Ostfront soldier story : any recommendations?

hinault

I am looking to read accounts by soldiers who served in the German army on the Ostfront during WW2.

I saw a book over the weekend called "the forgotten soldier" by Guy Sajer but the reviews that I have read online appear to dispute the authenticity of that
account.

Can any of the resident experts here recommend any other publications to read?

Thanks in advance.

Morlar

I'd definitely recommend the Forgotten Soldier. There are detractors but the jury is still out on whether or not it is pure recollection or not. I would have no problem recommending it to anyone at all. Some scenes of it will probably leave a lasting impression.

I'd also recommend 'Panzer Commander' by Hans Von Luck.

It's not only based on Ostfront, in fact it's mostly Poland, France, North Africa, D-day etc - but it does cover his time in Russia.

It also covers his later years in a Soviet Gulag, from getting his gold teeth pulled out on arrival by a soviet with a pair of pliers to the time he was almost not released because he had a 'Von' in his name. The communists believed this meant he was an aristocrat and enemy of the proletariat or some such and some wanted to keep him indefinitely.



http://www.amazon.com/Panzer-Commander-Memoirs-Colonel-Hans/dp/0440208025

hinault

Thanks Morlar:)

I might give the forgotten soldier a go so.
Your other recommendation looks to be a good read also.

Dr Strange

I read this one and found it very interesting:

"In my brother's shadow" by Uwe Timm

http://www.amazon.co.uk/My-Brothers-Shadow-Uwe-Timm/dp/074757975X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1309934211&sr=1-1

From Publishers Weekly
A memoir not of a brother but of his absence from the author's life and family, Timm's book revolves around memory--of how traces of his brother, an SS corporal killed in Russia in 1943, are tied up with aspects of WWII that still remain unspeakable for many Germans. Timm was two when his brother Karl-Heinz enlisted, at age 18. Using diary entries from a book Karl-Heinz kept at the front, family recollections and his own experience growing up without his brother, Timm works through, beautifully, his sense of an unknowable figure who, 60 years later, continues to loom large in his consciousness. At the same time, a good deal of the book goes toward unpacking the ways in which national identity informs personal identity; Timm digs into what it meant then (and means now) to have had a brother, or son, in the SS. Timm's novel The Invention of Curried Sausage was set during WWII, and this book is informed by a deep understanding of its horrors, anxieties and legacies. The translation is lyrical if occasionally awkward ("In the coffee break I went to the lavatory"); the whole compellingly scales a nation's failure down to the level of a nuclear family.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Also these may be of interest:

Eastern Inferno: The Journals of a German Panzerjager on the Eastern Front 1941-43
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Eastern-Inferno-Journals-Panzerjager-1941-43/dp/1935149474

Blood Red Snow - The Memoirs of a German Soldier on the Eastern Front
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0760321981/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp_sr_2?pf_rd_p=103612307&pf_rd_s=lpo-top-stripe&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=1935149474&pf_rd_m=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE&pf_rd_r=0ZQ5XPG275KHH656PQ15

In Deadly Combat: A German Soldier's Memoir of the Eastern Front (Modern War Studies)
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Deadly-Combat-Soldiers-Eastern-Studies/dp/0700611223/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1309934602&sr=1-2

Sniper on the Eastern Front: The Memoirs of Sepp Allerberger, Knight's Cross
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sniper-Eastern-Front-Memoirs-Allerberger/dp/1844153177/ref=pd_sim_b_5

who the fug

+ One on what Morlar said about forgotten soldier.

jonniebgood1

I read the forgotten soldier years ago and it is a good book. The doubts about whether it is fiction though devalue it IMO. There are other books that describe the German armies with first hand experiences that don't have doubts about authenticity. I like 'blood red snow' as already mentioned and 'Through hell for hitler' is also interesting http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1852602716/ref=oss_product.

