Last Letters from Stalingrad

Rating:
Summary: The Last Letters are true in the abstract...
Review: Although the letters in this book are forgeries, that doesn't mean they aren't true. The man who wrote these letters was a German war correspondent, named Heinz Schroeter, who reported from the Stalingrad pocket. He also wrote the greatest book about that battle, called Stalingrad; To The Last Bullet. Schroeter wrote the letters from the point of view of the German soldiers he had come to know during the siege. He was intimately acquainted with how the soldiers thought and felt in Stalingrad and I believe he accurately portrayed how the "Last Letters from Stalingrad" would have actually sounded, had they been written. For sheer depth of human emotion, nothing comes close to this book. It will personally move you, and isn't that what all great books have in common?

Rating:
Summary: Truth or Fiction
Review: Last Letters from Stalingrad contains a collection of some very compelling letters written by German soldiers in the last few days before their death or final surrender in Stalingrad. But are the letters authentic or phony?
Maybe I've been naive but I've always assumed they were actually written by the soldiers themselves. Certainly the forward to the books I've read represent them this way. Now I see reviews under this heading asserting they were all written by a German war correspondent. But none of these reviews cite a source or any authority for this claim.
These reviews may well be right but until some kind of proof is provided, I think it's more reasonable to believe those who claim to have collected the letters and put them in book form than it is unsupported claims to the contrary.

Rating:
Summary: A fabrication
Review: People who are thinking of purchasing this book should know that it is a fabrication. The last loads of letters from Stalingrad were in fact confiscated by the Nazi regime for analysis and never delivered to their intended recipients, but they were subsequently destroyed on Goebbels's order. Only a few extracts copied out by the analysts survived, and they were not incorporated into this book. Of course, the Soviets captured significant numbers of "last letters" in the course of liquidating the Stalingrad pocket (both from downed aircraft and from the captured German soldiers themselves) but none of those letters were available to the public when this book was published.

Rating:
Summary: What a God Awful Book
Review: This is an awful book. It could have been a lot longer, who were these people who wrote the letter and what happened to them anyway. What could have happened is that the Intro should have been longer, names could have signed. It is not the best book written. Dear America: Letters from Vietnam was so much better.