I don’t believe that the author set out to create a Wehrmacht version of Catch-22, but it has come as close as any modern history of the German army to that vision of military life.  The author points out that like all militaries, the German army of WWII was full of silly rules, scams and scammers, and unfortunately, like the author, individuals who would do their best to stay out of harm’s way if someone else could pay the price. 

From the beginning, the author admits that he volunteered for the Wehrmacht so that he could achieve his Abitur without having to sit for it.  From there, he admits to becoming a radio operator in a tank as it was less work than being a driver, and lying about his health so that he could avoid being posted back to the front.

Most histories written by combat veterans stress their loyalty to their comrades, the men they served with, even their personal guilt that they survived while their friends were killed in combat while they survived.  Bottger does not come at any point close to feeling a kinship with the men in his units and that is what makes this history of interest.  No noble deeds, no comradeship, no sacrifice: nothing but his focus on himself.  In that sense he can be viewed as very contemporary, but fortunately he was not at the front enough to cost his comrades because of his focus on the self. When I finished the book I was a bit disgusted with the author and he was definately put on the list of people I would not like to have over for dinner.

The war in Russia, from 1941-45 witnessed numerous major battles, such as Stalingrad, Kursk, Operation Bagration, etc. and even more interesting smaller battles such as the Soviet siege of German troops at Demyansk and the subject of this book, Cholm.  The author, a Latvian who fought at Cholm recounts how for 105 days (February 23 to May 5, 1942), 5500 mostly German troops were surrounded and besieged by numerous Soviet divisions.

Outnumbered, out gunned, having only 10 anti-tank guns, the garrison consisted of a mixed bag of units including non-combat units which were given guns to man the lines.  The one advantage the Germans had was that they were able to maintain contact with artillery units outside of their lines.  When the Soviets attacked, they besieged were able to call in accurate artillery fire with precision to help blunt the human wave tactics employed by the attackers.  Yet supplies were short as winter storms and fog often grounded relief supplies parachuted in by the Luftwaffe.  Ad hoc defenses were created, and the town was destroyed during the months of siege.

In the end, between (depending on the source), between 3500-4500 of the besieged were casualties (2200 were killed) while the Soviets lost an estimated 20,000 troops.

This is a short book, easy to read and will give the average reader a good idea of the battle from the level of the men on the ground.  It does not dwell on the real agonies of the battle, such as the dirt and lice, the thousands of wounded crammed into the buildings which were specifically targeted by Soviet artillery, nor the sufferings of the Soviet troops who had little if any shelter as they attacked again and again over the same ground, so well registered by the German artillery.  This battle, insignificant in the history of that campaign will fade from memory, will be a footnote in its history in another 50 years, and yet it was a time of terror, death and bravery for thousands who will forever be nameless.

Written between October 1946 and April 1947 while awaiting trial and hanging in Poland, Hoss once again validates the proposition that the greatest mass murders were not crazy or fanatical, but rather believers in the ideology du jour. They often present very logical arguments for their actions, all the stronger because so many of them are noted Doctor of Medicine or Law. They represent the highest intellectual standards and yet are responsible for the deaths of untold millions. Knowing that we was going to die, there is nothing in his writing that would indicate his willingness or ability to commit genocide. Additionally, there is no indication of any personal dislike or distain for the Jewish people of whom were the majority of his victims. The closes he comes to any form of antisemitism not in deed but rather in a statement he makes twice just before he is hung: “Please ask the Polish people to forgive me.”  Not the Jews, the Poles. How telling; it was as if the millions murdered under his regime did not and never existed.

Hoss was a believer, a National Socialist to the end; not necessarily in every bit of that pseudo-political philosophy, but enough so that he found a moral home in which he could face the world. Each time Himmler gave him a new task, he set to it with a determination and will to do the best he could. According to Paskuly, this is due to the strict upbringing of his father who wanted Hoss to enter the priesthood. This dream of his father was shattered when Hoss believed a priest had broken the sanctity of the Confessional.

