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Title: Black Edelweiss: A Memoir of Combat and Conscience by a Soldier of the Waffen-SS
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Manufacturer: The Aberjona Press
List Price: $19.95
Our Price: $12.83
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| Customer Reviews: |
| Black Edelweiss: A Memoir of Combat and Conscience by a Soldier of the Waffen-SS by The Aberjona Press Excellent | I bought the book based on the other reviews.
I really enjoyed the book and would recommend the read to anyone keen on the topic. Rather than rehash what others have already written, why not purchase a copy and enjoy a few evenings engrossed in an accurate account of what it really was like fighting a war in the far north.
10/10
| | Black Edelweiss: A Memoir of Combat and Conscience by a Soldier of the Waffen-SS by The Aberjona Press "A Memior of Conscience" (3.5/5) | Johan Voss's story is interesting in its sheer typicality. He grew up in an intellectual middle-class family which held varying opinions on Hitler, from fanatical enthusiasm to seditious contempt. As a teen, he became somewhat enrapt with the idea of the Waffen-SS, which was marketed not as a racial elite but as a brotherhood dedicated to protecting Europe from Soviet Communism. Seeing in the concept the seeds of a United Europe (divisions of Waffen-SS were recruited from everything from Danes to Frenchmen to Cossacks and Muslim Croatians), Voss joined up, and being from a mountainous area, was assigned to the 6th SS Mountain Division "Nord."
"Nord" spent most of its service fighting on the forgotten sector of the Eastern front - the Russian-Finnish border. Voss served in the frozen wastes of the Arctic Circle until late 1944, when the deteriorating military situation caused Finland to turn against Germany - indeed, the book's toughest emotional passages deal with the bitterness of the Germans as they are forced to march a thousand miles through the snow to Norway. After that, the division was sent to France to fight in the "Second Battle of the Bulge" - Himmler's assault into Alsace in the closing days of 1944. It was during this chaotic battle that Voss was captured by Americans and first had to hide his SS identity. In the prison camps he was confronted with evidence of Nazi atrocities and engaged in lengthly and painful self-examination about the Waffen-SS and his role in it, hence the "conscience" part of the title.
EDELWEISS is not the best WW 2 memior I've read. It moves a bit slowly, and Voss is almost too thoughtful for his own good; his constant introspection is interesting in and of itself but drags down the narrative. But it is a refreshingly bold and important book. Because he falls short of complete repudiation of the organization, seeing himself as both the facilitator of crime and a victim of it, Voss' memior is somewhat controversial. Like many other W/SS vets, he is willing to accept his share of responsibility for the actions of Nazi Germany, but refuses to serve as the "alibi of a nation", merely because he wore SS runes and not Army litzen on his collar. By refusing to be lumped in with the black-clad Political SS and the Death's Head troopers who staffed the concentration camps, Voss puts himself at odds with everyone, inside and outside of Germany, who wants him to admit that he is criminal and keep any non-criminal exploits to himself. Luckily for history, he didn't take their advice.
| | Black Edelweiss: A Memoir of Combat and Conscience by a Soldier of the Waffen-SS by The Aberjona Press Fantastic front line account of a little known unit and its battles | | This is one of the best first hand accounts I have read by any soldier. A majority of the book is about his time in combat, but there are many pages written while he was in captivity where he is forced to come to grips with what he was a part of. He is unashamed of his participation in the SS, and seems a firm believer that the German cause was just in its battle against Bolshevism. I can not judge him as I did not grow up in 1920/1930s Germany, but as a former soldier who has been in combat, I feel his memories and descriptions of his wartime experiences are genuine. This is a page turner, well written with nothing that will hang up a reader, and a glimpse into the mind of just one man in those conditions in our history. If you like this, I also recommend "Sniper on the Eastern Front" for another great first person view of combat on the ground in the ETO. | | Black Edelweiss: A Memoir of Combat and Conscience by a Soldier of the Waffen-SS by The Aberjona Press Fair book... | This book is worth reading, but it's not a book that you cannot put down.
Alot of politics discussed... If you want an exciting book to read, read "the forgotten soldier." There is controversy about the book.. whether it is a work of fiction.. maybe because it is so exciting. Not exciting , but very interesting. Exciting is the wrong word. But it is a book I highly recommend. | | Black Edelweiss: A Memoir of Combat and Conscience by a Soldier of the Waffen-SS by The Aberjona Press Black Edelweiss; | | I Have found this book a very compelling read , it shows a true picture of a young man doing his duty for his country. And haveing to face capture and the truth behind the extermination camps whilst trying to justify his existance and the torment with in his soul for being in a organisation that after the war ended was branded as a group of criminals. The only solace the author has to purge the guilt from his soul is to remember his comrades that fell and keep writing this book in their honour and then to show him self that his actions during the war were not in any way criminal but a man serving his country. | | Black Edelweiss: A Memoir of Combat and Conscience by a Soldier of the Waffen-SS by The Aberjona Press Book Description | | Originally written while the author was a prisoner of the US Army in 1945–46, Black Edelweiss is a boon to serious historians and WWII buffs alike. In a day in which most memoirs are written at half a century’s distance, the former will be gratified by the author’s precise recall facilitated by the chronologically short-range (a matter of one to seven years) at which the events were captured in writing. Both will appreciate and enjoy the abundantly detailed, exceptionally accurate combat episodes. Even more than the strictly military narrative, however, the author has crafted a searingly candid view into his own mind and soul. As such, Black Edelweiss is much more than a "ripping yarn" or a low-level military history. Black Edelweiss joins not only the growing body of German military memoirs, but the more select, more narrowly-focused group of personal memoirs by other Waffen-SS enlisted men. Beyond the microcosmic view of combat these books relate—to the extent that they are honest and candid—such books are important for what they can reveal about their authors’ motivations and reflections on those impulses and their consequences. To date, these works differ significantly. As it joins the ranks of the books in this genre, Black Edelweiss makes a unique and very important contribution. It is a true, personal account of the author’s war years, first at school and then with the Waffen-SS, which he joined early in 1943 at the age of seventeen. For a year and a half, the author fought as a machine gunner in SS-Mountain Infantry Regiment 11 "Reinhard Heydrich," mainly in the arctic and sub-arctic reaches of Soviet Karelia and Finland, and later at the Western frontier of the Third Reich. The characters in the story are real, and the conversations and actions are recounted to the best of his ability from the short distance at which he wrote the manuscript in 1945–46. Apart from the piercing insights into the question of why the German soldier fought as he did, what makes this book truly unique is the author’s anguished, yet resolute examination of the dialectic between the honorable and valorous comportment of his comrades and the fundamentally reprehensible conduct of about 35,000 men behind the front lines who nevertheless wore the same uniform. During his captivity, the author was assigned for a time as a clerk to a US Army Judge Advocate General’s Corps officer, and in the performance of his administrative duties, the author had access to the mounting reams of documentation of the Holocaust. His growing recognition of the involvement of Waffen-SS personnel in the monstrous crimes of that process caused him to dig deeply into his soul, to examine his most intimate and private motivations and thoughts, and to reevaluate the most basic assumptions of his life to that point. The author captured this process and the result in the notes which became this book. Honestly, forthrightly, and courageously told, Black Edelweiss is a precious gift to historians and other students of World War II. It not only provides a glimpse into the attributes that made the German armed forces a formidable and tenacious foe, but squarely confronts the most painful issue facing German World War II veterans in general, and Waffen-SS veterans in particular. Supported by 22 photos, 8 maps, and notes. |
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