I had figured that this book would be very similar, and inferior, to Guy Sajer's "The Forgotten Soldier", the book to which all German POV memoirs of the Eastern front are compared against. This is a very good account of a warrior's experience, an absolute must for anyone interested in personal accounts from WWII. The diary went missing, and it was not until he was reunited with his daughter in America some forty years later that it came to light and became Blood Red Snow. I've read WW2 memoirs from an American perspective or Russian perspective, but this my first from a German perspective.

But it would also be an extraordinary and accordingly improbable coincidence if, out of millions of Wehrmacht soldiers fighting on the Eastern Front, it had happened to be the machine-gunner Koschorrek and his comrades who became witnesses of some of the few massacres committed by Soviet troops against Soviet civilians accused of collaboration, and that in areas of southern Ukraine that had already belonged to the Soviet Union before 1939 (it is also a seemingly improbable coincidence, incidentally, that Koschorrek's unit, as he later claims, should have taken part in the retaking of the East Prussian town of Nemmersdorf and he should thus have become witness to the atrocities committed there by Soviet troops and loudly decried by NS propaganda). A constant theme of the book is the fate of the author's many comrades, some only briefly encountered in passing, others who remained with him for long periods of time. But what sense does it make, Tantor, to have an Englishman play the voice of a German soldier in in World War II? The author gives a more balanced descriptions of his Soviet enemies than some German memoirs, largely avoiding the cliched descriptions of a mindless hordes advancing with commissars at the rear that blight other accounts.

Read more about the condition Very Good: A book that has been read and does not look new, but is in excellent condition. He tells of the horror and confusion of fighting in the streets of Stalingrad are brought to life by his descriptions of the others in his unit - their. Having never served in the military, I read war memoirs for the action and the sense of "what war is like", which he does pretty well. After training as a heavy machine gunner, a particularly lethal, rapid-fire weapon mounted on a gun carriage, Koschorrek headed out to the Eastern Front and started making illicit notes, which he hid in the lining of his uniform. He kept a diary, wrote up events when on leave and put notes on scraps of paper that he put into a slit in his coat lining and he drew these elements together sometime in the 1980s or 1990s.

As keeping a diary was strictly forbidden, he sewed the pages into the lining of his thick winter coat and deposited them with his mother on infrequent trips home on leave. Really shows that the average German solider was just a person caught up in war no different than any one else unfortunate enough to find themself in one. As he explains, keeping a diary was forbidden, and though a lot of the situations he gets into seem too insane to be real, given the conditions of the war I can give him a pass on authenticity questions. This book stands as a graphic memorial to the huge numbers on both sides who did not survive the war in the East.No missing or damaged pages, no creases or tears, no underlining or highlighting of text, and no writing in the margins. This book stands as a memorial to the huge numbers on both sides who did not survive and is, some six decades later, the fulfilment of a responsibility the author feels to honor the memory of those who perished. Korschorrek dedicated his book ‘to be a tribute to the countless anonymous soldiers who spent most of their war in filthy foxholes in the Russian soil’.

It is a fairy-tale account of the circumstances leading to the Russian Revolution, featuring the poor woodcutter, the orphaned children, the romantic but oblivious Royal family, the mad monk, the sleeping bear and the two conspirators in the wood. How is it possible not to see that such accounts like this one (as is often the case with memoirs of German soldiers) fail to express the most basic acknowledgements of what nazi Germany has done in Russia and the incommensurable sufferings brought to its people. Gunter Koschorrek wrote his illicit diary on any scraps of paper he could lay his hands on, storing them with his mother on infrequent trips home on leave.

As a report transmitting a German front line soldier's experience, Koschorrek's book could be recommended, if it didn't contain some dubious claims that arouse the suspicion of propaganda serving political-ideological purposes.

He does a good job of conveying how non-ideological a good portion of the military was; when political officers show up late in the book to spout Nazi propaganda everyone rolls their eyes at them, and while there are some instances of atrocities he sees, they're things like shooting partisans, not death camp-type stuff. The truth is, in each one of us, the line dividing right and wrong meanders, blurs, and at times disappears altogether.Also, throughout the book I felt bombarded by German terms that lacked introduction, which left me feeling confused at times.