In this rare World War II memoir, Lothar Herrmann, a soldier from the
Wehrmacht, details his unimaginable experience as a German
Prisoner-of-War in the Soviet Union.
Hermann grew up in Bavaria, going through the RAD (Nazi Labor Service)
before being conscripted into a Wehrmacht Mountain Division (the
Gebirgsdivision) in 1940. He participated in Germany's advance through
southern Ukraine in 1941 and, in 1944, was arrested in Romania while
retreating to Germany. The Romanians passed him onto the Soviets, who
placed him in a forced labor camp, where he watched two-thirds of
prisoners around him die. In 1949, Herrmann was finally released to
Germany and returned to Bavaria.
Three million German troops were taken prisoner by the Red Army and
around two-thirds of them survived to return to Germany in 1949, but
their stories are little known. Klaus Willmann draws on interviews he
conducted with Herrmann, to recount these astonishing recollections in
the first-person. Depicting the challenges of growing up in Nazi Bavaria
to becoming a Soviet prisoner-of-war, this is a gripping and
enlightening account from a necessary but rarely explored perspective.