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Soldaten

On Fighting, Killing, and Dying

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Soldaten

Written by: Sonke Neitzel, Harald Welzer, Jefferson Chase - translator
Narrated by: Simon Prebble
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About this listen

On a visit to the British National Archive in 2001, Sonke Neitzel made a remarkable discovery: reams of meticulously transcribed conversations among German POWs that had been covertly recorded and recently declassified. Neitzel would later find another collection of transcriptions, twice as extensive, in the National Archive in Washington, D.C. These were discoveries that would provide a unique and profoundly important window into the true mentality of the soldiers in the Wehrmacht, the Luftwaffe, the German navy, and the military in general - almost all of whom had insisted on their own honorable behavior during the war.

Collaborating with renowned social psychologist Harald Welzer, Neitzel examines these conversations - and the casual, pitiless brutality omnipresent in them - from a historical and psychological perspective, and in reconstructing the frameworks and situations behind these conversations, they have created a powerful narrative of wartime experience.

©2011 Soenke Neitzel and Harald Welzer; English translation by Jefferson Chase copyright 2012 (P)2012 HighBridge Company
Germany Military Wars & Conflicts
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Not what I was sold

Let's start with the positive. The narrator is exceptional. It makes the book that much better and compensates for part of its flaws.

I was really excited to read, at length, discussions between POWs. Getting a detailed view of the soldiers thoughts and accounts of their experience would have been fascinating.

What you get is a book in which we are given very short excerpts of POWs dialog framed with a ton of editorial commentary by the authors. I don't know the authors and don't care a ton about what they think, not in such detail anyway. The book is about 20% transcripts and 80% interpretation or commentary. Something closer to the inverse would have been welcomed.

Still, a pretty interesting idea it just wasn't executed optimally.

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