Here is some of the analysis on 'the forgotten soldier'. http://members.shaw.ca/grossdeutschland/sajer.htm

These type of first hand accounts usually come out well after the event and are often a bit hit and miss in terms of quality. I struggled to get a perspective on the eastern front from a Russian perspective, there are not many legitimate accounts despite their victory due I presume to soviet sensors. I read 'Red Partisan: The Memoirs of a Soviet Resistance Fighter on the Eastern Front ' by Nikolai I. Obryn'ba http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1844154289/ref=oss_product. It was a great story but some of the accounts were hard to believe. Its also a less told perspective.

BlaasForRafa

Morlar wrote: »

I'd also recommend 'Panzer Commander' by Hans Von Luck.

+1 on Panzer Commander, Panzer Battles by Von Mellenthin is good as well, also Panzer Leader by Heinz Guderian is an excellent book on leading a panzer corps during barbarossa.

Those are mostly about commanding divisions and corps though, if its a book about the ordinary soldiers you want then War Without Garlands by Robert Kershaw is a must read in my opinion http://www.amazon.co.uk/War-Without-Garlands-Operation-Barbarossa/dp/0711033242/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1309942925&sr=8-1 . It uses a mixture of post-war interviews, journals, diaries and letters home to tell the story of ordinary soldiers during operation Barbarossa.

It does look at the soviet soldiers as well using diaries taken from captured and dead soviet troops but it most focuses on the germans and you can see how over time a lot of them became devoid of emotions due to the extreme stress and fear that they were subject to.

BlaasForRafa

jonniebgood1 wrote: »

These type of first hand accounts usually come out well after the event and are often a bit hit and miss in terms of quality. I struggled to get a perspective on the eastern front from a Russian perspective, there are not many legitimate accounts despite their victory due I presume to soviet sensors. I read 'Red Partisan: The Memoirs of a Soviet Resistance Fighter on the Eastern Front ' by Nikolai I. Obryn'ba http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1844154289/ref=oss_product. It was a great story but some of the accounts were hard to believe. Its also a less told perspective.

Over Fields of Fire by Anna Timofeeva-Egorova is the autobiography of a female sturmovik pilots, it is equal parts fascinating and gripping. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Over-Fields-Fire-Sturmovik-Memories/dp/1906033277/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1309943369&sr=1-2

Red Star Airacobra by Evgeny Marinsky is the autobiography of a Soviet fighter ace and provides a great view of air combat from the russian side. Most of the biography on the east front air war is from the german side so its interesting to get the russian perspective http://www.amazon.co.uk/Red-Star-Airacobra-Memoirs-Memories/dp/1874622787/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1309943468&sr=1-5

T-34 in Action by Artem Drabkin is a collection of stories from former soviet tank crew, there are some stories that come close to feeling like tall tales but its still a good read overall. http://www.amazon.co.uk/T-34-Action-Artem-Drabkin/dp/184415243X/ref=wl_it_dp_o?ie=UTF8&coliid=I12LIPQH12KDGY&colid=O94PHN0XNKYR

All 3 books are relatively free of soviet style propogandising and rewriting of history although the Germans are constantly called Hitlerites (a name I've never heard used by non-russian)

Morlar

I'd also recommend 'Black Edelweiss: A Memoir of Combat and Conscience by a Soldier of the Waffen-SS' By Johann Voss.


http://www.amazon.com/Black-Edelweiss-Conscience-Soldier-Waffen-SS/dp/0966638980




Here is the preface :

This book was conceived and for the most part written a long time ago. I was then a prisoner of the US Army from March 1945 to December 1946. The idea of editing and publishing the manuscript had never crossed my mind in the following decades. The war and what followed were a closed chapter.
The subject surfaced only when President Reagan and Chancellor Kohl visited the German military cemetery in Bitburg, Germany, in 1985. This visit
raised worldwide protests, namely because some young Waffen-SS soldiers were buried there. Including these soldiers in the memorial ceremony was
widely regarded as an outrageous affair. Since then the indiscriminate damnation of Waffen-SS soldiers has become even more pervasive and intransigent.
Apparently, in the sixty years since those soldiers fell in battle, the rubble, which the collapsing Reich heaped upon the course of their short lives, was
not removed.
The book is a personal account of my war years, first at school and then with the Waffen-SS, which I joined early in 1943 at the age of seventeen. I saw combat with the 11 th Gebirgsjiiger (Mountain Infantry) Regiment for a year and a half, mainly in the far north and later at the western frontier of the Reich. For all the differences in theaters of war, troops, and personal backgrounds, however, I think that this book is also about the volunteers of my age group in general; about their thinking and feeling; about their faith and their distress; and about their endeavors to live up to their ideals, even when hope was lost.

