Death March Through Russia: The Memoir of Lothar Herrmann

by Klaus Willmann, Roger Moorhouse (Foreword)

This World War II memoir by a Nazi soldier details his unimaginable experience as a German prisoner-of-war in the Soviet Union.

Lothar 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. 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 like Hermann, 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.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, War, Memoir

257 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 1, 2017

Reviews

[Ioana]

3,5
„Am realizat încă o dată că războiul îi dezumanizează pe oameni - fie ei germani sau ruși.„

[Neil]

This was interesting as it is a book from a German perspective. I loved the style as it depicts the way people thought and acted in that era. The writing was clear and to me very objective told from one persons point of view. If you are a WW2 nut then this is for you

[Scott Martin]

(3.5 stars) This was an interesting translation of a memoir of a German soldier who fought on the Eastern Front and was taken prisoner towards the end of the war by the Soviets. There is not a lot to the narratives and it can skip over a lot, but this was also written by a man who was always on the move and didn’t have a lot of time to himself. It can get lost in the narrative of the Cold War and all that followed the defeat of the Nazis, but many Germans that somehow survived the fighting in the East ended up in the Soviet Gulag system for years, with many not returning home until after the death of Stalin in 1954. For the author in this work, he would return before then, but not by much. Still, it must have been a difficult transition to go from German soldier to Soviet prisoner to eventually coming back to a land he did not recognize.

There is value in reading works like this, as they offer insight that is not easily found in other accounts. History is complex and human stories are varied. This is worth a read, even if the quality of the narrative is not great.

[Murray Brockman]

engaging story of human perseverance

A wonderful memoir, with an amazingly optimistic outlook. One is tempted to infer that some editing has been done, as part of the current (2023) attempts to whitewash communist atrocities worldwide, and that is certainly possible. The book appears to frankly admit deaths of POWs at communist hands, but it underestimates those deaths by nearly a factor of ten, that is 200,000 as opposed to 2 million! Still, its worth reading, especially if the reader bears in mind that the protagonist undoubtedly suffered far more than he acknowledges. Recommended highly.

[Robert Heldt]

A story new to first generation Americans

My dad immigrated from Pomeranian as a displaced person to go for his PhD in chemistry. He was born in1928 amd served in german army for the last 6months of the war as a child soldier. He could have been Herrmann if his luck to surrender to USA forces had not occurred. Fascinating to read a translated story. So many hardships my father endured, but never complained. He passed in 2009. I never really knew his full experience . good read!

[Deborah]

I prefer not to rate memoirs. I thought the book was well done. I appreciated getting a glimpse at what it was like for him. I know someone who was also a German POW of the Russians. He would never talk about it. I am sure there were many different experiences in these situations but I'm glad I read this to gain some understanding and insight into what my friend might have experienced.

[Susan Marrier]

This is the story of a young German soldier recruited for the Eastern front, and captured by the Russians, as told to Klaus Willman. Hundreds of thousands met that fate, and only about a third were eventually repatriated after brutal treatment, and not until 1949. It’s a story seldom told, and worth hearing.

[Martha G Flanagan]

Credible

I was a us military dependent in Germany from 52<56 then from 65 to 68. My father was the golf pro at Ramstein and Spangdahlem.. The arbeiters assigned to my father were all German war veterans and highly respected. My father greatly respected them and it was obviousness to me as his son these men were of deep character.

[Leonard A. Japchinski]

Good book, easy read. Not many books available about German POW's in Russia. Author had the correct attitude to survive his ordeal as a POW for many years. Lucky he had a trade as a decorator which was very useful in Russia.

[jim bowen]

interesting to a Degree..

It is an interesting book and like a road trip in some ways. It has a lot of filler detailing daily life and I’m suspicious of his recalling names of those he-served with. It’s more like a novel, but interesting.

[rick ladd]

Horrors of a POW

He had it easier than most, but I sure wouldn't want to go through what he did. Coupled with other reading it did provide a clearer picture of the life of a "typical" German soldier.

[HAROLD CHANDLER]

Interesting

Book is interesting in treatment of Prisioner of war,slave labor. No better than German counterparts. How people can live through mistreatment with hope of freedom.

[Craig Merkel]

It was ok but not great. Not nearly as good as The Long Walk or One Day in the life of Ivan Denosivitch but still a good insight into German life and culture and military training.

