Book Description
Panzergrenadier Division "Grossdeutschland" was one of Germany's most celebrated military formations of the Second World War. Formed in 1942 by the expansion of Infantry Regiment (motorized) "Grossdeutschland," the new division quickly earned its reputation on the Eastern Front of being the elite of the German Army. Twice the size of most other divisions, it was an immensely powerful and hard-hitting mechanized formation that cut a large swath through the Red Army, whether in the attack or on the defense. Its carefully selected officer and non-commissioned officer corps ensured that no matter what the odds, the division would always give a good account of itself in battle and would possess an esprit de corps enjoyed by few other comparable divisions, including those of the Waffen-SS.
The thousands of volunteers from every land and province in Germany who fought and died while serving in the ranks of Panzergrenadier Division "Grossdeutschland" represented a cross-section of German society, a radical departure from the manner in which most German divisions of the era were created. Now for the first time, the faces of these men, at rest and in battle, can be seen through the images gleaned from hundreds of photographs taken by the division's war correspondents or Kriegsberichter.
This outstanding selection of photographs, which until recently remained unseen for decades in a European archive, have been recovered and painstakingly researched by authors Remy Spezzano and Thomas McGuirl. Together with the assistance of the division's Veterans' association, they identified hundreds of men, living and dead, as well as dozens of combat vehicles, items of equipment, and specific engagements the division took part in from April 1942 to September 1944. Accompanied by a detailed narrative that ties each of the photos within the context of the war on the Eastern Front, "God, Honor, Fatherland" represents a milestone in the study of the war in the East and shows the face of the German soldier as he has never been shown before.
Customer Reviews:
The Best of the GD Picture Histories.......2006-08-07
Having purchased many Grossdeutschland photo histories over the years, I was pleasantly surprised to find this outstanding RZM product at a used bookstore. Yep...that doesn't happen every day. Naturally I snapped this gem up and am still amazed at the quality of pictures and narrative.
This volume follows the GD from 1942-1944, which are the years focused on the Soviet front. The pictures cover all aspects of the division from the maintenance and logistics elements to the Infantry, Panzer, and Reconnaissance units. As earlier reviews indicated, the captions are very well done and specific attention is paid to naming the individuals pictured. Another great plus is the large format size of many pictures. For modellers these are a window into details often missed in smaller format photos.
So if you already think you already have enough volumes of GD related history...think again. This volume is one that you don't want to be without.
Another first rate job by RZM.
Unbelievably good captions.......2002-02-15
Not just another mundane collection of photos, this book is perhaps one of the best volumes in English regarding German soldiers, and especially the GD Division. The captions cast light on many arcance areas of study - uniforms, organization, history, tactics - and all the details are consistently correct and well researched. The only minor nit I was able to find is the mis-captioning of an NCO equivalent beamten as a "Hauptmann" - (p. 114)
Overall, a thoroughly excellent photographic record, with emphasis on naming photo subjects (a very nice touch). Of course, as with any collection of WW II photos, most of the pictures in this book are obviously posed, and there is nothing in the way of "real action" shots. This is not a drawback, and few "real action" shots were taken during the war by any of the combatants.
There are also some excellent biographical sketches of Knight' Cross winners and unit commanders.
Well done picture history of an elite German division........1999-09-08
God, Honor, Fatherland is an excellent pictoral study of one of the Whermacht's truly elite divisions. The author covers "GD" from 1942 to 1944. Although I have a fairly extensive collection of books covering the German Army on the Eastern front, most photos in this book were new to me. The author made contact with numerous "GD" veterans and got many previously unpublished photos, many of which the people in them are listed by name and sub-unit. The author also gives 1 to 2 page narratives of the various major battles GD participated in during this time frame. As well as descriptions of the various sub-units that made up GD, including rarely covered support/maitenance units.
My favorite part of the book were the biographical sketches of various GD personalities. These include not only senior and company grade officers, but several NCO's as well. I recomend this book to anyone interested in German units or the Eastern front of WW2, particularly armor buffs and modelers.
Average customer rating:
- Works as both thriller and alternate history
- Outstanding Novel
- Slightly Disturbing, Definitely Enjoyable Page-turner
- Good fiction
- Good thriller, but Orwell's work.
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Fatherland
Robert Harris
Manufacturer: HarperTorch
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
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ASIN: 0061006629 |
Book Description
It is twenty years after Nazi Germany's triumphant victory in World War II and the entire country is preparing for the grand celebration of the FÜhrer's seventy-fifth birthday, as well as the imminent peacemaking visit from President Kennedy.
Meanwhile, Berlin Detective Xavier March -- a disillusioned but talented investigation of a corpse washed up on the shore of a lake. When a dead man turns out to be a high-ranking Nazi commander, the Gestapo orders March off the case immediately. Suddenly other unrelated deaths are anything but routine.
Now obsessed by the case, March teams up with a beautiful, young American journalist and starts asking questions...dangerous questions. What they uncover is a terrifying and long-concealed conspiracy of such astonding and mind-numbing terror that is it certain to spell the end of the Third Reich -- if they can live long enough to tell the world about it.
