Books about WW2 from a German perspective

[Smithy]

Actually I don't recommend that one from the research I've done. If you read Hadley's 'Count Not the Dead' there was a scathing remark about that book by a U-Boat historian (don't remember the name off-hand). But it isn't a recommended book. This is even discussed on uboat.net

'Steel Boat - Iron Hearts' by Goebler is a very good one (it is not from the perspective of a commander)

'Enemy Submarine' by Wolfgang Frank is another good one. Frank went out on a patrol with Prien (much like Buchheim did with U 96). There are some minor inaccuracies in the start of the book, but that is the only 'first hand' account that I could find of someone who went out on patrol with Prien and wrote about it.

There's a start though...I can dig up others.

fftopic:

Prien, have you got Ken Wynn's two volumes on U-boat ops?

I might be a touch biased as I know Ken but they are spectacular. Ken went and lived in Germany for about 6 years to research and write them. They are a tour de force and contain tremendous amount of info on individual boats, crew members, patrol details, etc, etc.

Must have if you're into U-boat history.

 

[Young fogey]

I had no idea

Actually I don't recommend that one from the research I've done. If you read Hadley's 'Count Not the Dead' there was a scathing remark about that book by a U-Boat historian (don't remember the name off-hand). But it isn't a recommended book. This is even discussed on uboat.net.

All these years I had no idea. Danke.

 

[The Lonely Navigator]

No I don't actually. I don't know if I could obtain them via inter-library loan and go through them, though. When I did my research (started out on it) my focus was on Prien specifically. I never really did too much 'broad based' research only because the research on Prien took me so long simply because of having to find obscure information in the least likely places as some books either had misinformation - disinformation or outright lies. I spent 7-8 years just trying to get to the bottom of things regarding Prien - never mind the more general research.

fftopic:

Prien, have you got Ken Wynn's two volumes on U-boat ops?

I might be a touch biased as I know Ken but they are spectacular. Ken went and lived in Germany for about 6 years to research and write them. They are a tour de force and contain tremendous amount of info on individual boats, crew members, patrol details, etc, etc.

Must have if you're into U-boat history.

 

[The Lonely Navigator]

All these years I had no idea. Danke.

You're Welcome

 

[The Lonely Navigator]

Response regarding the subject of the thread:

Teddy Suhren - Ace of Aces: Memoirs of a U-Boat Rebel (I never got to read this, but this is the commander noted for his backing away from the quay when the answer to his question if the Nazis were still in charge, was in the affirmative.)


The Hunters and the Hunted (Good book)

Another Place - Another Time (This is an excellent book - told by one who was the LI - Chief Engineer, if I recall right)

Wolf by Jordan Vause (There's some first hand accounts in this one, but also there is interesting information - a whole chapter - regarding Das Boot)

- reference book: Count Not the Dead (you might be able to find cheaper prices through allbookstores.com - interesting book to read and worthwhile)

I can also list some WWI first hand account books as well:

Fips

U-Boat Stories Great War

Raiders of the Deep

 

[Two Types]

'Berlin at War' by Roger Moorhouse. Not a memoir and not written by a German, but a fascinating account of life in Berlin during wartime. He is a serious student of German history and I believe he did a lot of research in Germany.

 

[Flynn]

Soldat (I thought this was a really interesting and fascinating book. I couldn't put it down. I'm suprised no one has mentioned this yet.)

 

[rayban]

Air war over Germany from a German perspective

Hello,

So your dad served with Bomber Command during the war? Interesting. I consider Len Deighton's fiction novel 'Bomber' (1978) a good starting point. Deighton researched the subject thoroughly. He covers the Allied side as well as the Axis.

You get a good impression of how (for example) the German Civil Defence operated.
And you will also experience what it is like to fly a Junkers Ju -88 nightfighter in the pitch black night, guided wih the help of radar to its target by Jägerleitoffiziere. Diogenes, the codename for the gigantic bunker (called 'Großraumgefechtsstand' in German) at Fliegerhorst Deelen (from which the interceptions where coordinated) is mentioned in the book. You can still visit it. As a matter of fact the Dutch Ministry of Culture declared the complete former Luftwaffe airbase ( some 500 buildings in all) a monument a few years ago.

Books on the air campaign over Germany written by German historians are relatively scarce. There's a reason for that. Post war Germany and the younger generations that grew up in it was/were burdened by questions of guilt. Germany had after all started an inferno in which for example 25 million Russians alone lost their lives. Not to mention the millions of Jews that were killed at first by the 4 Einsatzgruppen in mass shootings and later in the deathcamps.

Perhaps you can imagine this allowed little room for the german post war generations to mourn themselves for their own losses or to reflect on their own grief and suffering for that matter. During the last two decades however the tide has slowly turned.

Books and studies appeared in which for instance refugees from the former eastern German territories (Prussia, Silezia) tell about the horrors inflicted on them by the Russian army. If you think the sinking of the Titanic was the biggest maritime disaster in history ..... you're wrong. Google 'Wilhelm Gustloff'. And there you can read the tragic story about a passenger ship that in the winter of 1944 was torpedoed by a Russian submarine in the Baltic sea. The Gustloff carried almost 10.000 refugees who fled across the sea to Pommerania for the Russian army. Nearly all of them were women and children. Only some 2000 survived the freezing Baltic waters.

The air war over Germany resulted in some half a million dead. Most casualties fell during the last year of the war. From a strategical or tactical point of view the air campaign over Germany was questionable to say the least. Its only purpose so it seems was to reduce as many German cities as possible to rubble. In that Bomber Command and the United States Airforce succeeded remarkably well. Some historians consider this a warcrime as well.

