Just bought a Fiction book from Amazon which came today. From first look it's very well researched and follows a man called Max starting in 1918 and on to '43. He becomes a member of the Waffen SS Leibstandarte.

It's supposed to show the other side,  where their not all evil.

As I said it seems very well researched and has historical figures like Meyer etc.

Ilyana by John Orford. 

Wow. The other side?

It actually got me interested because history would have you believe there is no other side.

He would be the only man in the SS who did not commit attrocities?

He must have witnessed them.

I wonder when all of these view points were voiced? After the war, or documented during the war?

Yes its got me interested, but I would also be wary of it being modern revisionist history.... or is it history corrected once the heat 

dies down 70yrs later?

Originally Posted By DCosta (2 MAR 2012 8:10am)

Just bought a Fiction book from Amazon which came today. From first look it's very well researched and follows a man called Max starting in 1918 and on to '43. He becomes a member of the Waffen SS Leibstandarte.

 

It's supposed to show the other side,  where their not all evil.

 

As I said it seems very well researched and has historical figures like Meyer etc.

 

Ilyana by John Orford. 

I wonder what kind of literary treatment the subject gets in Germany or Austria?

Sorry but the cover art tells me more than I need to know. For every one Waffen SS soldier that carried a little girl on their shoulders, there were three others who were shooting her in the back of the head. Enjoy your reading of this propaganda piece!

If you want to read a good book about the SS, you should read The Order of the Death's Head. Details the history and rise of the SS throughout the war. I think it was written in the 60's, and may be hard to find.

It's a historical book, very well written.

It's a novel, not a historical document. It's funny how everyone makes such a fuss, yet those in the waffen SS where no different than you or me. Or did Germany breed thousands of evil psychopaths? Actually scrap Germany, as many other countries also had an SS division. 

The novel shows Max growing up and the propaganda he was fed. The highest rank he made is platoon commander. There are all sorts of men in his platoon, including cold blooded killers. This follows one man and his sister. What the author has done as taken into account historicla documnets and memiors and taken these and created a fictional infantryman who he places in Kurt Meyers recon unit.

Propaganda works both ways. 

I read novels and historical Non Fiction from all sides from Glantz to Grossmann.

Me thinks some of you are taking it to seriously. I'd bout everything I won on the fact that some Waffne SS men had a human side and did help children. A big difference between SS Algemaine and the Einsatzkommandos and the Waffen SS.

Never judge a book by it's cover. To discount a book as propaganda and never actually reading it is very ignorant in my opinion. Funny enough a trait that the German people where guilty of.

What I always find strange though is that the British invented the concentration camp during the Boar War and Stalin (well actually by the hand of probably thousands of fellow Russians) killed far more than the Third reich ever did. Then you have the bombing of Dresden, infact the list goes on and on, War is an atrocity in itself and millions of women and children have been murdered by all Nations. Even by the good old USA. I'm sure many a Native American child\baby was slaughtered by an all American Cavalry man.  If you have issues with one you should drop any hypocrisy and have issues with pretty much every Nation thats fielded an Army. I also suggest wargaming may be the wrong hobby as all sides killed innocnets and it still happens today. 

Anyway I can state the book isn't propaganda in any shape or form. It's novel about a vicious war in horrific times. 

Anyway, it's a good read so far.

Again I repeat it's a NOVEL! The author is Australian. 

Certainly the last time I recommend a book on here. I find there is a scarcity of novels sent on the east front. Cross of Iron and Crack of Doom and obviously the rather silly Sven Hassel and Leo Kessler books. I did own Scar of Honor but my ex rippe dit up. It now sells between $300 to $1500!! So I thought those who like to read fiction from the Gemran side would be interested. I didn't expect aload of high handed moral preaching about it.

As the saying goes, the victor gets to write the history books. 

To think the winning side can do no wrong and the losers are all butchers is being naive.

Originally Posted By JackG (3 MAR 2012 2:12pm)

As the saying goes, the victor gets to write the history books. 

To think the winning side can do no wrong and the losers are all butchers is being naive.

 

 

 

 

except where the mongols were concerned

No massacres are certainly never one sided in a war. The Eastern Front being especially nasty. It should not be forgotten how the German people suffered. But it also should not be forgotten why they suffered. You could almost say they brought it upon themselves.

This page is a bit of a guess and I am sure that many of the missing would have simply been MIA or AWOL. But it is certainly well known that the western allies, especially the Americans and French were no slouches when it came to "post war" prisoner deaths. However after what the Germans did I can sort of understand.

http://members.iinet.net.au/gduncan/massacres_axis.html

"HOW MANY?