Customer Reviews:
Works as both thriller and alternate history.......2007-09-14
What if Nazi Germany had won the European war? What would the world of the 1960s look like with an aging Führer still clutching the reigns of power? Those are the big questions that inform journalist and author Robert Harris' debut novel, a genuine page-turner about one German policeman's investigation of a routine corpse who turns out to be anything but routine.
I really enjoyed this novel on many levels. For one thing, it is a compelling thriller involving long-buried secrets, political assassinations, international intrigue, and Gestapo tactics and police state paranoia. The main protagonist, Sturmbahnnführer Xavier March, a surprisingly sympathetic SS officer-by-default whose loyalty to the Reich is far from perfect, finds himself drawn into a web of treachery involving a 20-year old secret that unknown parties will kill to protect.
*Fatherland* is also ingeniously crafted alternate history, in which Albert Speer's larger-than-life architectural visions for Nazi Berlin have been brought to fruition. Descriptions of the titanic Arch of Triumph (40 or so times bigger than the Parisian monument of the same name) and the thousand-foot tall Great Hall vied for my attention against chilling details about everyday life in a racist police state. And of course, there is that decades-old secret March unravels; it has something to do with obscure frontier towns called Treblinka, Auschwitz, and Dachau.
All in all, a well written debut novel that is well worth a read.
Outstanding Novel.......2007-09-13
Without question, this is a must read. Set in 1964 after Germany had won WWII, it spins a tale of life in the new Europe through the eyes of a top cop living under the regime's suppression. There are a few murders in which the main character becomes involved investigating. As the story winds on we find the real reason why people have been eliminated dating back to the war. The SS watches the cop's every move. He is safe nowhere. The job gets done in the end, though the end is a bit bittersweet. An excellent book
Slightly Disturbing, Definitely Enjoyable Page-turner .......2007-04-25
Robert Harris's debut novel 'Fatherland' centers around an alternate history. Nazi Germany won the war, it's 1964 and the country is about to celebrate Hitler's 75th birthday. President Kennedy is coming for a visit - but dead bodies begin to show up in Berlin. Not just any old bodies either, but high-level party members with intimate knowledge of the regime's biggest secret, perhaps the darkest secret of all time.
Kriminalpolizei detective Xavier March begins to unravel the murders and the secret they are meant to hide. But March's life is a shambles; his thorughly indoctrinated son hates March for being an 'asocial' who has little interest in conforming and supporting the 'normal' activities of the society that has resulted from 30 years of Nazi rule.
While I'm not a big fan of alternate histories (there's so much real history to investigate), I am a big fan of Robert Harris and the slightly disturbing, definitely enjoyable page-turner he unwinds in the Fatherland.
Highly recommended.
Good fiction.......2006-08-03
A body is found. A high ranking official. A policeman gets increasingly involved in a targeted-assasination-cover-up that goes to the highest levels of government.....
That's your plot - standard fare, all the way. Of course what makes this above the average is that Harris has set it in a 1960s Nazi Germany, a foreign, exciting, dangerous, brooding setting that really makes the book work. Also Harris uses such WW2 illuminaries as Heydritch as real characters, which adds to the frission. So with some real characters (it really helps if you've read, as Harris clearly has, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer), interesting German titles (SS Sturmbannfuhrer makes a change from "Detective") and a menancing atmosphere, it really does work well.
Good thriller, but Orwell's work........2006-07-12
I couldn't put this book down.
As a left-wing author (Harris was a BBC journalist)it seems obvious to me that he has re-written "1984", but with the political right being the baddies. So, I could only give two stars.
Book Description
Bad Faith tells the story of one of history’s most despicable villains and con men—Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, Nazi collaborator and “Commissioner for Jewish Affairs,” who managed the Vichy government’s dirty work, “controlling” its Jewish population.
Though he is one of the less remembered figures of the Vichy government, Darquier (the aristocratic “de Pellepoix” was appropriated) was one of its most hideously effective officials. Already a notorious Nazi-supported rabble-rouser when he was appointed commissioner, he set about to eliminate the Jews with particularly brutal efficiency. Darquier was in charge of the Vel’ d’Hiv’ round-up in Paris in which nearly 13,000 Jews were dispatched to death camps. Most of the French who died in Auschwitz were sent there during his tenure. Almost all of the 11,400 French children sent to Auschwitz—the majority of whom did not survive—were deported in his time. In all, he delivered 75,000 French to the Nazis and, at the same time, accelerated the confiscation of Jewish property, which he then used for his own financial gain. Never brought to justice, he lived out his life comfortably in Spain, denying his involvement in the Holocaust until his last days.
Where did Louis Darquier come from? How did this man—a chronic fantasist and hypocrite, gambler and cheat—come to control the fates of thousands? What made him what he was? These are the questions at the center of this extraordinary book. In answering them, Carmen Callil gives us a superlatively detailed and revealing tapestry of individuals and ideologies, of small lives and great events, the forces of government and of personalities—in France and across the European continent—that made Vichy possible, and turned Darquier into its “dark essence.”
