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I guess it's fortuitous that I'm writing this review on the day that Günter Grass died. In any event, this firsthand account of a soldier in the Waffen S.S. who fought the "good war" (that is, mainly against the Russians, with no complicity in war crimes) was a fascinating account. Battle sequences are interleaved with scenes in which Johann Voss, stewing in a P.O.W. camp, reflects on his service. He wonders to himself if his comrades died in vain. He also spends a good deal of time pondering whether or not he was part of a criminal organization, rather than a band of brothers, due to the horrific behavior of the Waffen S.S. on the home front.

This book is essential, I think, to understanding the war from the German side, and it is also fascinating in that it raises more questions than it answers. The main question of the Second World War (or at least the Holocaust) is how much did the Germans know of the atrocities, and when did they know it? For years, international opinion held that the Germans were mostly oblivious to the systematic extermination program of the Nazis. As the years passed, and scholarship intensified, the consensus shifted to the opposite opinion, to the belief that the German people, for the most part, knew what the Nazis were up to from the beginning, and decided to turn a blind eye to the evils perpetrated by the Reich to which they swore loyalty.

Thus Voss's claims of obliviousness will rankle the sensibilities of those who refuse to believe the Germans (or at least some portion of the soldiers, engaged in fighting in the East) didn't know about the "Shoah" that Hitler and his henchmen perpetrated.

I'm giving this book a mixed review, ultimately, not because I doubt Voss's account (I don't), but because I believe the muddled chronology of the work, the shifting between the battlefield and the Prisoner of War camp, undermined a lot of the otherwise solid aspects of the book that I admired. I remember reading a piece by Michael Herr, in which he discussed the Stanley Kubrick film, "Full Metal Jacket," and it source material, "The Short Timers" by Gustav Hasford. Herr pointed out (as he paraphrased Kubrick) that the best war books were primarily confined to the business of fighting, and that those accounts that segued between home front and battlefield tended to be less effective than those accounts that focused strictly on the fighting. I concur with that view, and, while I admire Voss's desire to search his soul for an answer to the question of whether or not his service was entirely wasted, I would have preferred to read more about the battles in which he engaged. The bits he tells are fascinating, but, unfortunately, they don't add up to a complete picture, in this reviewer's opinion.