My regiment was part of the 6th SS-Gebirgsdivision (Mountain Division) Nord, which fought from the summer of 1941 until September 1944 in the
wilderness of the North Karelian front, near the Arctic Circle. The division belonged to the German 20th Gebirgsarmee (Mountain Army), which defended
the northern half of the Finnish-German front, a line stretching some 900 miles from the Arctic Sea down to the Gulf of Finland. When Finland quit
the war in September 1944 and the 20th Army had to leave the country, the Nord became the rear guard of the southern Corps and fought its way along
the Finnish-Swedish border up to northern Norway. In the bitter cold and darkness of the Arctic winter, my regiment marched down the Norwegian
coast until it reached the railway at Mo i Rana, ending a trek of some 1,000 miles. Rushed to Oslo by train, and after a few days rest in Denmark, we
moved to the Western front, where the Nord participated in Operation NORDWIND in early January 1945, a bloody clash with the US Seventh Army in
the snow-covered hills of the Lower Vosges. In the battles and the war of attrition that followed, the frontline units of the Nord were destroyed bit by
bit. When the front reached the Rhine in March 1945, only remnants of the division remained. The rest was annihilated in the hills northeast of Frankfurt
on 3 April, just after Easter.

I had no intention of writing military history, a field in which I am no expert. Instead, I have chronicled combat the way I saw it, from the perspective
of an average soldier who, more often than not, lacked an overview of the general situation, but who was intimately familiar with life (and death)
in the foxholes. What I wanted to do was to portray these young volunteers under arduous physical and mental conditions and to show how they reacted.
Likewise, the characters of my story are real, to include those in my family as well as in my unit, but I have changed their names. They stand for a European youth who, at that time, saw themselves actively united in an effort to resolve a secular conflict between the Occident and Bolshevism.
Since that time I have enjoyed a rich professional life as a corporate lawyer with various international ties. My desire to understand the historical, political, and moral aspects of World War II has always been there, however, resulting in my reading of a wealth of material and then grappling with its inherent drawbacks and inconsistencies. I chose not to follow the advice of some, to rewrite the prisoner's manuscript from the perspective of a man of my age. Such a balanced view of the past, based on so many decades of experience, traveling, and reading, in particular about the crimes committed behind the frontlines in the East, seemed inappropriate for the voices of those combat soldiers who did not live to mature and grow, but instead had to die young in their limited perception of the world. The same notion applies to those who survived and found themselves, at that age, indicted and convicted as members of a criminal organization.

My generation's task was to clear away the ruins of the war and to rebuild our country. As I said before, however, there is still much rubble left. If this
book would uncover a small part of that long-hidden ground, I would have done my part for my comrades.
-Johann Voss

The Ronald Reagan visit to the German military cemetery in Bitburg (which triggered the writing of this book) was heavily criticised by the german writer Gunter Grass. Who was disguising the fact that he also was an SS Veteran (later coming clean about his membership while claiming to have never fired a round for the duration of the war).

who the fug

Damm you Morlar, I wasn't going to buy any books this week

jonniebgood1

Morlar wrote: »

I'd also recommend 'Black Edelweiss: A Memoir of Combat and Conscience by a Soldier of the Waffen-SS' By Johann Voss.


http://www.amazon.com/Black-Edelweiss-Conscience-Soldier-Waffen-SS/dp/0966638980

The Ronald Reagan visit to the German military cemetery in Bitburg (which triggered the writing of this book) was heavily criticised by the german writer Gunter Grass. Who was disguising the fact that he also was an SS Veteran (later coming clean about his membership while claiming to have never fired a round for the duration of the war).