[Frank Ray Washburn]

Good book

A very good book detailing the life in the prisoners of war in the Russian camps. The struggle for survival .

[Rick Roberson]

New View

I’ve read of them being marched to Siberia but first time to hear the story of one of that made that trip… Was it justice served as a blanket and not to the guilty

[Jim Rosebrock]

Great Book

Well written, an easy read. I learned a lot about the German POWs held in Russian captivity. Worth a look.

[Jiří Szabó]

Mé zhodnocení: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nn435...

[Kenneth]

A Romanian friend recommended this book to me and even handed me his copy. He mentioned it in the context of Romania’s role in the Second World War, which I admittedly hadn’t thought about much before. Most discussions of that war tend to focus on the larger powers, so reading a story that intersects with that part of the history already made the perspective feel different.

One of the things that struck me while reading it was something I’ve noticed in many war memoirs: ordinary people are remarkably similar everywhere. Soldiers grow up with a certain picture of the enemy drilled into them. In Lohtar’s account, the Russians were supposed to be uncultured, uncivilised, and almost barbaric. Yet once he actually encounters civilians, the reality looks much more familiar. They worry about food, family, survival, and the small things that make up daily life — the same concerns he would have seen back home.

That tension runs through the whole book. On one hand, there is a clear sense of empathy when soldiers encounter the people caught in the war. On the other hand, the machinery of war keeps moving. Training, loyalty, fear, and discipline keep pushing people to fight and kill those they might otherwise recognise as ordinary human beings. The contradiction is uncomfortable but very real.

Another theme that kept coming back to me while reading was something I had already seen in books like Man’s Search for Meaning. When people are reduced to prisoners or pushed into extreme conditions, their priorities narrow quickly. Bread, warmth, and basic survival become the centre of everything. Education, ideology, and social status fade into the background. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs always feels theoretical when you first learn about it, but stories like this make it very concrete.

The book also left me thinking about how each side experiences the same war differently. The prisoners endure hardship and suffering during captivity, but from the Soviet perspective the invasion of their country felt like an unprovoked attack that had already cost them enormous loss. Reading the story with that in mind makes it easier to understand why resentment and harsh treatment existed on the other side as well. It doesn’t erase the suffering described in the memoir, but it adds context to it.

One smaller detail I found interesting was how widespread the German language seemed to be among Soviet soldiers and civilians in the story. Many of them could communicate with the prisoners directly. It made me wonder whether the reverse would have been true in Germany at the time. My guess is probably not.

Overall, the book adds another personal window into a war that is usually told through strategy, battles, and politics. Stories like this remind you that beneath all that, the war was experienced mainly by ordinary people trying to survive circumstances that none of them really controlled.

[Alice]

3.5/5

Very few accounts from the perspective of the ordinary German soldiers who were Russian POWs in WWII seem to be available to read in English. As such, this book is a valuable historical resource in many respects and a source of details not widely known.

However, it fell somewhat flat in terms of readability and holding my interest. This is probably due in part to it being originally compiled, written and edited by Klaus Willmann from interviews given by Lothar Herrmann, a WWII veteran, and published originally in German. Which was then translated into English. So it was run through two sets of interpretations, and I think a lot of nuance was probably lost in the process.

Something that annoyed me about the authorship was Willmann wrote the book in the first person, as if this was his story, but did not credit the actual source of the materials and memories, Lothar Herrmann, on the cover. Willmann acknowledges the FOREWORD author by name on the front cover, but doesn't even mention the person this all actually happened to? This seems very dodgy ethically, and is certainly misleading.

[David Fraser]

Excellent "as told to" memoir of a German soldier captured in 1944 and held in captivity in the Soviet Union until 1950, often under harsh conditions. One thing I found interesting was that from the conversations recounted in the book, there is no doubt that the soldiers knew of the atrocities and war crimes the Germans had committed in the Soviet Union, even if they had not personally participated in them themselves.

[Drew Mashburn]

This is an excellent book, and hard to put down. A personal story of a German who was captured by the Russians in the Germany attack of Russia. His personal account shows how Russia treated German POWs and used them to repair and rebuild from the Nazi bombings. Good personal story of a German POW in Siberia.