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

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The endless and often pointless deaths of his comrades becomes depressing and crushing even for the reader, I do not want to imagine how it was for the real soldiers.

After the war, Koschorrek’s diary went missing and it was not until some forty years later when he was reunited in America with his daughter from his first marriage that it came to light and became Blood Red Snow. A German soldier recounts his experience serving along the deathly cold Eastern Front, fighting the Russian army in World War II. Such is the eloquent style of the author’s writing that anyone wishing to experience the deprivations of the Russian Front is highly recommended to read this excellent first-hand account. 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.

Although the writing was strong and it contained a lot of interest, it pales substantially when compared to Sajer's 'the Forgotten Soldier' opus. 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.

On what is intended to be a brief visit to England, he meets unexpected difficulties, being questioned by the authorities and losing his job with the Daily News. Serving in the German army on the Eastern front from 1942 to 1945, Gunther Koschorrek wrote small notes as a form of a diary. He didn't seem to be stuck in Stalingrad for too long, fortunately for him, but the retreats he chronicles are still epics of chaos and death. Between 1940 and 1942 the British colony of Malta in the central Mediterranean faced relentless aerial attacks by the Luftwaffe and Italian Air Force.When one reads such a book one has the feeling that Germans came there as liberators instead of conquerors. The diary went missing and it was when he was reunited with his daughter in America some forty years later that it came to light and became Blood Red Snow.

No high rank, no Nazi party line, no discussion of grand strategy and tactics; there's already fine memoirs from the Wehrmacht's top brass for all that, so this is ideal for a feel of the average recruit's experience. Kitabı zaman zaman roman okur gibi okudum çünkü gerçekten sadece kurgu olaylarda olmasını dilediğim anlar yaşamış yazar. The author was an “ordinary” German soldier who served in the hellish environment of the Eastern Front during World War 2. We give people around the world the opportunity to contribute to the circular economy, earn money and protect the planet, by trading their unwanted books and media. As two historians familiar with the subject matter informed me in response to my related inquiry, such massacres did in fact happen - but only in isolated cases and mainly in the areas that had been annexed by the Soviet Union in 1939/40, not on territory that had been part of the USSR before 1939.But what sense does it make, Tantor, to have an Englishman play the voice of a German soldier in in World War II? From his excitement at the first encounter with the enemy in the Russian Steppe to the horror and confusion of street fighting and the techniques used by his unit for dealing with squalor and death, this is a gripping story. 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. He hoped he would never behave like Schwarz but his attitude changes when a wounded Russian shoots a ‘beloved’ officer and is subsequently killed, Koschorrek is ‘not so much concerned’. He give a vivid sense of the sheer horror and hopelessness which ensues when when infantry, devoid of cover and heavy weapons, are overrun by tanks.

Such wouldn't have been necessary anyway, after German units, including such of the Wehrmacht, had copiously provided for mass graves in the course of the extermination of the Jews (about 2 ½ million victims from the occupied Soviet territories), the treatment of Soviet prisoners of war (about 3 million out of 5. Bir daha böyle şeyler yaşanmaması için fazla iyi niyetli bir dilek dilemekten başka elimden başka bir şey gelmiyor maalesef. The first part, "A Russian Fairy Tale", deliberately evokes the atmosphere of Arthur Ransome's Old Peter's Russian Tales.So Gunter Koschorrek, a fresh young recruit, wrote his notes on whatever scraps of paper he could find and sewed the pages into the lining of his winter coat.