Black Edelweiss: A Memoir of Combat and Conscience by a Soldier of the Waffen-SS

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 224 pages
• Published by: The Aberjona Press July 2002
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0966638980
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0966638981
• Book Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.6 inches
• Weighs: 12 ounces

Product Review
"A fascinating and unique contribution to our knowledge of the Waffen-SS[and] the German armed forcesHighly recommended." -- The Journal of Military History, July 2003

"A strong description of a young man's burning idealism to serve his country and how this idealism is later shattered." -- Swedish State Institute for Living History, August 2005

"Highly recommendedcomplements Into the Mountains Dark and The Good Soldier." -- Armchair General Magazine, September 2005

"Highly valuable because of its grass-roots perspective of the war and the Third Reich." -- Svenska Dagbladet (“Swedish Daily Newspaper”), 2 June 2004

"[This book possesses] an authenticity lacking in works written—and also adjusted—long after the war." -- Gefle Dagblad ("Gefle [Sweden] Daily Newspaper"), 21 June 2004

Product Description
Originally written while the author was a prisoner of the US Army in 1945–46, Black Edelweiss is a boon to serious historians and WWII buffs alike. In a day in which most memoirs are written at half a century’s distance, the former will be gratified by the author’s precise recall facilitated by the chronologically short-range (a matter of one to seven years) at which the events were captured in writing. Both will appreciate and enjoy the abundantly detailed, exceptionally accurate combat episodes.

Even more than the strictly military narrative, however, the author has crafted a searingly candid view into his own mind and soul. As such, Black Edelweiss is much more than a "ripping yarn" or a low-level military history. Black Edelweiss joins not only the growing body of German military memoirs, but the more select, more narrowly-focused group of personal memoirs by other Waffen-SS enlisted men. Beyond the microcosmic view of combat these books relate—to the extent that they are honest and candid—such books are important for what they can reveal about their authors’ motivations and reflections on those impulses and their consequences. To date, these works differ significantly.

As it joins the ranks of the books in this genre, Black Edelweiss makes a unique and very important contribution. It is a true, personal account of the author’s war years, first at school and then with the Waffen-SS, which he joined early in 1943 at the age of seventeen. For a year and a half, the author fought as a machine gunner in SS-Mountain Infantry Regiment 11 "Reinhard Heydrich," mainly in the arctic and sub-arctic reaches of Soviet Karelia and Finland, and later at the Western frontier of the Third Reich. The characters in the story are real, and the conversations and actions are recounted to the best of his ability from the short distance at which he wrote the manuscript in 1945–46.

Apart from the piercing insights into the question of why the German soldier fought as he did, what makes this book truly unique is the author’s anguished, yet resolute examination of the dialectic between the honorable and valorous comportment of his comrades and the fundamentally reprehensible conduct of about 35,000 men behind the front lines who nevertheless wore the same uniform.

During his captivity, the author was assigned for a time as a clerk to a US Army Judge Advocate General’s Corps officer, and in the performance of his administrative duties, the author had access to the mounting reams of documentation of the Holocaust. His growing recognition of the involvement of Waffen-SS personnel in the monstrous crimes of that process caused him to dig deeply into his soul, to examine his most intimate and private motivations and thoughts, and to reevaluate the most basic assumptions of his life to that point. The author captured this process and the result in the notes which became this book.

Honestly, forthrightly, and courageously told, Black Edelweiss is a precious gift to historians and other students of World War II. It not only provides a glimpse into the attributes that made the German armed forces a formidable and tenacious foe, but squarely confronts the most painful issue facing German World War II veterans in general, and Waffen-SS veterans in particular.

Supported by 22 photos, 8 maps, and notes.

Reader Reviews
As noted in the other reviews, this is one of the best war memoirs around, perhaps the best German memoir of WWII. Unlike so many other accounts written only years after the fact, Black Edelweiss was penned within the first years after the war and not originally meant for publication. I suspect the author, with a strong sense of family, wanted to have something to present to his decedents, something that he had completed as a young man still with the full emotion and confusion of the initial bewildering and catastrophic events that were the fate of his generation. This memoir is interesting on a variety of levels. One is the account of mountain infantry training the author received as a young volunteer for the Waffen SS. Far from politically indoctrinated fanatics, we see an elite military organization preparing men for combat in modern war. I suspect that the emphasis on political and racial indoctrination was more a product of the pre-war years, when the Waffen SS was seen as a force against potential enemies within the Reich, not after say 1941 when large numbers of new replacements were needed to man an expanding number of divisions fighting in foreign theaters of operations. That and the fact that many foreign volunteers, some from ethnic groups lower on the SS pecking order, where filling the ranks of these formations as well. The emphasis went from "elite order of racial Uebermenschen" to "cadre of the common European struggle against Bolshevism". This latter attitude is mentioned by the author numerous times and obviously was one of his main reasons for joining the organization. On another level is the sociological perspective of various views common among Germans during 1941-3. He sees his own class in school as divided between the idealists and the pragmatists. Some, like the author, saw the war as a personal challenge and were eager to commit themselves, while others saw it as the business of others and hoped to survive the chaos as best as possible, which is hardly the usual view we have of German youth of that time. Interesting in that the author shows us how universal this conflict of views is. One need only think of the attitudes of the generation of young Americans confronted with the Vietnam War and how they reacted, although in some cases in later life only to adopt the opposite view when it no longer required a personal commitment. So some of us can respect the author's decision to serve his country as a soldier in wartime. But the branch he chose to serve with was the Waffen SS, part of the larger SS, which was to be branded a criminal organization by the Allied courts due to their administration of the Holocaust among other crimes. The author admits the crimes and the guilt of the SS (he found out about the death camps and other atrocities as a POW after the war), but can't condemn all his comrades, most of whom are dead, as criminals in serving a cause which they believed in, which the author never thinks included common knowledge of the criminal character of the SS. It is a quandary for which the author never finds an answer, perhaps because no answer is possible. That the author saw the Nazis as having perverted all the values that his generation had believed in, of destroying his country in a senseless war while pursuing the most inhuman crimes imaginable is tempered by the fact that he doesn't see the defeat of Germany as a liberation. . . See page 133. The mistake was in not overthrowing the criminal regime themselves, which was a "disgrace", but in having to have their enemies do it for them. Furthermore, the final outcome of the National Socialist swindle was not inevitable, "All the same one lesson is clear: never again must there be any public authority without active popular control". Page 71. There are others points the author mentions as well such as the belief common in Germany after the First World War that a new movement which would do away with the old distinctions of class and status, create a Volksgemeinschaft, was necessary for national rebirth. Also of special note are his interesting and gratifying comments concerning US troops in action and his description of Operation Birke, the German evacuation of their Lapland Army from Finland to Norway in the fall of 1944, an arduous trek of over 1600 kilometers conducted in good order under pressure from both the Red Army and later the German's former allies, the Finns. I doubt that this unique military achievement of the Lapland Army will ever be repeated. This book should be of interest to all readers interested in the Eastern Front in World War II, particularly since it is one of the few accounts available of fighting on the Karelian sector, those interested in the history of the Waffen SS or those interested in a sociological perspective of Germany during World War II.