Comrades: The Wehrmacht from Within

By Felix Römer. Translated by Alex J. Kay.

Comrades is a new history of the mentalities of ordinary Wehrmacht soldiers, based on recently discovered intelligence records from the American interrogation camp Fort Hunt near Washington, where German prisoners of war were interned and secretly listened in on during the Second World War. US Military Intelligence captured tens of thousands of open conversations between Wehrmacht soldiers and recorded them in verbatim transcripts. The resulting collection offers new insights into the thinking and worldviews of ordinary members of Hitler’s armed forces – their attitudes towards National Socialism and the ‘Führer’, their views of the war and their experiences during the fighting, and their knowledge of and participation in war crimes and the Holocaust. The accompanying biographical information reveals how their mindsets were connected to their individual paths through the Third Reich, the Wehrmacht, and the war. The book offers a nuanced and realistic account of life in the Wehrmacht, based on unique source material, which allows us to see the Second World War through the eyes of the perpetrators.

Felix Römer is a research fellow in modern history at the German Historical Institute London. He has published widely on the history of National Socialism, the Third Reich and its military, and the Second World War. His book publications include Der Kommissarbefehl: Wehrmacht und NS-Verbrechen an der Ostfront (2008), Kameraden: Die Wehrmacht von innen (2012), and Die narzisstische Volksgemeinschaft: Theodor Habichts Kampf 1914 bis 1944 (2017).

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