Blood Red Snow: The Memoirs of a German Soldier on the Eastern Front

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Both served in hellishly brutal campaigns; one started at Stalingrad and fought all the way back to Germany during the retreat from Russia, the other was part of four island landings, Peleliu and Okinawa the two notable for their US casualties, as part of the "Old Breed" in the Pacific. The book reads quickly, as he leaps through large portions of time with only small notes and then slows down to give accounts of particularly brutal battles and incidents. The Eastern Front was by far the most vicious and awful front of the war, and so his descriptions of Stalingrad and Bagration are amazing in how unlikely his survival seems to be.

Capturing the flux of political discontent and unease, Blood Red Snow White is a powerful composite novel set amidst the Russian revolution that intertwines the stories of the Czars, the Russian revolution and children’s author Arthur Ransome’s time as a spy for the British secret service. After a visit to Berlin, I felt like I understood the Western front of WWII much more than I understood the Eastern front. And the real-life dramas of the hellhole that was Stalingrad, recorded on scraps of paper and handed over to his mother on his trips home through injury, form the basis of a coruscating warts-and-all memoir. From the Wehrmacht's retreat from Stalingrad, westward in the face of the enemy, to Germany's ignominious defeat, and the author's internment as a POW, Blood Red Snow is an engaging, personal memoir of a German enlisted man's experiences during World War II. He briefly saw combat in Stalingrad, and was involved in the desperate attempts to avoid being trapped after the Soviet's broke the German lines west of the city.For one, the author seems less dreamy and sentimental than Sajer did, and goes more into detail about the actual fighting not just the results of said fighting. 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. From October 1942 until August 1944, he served in the 1 st Battalion, 21 st Panzergrenadier Regiment, 24 Panzer Division, seeing action at Stalingrad, the Nikopol Bridgehead and in Romania.

Also, throughout the book I felt bombarded by German terms that lacked introduction, which left me feeling confused at times. According to these historians there is no indication that such massacres - as Koschorrek claims - were falsely blamed on the Germen troops. 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 honour the memory of those who perished. I've been waiting for ages for a show from the German side based on a real unit's story à la Band of Brothers, and my top contender has always been Sajer's "The Forgotten Soldier," but now I'm adding this one as well. From letters signed by Disney himself to classic children’s books or ephemera, be sure to check out some of the collectible Walt Disney books on Biblio!It is a very different view on war and all its horror, with down to earth front-line explanations, only slightly tempered from the vulgar. This may be a bit of a retcon (I'm not sure when he wrote the memoir as opposed to the notes sewn into his jacket) but he mentioned in several places how he didn't want to commit the atrocities so many of his other soldiers did.

Later, 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 differing manners and techniques for dealing with the squalor and death. One was a heavy machine gunner for the German Wehrmacht and the second was a mortar gunner for the US Marine Corp. I'm referring to the descriptions of Soviet massacres against their own civilian population accused of collaborating with the enemy, which the author claims to have witnessed during the German troops' retreat from the river Inhul to Voznesensk on the southern Bug (Mikolayiv Oblast, Ukraine) in March 1944 (pages 230, 235/236 and 242/243 of the English translation).It is a novel set during the Russian Revolution, a fictionalised account of the time the author Arthur Ransome spent in Russia.

This isn't just a former soldier telling his contributions to a greater fight; instead it becomes more personal, as in you almost feel Gunter is telling you his experiences in person. The opening was nice but honestly headed for a weak 4 star rating; I think this was partially because Gunter was either finding himself in writing or had written that section well after the war. Finance is provided by PayPal Credit (a trading name of PayPal UK Ltd, Whittaker House, Whittaker Avenue, Richmond-Upon-Thames, Surrey, United Kingdom, TW9 1EH). After mentioning this to my dad, he bought me two books; the famous "The Forgotten Soldier" by Guy Sajer and this book, which is less well-known. The final part, "A Fairy Tale, Ending", focuses on Ransome's private life, shifting into first person narration.When one reads such a book one has the feeling that Germans came there as liberators instead of conquerors.