This is an information-packed local chronicle that will notably enrich the considerable number of histories of “ordinary people's” everyday life in Germany during its most extraordinary, catastrophic couple of decades, at least since the Thirty Years' War. Panikos Panayi, who is best known as a highly prolific historian of migrants and minorities, sees his book very much in the tradition of Alltagsgeschichte, as it first emerged as an expressly designated “school” in Germany as a way to capture and process the reality of the increasingly criminalized German society under Nazism. The first chapter effectively summarizes the specific origins, applications, and value of this conscious historiographical approach in particular for this crisis period. Rather less convincing is the author's insistence that his grass-roots history of the Lower Saxon city is not “yet another book on the Nazis,” but “unique” because it stretches over more years to 1949 and because it deals with three “ethnic minorities” in separate chapters on Jews, Gypsies/Romanies (Sinti and Roma), and foreign workers. This claim is made twice—in the preface and in the first chapter, essentially in the same words. Above all Panayi is “therefore attempting to produce a portrait of the totality of life under the Nazis, using one town as the case study …” (p. 6). In fact, this does mean “yet another book on the Nazis,” as the book jacket with the inevitable black-and-white photo of main street (Große Straße) lined with bright red swastika flags suggests. This is also its greatest strength: it makes a valuable contribution to Nazi history and its immediate aftermath, because the breadth of detail that readers and researchers will find chronicled on the local level here is indeed impressive.

The book's organization is a bit unusual in that it proceeds first chronologically through chapters two to four on the economic and political collapse (1929–33), the construction of Nazi society (1933–38), the war, and defeat and recovery (1945–49). These are followed by four much shorter thematic chapters on groups outside the mainstream: German refugees, Jews, Sinti and Roma, and foreign workers/prisoners all as victims. The first chapters give brief overviews of general German history for each time period, frequently citing and meticulously footnoting the major literature. These sections are interspersed with largely parallel local facts and figures from city archives, the press, and several voluminous local histories, as well as personal reminiscences quoted or paraphrased from twenty-six interviews of thirty-three not altogether representative Osnabrückers, a third of whom were graduates of the same Catholic school just three years apart. This unusually comprehensive and detailed local information and subjective perspective make this book a particularly valuable source for research and a genuine contribution to the literature. The rich array of facts and reminiscences will be especially useful for student research because the overall historical context is simply and clearly summarized in each section and the standard sources clearly cited. There are many places where Panayi stops to compare generally accepted interpretations with his local evidence largely to confirm them, but in some cases to suggest that they might have to be reconsidered. A striking case is the local statistic for sterilization, which was performed on 79 women and 129 men, casting at least some doubt on Gisela Bock's assertion that Nazi sterilization policy demonstrated that women were essentially victims of Nazism.

Given the vast literature on the Nazi era, it is inevitable that Panayi's local sources could not yield as many fresh insights and nuances for the Nazi seizure of power or Nazi society generally. The stories of the individual witnesses from the author's interviews or reports from the time thus offer more new information for the period of the bombing, the postwar years, and in the chapter on the Sinti and Roma. On the latter, the author points out, even the voluminous local histories, which have dealt extensively with the suffering of the city's German and Jewish populations, are sparse, even though a monument has been erected in the city center to commemorate the Gypsy Holocaust.

There are more errors and inconsistencies of spelling and awkward translations than one would have wished, the non-word “Deutschmark” lurks everywhere, Umlaute are sometimes used and sometimes ignored (“fuhrer” and Führer). The reproductions of the city and regional maps are mostly illegible. One could have also expected more reflection about such puzzling facts as that the mayor remained in office from 1927 to 1945. But the scholarly apparatus—notes, bibliography, index, abbreviation list, and the overall organization—is excellent and user-friendly for the researcher.