 Yet the basic values of hard work and determination to complete any job in the best manner possible remained with him. Directed by Himmler to build Auschwitz and to manage it as it grew into the largest concentration camp of the Nazi regime, followed a machine that operated according to a set of Rules and regulations for Concentration Camps which were developed by Theodore Eicke, who developed the camp system and demanded that each SS guard develop a sense of hardness that went far beyond the societal boundaries. Eicke viewed each prisoner as an ENEMY OF THE STATE and demanded that the title never be forgotten. His fanaticism was the exact opposite of the technocratic approach taken by Hoss.

The book also contains Hoss’ profiles of various high level SS leaders involved in the camps, a profile of the organization of the camps, a section on Lebensborn, minutes from the infamous Wannsee conference and other details which help to create a better understanding of the camp system.

In the end, we face banality. We find what could be a middle-aged bureaucrat who goes to work each day and comes home to his loving wife and three beautiful daughters. The is no extremely angry, no ranting, no self-image as a man on a holy image. Just the dull, non-descript man found by Hannah Arndt, Dr. Douglas Kelley, and others. That is the lesson in and of itself, for it shows how thin the veneer of civilization may be and that it can be so easy to pierce.

The recent movie, Nuremberg, centers around two characters; Dr. Douglas Kelley, who spent many hours interviewing and interacting with the twenty-two defendants during the first Nuremberg trial and Reichsmarschall Hermann Goring.

Dr. Kelley in 1945 was 35 years old at the time of his work at Nuremberg, upon which the movie is based. He was a U.S. Army psychiatrist with an excellent reputation. His goal was to understand the mind set of the defendants in terms of how they viewed the war crimes they faced and how they could participate in the conducting of those terrible crimes. He interacted with those individuals for only one month, but that month changed his life forever. After those interviews, he gradually became more introverted, subject to flare ups of anger, and more argumentative. His career which held so much promise became short-circuited as he disagreed with fellow doctors and administrators; he was no longer invited for interviews; his scholarly papers were ignored and not published and he became a pariah. In 1958, he died by suicide.

What was it that changed the course of Kelley’s life? It was that month when he spoke with the twenty-two defendants and found a secret that he believed was totally opposed to the image that most people had of those defendants. It is a secret that has haunted generations as they studied the horrors of the Third Reich.

Dr. Kelley concluded, contrary to popular opinion, that the defendants were ordinary individuals; some brighter than others, some more vain, but all profoundly human. They were not devils or demons, they were not mad; in most cases they could be your next store neighbors until the right conditions were created. Dr. Kelley believed that it was not madness that enabled those men to participate in such crimes, but rather from a moral decay disguised as duty. We must remember that numerous commanders of the Nazi killing squads (the Einsatzgruppen) were medical and legal doctors and others possessing the finest intellectual educations in their fields. In their minds, their “work” was noble and ridding the earth of unhealthy and deadly enemies of their race.

In this book, 22 Cells, he saw that the “gradual process of moral desensitization, in which obedience and ambition eroded empathy” enabled those men (and so many others), to commit war crimes on a scale previously unknown. His belief in that process led him to believe that in any society, if the conditions were right, those actions could be repeated and that knowing that society had to take steps to safeguard such a recurrence. Naturally, such a view was not very popular in the victor nations who saw themselves as being not only the physical but also the moral victors of the war.

Long before Hannah Arendt went public with the phrase, the banality of evil, Dr. Kelley had spoken that way of what he had learned in Nuremberg. Like Kelley, Arendt paid a price using that phrase, yet there has never been any evidence to the truth of those words. They paid the price for staring into the darkest portion of the human mind. Will we learn from what they found? Try asking the average teenager of today who fought who in World War II. Ask them who fought in our Civil War. Some may say that Nazi Germany was an aberration, a fluke of history. If that is to be believed, what about the Armenian genocide, the Ukraine famine of the 1930’s, the intentional famine in China under Mao, the muti-year war in the Congo, the slaughter in Rwanda. Need I go on? Their ignorance is not their fault, but someone will have to pay the price for that ignorance. Perhaps not in this decade, perhaps not in the next, but there is always a price to pay for such ignorance.

