thorough and (99%) honest memoirs of a regular soldier on the Eastern Front.
The endless and often pointless deaths of his comrades becomes depressing and crushing even for the reader, I do not want to imagine how it was for the real soldiers...
For me it loses one star only because he is not such a great writer (nothing like Ernst Junger, for example), not for the historical point of view.
( )

From the Wehrmacht's retreat from Stalingrad, westward in the face of the enemy, to Germany's ignominious defeat, and the author's internment as a POW, Blood Red Snow is an engaging, personal memoir of a German enlisted man's experiences during World War II. Although wounded several times, author, Gunter Koschorrek, managed to survive spent almost the entire war as a heavy machine gun crewman engaged against the Russians on the imploding Eastern front. Similar to The Forgotten Soldier and Soldat – well worth your time.

The translation, however, as well as the narration has issues – first, the translation. I don't know if it's the translation from German to English or what, but several times the author refers to someone as a "bloke" or some other figure of speech one would completely associate with the British. Miriam Webster agrees, calling bloke an informal, "chiefly British," term for a man; akin to what we in Southern California might call a "dude!" Along the same lines, my second issue is the narratorTantor Audio chose. Not that Nigel Patterson is a bad narrator, for he is not. But what sense does it make, Tantor, to have an Englishman play the voice of a German soldier in in World War II? ( )

It is very easy to read as it has no fancy author trying to show you his education, except for the constant use of German terms for people's positions and rank. It is a very different view on war and all its horror, with down to earth front-line explanations, only slightly tempered from the vulgar.

It starts with entry into battle and continues with his adjustment to it. and ends with the war and his realization he is the looser.

Any WWII or war enthusiast should read it, as it is material they are likely lacking. ( )

This is an edited version of a diary kept by a Wehrmacht enlisted man during the various stages and theaters of his service from mid-1942 until the end of the war, with brief interruptions when he gets wounded or doesn't have time to write. As he explains, keeping a diary was forbidden, and though a lot of the situations he gets into seem too insane to be real, given the conditions of the war I can give him a pass on authenticity questions. The Eastern Front was by far the most vicious and awful front of the war, and so his descriptions of Stalingrad and Bagration are amazing in how unlikely his survival seems to be. I'm not sure of the survival rates for machine gunners, which was Koschorrek's specialty, so when I was reading I just sat back and marveled as he dodged endless waves of T-34s and mortars, or in the most ridiculous scene, manages to keep one step ahead of the Russians by stealing a pony. He didn't seem to be stuck in Stalingrad for too long, fortunately for him, but the retreats he chronicles are still epics of chaos and death. Having never served in the military, I read war memoirs for the action and the sense of "what war is like", which he does pretty well. He does a good job of conveying how non-ideological a good portion of the military was; when political officers show up late in the book to spout Nazi propaganda everyone rolls their eyes at them, and while there are some instances of atrocities he sees, they're things like shooting partisans, not death camp-type stuff. A lot of the book is about small things: food, new shoes, cigarettes, letters to home, and complaining about officers. It's interesting to see this kind of different take on the war, and I enjoyed Koschorrek's stories. ( )