Condemned to Live: A Panzer Artilleryman's Five-Front War

Rating:
Summary: The Other Side of the Hill
Review: History truly is written by the victors, but now 'Condemned to Live' joins the the ranks of books such as Guy Sager's 'The Forgotten Soldier', Hans von Luck's 'Panzer Commander' and Siegfried Kappe's 'Soldat' to help destroy the image of the average Wehrmacht soldier as being a ruthless, stupid, brutal, amoral automaton. Dr. Frisch was anything but ruthless, stupid, brutal or amoral ,but was simply a young Austrian caught up in the great events of his time, as were so many young men on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Like most of his comrades in the Wehrmacht, there was no question of choice involved in his military service. It was compulsory for all young Germans and Austrians. This type of obedience is difficult for those of us who live in democratic countries to understand, even though our news media are full of examples of just such behaviour from our own people. We call it expediency. In the case of Germany, Hitler and the Nazi's had been slowly chipping away at personal freedom ever since they had come to power in 1933, so that by 1939 they had turned the screw to the point that disobedience or protest became a death sentence for oneself and one's family. Like the majority of Wehrmacht soldiers outside of the ranks of the 'true believers', whose numbers probably never exceeded 10% of regular Wehrmacht soldiers, the name of the game was 'do one's duty to the Vaterland and survive to go home'. In battle loyalty, as in the Allied armies, was given to one's comrades and reality rarely extended beyond that small group. Dr. Frisch takes us on his tour of European battlefields with his Panzer Artillery Battalion from Poland to France, then Russia and on to Sicily and Italy, where he was captured. We get to know a kind, decent man making his way as best he can through the insanity of war, supported by his friends, his sense of humor and a lot of luck. Along the way he meets decent people of a variety of nationalities. He also meets some not so nice people, proving again that decency or the lack of it are not restricted to one ethnic, racial or national grouping. I am glad that Dr. Frisch decided to share his story with us after so many years of silence. The victors have dominated the story of WW2 for too long now. The crimes of Hitler and his Nazi thugs are hideous beyond belief, but many of the young men he press ganged into his army where also victims, and their stories are more pieces in the puzzle of WW2. Perhaps we will eventually have enough of the pieces to understand the greatest calamity which has befallen the human race since the Black Plague of the Dark Ages, and which created and shaped the world we all live in today.

Rating:
Summary: Condemned to Live
Review: Two Wehrmacht veterans' memoirs add up to make a valuable contribution to understanding how the Third Reich's war looked from the "Willie and Joe" level. Frisch, an Austrian whose family was politically left of center, spent the whole war as a private in a motorized artillery unit, seeing action in Poland, France, Russia, Sicily, and Italy, after which he was a POW for two years. He focuses less on his personal experiences than on the gritty details of daily German army life, showing that that well-equipped, formidable organization was still subject to Murphy's Law, "hurry-up-and-wait," and the other universal tribulations of soldiers. Manz focuses on his ideological journey, a complex one thanks to his loving but virulently anti-Semitic father, which made the son's subsequent disillusionment with Hitler all the more painful. Manz also provides some rare material on the arctic front, where two thin, gray lines of soldiers fought the climate as much as each other. Both Frisch and Manz eventually emigrated to the U.S. Manz worked in the space program, and Frisch in ship design. Both seem concerned to put the best foot forward, and even the most skeptical reader may well agree that the generation of Germans coming of age during the Third Reich was subjected to political and cultural crossfire long before they reached the battlefield, and that no simple scenario can adequately explain the complex paths so many of them followed, often to a premature grave