Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying, The Secret WWII Transcripts of German POWS(2011)

Sönke NeitzelHarald WelzerJefferson Chase

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 & recently declassified. Netizel would later find another collection of transcriptions, twice as extensive, in the National Archive in Washington. These were discoveries that would provide a unique & profoundly important window into the true mentality of the soldiers in the Wehrmacht, the Luftwaffe, the German navy & 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--& the casual, pitiless brutality omnipresent in them--from a historical & psychological perspective. In reconstucting the frameworks & situations behind these conversations, they've created a powerful narrative of wartime experience.