For many, the war – by its close – appears almost to have taken on a life of its own. The range of emotions on display are also interesting. For all of them, the imperative was to head west: to surrender to the Americans and thereby avoid the grim fate that awaited them at Soviet hands – a sojourn of hard labour in Siberia. One describes being captured by the Soviets in the ruins of Königsberg another found himself in hostile Czechoslovakia a third escaped the ‘Heiligenbeil Cauldron’ in East Prussia, only to be thrust back into the Battle for Berlin. The contributions surrounding events at the end of the war are similarly rich and varied. Another tells the story of a bloody engagement with Yugoslav partisans in Bosnia in 1943. One contributor, for instance, provides a fascinating account of waiting on the banks of the River Bug in occupied Poland in June 1941 for the order to invade Stalin’s Soviet Union. There is also a good geographical and chronological spread. The selection presented here is only a part of that collection a total of only ten accounts, it is but a drop in the ocean of German memory, but it nonetheless has significant breadth, with contributions from members of the Wehrmacht, Waffen-SS and Luftwaffe ground forces. Journalist Christian Huber has spent years collecting and editing the personal accounts of German veterans from southern Bavaria. It is interesting that it is only in the last decade or so that the accounts of ordinary German soldiers have found an audience in Germany at all.Īll of which should serve to explain why this book is so important. But, the real reason lies with Germany’s curious process of ‘coming to terms’ with its past, Vergangenheitsbewältigung, in which the national mantra of contrition and collective guilt has effectively silenced the voices of veterans – many of them entirely blameless – who might otherwise have found publication. It may be, of course, that many English-language historians lack the language skills to incorporate primary sources in German, or one might assume that there is some disinclination to include German military accounts, maybe for fear of arousing sympathy for the defeated enemy. But, in the vast majority of examples, one voice is crucially absent: that of the defeated German military. A number of English-language history books have sought to reconstruct the final days of Hitler’s odious Reich, with varying results. The bloody demise of the Third Reich – the famed Götterdämmerung, the ‘Twilight of the Gods’ – has been much explored in recent years. This collection of first-hand accounts include the stories of German soldiers fighting the Red Army on the Eastern Front of Horst Messer, who served on the last East Prussian panzer tank but was captured and spent four years in Russian captivity at Riga of Hans Obermeier, who recounts his capture on the Czech front and escape from Siberia and a moving account of an anonymous Wehrmacht soldier in Slovakia given orders to execute Russian prisoners. Their sense of confusion and terror is palpable as Nazi Germany finally collapses in May 1945, with soldiers fleeing to the American victors instead of the Russians in the hope of obtaining better treatments as a prisoner of war. Throughout we are witness to the kind of bravery, ingenuity and, ultimately, fear that we are so familiar with from the many Allied accounts of this time. Unlike other historical depictions of the fall of the Third Reich, German Accounts from the Dying Days of the Third Reich presents the authentic voices of those German soldiers who fought on the front line.
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