Thomas F. (hardtack) - , reviewed on 9/26/2011 + 2701 more book reviews

After recently reading "Panzer Commander," I was apprehensive about reading another German soldier's "We really hated Hitler and didn't know anything about the concentration camps" memoir.

However, I was pleasantly surprised with "Soldat." This is a well written memoir from a German officer that covers his days from graduation from the gymnasium to his release from a Russian POW camp 13 years later.

Starting out as a recruit in an artillery training camp until the days when he "commanded" a decimated division in the defense of Berlin, Siegfried Knappe tells of his experiences growing up in Nazi Germany: his hopes, loves, training, combat experiences, the men he served and fought with, and his gradual disillusionment with the war.

I finished the book in three days, as the 413 pages seem to fly by as I learned what it really meant to be German soldier in the initial, heady years of victory and the ghastly, hopeless years of defeat.

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