Free Twilight of the Gods A Swedish Waffen-SS Volunteer Experiences with the 11th SS-Panzergrenadier Division 'Nordland' Eastern Front 1944-45

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Twilight of the Gods: A Swedish Waffen-SS Volunteer's Experiences with the 11th SS-Panzergrenadier Division 'Nordland', Eastern Front 1944-45 WWII Today Follow the War as it happened There were many courageous actions among those trying to get away from Singapore during these last few days. Terrible battles were fought against overwhelming odds in ... 20 March 1945: The Waffen-SS retreat back over the Oder In Europe the western Allies were on the banks of the Rhine preparing for the last major push into Germany. In the east the Red Army was at the Oder the last ... Waffen-SS Wikipedia Waffen-SS: Datum: 19331945: Land: Tredje riket: Lojalitet: Adolf Hitler: Frsvarsgren: SS: Roll: fltfrband skerhetsfrband koncentrationslgerbevakning Rank: #247259 in eBooksPublished on: 2004-05-19Released on: 2004-05-19Format: Kindle eBook 5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.Combat, and Lots of it.By Walter E. KurtzIf you like war memoirs that have a lot of fighting and get straight to the point, you will love Twilight. In most memoirs authors begin with an introduction on where they came from, what kind of life they had prior to joining the army, why they joined the army, etc. No here. From what we are told (and there is not much of it), the author was a young Swedish man with deep and genuine fascist convictions. Around 1942 or 1943 he left his country and traveled to Germany to fight for Nazism, which he regarded as a good and noble cause. He joined Waffen SS and was sent to serve in the Nordland division, which took volunteers from Scandinavia and other northern countries.The book starts in January 1st 1945. The author is in Courland (present day Latvia) where he is celebrating New Year’s Eve. After some heavy fighting he is evacuated by the sea to Prussia where he fights Russians some more. The fighting eventually moves to the city of Stetin that guards a large bridge over the Oder (a river between Poland and Germany). After a lot of fighting his unit is one of the last ones to leave Stetin before the bridge is blown up. The Russian invasion stops briefly on the Oder, but the respite is short. Soon the Soviets manage to cross the river and the author (along with the rest of the German army, of course) spends his time trying to stop them from reaching Berlin. Once they get to Berlin, Nordland is pulled back inside the city where the author is engaged in very hard street-to-street, house-to-house fighting before being wounded. He spends the last few days of the war in a hospital. The last chapter is about him and a friend of his trying to escape to the Allied controlled part of Germany. All this time the author must hide his SS identity because if the Russians were to discover it, he would have been killed on the spot.The book is great to read for two reasons. Most of the book, about 80%, is about combat. The rest is about the author talking about his comrades (mostly), a little bit about himself (very little) and about soldiers goofing around. Some of the events described here read like something straight from an action movie. For example, at one point he and three other soldiers attack a Russian position and they chase away all the Russians hiding there. There is close to a hundred Russians there.It sounds hard to believe. Four men against one hundred However, I have read historically confirmed accounts of even stranger things happening in war, so I am willing to grant the author the benefit of the doubt and assume that everything he says is true according to the best of his recollections. There are a couple of other events in the book that are hard to believe, but nothing that would be totally impossible.A second aspect of the book that I find fascinating is the insight it gives into the mind of a Nazi. I have read a number of German World War II memoirs, and in all of them the writer takes pains to explain that he was never a Nazi and that he fought not for Hitler but for Germany and out of soldier’s duty.Not so in Twilight. The author is a Nazi and he makes no attempt to hide it. He has very low opinion of the Russians. The impression I got from reading his words is that he regards them as inferior because of their (in his opinion) crude culture, lack of education and political views (he hates Communism). But he does not seem to regard them as biologically inferior, which marks him as different from the “mainstream” Nazism, which regards Russians (and other Slavic peoples) as being subhuman even on the biological level.Of the Holocaust and the concentration camps, he says not a word. Could it be that he didn’t know Maybe. At one point he talks about escaped slave laborers who had armed themselves and formed into bandit groups. When talking about them, he rambles on about how ungrateful they are because they’ve been hired, paid good wages, treated fairly and introduced to such modern marvels as soap.Either he is lying, or he does not know what he is talking about. It is true that some slave laborers were treated better than others, but overall their treatment was an atrocity. They were “recruited” at gun point (that is why we call them “slave” laborers) and sent to work insane hours with little food and next to no medical attention. Many of them dropped dead while working or were killed once they could no longer work. The numbers are disputed, but it is estimated that hundreds of thousands of them died, maybe even millions. My own grandfather was a slave laborer in Germany. One night German soldiers surrounded his village, threw all the people out of their homes at gunpoint, forced all the young men on trucks and transported them to Germany for work. He spent two years there working at the railroads helping run locomotives. That was how he was “recruited.” Compared to others, he was quite lucky. Oh, and in case you wonder, he knew what soap was long before his captivity. (Not that he was given much soap during his “stay” in Germany.)But I am willing to assume that the author was ignorant of all these things because he was a frontline soldier. With all those bullets flying by and shells exploding around them, frontline soldiers have other things to worry about than what is happening back home. And in any case, they are cut off from the world. The only news they get is from the army newspapers, official announcements and radio broadcasts, which, needless to say, are heavily censored and stuffed with propaganda.But the author is delusion about other things—things he should know. At one point he refers to the war between Germany and the Allies as a civil war between brotherly nations which the Bolsheviks are using to attack Germany and spread Communism to Europe. Does he not remember that it was Hitler who started it all Has he already forgotten that it was Hitler who attacked Russia and not the other way around Is he really unaware of these things, or did he arrange and rearrange facts in his head until he came to believe what he wanted to believeThis book was written in late 1945. The author’s biography (which is short and gives very little information) says that he eventually left Sweden and travelled a lot around the world. It would have been interesting to get an afterword from him written decades later. How did he change with age What did his travels taught him Was he still a Nazi If not, what would he have said about his younger selfUnfortunately, we will never know. Twilight was rereleased years after his death. I find this regrettable.3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.interesting.By DoomsqueakIt's a short, intense read that's quite engrossing, and an rare account of a Swedish volunteer in the Waffen-SS. It's interesting to read the narrator's somewhat propagandist views and opinions which today appear nothing short of bizarre and racist (ie, his claim that slave workers were paid and well treated people rescued from lives of poverty in 'mud huts', or his insistence on portraying the Red Army as a murdering Asiatic, Mongoloid horde. Considering the book was written shortly after the war and without constraint, the pro-Nazi slant is actually quite a fascinating look at the attitudes of such volunteers at the time. If you can get past that, it's a decent read.1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.Nice readBy TherightisrightNice book that is pretty factual. Sad to hear that the Germans turned their backs on their own soldiers at the end of the war. Very shameful. the author recounts how Berlin was a communist infested city before the National Socialist revolution, then after the war the old communists came out of the closet to help the reds round up German soldiers.See all 59 customer reviews... 20 March 1945: The Waffen-SS retreat back over the Oder In Europe the western Allies were on the banks of the Rhine preparing for the last major push into Germany. In the east the Red Army was at the Oder the last ... Waffen-SS Wikipedia Waffen-SS: Datum: 19331945: Land: Tredje riket: Lojalitet: Adolf Hitler: Frsvarsgren: SS: Roll: fltfrband skerhetsfrband koncentrationslgerbevakning WWII Today Follow the War as it happened There were many courageous actions among those trying to get away from Singapore during these last few days. Terrible battles were fought against overwhelming odds in ...
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