When one reads such a book one has the feeling that Germans came there as liberators instead of conquerors. I'm referring to the descriptions of Soviet massacres against their own civilian population accused of collaborating with the enemy, which the author claims to have witnessed during the German troops' retreat from the river Inhul to Voznesensk on the southern Bug (Mikolayiv Oblast, Ukraine) in March 1944 (pages 230, 235/236 and 242/243 of the English translation). The biggest surprise of many will be the chaotic nature of the German front lines for most of the time.

I have not read many accounts where the German soldiers, not driven by the evil ideology, describe what soldiers on every side were thinking.This site uses cookies to deliver our services, improve performance, for analytics, and (if not signed in) for advertising. It's simply a diary-formatted account of a common foot soldier living, fighting, and being repeatedly wounded in the hell that was the Eastern Front, and as such it's extremely brutal at times. Although wounded several times, author, Gunter Koschorrek, managed to survive spent almost the entire war as a heavy machine gun crewman engaged against the Russians on the imploding Eastern front. The author describes himself and most of his comrades as gentleman soldiers and absolves himself of any participation in or knowledge of the barbarous actions of the Nazi regime and the SS.

The author is introspective and at times compassionate when dealing with the enemy (something I have rarely heard about)and describes many times where the enemy is given medical attention and treated humanely. The only war crimes Koschorrek mentions that are perpetrated by the Germans is the execution of wounded Soviet soldiers on the front line by a single German officer.Although the writing was strong and it contained a lot of interest, it pales substantially when compared to Sajer's 'the Forgotten Soldier' opus. Koschorrek's memoir, unlike so many others, doesn't make any attempt at being literary or philosophical, it's neither preachily anti-war nor a grovelling mea culpa manifesto for the crimes of Germany. No missing or damaged pages, no creases or tears, no underlining or highlighting of text, and no writing in the margins. I also preferred the broad experience he had in many theaters of battle besides engagements in the Soviet Union.

We sometimes make mistakes in our spelling, transcription or categorisation, or miss information out of our records. Void of discussions of high politics, the book reveals the destructiveness of war, at both a physical and spiritual level, for countless individuals who have little or no say in their fate in such an event. Later, the horror and confusion of fighting in the streets of Stalingrad are brought to life by his descriptions of the others in his unit, their differing manners and techniques for dealing with the squalor and death. Wounded 7 times, you get to follow a plain, unassuming mudslogger into the deepest penetration of the USSR and back out. But what sense does it make, Tantor, to have an Englishman play the voice of a German soldier in in World War II?He does a good job of conveying how non-ideological a good portion of the military was; when political officers show up late in the book to spout Nazi propaganda everyone rolls their eyes at them, and while there are some instances of atrocities he sees, they're things like shooting partisans, not death camp-type stuff.