There can be no finer example of the banality of evil than the book written by the commandant of Auschwitz and one of the greatest mass murders in history, Rudolph Hoss. Written while awaiting trial, he does not attempt to deflect blame or plead some sort of extraordinary circumstances for his actions. Instead, he paints a picture of a very bland, ordinary man simply doing his duty as he was ordered. A good family man, loving father, his main concern was to please his superiors everyday. He was the perfect face of the banality of evil.

For further reading, please consider The Nazi Conscience by Claudia Koonz, The Nuremberg Interviews by Leon Goldensohn, The Mind Doctor of Nuremberg by Kendrick D. Erasmus, and Marriage & Fatherhood in the Nazi SS by Amy Carney, Death Dealer by Rudolph Hoss.

I must admit that I failed (twice) to “get into” the series “Masters of the Air,” in fact I only watched two or three episodes before turning it off. The main problem was that compared to “Band of Brothers” and “The Pacific,” the characters seemed shallow and there was too much time spend on the drinking and almost childish actions between missions. After reading this book, I shall make it a point to watch the television series through to the end.

The book, “Masters of the Air” is a brilliant, gripping history of the American air effort against the Luftwaffe from 1942 though to final victory in 1945. The author takes us on a step by step path as the American air effort is slowly built up, as theories of air warfare are tested and as the initial aircrews in the struggle are sacrificed time and time again on raids that often serve no tactical or strategic purpose.

Prior to the arrival of the Americans, the British had gone through a long and painful campaign of attempting to bomb key targets in German occupied Europe. The Brits had suffered serious losses during the initial campaign against the German invasion of France and wanted to strike back at Germany as the Luftwaffe began their bombing of British cities. The Germans and the British both learned that daylight bombing was too expensive. Despite the pre-war theory of Italian air commander General Giulio Douhet that the bomber will always get through, the cost of such a policy was too heavy, and the results were too meager. The British thus moved to night bombing which produced its’ own problems, one being faulty navigation. Originally the British bombers tried to follow the lights from rail lines and highways which only got them to the British coast, then after that many bombers were fortunate to find the European continent let alone their primary military objective. Thanks to a technological breakthrough, the British were finally able to at least get to the vicinity of their target but under the direction of Arthur Harris the concept of area bombing was developed. Under this theory, Harris hoped to “un-house” German workers and civilians and break the back of German morale. Why the Germans should break when the British civilian morale did not must not have been asked.

The Americans with their heavily gunned B-17s and B-24 bombers and their precision Norden bombsight set out to confirm Douhets’ theory while at the same time destroy the key German war industries. Thus, began around the clock bombing, the British by night, the Americans by day. The only problem was that while the ten-thousand dollar bombsite worked in perfect conditions, in reality with clear days over much of the continent limited to one day out of three, flak jarring the planes, and German fighters closing on the bombers at a combined speed of five-hundred-miles-per-hour, only one bomb in ten landed within five-hundred feet of the target. Added to this was the severe loss rate of raids in which ten, twenty, even forty percent of the bombers were destroy or badly damaged.

Through trial and error for over a year the Americans took heavy casualties, and Miller provides a fascinating section on how the medial teams approached battle fatigue, shell shock and morale problems which threatened to destroy the American effort. One great problem was that with the hostile elements, the randomness of the flak and the determination of the German defenders, many crews felt an extreme sense of helplessness regarding their lives. Rest homes, special meals, more breaks in the early days helped to keep the bombing effort on track despite the dispersal of bombing effort. Miller does a wonderful job of making the reader understand the strain of flying a mission; hours in the air where the temperature can be -60 degrees, where taking off a glove for even a minute can lead to first bite, the jarring of the plane as it flies through hundreds of miles of flak, each shell capable of destroying a bomber, of being wounded during the flight and the slim chance of survival in the terrible cold and then the return to the base which so many empty beds stare at the survivors, knowing that the next day the same drama will be presented to the survivors.  In fact, during the early days until the back of the Luftwaffe was broken, the chance of surviving twenty-five missions (at which point a crew member would be rotated back to the U.S.), stood at 1 in 4. As late as the three months leading up to D-Day, the Eighth Air Force lost fifty percent of their bombers, as the Germans had concentrated over 13,000 heavy anti-aircraft guns along the bombing routes. While it took about 8,500 rounds from the newest German guns to bring down a bomber, flak still accounted to over 40 percent of the wounds suffered during the air campaign and flak took down more planes than the Luftwaffe.

