Death March Through Russia: The Memoir of Lothar Herrmann (Oxford English Texts)

This World War II memoir recounts the experience of Lothar Herrmann, a German soldier taken prisoner by the Soviet Union. Herrmann grew up in Bavaria and served in the RAD (Nazi Labor Service) before being conscripted into a Wehrmacht Mountain Division in 1940. He participated in Germany's advance through southern Ukraine in 1941 and was captured in Romania in 1944 while retreating. The Soviets placed him in a forced labor camp, where he witnessed the deaths of two-thirds of the prisoners around him. He was released in 1949 and returned to Bavaria. Of the three million German troops captured by the Red Army, approximately two-thirds survived and returned to Germany in 1949, though their accounts remain largely untold. Based on interviews conducted with Herrmann, Klaus Willmann presents this first-person narrative, documenting Herrmann's life from his childhood in Nazi Bavaria through his years as a Soviet prisoner-of-war.