Nowadays it is accepted inside Germany as well as outside, that the German population suffered as well under the National Socialist dictatorship and from the war as a whole. This has resulted in several studies by German historians on the subject of airwar for example.

There are two books on this particular subject you asked for, that come in to my mind. However I only have the German versions on my bookshelf (sorry but I am 50 % Dutch and 50% German because of my German grandmother).

They are:

'Der Brand. Deutschland im Bombenkrieg 1940 - 1945'by Jörg Friedrich
'Dresden im Luftkrieg' by Götz Bergander.

I think that the first book is translated into English. I am not sure about the book on the Dresden raids.

Two very good English books on this subject are 'The Battle of Hamburg'. The Firestorm Raid' by Martin Middlebrook and 'Inferno. The Devastation of Hamburg, 1943'by Keith Lowe.

Hope all this helps. Sorry I got carried away a bit. If you have further questions I will be happy to ask them.

 

[Monsoon]

German WW2 Books

Len Deighton's "Bomber" is a book I read at least once a year. The fictional town that he writes about is in the area I was stationed at with the USAF in the late 1980s's.

"It Never Snows in September" is a good one on the German view of "Market Garden".

 

[TM]

A good novel is "Cross of Iron" by Willi Heinrich

Later became a pretty good Sam Peckinpaw film.

Tony

 

[Dated Guy]

I ordered a copy of this one below, in order to see the other perspective of a German gunner on the beaches of Omaha during the D-Day landings. I had purchased a book about Colditz Castle, written from the German perspective earlier last year, and it had a reasonably good, interesting viewpoint, so hence this order. It duly arrived, packaged very well, but the entire book was written in German, I returned it sad to say....

WN 62 - Erinnerungen an Omaha Beach: Normandie, 6. Juni 1944
Hein Severloh

 

[Alice Blue]

I haven't read it, but Nazism 1919-1945 Volume 4: The German Home Front in World War II: A Documentary Reader looks promising. I linked to the US Amazon site because (from here at least) you can preview the Table of Contents and some of the book. There are chapters on women and on the effect of civilian bombing on morale.

 

[Foxer55]

W-D Forties,

Can anyone recommend a good book, or books, about WW2 told from a German perspective? I'm looking for something readable covering a fairly wide perspective and more homefront based than millitary. My dad was a tail gunner on Lancasters and I'm particularly interested in the bombing campaign from the German point of view.

Along with your desire to understand the German perspective of the war, it might help for you to understand the greater picture - what brought the war about. My best learning experience about this was a required college course in Modern American History and the professor concentrated most of the class on WWI to the period after the WWII. At that young tender age, and being an amateur student of the war, I thought I knew a lot. Well, not quite. Little did I understand that the WWI allies were actually naive architects of WWII. In fact, it is often known as WWI Part A & WWI Part B for WWII because WWI was never really settled. The extreme measures and reparations the allies forced on Germany in the 1918 armistice were crushing to that country's economy and its state of mind. This in turn abbeted the rise of Hitler and the rest is history as they say. I'm not making excuses for Germany here but I full well understand now why it happened. I believe the unbridled perversion and cruelty that grew out of Hitlers rise to power is an example of human behavior out of control that is waiting in the wings all the time. What happened in Germany (and Japan as well) during WWII was despicable.

These experiences were the driving forces (along with trying to thwart the Soviet Union) of the Marshall Plan from the U.S. to rebuild Europe and avoid a repeat of the causes of WWII. So far it seems to have worked.

 

[TomS]

"Loyalty is my Honor". Its a Waffen SS perspective.

 

[Story]

I've finished the first edit of the wartime diary of Kriegsmarine Oberleutnant z.S. Max von Zatorski (Gold Cross).
He was roughly equivalent to JFK (patrol boat skipper) and his tale reads as well as DAS BOOT, only Max's was true.
It'll probably be out in print by January 2014.
Stay tuned here
https://www.facebook.com/Seekleer

 

[the hairy bloke]

I've sort of asked about this before. It must have done strange things to one to have been crew of a German bomber over Britain, when the USAAF and RAF came and did it again to you, and to yours.

 

[Guttersnipe]

I recommend Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. It's a pretty dense, academic read but it's worth it. It was fairly controversial when first released 15-20 years ago -- especially in Germany -- because it attacks the post-war revisionism that transferred blame from Germany/Germans as a whole to Hitler/Nazis specifically (you know, the whole "oh we were regular army, not SS." "Don't blame us for our participation in a culture of militarization, obviously violent nationalistic ideology, and a war of aggression all against civilization" arguments). It's pretty widely accepted as an important work now, though.

 

[Bee]

I found Blood Red Snow to be a good read. http://www.amazon.com/Blood-Red-Snow-Memoirs-Soldier/dp/0760321981

 

[Two Types]

Personally, I wouldn't recommend 'Hitler's Willing Executioners'. I felt that the author had a theory and tried to fit the 'facts' (that part is at times debatable) onto his theory.

I found 'Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland' by Christopher Browning to be a much more convincing read. In later versions of 'Ordinary Men' there are annexes addressing the arguments put forward in 'Hitler's Willing Executioners'. It's safe to say that the two authors are not friends!
Much detailed argument about the merits of the two books can be found on the internet.

 

[Two Types]

I would second the recommendation of 'Woman in Berlin'. The film of it 'Anonyma' was also rather good.

There exists (I believe) an official German study of Allied war crimes. I have never seen the book and can't recall the title. It gives accounts of incidents in which Allied troops murdered German PoWs etc. When i read about the accounts there was mention of 180 German wounded soldiers being murdered by New Zealand(maybe Australian) troops when a hospital was overun (in North Africa?). A Swiss PhD student is currently working on a thesis on this subject.