Just got finished reading
D DAY Through German Eyes - The Hidden Story of June 6th 1944 by Holger Eckhertz -- volume 1, not vol 2 yet (both are combined in a paperback edition). WW2 Axis memoirs (or Allied for that matter) are a new genre for me, but while I enjoyed this entry a lot the experience has been unfortunately mired in strong suspicions about the publisher Sprech Media forging or hoaxing much or all of their material, including from Eckhertz as their latest entries. (A 3rd book from HE is on the way.) It doesn't help that Sprech Media has
definitely had cheaty publishing practices in their prior series "SS Panzer SS Voices" where, even if their material was one hundred percent legitimate, the publisher has misled readers about which books in the set feature which content, in an effort to milk as much money as possible from rebuying the same material -- when all of it together would make one solid book. (There are signs of similar problems in this series, as the publisher reported the book I bought running around 330 pages, which is frankly impossible, although both books together might run that. On the Kindle page counts are notoriously iffy.)
Some recent research by an Amazon reviewer suggests that this might be material repackaged from a German pulp magazine "Der Landser", whose contributors were (per the German wikipedia page on the magazine) former Nazis with journalism and propaganda backgrounds -- exactly the background of the (supposed) grandfather of the author (who is more like an editor really, collating his grandfather's interview notes... supposedly.) No one has been able to confirm yet that Dieter Eckhertz (the grandfather) even existed, much less that he visited the Atlantic Wall to write a series of interview / propaganda articles for "Der Wehrmacht" magazine. (Was there such a magazine?) Much much less that he then went back 10 years later to re-interview a number of survivors, especially including people he originally interviewed before Overlord.
Der Landser was (supposedly??? per the German Wiki) shut down in 2013 after complaints from the Simon Wiesenthal Center. It's plausible that someone is repackaging the material, but more study needs doing.
The books themselves thus feature an interesting case study in why informal historiography should be avoided: because it's difficult to tell legitimate informal material like this from hoaxes. And yet, informal historiography
does happen, and
can be very legitimate. And yet again, informal historiography, but formal, too, runs into the constraints of memory; and into redaction processes with an editor touching up material to run more smoothly than the interviews themselves; and how far these and other factors can create historical fiction even with intentions otherwise. Or, is an author using verisimilitude to just create historical fiction from the outset?
(This naturally has bearing on historical religious studies and evaluating any ancient texts historically, and detecting modern or relatively modern forgeries, so I've run into these problems often before -- but it's interesting to see them in the context of modern events.)
I will say that, to me, the presentation of the material rings ideologically true, in that the veterans present plausible mental recollections of how people believed and acted at the time, and that there seems to be no attempt at making the Wehrmacht and/or SS heroes retroactively, or at lauding or demonizing the Allies. The atrocities committed on both sides during fighting, and the compassion (generally) of the Allies after fighting, fits the historical scenarios elsewhere reported. That the imagery seems "cinematic" also rings true to the devastating power of the weapons involved and the clarity with which such scenes can be burned into memory (though also perhaps redacted a bit for narrative convenience). If the material is legitimate, then we have some firsthand accounts of attempts at German wonder-weapons which operate plausibly, warts and all -- like the wire-controlled tracked bombs which seemed like a great idea until actually put into action, or (in Vol 2) the attempt at taking early fuel-air-explosive weapon technology (definitely used by the Germans in Poland and the Crimea) and converting it to artillery shells (which ends inconclusively).
The most serious problems so far seem to be the reported presence of StuGs in a unit that, reportedly, didn't have them; and a pilot being part of a flying group which should have been a different flying group for the area. Historical clarification, or hoax goof?
Anyway, reader beware that this may be some kind of scam.
But one way or another I found it interesting.