A tour de force of memory, accountability, and acknowledgment, Bad Faith is a brilliant meld of grand inquisitive sweep and delicate psychological insight, a story of how past choices and actions echo down to the present day, and an invaluable addition to the literature and history of the Holocaust.
Customer Reviews:
Eye Opening but Lacking Depth.......2007-09-22
After reading 400+ pages I don't feel that I truly know the full extent of Louis Darquier as an individual. I have no doubt that this book was expertly researched but it left me feeling that I understood Vichy, Louis Darquier, collaboration, etc. on the surface but without the insight I would expect from a book of this length. The exploration of French anti-Semitism and Catholicism before the war is the only aspect of the book that comes across as truly 3 dimensional. I learned a lot from this book but it leaves me looking for other sources that will take me deeper into these people, institutions and times.
Unbelieveably interesting.......2007-09-18
This is very scholarly book but never boring. It is a fascinating look at an evil man. I was sad to come to the end of it, I enjoyed it so much.
Excellent, but with a caveat.......2006-11-27
Fascinating as a history of anti-Semitism in France. The author, however, is off-putting in the first section of the book. So much time and space is evoted to the family background in Australia, and the detail is so involved, that there is a temptation to put the book down and forget about it. But skip through this intial section and it becomes more and more revealing and exciling and gruesome as we learn of this wretched bunch of French fascists fighting among themselves to rid their country of a tiny minority on whom they blame all their social ills. Stanly B. Dickes
Brilliant read.......2006-11-17
In this eye-opening account of the Holocaust and the Second World War in France and the interwar years in that country we are given a great insight into the life of Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, who himself is partly a symbol of France itself or perhaps the underbelly of Franc. Louise Darquier was a minor Frenchman from a small town south of Paris and had served in World War One. He had a plethora of family members and contacts but he chose to marry a strange and slightly insane English woman and spend the post-war years wandering the world to Australia and the U.K.
Having evnetually settled in France in the 1930s he became a rabid anti-semite and befriended the various right wing veterans movements fighting in the streets agains the government of Leon Blum. When Vichy fell in 1940 the Nazis plucked him out of obscurity to head up the department of Jewish affairs. He set to work extorting Jews and eventually deporting them to their deaths. At the end of the war he fled to Spain where he lived out the rest of his years into the 1970s. He never gave up his anti-Semitism, eventually turning it into anti-Israel rhetoric.
This is a brilliant popular book, an investigation of family and life, a true picture of an age and a tragedy. This book reads like fiction, and could have been such if it were not a true story based one exhaustive research. THe Footnotes are veritable encyclopedia of inter-war french anti-semitism.
Seth J. Frantzman
BOOK REVIEW: `Bad Faith' Reminds Us How Anti-Semitic Many French Were in 1930s, WW II; Catholic Hierarchy Force Behind Jew Hatr.......2006-10-16
By David M. Kinchen
Huntington News Network Book Critic
I don't envy the John Le Carres, Frederick Forsyths, Robert Harrises and Len Deightons of the literary world, trying to come up with characters for their political thrillers that even come close to matching the real thing. Carmen Callil has crafted a nonfiction thriller in "Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family, Fatherland and Vichy France" (Knopf, 640 pages, illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, appendixes, index) that reminds us that the Germans weren't alone in their efforts to wipe out the Jews of what British historian Mark Mazower has aptly called "The Dark Continent" - Europe.
Vichy France - named for the spa city which served as its capital - was more like Franco's Spain than Hitler's Germany, in Callil's assessment. It is necessary to remember that although he was anti-Semitic in the conservative Roman Catholic tradition, Francisco Franco never participated in the Holocaust. Franco did provide sanctuary for many French war criminals, including Louis Darquier (1897-1980), a rabid anti-Semite and "Commissioner for Jewish Affairs" for the Vichy collaborationist regime from 1942 to 1944.
Movie fans will remember the regime from "Casablanca" (1943) set in a French Morocco ruled by Vichy before the Allied Invasion of North Africa. Real movie buffs will recall a marvelous documentary by filmmaker Marcel Ophuls called "Le Chagrin et la pitie" ("The Sorrow and the Pity") depicting life in the Vichy French town of Clermont-Ferrand, focusing on French participation in the Holocaust. Clermont-Ferrand is the hometown of Blaise Pascal and the founders of the Michelin tire firm and is the headquarters of Michelin.
The 1970, 270-minute film (it's the best documentary ever made in the view of many critics - and in my opinion) was how Callil, born in Australia in 1938 and living in London when she met Dr. Anne Darquier, made the connection between her therapist - Anne Darquier -- who was only eight years older than Callil and the Holocaust. In a true tale that sounds stranger than fiction, Carmen Callil, founder in 1972 of the Virago Press and later managing director of Chatto & Windus, an English publisher, learned of Anne Darquier's connection with Vichy France from watching "The Sorrow and the Pity" in London.
