Soldaten

July 16, 2012
From 1940 to 1945, as German soldiers idled in POW camps, their captors surreptitiously recorded their conversations. Declassified in 1996, the massive transcripts reveal an uncensored, often disturbing picture of how the average Nazi soldier thought, acted, and justified himself to his comrades. According to Glasgow University professor of history Neitzel and German psychologist Welzer, the results contradict the belief that exposure to war brutalizes normal men. While the authors don’t skirt the issue of individual Wehrmacht soldiers’ knowledge of and participation in the Holocaust, they argue that most simply accepted that soldiering was a necessary job; they tried to do it properly to preserve their own self-respect and support their comrades. Ideological concepts like the threats of Jewry or Bolshevism “played only an ancillary role.” Ordinary soldiers who committed mass murders of Jews, prisoners, or civilians didn’t think, “What terrible things I am doing,” but “What a lousy job this is...!” Readers may prefer to skim because the text consists of lengthy analyses of snippets of chatter. While insightful, the authors provide more than most readers will want to know about frames of reference, ideological influences, value systems, and social environment. The chatter itself is often horrific. Agent:

February 1, 2013
Historian Neitzel and social psychologist Welzer analyze and examine their remarkable 2001 discovery of reams of recently declassified, meticulously transcribed conversations among German POWs during World War II. Rather than interviews conducted by their captors, the recordings were the result of covert surveillance undertaken while the prisoners were casually conversing in their cells. The authors explain the historical and psychological perspective of the revelations, which helps to reconstruct the frameworks and situations behind these conversations. Be warned: these brutally frank discussions provide a unique, chilling, and frequently disturbing window into the mentality of the soldiers who insisted on their own honorable behavior as they participated in inhumanity without impunity. Celebrated narrator Simon Prebble does a masterly job solemnly conveying this powerful, dramatic material. VERDICT This important work opens a brand new arena of scholarly World War II research and nicely supplements James Waller's "Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing" and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's "Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust". Essential for university history and military/World War II research collections. ["A powerful and often wrenching approach to the World War II experience," read the review of the Knopf hc, ow.ly/gyl3F.]--Dale Farris, Groves, TX

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