Death March Into Russia by Karl Willmann

Death March Into Russia

The Memoir of Lothar Herrmann

Karl Willmann, Roger Moorhouse, Klaus Willmann

Pen and Sword · Print & ebook · November 29, 2019

In this rare World War II memoir, Lothar Herrmann, a soldier from the Wehrmacht, details his unimaginable experience as a German Prisoner-of-War in the Soviet Union.

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Who it’s for
Interviews with Lothar Herrmann recount his journey from Nazi Bavaria to Soviet captivity and return.
Genres
WWII Eastern Front, Military Lives, Prison Writing
Published
Pen and Sword, November 29, 2019

About this book

In this rare World War II memoir, Lothar Herrmann, a soldier from the Wehrmacht, details his unimaginable experience as a German Prisoner-of-War in the Soviet Union. Hermann grew up in Bavaria, going through the RAD (Nazi Labor Service) before being conscripted into a Wehrmacht Mountain Division (the Gebirgsdivision) in 1940. He participated in Germany's advance through southern Ukraine in 1941 and, in 1944, was arrested in Romania while retreating to Germany.

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The Romanians passed him onto the Soviets, who placed him in a forced labor camp, where he watched two-thirds of prisoners around him die. In 1949, Herrmann was finally released to Germany and returned to Bavaria. Three million German troops were taken prisoner by the Red Army and around two-thirds of them survived to return to Germany in 1949, but their stories are little known. Klaus Willmann draws on interviews he conducted with Herrmann, to recount these astonishing recollections in the first-person. Depicting the challenges of growing up in Nazi Bavaria to becoming a Soviet prisoner-of-war, this is a gripping and enlightening account from a necessary but rarely explored perspective.

Herrmann’s Captivity

Interviews with Lothar Herrmann recount his journey from Nazi Bavaria to Soviet captivity and return.

Come here for

  • Lothar Herrmann’s account of capture in Romania and Soviet imprisonment
  • His return to Bavaria in 1949

Expect

  • A first-person account of forced labor in a Soviet camp
  • A Wehrmacht soldier’s wartime path through southern Ukraine and Romania

Where it sits

WWII Eastern Front87%
Military Lives69%
Prison Writing27%

Percentages are BookFrontier’s reading of the book.

Publisher categories

  • Biography & Memoir
  • History
Authors
Karl Willmann, Roger Moorhouse, Klaus Willmann
Publisher
Pen and Sword
Published
November 29, 2019
Format
Print & ebook
Reading lane
Biography & Memoir