In the film, Darquier meets Reinhard Heydrich, whom many consider the Nazi behind the "Final Solution" that led to the extermination of 6 million human beings of the Jewish faith and millions more who were gypsies, Communists, Jehovah's Witnesses and - yes--Masons. The French, driven by Catholic hatred of a competing cult, were fiercely against Freemasonry and Darquier shared this prejudice. The meeting took place in May 1942; Heydrich was assassinated in Prague on June 4, 1942. The Germans massacred the entire town of Lidice, Czechoslovakia in reprisal for the assassination of Heydrich, born in 1904 and rumored to have had a Jewish grandparent. Heydrich was dubbed the "Blond Beast" and "The Hangman" by his fellow Nazis.
In many ways, Vichy France, led by World War I military hero Marshal Henri-Philippe Petain, was what Catholics considered payback time for the turn of the 20th Century Dreyfus affair, which led to anticlericalism and the separation of Church (the Catholic variety) and the French state in 1905.
Those who defend the Catholic Church - an extreme branch of which claims Mel Gibson's dad Hutton Gibson - for its actions and inactions in the 1930s and 1940s do not include author Callil. She blames the hierarchy of the Church, including Pope Pius XII, and the entire top rank of French Catholic bishops and cardinals. She says that many parish priests and ordinary French gave sanctuary to Jews - many as a way of protesting the hated Vichy Regime and the many French who collaborated with the Germans. It was probably more a case of hatred of Germans and collaborators than any love of Jews in a France where anti-Semitism persists to this day, despite the murder of at least 75,000 French Jews - including many young children - in the death camps of Germany and Poland or the French concentration camps like Drancy.
Ironically, Callil points out, it was Charles de Gaulle - whom the Vichy government had sentenced to deathm - who helped create the myth of widespread French participation in resistance to the German occupiers. The reality, portrayed beginning with Ophuls' film and other works, is that many more French collaborated than resisted. Collaborators included the families behind the Coty and L'Oreal cosmetics firms, Coco Chanel, and the Taittinger champagne family, as well as many French authors including Celine, Callil points out. Many French actors and authors, including Jean-Paul Sartre, born in 1905, continued to work during the German occupation. This couldn't have occurred without some form of collaboration.
Anne Darquier was born in London in 1930, from the union of two phonies, Louis Darquier, from the southwestern French city of Cahors, and Myrtle Marian Jones, a native of the Australian state of Tasmania, who had married the ne'er do-well Frenchman a few years before. Myrtle Jones had been married before to an actor and was a minor actress and singer herself. Only after her death in the 1970s did Louis Darquier learn that she was four years older than Darquier. Like Darquier, who appropriated the aristocratic name de Pellepoix without any claim to it, Myrtle was a poseur and a snob.
The couple placed their young daughter in the care of an English nanny, who raised Anne more or less as her own child. Basically, they abandoned the young girl. Thanks to her persistence and moral support from her extended English "family," Anne Darquier went on to graduate from Oxford University and qualify as a physician at London's famed St. Bartholomew's Hospital. She was a popular and successful therapist who attracted a worshipful following among her patients - including author Carmen Callil.
"Bad Faith," which owes its title to a passage from "The Drowned and the Saved" by Italian holocaust survivor Primo Levi ("To keep good and bad faith distinct costs a lot; it requires a decent sincerity and truthfulness with oneself, it demands a continuous intellectual and moral effort. How can such an effort be expected from men like Darquier?") is a multi-layered biography of the entire Darquier family, including the conflicted and tormented Anne. Callil had been seeing Anne for several years when, in 1970, she learned of the death of a woman she credits with saving her life and giving it focus. The death of the 40-year-old physician was ruled accidental, but it was probably a "slow suicide" for the tormented woman, Callil surmises.
Louis Darquier served in the French army in both World Wars and was briefly a POW in 1940, after the French signed an armistice with the Germans. (France was the only nation defeated by Germany in WWII that signed an armistice - mirroring the Nov. 11, 1918 one with the Germans). He was released, largely because the Germans saw him a useful player in their extermination of the Jews of Europe. He had been in the pay of the Germans before the war and was active in the many anti-Jewish organizations of the Third Republic - many of them - like Action Francaise and Croix-de-feu - funded and favored by the Catholic Church of France.
In her description of the looting of French Jewish art collections and other institutions by both Vichy and Nazi Germany, Callil relies heavily on "The Rape of Europa" by Lynn H. Nicholas, a seminal 1995 work. Earlier this year I reviewed a moving book by Lynn Nicholas called "Cruel World" (Knopf, 2006) dealing with the fate of children "caught in the Nazi web." Callil's description of French Jewish families torn apart by the Germans and their French collaborators is moving in the extreme. More and more, I think that if there is a God, he has turned the planet Earth into his own private insane asylum. Reading books like Callil's and the two Nicholas works and Jan Gross's "Fear" (Knopf, 2006) - also reviewed on this site this past summer - certainly reinforces that feeling in me.
