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Author: Helga Herzog Godfrey Publisher: Author House ISBN: 1452040168 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 558
Book Description
I was born and raised in Germany. After my father’s death, my mother spent many winters with my husband and I here in Florida. During these visits, she and I transcribed my father’s World War II diaries into German from the old “Gabelsberger” shorthand, which only Mama was able to read. Subsequently, I translated them into English. These diaries fortunately were discovered by my sister Sigrid in the attic upon the sale of the old family home after my father’s passing in 1989. She felt Mama and I should translate these books for the family. At a later point many friends and acquaintances encouraged me, to publish this diary, to document his thoughts, experiences, and innermost feelings from the beginning of his conscripted military service in 1939 through 1946, when he returned home after being released from a French POW labor camp. During the latter part of 1946 and into 1947, an epilog describes his daily struggles to return to normalcy, the resumption of his teaching career, and the search for food to feed his family. He describes his touching love for his family, as well as his anger and hatred for the insane war and its inept leaders. A war, he was forced to participate in as an ordinary German soldier. Many times he naively commented very unfavorably, sometimes using “choice words” about Hitler, the Nazi Party, and his superiors, a risk, if found out, could have cost him his life. I myself have many memories of the war and its horrors as a little girl without a father, spending night after night in a bunker, the “liberation” of our small town by the Americans. This has left deep and lasting impressions on me. Later on, I met a wonderful American with whom I fell in love and married, with my father proudly walking me down the aisle. This, in spite of the resentment he held against Americans, for shamefully turning him over to the French as a forced labor POW. I remember his sadness, when his little “Murschel”, as he used to call me, left for America with his conviction that if he was lucky, he may be able to see me only once more during his lifetime. However, he was able to enjoy many trips to the United States and I with my family visited my parents often in Germany. After reading his legacy, I knew, I have my beloved father’s permission to share his writings with others, and by doing so, honor his memory.
Author: Helga Herzog Godfrey Publisher: Author House ISBN: 1452040168 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 558
Book Description
I was born and raised in Germany. After my father’s death, my mother spent many winters with my husband and I here in Florida. During these visits, she and I transcribed my father’s World War II diaries into German from the old “Gabelsberger” shorthand, which only Mama was able to read. Subsequently, I translated them into English. These diaries fortunately were discovered by my sister Sigrid in the attic upon the sale of the old family home after my father’s passing in 1989. She felt Mama and I should translate these books for the family. At a later point many friends and acquaintances encouraged me, to publish this diary, to document his thoughts, experiences, and innermost feelings from the beginning of his conscripted military service in 1939 through 1946, when he returned home after being released from a French POW labor camp. During the latter part of 1946 and into 1947, an epilog describes his daily struggles to return to normalcy, the resumption of his teaching career, and the search for food to feed his family. He describes his touching love for his family, as well as his anger and hatred for the insane war and its inept leaders. A war, he was forced to participate in as an ordinary German soldier. Many times he naively commented very unfavorably, sometimes using “choice words” about Hitler, the Nazi Party, and his superiors, a risk, if found out, could have cost him his life. I myself have many memories of the war and its horrors as a little girl without a father, spending night after night in a bunker, the “liberation” of our small town by the Americans. This has left deep and lasting impressions on me. Later on, I met a wonderful American with whom I fell in love and married, with my father proudly walking me down the aisle. This, in spite of the resentment he held against Americans, for shamefully turning him over to the French as a forced labor POW. I remember his sadness, when his little “Murschel”, as he used to call me, left for America with his conviction that if he was lucky, he may be able to see me only once more during his lifetime. However, he was able to enjoy many trips to the United States and I with my family visited my parents often in Germany. After reading his legacy, I knew, I have my beloved father’s permission to share his writings with others, and by doing so, honor his memory.
Author: Mark Nixon Publisher: A&C Black ISBN: 144115258X Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 263
Book Description
Rethinking Children and Families considers the way we approach the complex relationship between childhood, families and the state, and explores the contested nature of the terms childhood, family and state. Theoretical and practice-based perspectives are discussed within the context of recent key developments. Examples of research, reflections on research and key points and guidance on further reading make this a really accessible text. Rethinking Children and Families is essential reading for those studying childhood at undergraduate and graduate level, and will be of great interest to those working with children in any field.