Just how many German POWs died in Allied camps? For over forty years we have been told that many hundreds of thousands of German soldiers had died in Soviet prison camps while at the same time keeping quiet about the number of prisoners who had died in American, French and British camps. In 1997, around 1.1 million German soldiers were still officially listed as missing. According to the recently opened Soviet archives, which have been proved to be extremely precise and detailed, the Red Army captured 2,389,560 German soldiers. Of these, 423,168 died in captivity. In October, 1951, the West German government stated in the United Nations that 1.1 million soldiers had not returned home. In other words, we were led to believe they had died in Soviet camps. If we subtract the proven number of deaths in Soviet camps from the missing in Germany we arrive at the figure of around 677,000. Where are these men?. They must have been interned by the western Allies, the greatest majority being held in American and French camps where they died in their thousands through deliberate starvation, disease and hard work.

The standards set by the Geneva Convention were, in most cases, totally ignored by the Americans and French in relation to their treatment of German prisoners-of-war. The French deliberately starved many of their POWs in order to force them to join the French Foreign Legion. Thousands of Legionnaires who fought in the Vietnam conflict were Germans, handed over by the Americans to the French in 1945/46 to work as slave labourers in the rebuilding of France's war damaged cities. Conditions in the French camps were just as bad if not worse than in the American camps. It is estimated that at least 167,000 German soldiers died in French captivity between 1945 and 1948."

I also found this interesting after watching a movie called days of glory about how heroic the French Moroccan, Algerian, Tunisian were in ww2

RAMPAGE ON MONTE CASSINO

Monte Cassino fell to the Allies on May 18, 1944. After a four month struggle and the abbey bombed into ruins by the US Air Force, Polish troops of the 12th Lancers, 3rd Carpathian Division, raised their regimental flag over the ruins of the 6th century Benedictine Monastery situated high in the Apennines of central Italy. The next night thousands of French Moroccan, Algerian, Tunisian and Senegalese troops, attached to the French Expeditionary Corps, swarmed over the slopes of the hills surrounding Monte Cassino and in the villages of Ciociaria and Esperia, which is in the region of Lazio, raped every woman and girl that came within their sight. Over 2,000 women, ranging in age from 11 years to 86 years suffered at the hands of these gang-raping soldiers as village after village was entered. Menfolk who tried to protect their wives and daughters were murdered without mercy, around 800 of them died. Two sisters aged 15 and 18 were raped by dozens of soldiers each. One died from the abuse, the other was still in a mental hospital in 1997, 53 years after the event. Most of the dwellings in the villages were destroyed and everything of value was stolen. Later in the war, these same troops raped around 500 women in the Black Forrest town of Freudenstadt, on April 17, 1945, after its capture. In Stuttgart, colonial French troops, mostly African, but under the command of General Eisenhower, rounded up around 2,000 women and herded them into the underground subways to be raped. In one week more women were raped in Stuttgart than in the whole of France during the four year German occupation.

If you think there are good and bad guys that fight in War...read this.

http://www.mediumdifficulty.com/2012/03/01/call-of-apathy-violent-young-men-and-our-place-in-war/

Oh the ptotaginist of the book I read...

SPOILER...

Deserted after being sent to a Cmap as punishment for not following orders, was caught and killed himself. 

Labels in general can lead to sloppy thinking.  That doesn't mean that we never use them, but we should use them with full knowledge that, as we use them to describe people from larger and larger groups--with more and more diverse backgrounds--the quality of the label grows more and more suspect.

Destraex, those are interesting numbers on WW II German prisoners, but it sounds like there's a huge jump from an "MIA" number to a "died in Western prison camps" number.  I'm not saying the conclusions are bogus, but they seem suspect if they assume that every MIA soldier was captured?

Atrocities are committed by both sides in war.  It's as much a question of how often, and what senior commanders did, as whether.

Hey DCosta, I was just offering a book I read that is more historical, but deals not with the troops, but more the creation and development of the SS and that whole apparatus.

Let's be clear, in war there are atrocities committed by both sides. Nobody is innocent, but none of us I venture to say have pulled a trigger at someone or been shot at, so none of us knows what we are/aren't capable of.

i read recently a book on ww2 made of actual diary entries. one of of the 'contributors' is a waffen ss officer. he is constantly complaining on his weak killing commandos, that after days behind the machinegun some of them even have to be replaced because they felt exhausted and morally insecure.

well maybe someone ought to do a book on such a machinegunner hindred by ethics and morale? while i agree that war will see atrocities on all sides it is rather surprising to read some of the comments. the western allies fought without any orders to kill german officers or the like. whereas the german army fought at least in the east against an ennemy that was declared to be racial inferior and politically fueled with hatred.

Originally Posted By Keunert (5 MAR 2012 12:45am)

 

 

well maybe someone ought to do a book on such a machinegunner hindred by ethics and morale?

How about "Blood Red Snow"?

i was talking about this one:

http://books.google.ch/books?id=Pl_zAAAAMAAJ&dq=Echolot&hl=de&source=gbs_similarbooks

a brilliant book but only available in german.