Darquier was everything he falsely accused Jews of being: Corrupt, greedy, sexually promiscuous and exploitive, grasping for power and money. He owed his survival in 1944 to his resemblance with another monocle-wearing Frenchman, who was assassinated during the brief French civil war following Liberation in the summer of 1944, after D-Day. Thousands of Frenchmen and Frenchwomen were killed after Liberation and many - like Darquier - managed to escape to Franco's Spain. Louis and Myrtle Darquier lived in Madrid, where he survived by working as a translator, helping promote tourism in Spain. He had limited contact with Anne Darquier after the war and Anne refused to meet with her half sister Teresa, born of a liaison between the womanizing Darquier and a much younger Frenchwoman.
Carmen Callil's "Bad Faith," published last year in England by Jonathan Cape, an imprint of Random House, is a magnificent, moving, well-documented book that deserves wide readership. I've recommended it to all my friends. It would form the basis for a wonderful follow-up documentary to "The Sorrow and the Pity." If this book is optioned for a movie, Australian actress Nicole Kidman could be a wonderful Anne Darquier, who after all, was half-Australian.
Publisher's web site: www.aaknopf.com
Book Description
National Book Award NomineeAmerican Library Association Notable BookAn Outstanding Book in Women's History at the Berkshire Conference of Women HistoriansFrom the collapse of the Kaiser's regime to the destruction of Hitler in his bunker, Germany has been studied, explicated, and psychoanalyzed time and again. Yet there have been few detailed investigations into the historical and cultural roles played by German women in modern times. This important book, which Kirkus called "original and intriguing," corrects this imbalance.
Customer Reviews:
Fascinating, Disturbing, Informative.......2005-02-28
"Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics," is a scholary work, but I read it quickly, as if it were a popular page-turner. I asked myself why I was reading it so quickly.
I read this book so quickly, I think, because it fascinated me, of course, but also because it disturbed me and, given how informative the book is, I kept expecting that I'd turn the page and find THE EXPLANATION that would make it all make sense to me, and give me peace of mind.
The "it" I wanted explained, of course, was the absolute evil of Nazism. The Nazism in this book is not -- for the most part -- the public Nazism of "Trimuph of the Will" or the notorious Nazism of Auschwitz.
It's the Nazism of cookie bakers and apron wearers. It's the Nazism of women breast feeding their children and dreaming of a Judenrein Germany; their hearts aflutter at thoughts of their fuhrer.
Koonz has amassed a trove of data, including personal letters, memoirs, and newsclips, that one is unlikely to encounter in other volumes.
Inevitably, her book emerges as a social history of Nazism, the Nazism of the hearth, as it were, rather than the headlines.
As alien as Nazism is, the reader cannot help but draw parallels to the present moment.
Social reformers who oppose any birth control, and who have deep convictions about woman's place being in the home, having as many babies as possible, and quietly and unobtrusively devoting themselves to making life easier for their husbands and sons who serve the state, are not exclusively a thing of the past.
This book, in passages, made my skin crawl. It certainly made me think. It did make me cry. It is a worthy addition to the scholarship on the Nazi era, and an invitation to deep thought about misogynist ideologues' control over women's lives.
nice.......2003-08-20
This is a very good pioneering study of the women's sphere of Germany during the Hitler years. I especially enjoyed the portions on Sholtz-Klink, the Nazi women's leader. And I was especially facinated by Mutter Diehl's idea of a Women's Chamber of Syndicates.
This is a good pioneering study of this topic. Further studies are needed.
Interesting and well written discussion.......2002-05-23
In her book Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family and Nazi Politics historian Claudia Koonz tackles an interesting aspect of Nazi Germany and women's history. Koonz's topic is one that has been relatively unexplored, despite the vast abundance of historical writing and discussion on Nazi Germany since WWII. I enjoyed the book for the most part, and found her ideas and explanations for the many contradictions and issues women found in Nazi Germany to be satisfactory and enlightening. Using many previously unearthed documents and sources, Koonz attempts to explain how women survived and adapted during such a misogynist and time.
I found Koonz's writing to be both in-depth and comprehensive, but rarely boring or cumbersome. I think she did an excellent job of keeping the reader informed of her thought progression, and at times I felt that I was along with her looking for sources or trying to figure out an explanation to a problem. I liked her analysis of the Weimar republic and "New Woman" and how those factors influenced many women's decisions and opinions on submitting to Nazi dominance. I also found her chapter on Jewish women very enlightening and yet frustrating. Reading about how hopeless it seemed to the women when their children brought home Nazi propaganda from class provides a good example of the cruelty (and stupidity) of the Nazis. I do feel that Koonz tended to get bogged down in her examples of particular Nazi women. Although they were necessary, I feel that they ran long-winded at times. Overall, Mothers in the Fatherland is a very interesting and insightful analysis of this dark period of women's history.
wonderful.......2001-12-15
I have just finished taking a semester long course with Claudia Koonz at Duke University, and have been inspired to read more about the cultural aspects of Nazi Germany. I was impressed that she truly is as good a writer as she is professor. I highly recommend the book and highly recommend coming to Duke to take a class with her!!
