We are asked to believe that the author’s grandfather was a journalist writing for German army magazines in 1944 who interviewed soldiers along the Atlantic Wall for an article shortly before D-Day; that his article was never published because D-Day changed the situation; that ten years after the war he sought out the men he’d interviewed, or at least others from their units, and conducted a second series of interviews focussing on their experiences of the day itself; and that the notes from this second series of interviews were discovered by the grandson and collated into the two books “D-Day through German Eyes” books 1 and 2, subsequently translated into English.
Like most readers, I took these claims at face value when I started reading the books. I’m frankly embarrassed at how long it took me to cotton on that I was reading fiction. There is a lack of detail about locations and units – well, sometimes these works of history are anonymised to an unnecessary degree. The language and style of speech of all the supposed interviewees are very similar – well, the interview records might have been condensed by the interviewer and then they were translated and those processes would tend to homogenise the language somewhat. The accounts are highly dramatic and full of action – well, perhaps he interviewed scores of veterans and selected only the most interesting and exciting accounts. The accounts of hand to hand combat and the effects of various weapons on the bodies of the combatants are reproduced in a level of gory blow-by-blow detail more appropriate to a cheap paperback war novel – well, now I’m starting to wonder.
The final account of book 2 was what finally tripped the alarms on the fake-ometer. The interviewee, name of Bergmann, supposedly relates a tale of how the Germans had a fully developed thermobaric (fuel-air) weapon deployed and operational and ready to be used to destroy the port of Calais if the allies took it. A weapon of that type, if it works efficiently, produces several times the explosive effect of a conventional bomb of the same weight. But the claims made by ‘Bergmann’ are ludicrous – the bomb was powerful enough to destroy an armoured division and potentially lethal to exposed troops at up to 10km from the site of the explosion but small enough to be launched from a truck! ‘Bergmann’ goes on to say that the weapon was redeployed to destroy the armour concentration being readied for Operation Cobra. He was literally moments away from launch (and turning the tide of the war) when by sheer luck an allied fighter-bomber destroyed the launch vehicle. For vague reasons relating to shortage of aluminium, they never built another of these devastating wonder weapons.
My immediate reaction was that Bergmann was a fantasist. Unfortunately, a little digging reveals that Bergmann is not a fantasist, but a fantasy. He’s a made up character and so is every one of the veterans in this fabrication. Read the one-star reviews for books 1 and 2 and the compilation volume. No-one is able to trace the author. No-one is able to trace his grandfather. Accounts can’t be matched to locations. Those accounts that can be matched contradict more reliable sources. Language is used to describe equipment that wasn’t current in the WWII or even ten years after the war. It’s supposed to be the English language version of the German original, but no-one can find the German original. Put all that together with the concerns outlined in my second paragraph and it adds up to fraud.
Why perpetrate the fraud? Well apart from the obvious – to make a fast buck – we have here a number of accounts of the war that are inherently sympathetic to the Germans. Some have suggested that the books were written by an American because they portray the Americans as treating prisoners well etc and I do agree that they may have been written by a native English-speaker. But while genuine accounts of the war by Germans do often display a natural bias, a reluctance to recognise the evils done by ordinary soldiers etc, I have here a sense that the message the author is slyly sending is; “I’m not saying that I agree with these viewpoints, I’m merely recording how the ordinary soldier felt about the war: that the Germans did some bad things but the Allies were just as bad, that even if they didn’t go about it in quite the right way the Germans were really defending European civilisation against the evil Bolshevik horde and the rapacity of American capitalism, that whatever you think of the leadership the ordinary German people’s ideals and war aims were noble” with the intention that these misrepresentations take seed and the reader starts to look more sympathetically not just at the individuals caught up in the situation but at the German people and the National Socialist movement as a whole.
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![D DAY Through German Eyes - The Hidden Story of June 6th 1944 by [Holger Eckhertz, Sprech Media]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51wi89LHRDL._SX260_.jpg)
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Customer reviews
It was unusual to get another version of the conflict, and it definitely did not glorify war like most accounts do.
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