Left with his mother on his rare trips home, this illicit diary eventually was lost—and did not come to light until some 40 years later when Koschorrek was reunited with his daughter in America. The only war crimes Koschorrek mentions that are perpetrated by the Germans is the execution of wounded Soviet soldiers on the front line by a single German officer. This memoir is particularly close to me because my father also fought for the Germans on that violent Eastern Front. 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.

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.He becomes acquainted with the leading Bolsheviks and begins a romance with Trotsky's secretary Evgenia who will become his second wife. Gnter 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.

It seems unlikely that the Soviets would retake a village, massacre the civilians, and then lose the village again just before Koschorrek arrived. As the Tsarist White Army makes advances against the Bolshevik Red Army, he becomes worried for Evgenia's safety. He was also posted to Romania and Italy, assignments he remembers fondly compared to his time on the Eastern Front. But by the time of publication the author, now an old man, seems to have added the parts about Soviet troops slaughtering their own people (while German troops were innocent as lambs) and having personally witnessed, coincidence of coincidences, the most well-known massacre committed by Soviet troops against German civilians, the one at Nemmersdorf, which was widely touted in Nazi propaganda at the time.

I also preferred the broad experience he had in many theaters of battle besides engagements in the Soviet Union. Serving in the German army on the Eastern front from 1942 to 1945, Gunther Koschorrek wrote small notes as a form of a diary. This is a used book - there is no escaping the fact it has been read by someone else and it will show signs of wear and previous use.