Author: Friedrich Kellner Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1108307841 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 544
Book Description
This is a truly unique account of Nazi Germany at war and of one man's struggle against totalitarianism. A mid-level official in a provincial town, Friedrich Kellner kept a secret diary from 1939 to 1945, risking his life to record Germany's path to dictatorship and genocide and to protest his countrymen's complicity in the regime's brutalities. Just one month into the war he is aware that Jews are marked for extermination and later records how soldiers on leave spoke openly about the mass murder of Jews and the murder of POWs; he also documents the Gestapo's merciless rule at home from euthanasia campaigns against the handicapped and mentally ill to the execution of anyone found listening to foreign broadcasts. This essential testimony of everyday life under the Third Reich is accompanied by a foreword by Alan Steinweis and the remarkable story of how the diary was brought to light by Robert Scott Kellner, Friedrich's grandson.
Author: Johanne Hurter Publisher: Pen & Sword Military ISBN: 9781399082815 Category : Languages : en Pages : 176
Book Description
The Eastern Front, 1941. Operation Barbarossa. HitlerÃ-s armies advance into the Soviet Union to conquer Lebensraum in the East. Among the corps commanders is General Gotthard Heinrici, a career soldier, a highly decorated First World War veteran, who observed and recorded in his diary and letters the unprecedented harshness of the German conduct of the campaign. With remarkable candour he described his experiences at the front and the everyday lives of the troops under his command - and the appalling conditions in which the war was fought. In his writings he revealed his growing doubts about Hitler's strategy and his mounting concern as the Wehrmacht was implicated in war crimes and the first actions of the Holocaust. This selection from Heinrici's diaries and letters, edited and with a perceptive introduction by Johannes HÂrter, gives a fascinating inside view of the fighting on the Eastern Front from a commander's perspective. It is also provides an unusual insight into the feelings, attitudes and acute anxieties of one of the Wehrmacht's most able generals in the midst of a brutal campaign.
Author: Günter Grass Publisher: Random House ISBN: 1448163757 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 272
Book Description
In 1990, Günter Grass - a reluctant diarist - felt compelled to make a record of the interesting times through which he was living. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the collapse of Communism, Germany and Europe were enduring a period of immense upheaval. Grass resolved to immerse himself in these political debates: he travelled widely throughout both Germanys, the former East and the former West, conducting a lively exchange with political enemies, friends and his own children about all the questions posed by reunification. His account gives the reader an unparalleled insight into a key moment in the life of modern Europe, seen through the eyes of one of its most acclaimed writers. It also provides a startling insight into the creative process as the reader witnesses ideas for novels occurring and then taking shape. From Germany to Germany is both a personal journal by a great creative artist and a penetrating commentary on recent European history by someone who was simultaneously an acute observer and a highly engaged participant.
Author: Don A Gregory Publisher: Casemate ISBN: 1935149741 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 273
Book Description
Two war diaries that reveal “just what it was like, day by day, living in a Wehrmacht unit” (Internet Modeler). This book is built around two recently discovered war diaries—one by a member of the 23rd Panzer Division, which served under Manstein in Russia, and the other by a member of Rommel’s Afrika Korps. Together, along with detailed timelines and brief overviews, they comprise a fascinating up-close look at the German side of World War II. The stories are told primarily in the first person present tense, as events occurred, and without the benefit—or liability—of postwar reflection. The first diary, author unknown, covers April 1942 to March 1943, the momentous year when the tide of battle turned in the East. It first details the unit’s combat in the great German victory at Kharkov, then the advance to the Caucasus, and finally the lethal winter of 1942–43. The second diary’s author was a soldier named Rolf Krengel, and the diary was the original, handwritten copy. It starts with the beginning of the war and ends shortly after the occupation. Serving primarily in North Africa, Krengel recounts with keen insight and flashes of humor the day-to-day challenges of the Afrika Korps. During one of the swirling battles in the desert, Krengel found himself sharing a tent with Rommel at a forward outpost. Neither of the diarists was famous, nor of especially high rank. These are simply the brutally honest accounts written at the time by men of the Wehrmacht who participated in two of history’s most crucial campaigns.