Must Read for Modern German History Majors!.......1999-12-18
I was led to reading this book for a paper I did on the civil rights of women and reasons behind women's support of the state during Hitler's reign. Professor Koonz did a superb job of bring several elements together to form a large, descriptive view of the lives of all women, Christian, Jewish, Nazi, Socialist, etc. I found the interview done with Frau Scholtz-Klink, former head of the women's department under the Nazis, one of the most fascinating, especially since she has held on to her Nazism when other Germans such as Hemult Kohl have renounced and apologized for their role in Nazi Germany. For the first time in all my studies of Germany, I finally began to understand not only who, what and when but also how and why the German Weimar Republic of the 1920's could accept a dictator such as Hitler.
Average customer rating:
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Great Fatherland War, The
Ted Gottfried
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ASIN: 076132559X |
Book Description
Fighting for the Fatherland traces and analyzes three and a half centuries of the evolution of the German fighting man and the armies in which he served. It sets his patriotism against his cultural background and against the ever-changing national imperatives of his time.
The German soldier's cultural legacy encompasses the romanticized Teutonic legends of Germanic mythology. The more immediate and pragmatic imperatives of Brandenburg's and Prussia's national survival during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries reinforced the Germans' emerging awareness of their wider national identity, precipitating the heady brew of spectacular military victories and imperialist aspirations that dominated the following century. But then came the humiliating Versailles Treaty and the pervasive lure of National Socialism, a perverse path that left Germany divided in 1945 after a world war that saw both the zenith and nadir of the German soldier's fortunes. Finally, yet another culture, with its very different priorities, today underwrites the post-Cold War Bundeswehr of a reunified Germany.
David Stone explores the true nature of the German soldier-his motivation, his preparation for war, his conduct in battle-and those aspects of his training, organization, leadership, and lifestyle that reveal why this fighter for his fatherland has proven so formidable and has had such a pronounced impact upon European and world history during the past 350 years. With a foreword by Richard Holmes.
Customer Reviews:
A Potentially Good Book Marred with Several Problems.......2007-01-12
I had very high hopes for this book. I briefly read a few excerpts from the local Barnes and Noble, and what I saw, I liked. As soon as I could, I purchased this book from Amazon. It is fairly good overview of all of German history, with a particular emphasis on the German soldier. That is what makes this book good, when it sticks to talking about the soldiers, and anything particularly relating to them.
Unfortunately, some parts of the book are just unncessary because he carries it beyond that for no real reason.
The book is pretty good, starting at the Thirty Years War, and continuing throughout the reign of Frederick the Great, and then the wars of liberation against Napoleon. The book loses it's luster when it gets to the Franco-Prussian War. Nearly 100 pages, or basically one-fourth of the book is dedicated to that war. That is somewhat understandable, because this was a very pivotal time in German history. It would have been better, however, if he had just done what he did with all other wars in German history covered by his book. Every other war starts with the equivalent of "a deep look at this war goes beyond the scope of this book" (which gets very annoying to hear, chapter after chapter, by the way). He devotes an entire chapter to every major battle in the Franco-Prussian war, and this diverts the attention from the main focus of this book... the German soldier. 100 pages is not enough to cover in-depth the Franco-Prussian war, and 100 pages is too much attention paid to it in a book that is supposed to only look at the German soldier, and breezes through every other war. I suggest anyone to just pick up Geoffrey Wawro's book on the Franco-Prussian war. You simply can't learn enough about the war simply frmo this book, because he breezes over it too quickly to give anyone a clear understanding of the war. For every other war, he expects the reader to have background knowledge, or to acquire it elsewhere, and he should have done the same for this war. Like he said... an in-depth coverage of the war is "beyond the scope of this work".
I also don't agree with the author that WW2 was less important than the Franco-Prussian war. They both completely changed Germany. One created Germany, the other destroyed it. And I would argue that WW2 was more important, because it completely changed German society, and the way the German soldier is viewed... that never happened due to the Franco-Prussian war.
The book seems to shine again near the end when he talks about the Bundeswehr. I have not found too many books that cover the Bundeswehr, so this was helpful, especially since most history books about the German army end at 1945. Unfortunately, the author suddenly takes a political stance in the last two chapters (not counting his vehement hatred of National Socialist Germany... although understandable, completely unnecessary to state in this book as his opinion of Nazi Germany doesn't matter... he is supposed to be talking about the soldiers). He takes a very anti-war line when speaking of the war in Iraq. All he had to mention was that the German government is not getting involved and why, but instead he says the war is going very badly, etc, etc... something you would expect to hear from political pundits on CNN. It was completely unnecessary for some of his opinions to be thrust in the book, but apparently he just could not help himself.
The book really shines in the appendices! This will always be a very useful reference book (albeit, there are books dedicated to these statistics that are better suited for reference, but this is a very clear, clean way of looking at things quickly). The appendices contain a lot of order of battle information, and statistics about how many regiments, divisions, etc that were in the Germany army at different points in history. It was very helpful, and I commend the author for putting these in, I think they are pretty amazing.
Overall, this book is pretty good. It should not be used as a general history of Germany, only as what it's title suggests... it is really a history of the German soldier. It has a few problems in the middle of the book, but once you overpass that hurdle it gets going really well again. The few problems in the last two chapters are not a big deal. The two chapters were great besides a few lines of politics that the author put in. Very few books are out there with such up to date information about the Bundeswehr (running all the way to late 2005). I recommend this book, but if you are really interested in German history, be prepared to buy separate books covering all of the wars, as this book simply will not present to you a comprehensive history of Germany, just as the title suggests it should not.
