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Rating: 
Summary: A 17 year old induction in the German Army.
Review: Altner was a seventeen year old German when he was inducted into the German Army and fought for five weeks in the defense of Berlin. This book is the story of those five weeks. As a previous reviewer has noted, Altner is not very careful in his descriptions of arms, tanks, aircraft, etc. Footnotes are provided that fill in much of this information. What is a seventeen year old interested in....food and sex, and so some of the story focuses on these two items at the expense of others. Altner also focuses on the traumatization of war, seeing a friend without his nose and eyes, walking past a wounded soldier without stopping, watching wounded soldiers be run over by tanks.
One gets a pretty vivid portrait from this seventeen year old kid of what war is like.
Although an interesting read, there are better stories out there such as Sajer's The Forgotten Soldier. Altner's experience was only five weeks, so perhaps it was not a complete picture of the war on the Eastern Front.
Rating:
Summary: A 17 year old induction in the German Army.
Review: Altner was a seventeen year old German when he was inducted into the German Army and fought for five weeks in the defense of Berlin. This book is the story of those five weeks. As a previous reviewer has noted, Altner is not very careful in his descriptions of arms, tanks, aircraft, etc. Footnotes are provided that fill in much of this information. What is a seventeen year old interested in....food and sex, and so some of the story focuses on these two items at the expense of others. Altner also focuses on the traumatization of war, seeing a friend without his nose and eyes, walking past a wounded soldier without stopping, watching wounded soldiers be run over by tanks.
One gets a pretty vivid portrait from this seventeen year old kid of what war is like.
Although an interesting read, there are better stories out there such as Sajer's The Forgotten Soldier. Altner's experience was only five weeks, so perhaps it was not a complete picture of the war on the Eastern Front.
Rating: 
Summary: I quite enjoyed it
Review: I look for books on this subject, and have to say I enjoyed this one. Ther style is a bit different from what I expected, and the story is certainly not what I expected - which ads a new dimention to the Berlin fight. It wasn't always constant bitter fighting with tanks everywhere. There was a lot of confusion, and a lot of time when not mnuch was going on. The one weak point is in the maps, which could be improved, but they do help tie the story into the historical tale- and the fellow that helped edit in in English is known as a long time student of the Berlin fight, so if he says its real, I belive him. So all in all I recomend it for those looking for a groiund eye view of the fight for Berlin.
Rating: 
Summary: disappointing and chaotic
Review: Imagine if you were a 17 year old male and knew nothing about armies, weapons, or how to be a soldier, and yet were told to put on a uniform, not given any weapons initially, (the author had to scrounge for a gun from the battlefield) and then told to go out with a group of other teenage boys to fight the advancing Russian army. The result is pretty much total chaos - our author gets randomly shifted around from one assignment to another, basically as cannon fodder to stand and hold his ground against the Russians. He only occasionally manages to fire his gun, rarely to any effect. His location at any one moment in the book is just as baffling to him as it is to the reader. He has no idea of what or who is advancing on him or why he is even in any particular location. Tanks and heavy weapons he encounters are just tanks and heavy weapons. Several times, I wanted to scream out, what kind of tanks are those that you saw out there? Tigers? Panthers? T-34's? You know, basic stuff that even the novice WWII history buff would know. Not a clue. There are lots of descriptions of soldiers and civilians getting killed, of mangled bodies, of the cruelty of SS and SA "chain dogs" (assigned to hunt down and execute deserters and otherwise terrorize other Germans, military and civilian alike) in the final days of the Third Reich. A surprising amount of the really detailed verbiage in this book is spent describing what the author eats, practically every single day. It's just amazing to me that the guy could remember exactly what was in that tin of meat he just opened up, but can't tell the reader what kind of tank that was that just almost killed him. About the only interesting vignettes from this book, the only topic that I have not seen set down in other "soldier's tale" books of this type, are the descriptions of the author's brief tryst with a German teen age girl right before his group of teenagers gets slaughtered in battle, and of the existence of "SS girl volunteers" whose main function seems to have been to bed down the German soldiers that they encountered. These scenes really do remind you that even in the midst of war, these were just high school teenagers, complete with raging hormones. But don't buy the book for that reason either. These parts are very much PG-13 rated. Not much value as military history overall.
Rating:
Summary: Unbelievable first-person account!
Review: These are the experiences of a 17 year-old conscripted in the last couple months of the war where training was "on the job". Unbelievable accounts of fighting in Berlin where chaos reigns. Very detailed, very graphic. Every male from 14 to 60 gets pressed into service, or shot by the SS. Many don't have useable weapons, very little food and no rest from the hell of war. Civilians carry their few remaining possessions as they flee before the Russians. The flight of the remaining military and civilians as they try to break out of the Russian encirclement of the city and reach the western front is described graphically. The author is one of only a few survivors of a company of 150 17 year-olds. Probably the most enthralling first-person account of the many I've read, if only because it was written by a youth and covers only the last few months of the war when there was no longer any glory left to fight for--only survival.
Rating:
Summary: Unbelievable first-person account!
Review: These are the experiences of a 17 year-old conscripted in the last couple months of the war where training was "on the job". Unbelievable accounts of fighting in Berlin where chaos reigns. Very detailed, very graphic. Every male from 14 to 60 gets pressed into service, or shot by the SS. Many don't have useable weapons, very little food and no rest from the hell of war. Civilians carry their few remaining possessions as they flee before the Russians. The flight of the remaining military and civilians as they try to break out of the Russian encirclement of the city and reach the western front is described graphically. The author is one of only a few survivors of a company of 150 17 year-olds. Probably the most enthralling first-person account of the many I've read, if only because it was written by a youth and covers only the last few months of the war when there was no longer any glory left to fight for--only survival.
Rating:
Summary: Unbelievable first-person account!
Review: These are the experiences of a 17 year-old conscripted in the last couple months of the war where training was "on the job". Unbelievable accounts of fighting in Berlin where chaos reigns. Very detailed, very graphic. Every male from 14 to 60 gets pressed into service, or shot by the SS. Many don't have useable weapons, very little food and no rest from the hell of war. Civilians carry their few remaining possessions as they flee before the Russians. The flight of the remaining military and civilians as they try to break out of the Russian encirclement of the city and reach the western front is described graphically. The author is one of only a few survivors of a company of 150 17 year-olds. Probably the most enthralling first-person account of the many I've read, if only because it was written by a youth and covers only the last few months of the war when there was no longer any glory left to fight for--only survival.
Rating:
Summary: Berlin Dance of Death
Review: Very detailed and factual. Slow moving. If you like daily military unit reports you will find this interesting. Floyd McRae
Rating:
Summary: Berlin Dance of Death
Review: Very detailed and factual. Slow moving. If you like daily military unit reports you will find this interesting. Floyd McRae
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