Author: Friedrich Reck Publisher: New York Review of Books ISBN: 1590175867 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 273
Book Description
Hailed as one of the most important works on the Hitler period, this is an “astonishing, compelling, and unnerving” portrait of life in Nazi Germany between 1936 and 1944—from a man who nearly shot Hitler himself (The New Yorker) Friedrich Reck might seem an unlikely rebel against Nazism. Not just a conservative but a rock-ribbed reactionary, he played the part of a landed gentleman, deplored democracy, and rejected the modern world outright. To Reck, the Nazis were ruthless revolutionaries in Gothic drag, and helpless as he was to counter the spell they had cast on the German people, he felt compelled to record the corruptions of their rule. The result is less a diary than a sequence of stark and astonishing snapshots of life in Germany between 1936 and 1944. We see the Nazis at the peak of power, and the murderous panic with which they respond to approaching defeat; their travesty of traditional folkways in the name of the Volk; and the author’s own missed opportunity to shoot Hitler. This riveting book is not only, as Hannah Arendt proclaimed it, “one of the most important documents of the Hitler period,” but a moving testament of a decent man struggling to do the right thing in a depraved world.
Author: Ernst Jünger Publisher: Columbia University Press ISBN: 0231548389 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 936
Book Description
Ernst Jünger was one of twentieth-century Germany’s most important—and most controversial—writers. Decorated for bravery in World War I and the author of the acclaimed western front memoir Storm of Steel, he frankly depicted war’s horrors even as he extolled its glories. As a Wehrmacht captain during World War II, Jünger faithfully kept a journal in occupied Paris and continued to write on the eastern front and in Germany until its defeat—writings that are of major historical and literary significance. Jünger’s Paris journals document his Francophile excitement, romantic affairs, and fascination with botany and entomology, alongside mystical and religious ruminations and trenchant observations on the occupation and the politics of collaboration. While working as a mail censor, he led the privileged life of an officer, encountering artists such as Céline, Cocteau, Braque, and Picasso. His notes from the Caucasus depict the chaos after Stalingrad and atrocities on the eastern front. Upon returning to Paris, Jünger observed the French resistance and was close to the German military conspirators who plotted to assassinate Hitler in 1944. After fleeing France, he reunited with his family as Germany’s capitulation approached. Both participant and commentator, close to the horrors of history but often distancing himself from them, Jünger turned his life and experiences into a work of art. These wartime journals appear here in English for the first time, giving fresh insights into the quandaries of the twentieth century from the keen pen of a paradoxical observer.
Author: Christine Alexander Publisher: Casemate ISBN: 161200024X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 241
Book Description
“Remarkable personal journals . . revealing the combat experience of the German-Russian War as seldom seen before . . . a harrowing yet poignant story” (Military Times). Hans Roth was a member of the anti-tank panzerjager battalion, 299th Infantry Division, attached to the Sixth Army, as the invasion of Russia began. As events transpired, he recorded the tension as the Germans deployed on the Soviet frontier in June 1941. Then, a firestorm broke loose as the Wehrmacht tore across the front, forging into the primitive vastness of the East. During the Kiev encirclement, Roth’s unit was under constant attack as the Soviets desperately tried to break through the German ring. At one point, after the enemy had finally been beaten, a friend serving with the SS led him to a site—possibly Babi Yar—where he witnessed civilians being massacred. After suffering through a brutal winter against apparently endless Russian reserves, his division went on the offensive again when the Germans drove toward Stalingrad. In these journals, attacks and counterattacks are described in you-are-there detail. Roth wrote privately, as if to keep himself sane, knowing his honest accounts of the horrors in the East could never pass Wehrmacht censors. When the Soviet counteroffensive of winter 1942 begins, his unit is stationed alongside the Italian 8th Army, and his observations of its collapse, as opposed to the reaction of the German troops sent to stiffen its front, are of special fascination. Roth’s three journals were discovered many years after his disappearance, tucked away in the home of his brother. After his brother’s death, his family discovered them and sent them to Rosel, Roth’s wife. In time, Rosel handed down the journals to Erika, Roth’s only daughter, who had emigrated to America. Roth was likely working on a fourth journal before he was reported missing in action in July 1944. Although his ultimate fate remains unknown, what he did leave behind, now finally revealed, is an incredible firsthand account of the horrific war the Germans waged in Russia.
Author: Helga Herzog Godfrey
Author: Helga Herzog Godfrey
Author: Mark Nixon
Author: Friedrich Kellner
Author: Johanne Hurter
Author: Günter Grass
Author: Don A Gregory
Author: Friedrich Reck
Author: Martin Pöppel
Author: Ernst Jünger
Author: Christine Alexander