Frontsoldaten: The German Soldier in World War II

Rating:
Summary: A scholarly review of the German Soldier in World War II
Review: Do not purchase this book if you expect an autobiography on the par with Guy Sajer or Siegfried Knappe. This book can best be described as an overview of what made up the "average" German soldier, his training, political beliefs and how he came to serve the Fatherland. Mr. Fritz is a professor and you can expect that level of academic analysis and discourse, hence, my five stars. I found this book useful because it did delve into the political making of these soldiers through the Hitler Youth, etc. Imagine, if you will, you are a young boy whose entire world is shaped by mandatory membership with a state sanctioned para military organisation. You would of course, hold views very similar to the state and not question them, at least not openly or have any reason to as you were being told the same as your parents. Certainly, the descriptions of what the Landser witnessed of Bolshevik Russia reinforced his beliefs of the inferiority of Communism/Bolshevikism. Yes, there is an overemphasis on Guy Sajer's work, The Forgotten Soldier, but that is understandable. Unlike Mr. Knappe, Mr. Sajer was not an officer and presents a somewhat more "down-in-the-trenches" account of his experiences in WWII. This book provides a great source for additional reading material. I found it to be a moving account of individuals' experiences that have not often been heard in this country. I only wish that Mr. Fritz would identify the cover (SS?) soldier. A haunting picture.

Rating:
Summary: Absolute Joke
Review: The author has strung together quotes from thinly disguised works of fiction, did not interview a single veteran himself, and has passed it off as some sort of scholarly work. The only embarrassing thing about this is the pseudo-intellectuals who have bellied up to the bar here to trumpet and champion this second rate work. I suppose for those starved for literature sympathetic to the Nazi cause in WW II, this book must appear to be a godsend.

But for those with an actual working knowledge of the Wehrmacht Heer in the Second World War, they can only shake their heads at the ignorance displayed in the other reviews here. For shame.

Rating:
Summary: Poorly researched and uninformative
Review: The author, Fritz, breaks the most elementary rules of scholarly writing this volume by quoting the same references several times in a row - something even an undergraduate would know to avoid. It wouldn't be so bad, if he wasn't quoting the contentious and quite probably fictional FORGOTTEN SOLDIER. Fritz adds nothing new to the discussion of German soldiers in WW II, and readers are advised to turn to other material, such as SOLDAT by Siegfried Knappe.

FRONTSOLDATEN is simply a collection of quotes from dubious sources - and all secondary ones at that. Fritz does not appear to have conducted a single interview on his own. How then can he claim to have any kind of grasp on what it was like to be a German soldier, if he's never actually talked to one?

This book is not "scholarly" as some claim, as scholarship generally insists on multiple documentary sources, and a modicum of primary research. Fritz didn't research this book - he cribbed it from other sources.

Readers serious about the German military in World War Two will have to wait for a definitive book on the Landser to appear in English.

Rating:
Summary: details
Review: the front photo is from a series taken during the german advance in the ardennes in 1944.
the book "After the Battle" has more details

http://www.afterthebattle.com/bobulge.html


Rating:
Summary: It needs more work
Review: The overall goal of this book is done very well, which is to inform the reader of the hardships of the German Landser "soldier" in WWII. The problem comes along if you have read some books about the subject already. I will explain that later. But if this is your first book on the subject then I think it is done quite well and should be bought and it will be enjoyed.

Now, if you have already read excellent books like "Soldat" by Siegfried Knappe and "Forgotten Soldier" by Guy Sajer, and let's face it, if you are serious about anything concerning WWII you should at least have read "Forgotten Soldier"; then this book becomes a bit slow and somewhat frusturating to read. Why? Because the author takes a lot of quotes from "Forgotten Soldier" which some say is Fiction. To what I say, no way! But when you read Frontsoldaten you feel as you are reading a lot about book(s) you already have read and know. That is what makes it frustuating.

The book has some nice quotes overall, even if from books you may have read, and you get a good feel about the real situation in the lives of these poor Human Beings. Good buy if it's the first read on the subject.

Rating:
Summary: Good, not great, book on the life of the average Landser
Review: This book is from the U of Kentucky press and is essentially a loose collection of first-person accounts from the Landser (German infantryman) during WW2. The chapters are organized by topic and the writer provides some supporting analysis to supplement the quotes and give structure to the overall work.

