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by Sonke Neitzel (Author), Harald Welzer (Author)
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.]Author Biography
Sonke Neitzel is a professor of International History at the London School of Economics. He has previously taught modern history at the University of Glasgow, University of Mainz and has also held posts at the universities of Karlsruhe, Bern, and Saarbrucken. He is currently editor of the journal German History in the Twentieth Century.
Harald Welzer is head of the Center for Interdisciplinary Memory Research at the KWI Essen. He teaches social psychology at the universities of Hanover and Witten-Herdecke.