Book Description
"The chapters in this volume painfully drive home the point that certainly as far as Germany is concerned, the lessons of the Third Reich have not yet been learned... These significant attempts by younger recruits to the larger medical establishment to change things through eye-opening reflection and analysis, however uncomfortable, need support."--Michael H. Kater, author of Doctors under Hitler, in the foreword.
The infamous Nuremberg Doctors' Trials of 1946-47 revealed horrifying crimes --ranging from grotesque medical experiments on humans to mass murder--committed by physicians and other health care workers in Nazi Germany. But far more common, argue the authors of Cleansing the Fatherland, were the doctors who profited professionally and financially from the killings but were never called to task--and, indeed, were actively shielded by colleagues in postwar German medical organizations.
The authors examine the role of German physicians in such infamous operations as the "T 4" euthanasia program (code-named for the Berlin address of its headquarters at Number 4 Tiergartenstrasse). They also reveal details of countless lesser known killings--all ordered by doctors and all in the name of public health. Maladjusted adolescents, the handicapped, foreign laborers too illto work, even German civilians who suffered mental breakdowns after air raids were "selected for treatment." (One physician who persisted in speaking of "killings" was officially reprimanded for his "negative attitude.")
The book also includes original documents--never before published in English--that give unique and chilling insight into the everyday workings of Nazi medicine. Among them:
• Minutes from a 1940 meeting of the Conference of German Mayors, at which a Nazi official gives the assembled politicians detailed instructions for the secret burial of murdered mental patients.
• A pre-Nazi era questionnaire sent by the head of a state mental institution to parents of disabled children. (Sample question: "Would you agree to a painless shortening of your child's life after an expert had determined him incurably imbecilic?" Sample answer: "Yes, but I would prefer not to know.")
• The diary of Dr. Hermann Voss, chief anatomist at the Reichs University of Posen (and later a highly respected physician in postwar Germany), who delights in the flowers blooming outside his window and worries that the overstock of Polish cadavers from his Gestapo suppliers might cause his crematory oven to break down.
• Letters of Dr. Friedrich Mennecke, director of the notorious Eichberg Clinic, who writes with cloying sentimentality to the wife he calls "mommy" and comments offhandedly about visiting concentration camps to select "patients" for death.
Today, as reports of mass death in Europe are once again cast in terms of public hygiene, and as euthanasia is advocated--even applauded--on U.S. television, the relevance of what Michael H.Kater here calls "the lessons of the Third Reich" is perhaps greater than ever. Against this background, Cleansing the Fatherland sends a stark message that is difficult to ignore.
Customer Reviews:
Viewing the beast.......2006-08-17
This little book containing a collection of essays on the perpetrators of the Holocost, not the thugs who operated the camps or served in the mruder squads but the intellectual killers who developed the concept and implemented the programs that murdered first the disabled and the mentally ill before turning to other betterknown prey.
A must read for any interested in this subject.
"Nazi Economics of Therapeutic Extermination".......2005-09-13
"Cleansing the Fatherland: Nazi Medicine & Racial Hygiene," Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore 1994, ISBN 0-8018-4824-5 (PB) 296 pgs., 6" x 9" No index, a few notes & B/W photos.
In the foreword, Michael Kater warns despite passage of those Nuremberg, Helsinki & Tokyo convenants after WW-11 to safeguard medical ethical standards (& prevent hideous medical abuses as done by Nazis & Japanese during the war) that many countries of the world persist in violation of these codes of conduct & he mentions a few countries including India, Canada, Lebanon & Germany in Bavaria. Kater informs us the authors including Ernst Klee are of a "new generation of German Scholars" whose aims are to further rectify & uncover Nazi medical irregularities - & that some of the Aly & Pross writings have been declared controversial & "exaggerated or twisted out of all proportion." He details various ways the Jewish physicians were eliminated starting in 1934 & replacing them with "Aryan" doctors, noting some 4,500 to 6,000 Jewish doctors were expelled from Germany & several hundred committed suicide. Pross states crimes (persecution & Holocaust) were not only by "the tiny number of 350 black sheep among the German medical profession...involved in medical crimes, but... many more...directly or indirectly, ...the cream of German medicine, ...professors, ...scientists and researchers." The only plausible explanation to me is that some residuum of the "old generation of German scholars" remain in the medical citadels & refuse to leave their chairs for the likes of Aly & Pross.
The book contains 5 chapters: Introd. by Pross has information on recent attempts to introduce various types of euthanasia & a provocative discussion of Robert Lifton's neologistic "doubling" to account for Nazi physicians' mass murdering ("The Nazi Doctors"). Goetz Aly has 3 interesting chapters on medicine against the "useless" & discussion of Operation T-4, the Posen diaries of Dr. H. Voss, & "Pure & Tainted Progress" which examines economic forces driving "therapeutic extermination" including taking all of patients' possessions including dental gold, charging for meals during starvation & billing the mandated Insurance coverage after inmates were "treated" (code word for "exterminated"). The final chapter "Selected Letters of Doctor Friedrich Mennecke" by Dr. Chroust appear to have been added on as an after thought, offering one interesting Mennecke tidbit: "Your can tell by looking at the Russian people that they are born and raised right in the dirt, so they don't know any better. These paople are..."