There are some interesting parts in 'Black edelweiss'. Alot of it is focused on the day to day military goings on which becomes repetitive. It does jump to the authors time in a prison camp after the war (when he wrote most of the book if i remember correctly) when he was being questioned by the allies about his role in the war. This coincided with the SS being classed as a criminal organisation and the author had interesting views on this. It also tells how the Finnish army who had fought with the Germans for most of the war changed sides and began attacking them at the end.

couldntthink

I have read most of the books mentioned above. WW2 fascinates me and this particular side of the story is the most fascinating of all for me.

Forgotten Soldier is well worth a read regardless of what critics etc say about authenticity. No one will ever agree unanimously.

Sniper on the Eastern Front is outstanding IMO. I read it from start to finish in one sitting the first time and have read it several times since then. It is excellent.

Panzer Commander by Von Luck is also quite good, especially his description of his time in a Soviet POW camp.

I have ordered "Twilight of the Gods" recently from Ebay. It's about a Swedish volunteer in the SS. Not sure what it's gonna be like. It was cheap so why not.

www.feldgrau.net is a good site to check out book options on various WW2 subjects. There is a dedicated section for book reviews.

mikemac

It's not a book

But go to itunes and lookup Hardcore History by Dan Carlin

He has a series called Ghosts of the Ostfront and includes a lot of quotes and stories from common soldiers. The series is about 6 hours long I think
It's pretty full on with the violence that happened but it's called Hardcore History for a reason.

I'm a big fan of Dan Carlin

Fuinseog

I am surprised nobody has mentioned Sven Hassel, though his books may be fiction.

BlaasForRafa

Fuinseog wrote: »

I am surprised nobody has mentioned Sven Hassel, though his books may be fiction.

I've got a heap of Sven Hassel books and they're a rollicking good read but they are just tall tales and exaggerated beyond belief, I figured the OP was looking for serious biographies and autobiographies.

couldntthink

Fuinseog wrote: »

I am surprised nobody has mentioned Sven Hassel, though his books may be fiction.

I have some of these. But they seem about as factual as the movie "Hot shots".

Reckons he was in a penal battalion that received tiger tanks. Gimme a break.

But they're an ok read if you don't take them seriously at all. Like chewing gum for the mind really.

hinault

mikemac wrote: »

It's not a book

But go to itunes and lookup Hardcore History by Dan Carlin

He has a series called Ghosts of the Ostfront and includes a lot of quotes and stories from common soldiers. The series is about 6 hours long I think
It's pretty full on with the violence that happened but it's called Hardcore History for a reason.

I'm a big fan of Dan Carlin

Hardcore history series, especially those dealing with the Ostfront, are superb.

I fully agree with you that you need to clear plenty of time to listen to each part of Carlin's presentations.

Fuinseog

You also have Leo Kessler. He largely writes fiction, but has produced a biography on Obersturmbannführer Jochen Peiper, who served in the east.

boomchicawawa

Its not a book but a film made in 1993 about the battle for Stalingrad from a German perspective, obviously it is in German and its very much an anti war film and quite bleak. I viewed it on You tube with english subtitles this week and was very impressed. Its refreshing to see a film where the germans talk german and a story from their perspective and not a hollywood 've have vays of making you talk' bull. The title is 'stalingrad'.

Stovepipe

Hi all,
have a read of "Heaven and Hell" by Martin Poppel, about the service of a German Paratrooper, in the West and East. very good, but patchy in places, especially about Crete.
regards
Stovepipe

Any memoirs by any General Officer should be taken with a pinch of salt, as they are, in the manner of all autobiographies, self-serving first and entirely truthful later. I read Guderian's and enjoyed it but had to remember that this man had been an enthusiastic follower of Hitler's, which tempers the enjoyment of the book.