Photos of the Fighting German Wehrmacht During World War II

Unique pictures

First of all, please excuse some flaws in my language - I am German and not a native speaker.

I bought the book not out of sympathy towards Nazis or the Third Reich, but because I build model kits of tanks mainly. However, I spend a lot of time going through archives, documents and pictures of the WWII era to understand why people could have let a desaster like the Third Reich happen.

This book will not give too much hints in that direction, but features tons of pictures which even I have never seen before. The majority are no propaganda shots but very obviously taken by regular soldiers. Therefore, you will not see too many pictures of equipment, vehicles and planes, but maybe something what is actually more striking: The soldier´s faces, maybe confident in the beginning, later on more and more exhausted and desperated. The book also shows a lot about the soldier´s lifes at that time, how they lived and tried to get through that period.

Combat pictures are relatively rare, and some seem to be propaganda shots, but I think this is very much understandable, given the circumstances. Whenever needed, you also see some "official" pictures, propaganda posters and ads, insigngia and uniform drawings.

The text describes the course of the war, but does not go into depth and is sometimes simply not accurate, e.g. the sinking of the battleship Bismarck. Unfortunately, there are also a lot of mistakes when it comes to the pictures. For example, a picture of Panzer I tanks with mounted 2cm Breda cannons turn up within the chapter about the Blitzkrieg in Poland. In reality, these were field conversions done by the Franco troops in the Spanish Civil war and never saw service somewhere else. Some pictures seem to be randomly distributed throughout the book, for example a Tiger II (Koenigstiger) in west front camoflage turns up in the chapter describing the beginning of the campaign in Russia 1941. You will see loads of these (maybe for other readers neglectable) mistakes.

The other point I would like to critisize is the lack of captions. You will find a lot of pictures without any explanation. Of course it is difficult to reconstruct all of that after such a long time, but it would have been helpful to do something like "German troops in Poland, unidentified unit" or so if there is no further information available.

To wrap it up, there are quite a lot of errors and mistakes in the book, but for me it was worth the money because Mr. Schwendiman did an excellent job in collecting absolutely rare pictures. The book may not be too suitable for modelers concentrated on vehicles, planes and ships, but gives a lot of ideas for dioramas. For people more interested in military history this book illustrates the Wehrmacht how it probably was: Without glory or propaganda heroes. It was a thoughtful move of Mr. Schwendiman to mix a few propaganda shots into the collection: This shows the picture the regime wanted to paint on the one hand side and the unflattering reality on the other.

A very unique insight into the Wehrmacht.