Overall, the book is well-written, provides many details on ruminations of the Nazi mindset to evoke rules & regulations to promote active killing as "medical euthanasia" with the least amount of discussion & protest by the Volk. Aly is a freelance historian & political scientist with a personal agenda, but knowing that, it still makes a good read.
not for everyone.......2000-03-21
This book is an exceptional survey of the development of a genocidal mentality among the doctors of the Third Reich. Of great interest to those doing research on this topic are the diaries of Nazi anatomist,Dr. Hermann Voss in Posen during the war. It demonstrates, among other things, a pervasive manichaean attitude that extended from Hitler on down- A tendency to view the world in all-or-nothing terms. The characters are largely repulsive (Dr. Friedrich Mennecke referring to victims as "portions")and it is sometimes hard to handle the intricacies of the history unless you have a background in this area. If you are looking for a general understanding of the doctors, try Lifton's book, The Nazi Doctors. For more history of this type, try Death and Deliverance by Burleigh or The Nazi Doctors and the Nuremberg Code by Annas and Grodin. If you want to know about the experiments, go to a library and sift through the case of United States vs. Karl Brandt et al. (1947 - the Nuremberg "Doctors" Trial). This book is valuable to those initiated into the macabre studies of Hitler's Germany, but you might want to stay away if you're only a general reader.
Semi-descriptive book on Nazi bio-medical experimentation..........1999-07-28
While I have not purchased this book from Amazon.com, I have reviewed it at a local bookstore. The book itself speaks more on the psychiatric area of "Nazi-medicine" rather than on actual experimentation. For those interested in a more focused book on the Nazi's "bio-medical vision" they should read "The Nazi Doctors" by R.J. Lifton. It is an excellent and descriptive book, giving accounts from survivors. It is careful to give actual accounts instead of fabricated stories, at the same time not glorifying Nazi science. I disagree with the comment about this book being reviewed. In my personal opinion, it does not glorify Nazi science. I have read many books on this subject and say that this book deserves credit, but not enough for five stars.
Customer Reviews:
A Vivid Record of Germany at the End of WWII.......2006-10-30
I grew up in the Displaced Person camps set up by the Allies to save the lives of those who the Nazis condemned to slavery and death, and I have never read a more accurate description of what it was like in Germany at the end of the war.
I've read all three of Bourke-White's memoiristic photo-narratives of the war in Europe and this one is easily the best. Bourke-White does not hide her disgust with the Germans who supported Hitler's war and then rejected responsibility for what they helped bring to pass. I would be surprised if she could hide such feelings. She was one of the first civilians to go through Buchenwald after its liberation, and the things she saw and smelled and heard taught her something profound about the everyday evil that allowed places like Buchenwald to exist in Germany. That she can write as accurately and clearly as she does having experienced this is a testament to her considerable talent as a writer.
This book is not a history, and if you seek a historian's objectivity you will not find it. This book is rather something quite different. It is a personal narrative written by a sensitive human being who has experienced things most of us will never thankfully have to experience. What Bourke-White gives us is a unique record in pictures and words of what it was like in Germany as that place faced the whirlwind of two great armies. Bourke-White writes about the camps and the GIs and the DPs and the concentration camp survivors and those that didn't survive, and she writes about the Germans who stood by and imagined that the world Hitler envisioned was the ideal one and that it should exist for a 1000 years.
spirit of the times.......2006-06-21
This book came out in the immediate post-war period and is Life magazine photographer Bourke-White's comments to her photographs as she tours a destroyed Germany with Gen. Patton. Bourke-White, daughter of an Orthodox Jewish father, shows sleek Allied generals sitting triumphantly in Krupp's 'requisitioned' study (and mentions their looting), shows Buchenwald typhus victims (along with their healthy fellow detainees), the hundreds of thousands of surrendered soldiers herded by the victors into open fields (for weeks, without food, water, shelter, medical care, although she doesn't say so), and castigates the hapless population for having let it all happen. To her, the Berlin rubble women clearing the miles of ruins one bucket at a time work 'too slowly,' just about everyone is a [...] who deserves this hell, and even has a vicious tone for Germans having 'good teeth,' according to her because they had 'plundered' the rest of Europe. Well, prejudice, bias, slant and all that, this book is a partial photographic record of what the destroyed country was like in 1945. Her comments reflect no guilt for the destruction but instead she clamours for the people to 'accept their responsibility.' If this is your cup of tea, you might rate the book higher. Having been there at the same time and seeing much of the same things, I had a completely different reaction to the horrors and utter devastation inflicted on Germany.
Average customer rating:
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Fatherland
Karl Billinger
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Patria/ Fatherland (Best Seller)
Robert Harris
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