The quotes and personal accounts of the war are extremely interesting. The book does not get bogged down in the detail of individual battles, campaigns, or strategies, but instead focuses on the feelings and emotions of the soldiers involved. I found the analyses, however, to be a bit superficial and too forced. At times it seemed the author was analyzing things just to have something to say. He also quotes too heavily from certain sources (he must have quoted Guy Sajer's Forgotten Soldier 50 times) and tends to use the same quote several times throughout the book to support various analyses.

Despite the problems of the weak analyses and the repetition of quotations, the personal accounts are extremely interesting and make up for the book's deficiencies.

Rating:
Summary: Frontsoldaten
Review: This book is nothing more than a re-hash of things from other books. A large portion of this book is nothing more than quotes from the book "The forgotten Soldier" by Guy Sajer. Interspersed is the authors "opinion" of what the various quotes mean. Not very historical if you ask me. All in all, it is just barely interesting, and also one of the least informative that I've ever read.

Rating:
Summary: Not the best
Review: This book seems to lack a voice. Considering that it is mostly quotes from other(and better) books about the german fighting man, it just didn't seem to flow well. The writing style reminded me of the terrible english papers I wrote for basic college writing. Besides that, it seemed like 50% of the quotes came from the Forgotten Soldier, making this book feel like a cliff notes version of Sajer's. In the time that it would take you to slog though this book, you could read two or three first hand accounts and form your own opinions.

Rating:
Summary: Offers an answer to the big question: "Why?"
Review: This is an indispensible, if somewhat superficial, look at the ideological motivations of the German soldier (or "landser" as he called himself) during WWII. It is the only book I've ever read that actually attempts to probe the mindset of the rank-and-file soldiers and junior officers who fought Hitler's war rather than dismissing them as brainwashed robots or mindless products of a militant culture, content to "just follow orders."

Author Fritz genuinely wants to understand why the Landser fought so long and so hard, and against such overwhelming odds, for a government that committed such outrageous crimes against humanity. To do this he examines the correspondence of, and some of the memiors and fiction written by, the average Wehrmacht soldier (he excludes works written by veterans of the Waffen SS, because he feels they come from a different place ideologically than the guys in gray). In his examination, Fritz makes a number of assertions, observations and discoveries, some of which are extremely interesting, while others which come off as facile and opinionated.

On the plus side, Fritz does an excellent job of examining how Hitler's promise of a 'social revolution' which would produce a truly classless society by transferring the selfless, all-for-one values of the combat soldier (the 'frontsgemeinschaft') to the whole civilian population (creating the 'Volksgemeinschaft'), intensely motivated millions of young men. He does a fairly poor job of explaining why Germans had such intensely anti-class feelings (it is not generally knpwn that Germany has traditionally had intense class divisions and hatreds going back centuries....see Bailey's excellent work, 'Germans'); the two go hand in hand. Anyway, Fritz comes to the conclusion that for many in the German army, the war was not about conquest, but about an attempt to create a totally new world, one where all the old, corrupt ways of doing business would be thrown out the window, and a sort of socialist meritocracy created. He also does a very insightful job of showing that the Hitler Youth was not merely a brainwashing factory but a place where children were taught to ignore social status and think about the group before the individual, and how emotionally moved many of the children were by this notion. One of the most startling comments comes from a committed German communist who admitted, 'The HJ was a positive sight in my neighborhood.'

The German soldiers' reaction to combat, hardship, and suffering was largely the same as any other combatants', but Fritz points out that the superior German educational system of the 1930s and 40s produced rank-and-file soldiers who could quote philosophers and theologians in their letters home, and had a firm grasp of military and political history in Europe. This is why the letters of many privates sound like master's dissertations, and makes for good insight.

Fritz is also on the ball with his analysis of German training methods, which relied heavily on psychology (amusing in light of the Jewish origin of this science...somehow I'm sure Freud got no credit) and the understanding that cameraderie and initiative were more important than any other factor in producing first-class soldiers. He points out that the British and Russian armies actually showed far less imagination in battle, and they, rather than the Germans were closer to being 'robots' than the Germans.

Where Fritz stumbles is in his sources, which rely too heavily on Sajer's "Forgotten Soldier" and on the letters of two or three particular soldiers. He also has a tendency to throw in disclaimer-type statements, as if he fears he is being too sympathetic to the Nazis. The book sometimes has the feel of a graduate thesis itself.

Overall, though, I would strongly recommend "Frontsoldaten" to anyone who wants a better understanding of why one poor nation led by a man who was probably insane before the war even started, came to within a hair's breadth of conquering the world.