The Thirty Years War: Europe’s Tragedy, winner of the Distinguished Book Award from the Society of Military History. He has appeared on BBC Radio and has written for Prospect, the Los Angeles Times, and Financial Times. President of the Society for the History of War and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, Wilson is Chichele Professor of the History of War at the University of Oxford. His work has been translated into Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, and Spanish.
Wilson's new book is Iron and Blood: A Military History of the German-Speaking Peoples since 1500.
[The Page 99 Test: The Thirty Years War; The Page 99 Test: Iron and Blood]
At Lit Hub he tagged five books that provide "insight into the diversity of the German experience of war, its conduct, societal impact, and human cost." One title on the list:
Felix Römer, Comrades: The Wehrmacht From WithinRead about the other entries on the list.
This book gave me nightmares. It is based on an extraordinary set of sources compiled by British and American intelligence. Based on experience from the First World War, British officers began to collect information systematically from German prisoners of war using interrogations, questionnaires, wiretaps of inmates’ cells, and “stool pigeons” recruited from the captives. A group of officers, including Royal Navy Commander Ian Fleming, took these techniques to the United States afterits entry into the war in 1941. The result is over a quarter of a million pages of transcripts of conversations between prisoners who had been specially selected as possessing potentially useful information and sent to a secret camp concealed from the Red Cross.
Römer uses this material to understand what motivated Germans to fight a genocidal war. This question has been addressed by many other books and remains hotly contested in Germany today. Römer’s account is distinguished by his careful handling of the material and avoidance of monocausal explanations. He recognizes that the prisoners inhabited several mental worlds simultaneously, while they were not always reliable narrators when bragging to their comrades, or concealing matters which might have reflected badly on themselves. One man’s war was not necessarily the same as another’s and there were considerable differences between branch of service, location or deployment, and the time of capture.
He concludes that soldierly ethos trumped Nazi ideology in persuading men to fight despite increasingly difficult circumstances. The quality of junior officers and squad leaders was also crucial to the small unit cohesion that Allies came to admire and sought to replicate in their own armies after 1945. Though most soldiers had a poor grasp of Nazism, core elements of that ideology were deeply rooted in other beliefs they did share and encouraged the shocking violence many of them engaged in. An enlightening but also deeply disturbing book.
--Marshal Zeringue
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