---
product_id: 562533897
title: "A German General on the Eastern Front: The Letters and Diaries of Gotthard Heinrici 1941-1942 Paperback – 30 Nov. 2021"
brand: "huerter johannes"
price: "₨584"
currency: SCR
in_stock: true
reviews_count: 8
url: https://www.desertcart.sc/products/562533897-a-german-general-on-the-eastern-front-the-letters-diaries
store_origin: SC
region: Seychelles
---

# A German General on the Eastern Front: The Letters and Diaries of Gotthard Heinrici 1941-1942 Paperback – 30 Nov. 2021

**Brand:** huerter johannes
**Price:** ₨584
**Availability:** ✅ In Stock

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- **What is this?** A German General on the Eastern Front: The Letters and Diaries of Gotthard Heinrici 1941-1942 Paperback – 30 Nov. 2021 by huerter johannes
- **How much does it cost?** ₨584 with free shipping
- **Is it available?** Yes, in stock and ready to ship
- **Where can I buy it?** [www.desertcart.sc](https://www.desertcart.sc/products/562533897-a-german-general-on-the-eastern-front-the-letters-diaries)

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## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5.0 out of 5 stars







  
  
    Excellent insight into the thoughts and fears of the reality ...
  

*by B***Y on Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 3 March 2015*

Excellent insight into the thoughts and fears of the reality of life on the Eastern front within a short few months of the invasion.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5.0 out of 5 stars







  
  
    Valuable new insights into the Eastern Front of WW2 from the perspective of a senior German general
  

*by B***D on Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 5 November 2018*

The eight months between June 1941 and February 1942 transformed the scale, character and course of World War Two. A great deal of this was due to the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. Hitler designed the invasion as a war not of conventional conquest but of annihilation, to enslave, subjugate and decimate the population of the Soviet Union and ruthlessly exploit its resources. Among the millions of victims of this economically and ideologically driven push to the east were the Soviet Jewish population, and well over half the Red Army soldiers who went into German captivity.But such ruthless conduct could not, of course, assure the Germans’ military victory. Instead, the Germans’ spectacular early advance became an increasingly sluggish one, and eventually stopped altogether as the Red Army ground their forces down and held on long enough for the weather to come to its aid and together halt the German advance. Thus failed Germany's effort to defeat the Soviet Union in a single lightning campaign, and this failure, together with the entry of the United States into the war in December 1941, made it impossible for Germany to win the war.Yet despite the central importance of the eastern campaign to the course of World War Two, it's still rare for Anglophone readers to have the benefit of relatively honest contemporary accounts – instead of self-exculpatory post-war memoirs – from high-up German witnesses to these events. Johannes Huerter’s book, which he both introduces and compiles the material for, is therefore a highly valuable as well as thoroughly absorbing work. It’s based upon the private letters and diary entries of General Gothard Heinrici, who was a corps commander on the Eastern front during this period. The book begins by sketching Heinrici’s background and his national conservative upbringing, which made him highly susceptible to Nazi ideas about Jews, communists and the ‘backward east’.  Like many of his generation, Heinrici was also hardened by his experience of World War One and traumatized by its aftermath when Bolsheviks, whom many on the German right and in the German military wrongly equated with Jews, tried to overthrow the government and seize power in Germany itself. The book goes on to convey at length Heinrici’s response to the initial German triumphs in the east in 1941, his racially and ideologically coloured impressions of the Soviet Union and its peoples, and his growing apprehension and frustration as the tide of war begins to turn against the Germans.Throughout all this, the book details such matters as the effect the fighting had on the troops, the army’s relations with the Soviet population, the character of the Soviet landscape, and the course of the campaign as a whole. Heinrici was an infantry general, in extensive contact with his troops, and well aware of the mounting challenges they faced. The accounts he gives of the fighting conditions and environmental conditions that the Germans faced are vivid, dramatic and engaging, and he is acutely aware of the host of problems mounting up against the Germans as the campaign continues. He also implicitly criticizes the Nazi leadership in places. Among other things, he fears that the appalling treatment of Soviet prisoners of war will backfire on the Germans. He also praises the fighting qualities of the Red Army, albeit reluctantly and putting such qualities down primarily to the frightening power of Bolshevik ideology. The fact that these sources contain views that are not simply ideologically slavish, even though they may well be picked up by the censors, suggests that they really do reflect Heinrici’s opinions.But overall, such implicit semi-criticisms aside, Heinrici comes across as politically naïve at best, and strongly susceptible to Nazi ideology at worst. Quite apart from anything else, he was himself a generally ready, willing and unapologetic instrument in a raft of brutal, so often murderous Nazi policies against Red Army prisoners of war, Jews and other Soviet civilians.The book is also concise and highly readable, with Huerter skilfully condensing the text of the sources and also providing valuable background context. This is a must-read for anybody interested in the eastern front during the Second World War, which does an excellent job of filling an important gap in our understanding of that campaign and further deepening our understanding of how complicit the German army was in its crimes. Among other things, I always recommend this book highly to my undergraduate students, but also to anyone interested in reading a particularly revealing, high-level German perspective on this crucially important but still misunderstood aspect of World War Two.

### ⭐⭐⭐ 3.0 out of 5 stars







  
  
    Not so clean hands
  

*by A***S on Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 5 January 2015*

The legend of the relatively clean-handed Wehrmacht old school takes another whack.In 1966 when  Irish-American pop historian Cornelius Ryan - author of "The Longest Day" - wrote "The Last Battle" about the end of WW2 the legend, based primarily on the memoirs of such generals as the supremely slippery Heinz Guderian ("on July 20th 1944 I went for a long walk on my own") and  English militarists like Liddell-Hart, was untouchable.  Ryan made Heinrici the virtual hero of his book - "decent", dutiful, careful of lives, a patriot living an  impossible conflict between his desire to save those who could be saved, his love of his essentially Christian country and the criminal Nazi monster regime  that he answered to. This granite-faced patriot deserved our sympathies.It was all junk, as the archives and, in particular,  the German travelling exhibitions  have demonstrated over the last twenty years.Heinrici was a thoroughly able infantry general  - and a racist whose descriptions of Jews and Poles give off something approaching a stench; he was in sympathy with Nazi aims and unruffled by the contents of "Mein Kampf"; he loved fighting as much as he loved command; he had blood not just all over his hands but dripping from every limb; the soldiers under his leadership massacred prisoners and the helpless as a matter of routine throughout the campaign and he had no objections, either in his orders or in the privacy of his diary. Where Heinrici went the Jews and the other "riff-raff" were doomed; had he commanded in Operation Sealion, as he expected to, the Jews of Kent and Sussex would have met the same fate.The evidence for this is all over the diaries, such as they are. The latter, in fact, form only a tiny  part of this volume and are surrounded with much padding. We do not know how representative they are of what is presumably  a large archive. The translation is at times idiosyncratic.But Heinrici can write. His descriptions of the Russian front  in 1941/42 spring from the page, alive with detail and atmosphere and full of superb descriptions of the unending marsh and forest landscape as well as the spiritual paralysis that this vast, unforgiving territory gradually imposed on Landser and general alike. Worth buying for that, just. Those who want the truth, rather than the record,  should read Ales Adamovych's 2012 masterpiece "Khatyn".

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*Last updated: 2026-03-08*