Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
“Uniqueand essential to any understanding of German mentalités in the Hitler era.”
Kirkus
Review
“A powerful and often wrenching approach to the World War II experience.”
—Library Journal Library Journal
Review
“Celebrated narrator Simon Prebble does a masterly job solemnly conveying this powerful, dramatic material. . . . Essential for university history and military/World War II research collections.”
—Library Journal
Synopsis
A trove of previously unpublished, transcribed conversations among German POWs—secretly recorded by the Allies—reveals the extent of their brutality and changes our understanding of the mind-set of the German soldier during World War II.
About the Author
SONKE NEITZEL is a professor of Modern History at the University of Glasgow. He has previously taught modern history at the University of Mainz and has also held posts at the universities of Karlsruhe, Bern, and Saarbrucken. He is currently editor of the journal German History in the Twentieth Century.HARALD WELZER is head of the Center for Interdisciplinary Memory Research at the KWI Essen. He teaches social psychology at the universities of Hanover and Witten-Herdecke.SIMON PREBBLE, a British-born performer of considerable talent and experience, has built a successful career that spans the Atlantic. As a stage and television actor he has played in everything from soaps to Shakespeare, but it is as a veteran narrator of some 275 audio book titles that he has made his mark since coming to the U.S. in 1990. Audiofile magazine has named him a “Golden Voice” and in 2004 he was named “Narrator of the Year” by Publishers Weekly. He lives with his wife in New York.