(Mobile pdf) Soldat: Reflections of a German Soldier, 1936-1949 Soldat: Reflections of a German Soldier, 1936-1949

ci4VZJs5O IM3z0Hrq4 lWD1zsOoN NCgAZMbUf p5LM28PMp PIyLA78hO KFZCvBxxR 0sBRvDW6u ZrvDRXim3 bgjQeSSwC 2HMHG7SDo M3bkUU5Yw Soldat: Reflections of a German Soldier, 1936-1949 nQFIoL5B5 MK-91021 KCLVCPbAh US/Data/History fH47pMBVf 4/5 From 617 Reviews ecftLVUMr Siegfried Knappe XIQ0cupEm ebooks | Download PDF | *ePub | DOC | audiobook D4oflcQRf bcQbbmDtX vYVWqCZ8t gypZOS2p7 5ATxIoRtq 0 of 0 people found the following review helpful. One of the Better German WW2 iSgACu5cq MemoirsBy R. A ForczykSoldat is the memoir of Siegfried Knappe, who served bHwQFqrwJ as a German artilleryman and staff officer who served throughout the Second zynA0GO5R World War. Through the bulk of the narrative, Knappe was a mid-level officer, zCHTgRn70 which gave him a better sense of what was going on than the average front-line W2yDkq3P2 officer. Overall, Soldat is a well-written memoir and includes a good amount of xpT2oVcPb detail about the authors training, wartime career and post-war captivity. The author also makes efforts to depict himself in human terms, providing details about his family, fiance and military comrades so he ultimately comes across in a sympathetic light. There is much good in Knappes memoir and if he occasionally glosses over German brutality in Russia, he is in good company with other German memoirs. One of the better German memoirs. Knappe begins his narrative at the end, when he was operations officer for the LVI Panzerkorps in the defense of Berlin in April 1945. He provides a day-by-day description of the Soviet attack on the Seelowe Heights and their push into Berlin. Knappe actually got to meet Hitler briefly in the final days and describes the atmosphere around the Fuhrer bunker. The second part of the book jumps back to 1936 to cover Knappes family background and initial entry into the military in October 1936. After a year in enlisted service, Knappe began officer training in 1937 and was commissioned as a junior artillery officer in 1938. By the start of the Second World, Knappe had been a battery officer for a year and he initially served on the quiet West Wall front during the Phony War. Knappes baptism of fire came during the French campaign and he was wounded in June 1940. His account of the French campaign is a bit hard to follow at times and his dates/locations seem iffy in some places, but it is clear that he thought the French units in his sector put up a tough fight. After recovering at home, Knappe participated in Operation Barbarossa in 1941, serving with Army Group Center in the advance toward Moscow. Interestingly, Knappe recounts an incident where one of his non- commissioned officers was mistreating a civilian not much of an incident really and says that he reprimanded the NCO and that this was the last such incident he ever witnessed. That seems hard to swallow (particularly given that he specifically mentions the infamous Commissar order), but given the authors later comments about suppressing information during his interrogations in Soviet captivity, it seems likely that he chose to sanitize his account of any details that could have gotten him in trouble. At any rate, Knappe made it to the outskirts of Moscow but then had the good fortune to be wounded by Soviet artillery fire in December 1941, just as the Soviet counteroffensive was beginning. Consequently, he was sent back to Germany and missed most of the first winter on the Russian front. Knappe returned to the Russian front in spring 1942 but managed to return to Germany for much of the year due to another wound and a special artillery course he attended. He was supposed to go to Stalingrad in December 1942, but by the time that he reached Rostov, the 6th Army was surrounded and he was re- assigned. Indeed, Knappe had a very lucky career and managed to avoid disaster several times. In 1943, Knappe was assigned to occupation duty in France and later shifted to the Italian Front, where he was wounded by the Allied bombing attack on Kesselrings headquarters. Once again back in Germany, Knappe convalesced and was given another lucky break he was allowed to attend General Staff training for the last half of 1944. He returned to the Eastern Front just after the Soviets had attacked across the Vistula in January 1945. The last section of the book covers Knappes captivity in the Soviet Union. Once again he was lucky, since the Soviets were very interested in him because of his knowledge of the final days around the Fuhrer Bunker in Berlin and this interest kept Knappe away from a labor camp. Knappe was released in December 1949 (many German POWs remained in Soviet captivity until 1954-55) and then managed to escape East Germany to the West, and then made his way to the United States. He wrote Soldat in 1992, when he lived in Ohio. As far as personal revelations, Knappe admits that he finally realized by 1945 that the German Army had been culpable in facilitating Hitlers wars of aggression, in a gee, I guess I was kind of nave sort of way. He also admits some shame when he learned about the Holocaust and other criminal acts committed by Hitlers regimes, but like most Germans of his generation, the blame is affixed solely on the Nazi party. Oddly, the author seemed to have a favorable impression of Generalfeldmarschall Ferdinand Schorner, a well-known Nazi and convicted war criminal. Readers will find that this account has only a modest amount of front-line combat action and that the author also missed some critical moments of the war. However, he does provide some insight into mid-level staff operations and offers a detailed description of the fighting around Berlin in April 1945. As wartime memoirs go, Soldat is a good one, although like anything written decades after the fact, memories are iffy in places and there is evident intent to avoid touchy issues. Indeed, Soldat is something of a sanitized memoir, well-written, but one that does not really admit how the author felt in 1941-42, when Germany seemed on the cusp of victory (in contrast, German memoirs written at that time betray very different attitudes than seen in the post-war accounts).3 of 3 people found the following review helpful. SuperbBy Farley X WilburA very well written first-hand account of a young man who became an officer in the Wehrmacht at the beginning of the war and amazingly lived through to the end at the Fhrer Bunker. The account is very informative of his war-time career and extremely interesting. He details not only his public life, but his private life as well. I was very happy with this book and would recommend it to anyone interested in the history of World War II.1 of 1 people found the following review helpful. One Man's Military JourneyBy NHBunionWonderful well written saga of one German's WWII military career, based on his diaries. Author Siegfried Knappe writes with a refreshing sensitivity, gives his readers a front seat view of his military life as he progresses from a fresh- faced, excited newbie to a disillusioned high-ranking officer. Not every German soldier was a despicable Nazi, I was sorry to see this book end.

A German soldier during World War II offers an inside look at the Nazi war machine, using his wartime diaries to describe how a ruthless psychopath motivated an entire generation of ordinary Germans to carry out his monstrous schemes.