The book is filled with descriptions of bravery of young men, often twenty-one years old, who stepped into manhood by feats of bravery equal to the brave young men in the infantry, armor, navy, etc. There was no glory in this war; it was a battle of attrition between two industrial powers who fed machines and bodies into its’ maw until one or the other bled to death. Fortunately for us, it was the German’s who bled faster.

Despite its’ size (over 500 pages before footnotes), it is a fast read; beautifully written and providing insight into the questions the intelligent reader will be mentally asking.  Well done and I look forward to giving another chance for the series; I hope it lives up to this excellent work.

One of the pleasant things about New Orleans is that you can spend hours in used bookstores, shifting through volumes which reflect the mind set of the locals. I have found a number of gems over the years, and this last trip enabled me to find this excellent volume on RMA (revolutions in military affairs). I have to admit that I had never heard of the book (originally published in 2001 while the volume I found was from its seventh printing in 2008. The last printing was in 2015), but it is a find that I shall keep close. The contributors range from professors of history to the Director of Royal Artillery, British Army. This is short (less than two-hundred pages) but serious book.

According to their thesis, there have been five military revolutions in Western history:

1. The creation of the modern nation state which brought about the discipline of military power.
2. The French Revolution which “merged mass politics and warfare.”
3. The Industrial Revolution which made the nation states to pay, feed, cloth, and arm masses of manpower.
4. The First World War which merged numbers 2 and 3 while “set(ting) the pattern for twentieth-century war, and
5. The Cold War which was cold in the “decisive European and northeast Asian theaters.”

These five RMAs are more important than any momentary tactical advantage (such as the superior use by the Germans of tanks vs. the French use in May 1940). They are more important as they completely change how war is fought across all theaters involved.

Moving into the book, there are separate studies regarding the Western army in seventeenth-century France, the impact of the French Revolution with it dramatic introduction of the mass army, the U.S. Civil war, the Prusso-German RMA of 1840-1871, the Battlefleet revolution of 1885-1914 under the direction of First Sea Lord Jackie Fisher, and of course the First and Second World War.

One might be tempted to ask about the current war in Ukraine and the impact of drones on the battlefield. I believe the authors would not say that drones are a real RMA as they would fall into the category of say, the introduction of the tank in World War I. Yes, they do make an impact, but the initial monopoly by one side was quickly lost and, in many ways, it mirrors the technological battle that was fought during the Battle of the Atlantic.

The writing is decidedly not academic: each section is sharp and well argued with a minimum of excess verbiage. The writing is tight and the average armchair military historian could easily grasp the ideas put forth in each section.

Although in recent years, more histories of the battles on the Eastern Front during World War II have been published, it is the landings in Normandy that still hold most Western Europeans and Americans attention and interest. Indeed, even the name “Eastern Front” reflects the prejudice of Western historians, for most certainly that name was never used by either the Soviets or those Europeans who fought in that area of Europe and the then Soviet Union. The lack of general knowledge can be considered amazing as the German military suffered ninety percent of its casualties in that theater of operations. It was the Soviet military and more importantly, Stalin who was willing to accept the huge losses throughout the war to insure victory.

It can be difficult to appreciate the size of the battles in the east, but a comparison does show that no battles in western Europe after the Normandy invasion comes close to the size of the final battles in the east. The invasion of Normandy and the following ten weeks ended costing the Allies about 209,000 casualties vs 276,000 German. The Battle of the Bulge in forty-one days totaled for both sides almost 200,000 men killed, wounded or missing. Market Garden was a small business with losses totaling about 25,000 (to put it in perspective, during the battle for Stalingrad, the Soviets executed about 12,000 of their own men for desertion, cowardice, etc.)  The battles covered in this book in the period of January-May 1945 resulted in a million Germans and one and a half million Soviet losses. Two and a half million men killed, wounded or missing. Many of those men were killed when their fuel and ammunition ran out and they stood practically disarmed, often little more than a militarized mob, spent after six years of battle.

