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On Fighting, Killing, and Dying

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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.

©2011 Soenke Neitzel and Harald Welzer; English translation by Jefferson Chase copyright 2012 (P)2012 HighBridge Company Deutschland Europa Militär
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Even though I agree with most of the perspective, this book was more of a self indulgent monologue than real historical research, and therefore a disappointment. The authors pick and choose a tiny, tiny sample of quotes, then build onto these a much longer monologue elaborating on a narrative and generalisation that is nowhere near supported by the presented evidence. Why not center the book on suitably arranged source material that speaks for itself? It's hard to imagine this approach flying in an undergraduate university paper, but the authors are apparently qualified historians? The mind boggles. I'd love to see what an author like Svetlana Alexievich could have made of a gold mine such as these 1000 pages of source material.

The audio narration performance was decent: The intonation and vocal variety was generally engaging, although it bothered me how the name of the respective speaker was repeated ahead of each line of dialog, which I found distracting to be point of ruining these sections; If would have been much better for a second narrator to represent the respective other side.

Elaborate narrative built on flimsy evidence

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