an interview with a person recalling the fallout of Kristalnacht on his Jewish classmates. This interview subject (they are called "witnesses" throughout the book... even though any crimes they may have witnessed are carefully erased from the narrative) explains that following Kristalnacht, nothing particularly bad happened to his Jewish classmates. They were only expelled from school and forced to emigrate to South America, leaving all their possessions behind. Except for one classmate, who was killed together with their family at Auschwitz. But you know, other than the expulsion, theft, deportation and murder? ... nothing so terrible happened to the Jews he knew.

This pattern of Holocaust near-erasure becomes glaring to the point of humorous. The lone mention of a Concentration Camp comes from another interview subject who acknowledges working in one, but claims that their prisoners were treated well and denies ever encountering the machinery of the Holocaust. It's laughable. In another interview, the subject complains about how crowded the train cars were as they were evacuated ahead of the Russian Army, but does acknowledge that the Red Cross was on hand to give out sandwiches and tea.

Reading complaints about overcrowded passenger trains receiving Red Cross meals while also being aware that the author is pointedly NOT discussing the cattle cars full of humans who were starved on their way to the gas chambers? Is a whole new level of cognitive dissonance. There is NO mention of Jewish suffering- or Roma, or Queer, or Unionist, or Jehovah's Witness, etc.- throughout this book. But we are reassured at least one interview subject's good family china survived the bombing!

I'm not sure how one writes a book of this kind without critically engaging with the subjects one chooses to interview. Each interview is presented almost without editing, and that makes them tiresome to read as the subjects are allowed to tangent, make asides, and meander their way to the point of their stories- most of which are entirely uninteresting. This book is evil made so banal, it almost becomes apologist for the regime.

I don't understand the author's choices here. Or what the goal of compiling these particular interviews was intended to be. We learn nothing of interest about Living in the Third Reich and the reader comes away wondering why the author was so resistant to acknowledging the elephant in the proverbial room.

Milton Meyer's The Thought They Free: The Germans 1933-1945 is more skillfully edited, more interesting and most importantly, more honest about its subject. I give Meyer 5/5 stars.

I give this one a begrudging 3/5.

An incredibly important and poignant historical recollection of the Third Reich from the author’s interviews. The diversity of the interviewees is well done. It was also lovely to see the helpers. I took all of the cost and genocide prevention studies in grade 12 and we were led to believe that most German people were Nazis or Nazi sympathizers. I was grateful to be proven wrong by this book and to see and hear about so much of the good that’s still in the world. Compassionately and impartial/unbiased account. Stories like these are pivotal so that we can make sure genocides like the Holocaust can never happen again. Also accompanied by gorgeous photography’s to help bring the stories further to life.

I found this book by Dr. Patrick Labriola that featured first hand accounts of civilians living and growing up in Nazi Germany to be interesting and fascinating. When it comes to Nazi Germany, I typically stick to reading historical fiction as opposed to non fiction, but I am glad I got the chance to read this book. The firsthand accounts/oral histories featured in the book were captivating and allowed me to learn so much new information about what it was like for everyday Germans who were living under the rule of Adolf Hitler. It was sad to read about how German citizens were treated by the younger generation in Germany after the war and how they were blamed for the events that led up to Adolf Hitler's rise to power as well as for Germany being on the losing side of the war. I liked how the book was structured and how Labriola used open ended questions with the participants and allowed them to speak freely about their wartime experiences. This book is so important as it features firsthand accounts from those who are often marginalized in society. I am glad that these stories are being preserved as they are highly essential to understanding what it was like being someone who lived in Nazi Germany and who dealt with the social and political effects of such a destructive regime.

Thank you to NetGalley for an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review of Living in the Third Reich. Many thanks to Netgalley and the publisher, Pen & Sword, for this opportunity.

In Living in the Third Reich, Dr. Patrick Labriola presents a sobering and deeply human collection of oral histories from Germans who lived through the Nazi era. Drawing on firsthand accounts, this volume captures the intimate, often harrowing experiences of individuals caught within one of history’s most destructive regimes. With quiet rigor and ethical sensitivity, Labriola curates voices that are often marginalized in popular and academic discussions of the Second World War: ordinary Germans—children and mothers —whose daily lives unfolded in the shadow of Hitler’s Third Reich.

The book’s strength lies in its commitment to preserving these memories without judgment or apology. Instead of asking readers to sympathize, Labriola asks us to listen and to give space and grace to understand the confusion, fear, complicity, indoctrination, and, occasionally, resistance that shaped these lives. The testimonies are not unified by ideology but by a shared sense of surviving history, often without fully understanding its weight until decades later.

From a historiographical standpoint, Living in the Third Reich is a vital contribution. Oral history remains one of the most contested and yet essential methods in reconstructing the past, especially when dealing with personal memory, trauma, and the moral complexities of ordinary life under authoritarian rule. Labriola's work helps fill a gap in the historical record; one that too often excludes the perspectives of those who lived inside Nazi Germany but were neither architects of policy nor formal resisters. These are the voices of the “gray zone,” to borrow Primo Levi’s term: those who endured, obeyed, questioned, or remained silent.

What emerges is not a defense of the past but an act of remembrance. As the generation who lived through World War II fades into history, Living in the Third Reich takes on an urgent relevance. Fewer and fewer are left to tell these stories. And while many may not want to hear them, they are essential to preserving the full scope of human experience in the 20th century. Labriola gives these individuals space to speak in their own words, without imposing moral conclusions, so that the historical record might better reflect the messy, painful reality of life under dictatorship.
This book is a powerful reminder that history is not only written in grand events or political decisions, but also in the quiet moments of memory—some painful, some shameful, all necessary to confront. For scholars, educators, and anyone committed to understanding the human dimensions of history, Living in the Third Reich is a deeply important work.

This book describes personal stories of people who lived during and before WWII in Nazi Germany. It is interesting to read how these individuals were affected by the war. Although many claim to have not been Nazis or know of concentration camps, these same people did not help any one who was persecuted by the Nazis. They just fell inline with the government where they placed their trust. The book rings familiar to some of the political ideas that are happening today. It is frightening in that manner. Overall it was a good read providing insight to one of the most horrific times in the world.

This book is a window into the lives and experiences of ordinary people living in Germany and occupied territories during WWII. It exposes some terrible events and experiences but also highlights the simple truth - war impacts all and we are all humans, regardless of the “side” we are on. The author presents the material very plainly and without analysis, adding power to the individual voices. There is no judgement. The roles played in the war are irrelevant. It is simply an opportunity to gain insight into what people experienced and how they remember it. And this makes the book incredibly powerful.