In action after action, German troops fought and delayed the Soviets in desperate battles against huge odds. Often outnumbered up to ten to one, the Germans delayed their enemy so civilians could try to reach the zones the American or British occupied. Civilians fled in freezing weather and had to camp in bare fields while being attacked by Soviet war planes. The book covers dozens of actions where officers and men sacrificed themselves in often vain attempts to save their compatriots. The Soviets, urged on by Stalin and their officers, raped, burned, and crucified tens of thousands of German civilians.

Unfortunately, the average reader will not think of the Soviet civilians who fled from the Germans in 1941 and after. Nor will they fully understand the terror of living under German occupation when hundreds of thousands were rounded up for slave labor or mass executions. It was likely that a huge proportion of the Soviet soldiers showing no mercy to the fleeing Germans had family members who had lived and suffered under the German occupation and had lost members of their families. Was the revenge meted out to the Germans fair, or justified? Unfortunately, because of the how the Soviet system worked, few common Soviet soldiers left written records as was the case with the Germans.

In the end, the battles came down to desperate Germans and Soviets, driven on by a sense of duty, fear of capture, the hunt for glory from their officers and tactics which was the only option at a time when everyone wanted the war to stop.  Battles create mountains of dead, but when at the very end, one side is out of ammunition and has no opportunity to escape, and the killing continues at an industrial rate, there is nothing but murder.

It is easy to understand how, after the war, many Germans viewed themselves as victims. They were pounded from the air, night after night. Their armies were torn apart and slaughtered at a rate which towered about the four terrible years of the First World War. Their cities were destroyed, hundreds of thousands of their women raped and hundreds of thousands of their soldiers were simply wiped off the face of the Earth. Yet, their terrible experiences were the result of one simple fact; they started the war, their intended victims finished it.

When we think of war, we tend to think of great campaigns, great Generals, and the struggle between nations. The countless small battle actions done by the millions of people who make up the battles are often overlooked. We know no individual combat action by any of those millions will be decisive in the war, but taken together, they create the victory or defeat in war.

The battle of the River Plate, off the coast of Montevideo in mid-December 1939 was a single action that was not a major factor in the loss by Nazi Germany. It was a battle that was more symbolic for the British and a lesson learned by the German Navy. On the surface it was a battle between a German “pocket battleship” and the British navy; one ship against a professional navy that could call on aircraft carriers, battleships, heavy cruisers, and other ships by the dozen. Logically, there was no doubt of the outcome of the battle, yet it had to be fought for war is not a gentleman’s game.

The German ship was the Graf Spee, a lone ship whose main purpose was to seek out and destroy Allied merchant ships in both the Atlantic and even the Indian oceans. The presence of such a ship, armed with six-eleven-inch guns put every merchant ship, destroyer, and light cruiser in harm’s way. If the Graf Spee could not sink any ships, her existence and presence would disrupt the passage of merchant ships and with every ship valuable to the survival of England, she had to be hunted and destroyed.

The author does and excellent job of outlining and following how the British reacted to the realization that the Graf Spee was lose in the Atlantic. They immediately reached out to their major ports to gather ships capable of destroying the German raider and created several hunting groups. From the North Atlantic to the Med to the southern tip of Africa, heavy units of the British navy all joined the hunt for the Graf Spee.

For anyone not familiar with navy ships, the book does leave something to be desired regarding the match up between the Graf Spee and the British; speed, armor, firepower are briefly covered by the assumption seems to be that the reader at least has a glancing knowledge of these topics. Also missing are the stories of the individual sailors for both sides. Anyone who has read the excellent Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors by James D. Hornfischer will be disappointed at the lack of personal depth in this book.

In the end, the British sank the German raider, the war moved on to the Battle of the Atlantic and one episode in a great war ended. Yet today, it is a tradition when sailing off Montevideo to sail over the graveyard of the Graf Spee and think even if only briefly, of those men who fought and died some eighty-five years ago.

