Soldaten : the secret world of transcripts of German POWs

What the soldiers discussed -- The soldiers' world -- Fighting, killing, and dying -- Frame of reference: annihilation -- Sex -- Technology -- Faith in victory -- Ideology -- Success -- Frame of reference: war -- How national socialist was the Wehrmacht's war? -- War as work -- Appendix: The surveillance protocols.;Though initially recorded by British intelligence with the intention of gaining information that might be useful for the Allied war effort, the matters discussed in these conversations ultimately proved to be limited in that regard. But they would supply a unique and profoundly important window into the 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. It is a myth these transcripts unequivocally debunk. A trove of previously unpublished, transcribed conversations among German POWs--secretly recorded by the Allies--reveals the extent of their brutality and changes our understanding of the mind-set of the German soldier during World War II. 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... On a visit to the British National Archive in 2001, Sönke Neitzel made a remarkable discovery: reams of covertly recorded, meticulously transcribed conversations among German POWs during World War II that recently had been declassified. Neitzel would later find another collection of transcriptions, twice as extensive, in the National Archive in Washington, D.C. These discoveries, published in book form for the first time, 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—to create a powerful narrative of wartime experience. [Originally published as Soldaten .]