Who were the financiers who provided the manufacturing and technical expertise which allowing Hitler and the Nazis to overrun so much of Europe and commit the Holocaust?  And, after the war, what actions if any were taken against them not only for their material support of Hitler, but also for the use of slave labor on a scale not seen since the Roman Empire?

Mr. De Jong spent four years researching this book focusing on four major German families; the Quandts, the Flicks, the von Fincks and the Porsche-Piechs.  How is it that the Krupps are so well known and yet these families contributed in so many ways to the Nazi war machine, producing tanks, guns of every caliber, ammunition, drugs, medicines and almost every other item that a nation needs for war.

Some of the named above were successful industrialists before Hitler’s rise to power, such as the Quandts while other took advantage of the “Aryanization” of Jewish businesses.  “Aryanization” was the concept that with the introduction of the Nuremberg Laws, Jews were forbidden to own factories and businesses.  In order to comply with the law, Jewish businesses were “bought out” by Germans for pennies on the dollar and then those few pennies were determined to be the cost of an exit visa from Germany as many of the Jews fled to other countries. Such theft was in itself a crime that these and other families committed but add to the list the inhuman treatment of the slave laborers and the wheels of justice should have centered on these families.  Why weren’t these families the targets of justice?

Through the mists of time, the campaign against Poland in September 1939 has seemed to have almost disappeared.  Memoirs and campaign histories of other actions of World War II have stuffed libraries around the world to overflowing and even today new volumes are produced which seldom contribute something new to our understanding of these events.  Aside from an occasional article in a history magazine, about the most complete history of the campaign that I found was by Major Robert M. Kennedy as published by the Department of the U.S. Army (1956).  Roger Moorhouse’s new book promised to bring some new facts to bare, especially around personal narrative from the Polish defenders.  To some extent, this has been achieved.

I say to some extent as there are some actions where the thoughts and activities of the defenders are noted, but not as many as I personally would have enjoyed.  The strength of this book is in putting the lead up to the war in good context, especially in the alliance between the U.K., France, and Poland.  To be brutally truthful, Poland was betrayed by its allies, who promised aid and an offensive against the Germans but had no intention or desire; instead the “allies” of Poland were depending on bluff to stop the Germans. Just two days before the invasion, when the German army was deployed on three sides of Poland, the French Minister of War assured his Polish counter parts that France was fully committed to invading Germany with the full might of its military if war were to begin.  Of course, the French “offensive” thrust a few kilometers into Germany and then quickly pulled back, while the British did not begin a bombing offensive as “private property” might be damaged.

The Polish defense of Westerplatte is covered well, but other actions such as those on the Hel peninsula and at the fortress of Modlin are barely touched.  The famous cavalry actions of Poland’s Uhlans are put into proper perspective and the Soviet invasion of Eastern Poland are also covered adequately.  Other weaknesses include not discussing the escaped of over 100,000 Polish troops through Romania and their contribution to the allied victory (as well as their betrayal in England where they were not allowed to participate in the victory parade for fear of offending Stalin and the domestic Labor Party), and a summation of German losses during the campaign.  It is known that the war costs the Germans over fifty-thousand casualties and approximately twenty percent of their tanks.

From the very start of the war, the Germans embarked on a reign of terror, executing both Polish “intellectuals” including policemen, lawyers, doctors, priests, and teachers.  In the beginning theses individuals were primarily Polish but Jews were also targeted.  The key was to break the will of the Poles to resist, the view being that the Jews had no where to go and could be handled on a larger scale in time.

In the end, the nation which was the first to stand up to Nazi Germany and who stood by the Allies in spite of bad faith, was a loser in the Second World War. There were no victory parades, no awarding of honors but there was forty-four years more years of terror under the rule of Communism. Perhaps that is why Poland realizes the danger of Russia so much more clearly than the Western Europeans.  

This work is a good introduction to the campaign and basic reference book for anyone who wishes to understand the importance of the politics on both sides and a bird’s eye view of the battles. Moorhouse follows in the footsteps of his mentor, Norman Davies so we should see additional fine histories in the future.