Soldiers' letters can be used in many ways. One is to test historical generalities. Another is to expose intergenerational Weltanschauungen. A further one could be as travel writing. The editors of this important, comprehensive documentation employ it for the first two purposes; limited samples for the third are below.

The book is organized in three parts. After an explanation of the editing process, the prolific historian Konrad H. Jarausch (pp. 20–44) outlines the search for his father, Konrad Jarausch. The latter died while on military duty, so that he never knew the son. The younger Jarausch reveals his mother's attempt to expand the departed's reputation, and some of his own anguish at being expected to match a mythical father, including career choice pressures to follow his father's theological studies. In his “Vatersuche,” the younger Jarausch traces his father's slow distancing from the Nazi regime during 1941, as well as the son's distancing from his parents' values. They had been fairly typical middle-class Protestants who approved National Socialist expansionism even if they had reservations about its attitude toward Christianity. The father-search led to “no uncritical hero worship” but to a “critical appreciation” (p. 44), with the son asserting that the father went “from perpetrator to sympathizer [vom Mittäter zum Mitleidenenden].” Unfortunately, no examples are provided on where the son stood on the issues of his day (Vietnam, Iraq, cluster bombs) when he contrasts his “transnational-democratic” values to the nationalist German failings of his father's generation (p. 45). Though a footnote mentions the father's membership in the Nazi teacher organization as well as welfare and air defense leagues, party membership seems not to have been checked, and the delay in publication is only partially explained. Some 270 pages of lengthy letters precede a list of Konrad Jarausch's publications and a bibliography. Interspersed are three sections of very relevant photos and too few maps.

Using the detailed letters as evidence, Klaus Arnold (pp. 54–91) places the military experiences of the elder Konrad in the historical and historiographical context of military education and German POW practices. The scholarly world will be grateful since the almost daily account provides much information on the military's occupation practices in Poland as well as mass starvation of Soviet POWs held by the Wehrmacht. As a military educator, the elder Konrad had time to report on his training methods, reservations about intolerant younger soldiers, ghettos, food supplies, and the general situation in occupied Poland during 1939 to 1941. In his second military task, Konrad Jarausch had responsibility for administering food in one large POW camp. He became a reluctant participant in mass death, eventually acknowledging it was all “more murder than war” (p. 339). The scholarly debate about its meaning is explored by Arnold in relation to whether it was a planned genocide, which he, too, categorically claims these documents refute.

With his unit located near Kosów, about eighty kilometers northeast of Warsaw, the elder Jarausch reported on May 13, 1940: “Yesterday four of us were in one of the Polish villages and again looked into some houses during our shopping. At one place we even received a bread-cake. In some houses everything was festively decorated. The pillowcases with embroidery were stacked on the beds. In front of the holy images outside were fresh flowers. The black Madonna hung in many houses but I also found pictures with nearly Greek, stark traits, including foreign lettering. . . . In between often there were children's school drawings” (p. 212). Later, at Radzymin when quartered in a new Polish school, he found “friendly, green streets with simple but clean houses with gardens” (p. 225), from which his group looted furnishings. None of this seems to match the stereotype of the “polnische Wirtschaft” (Polish sloppiness) so often described by Germans. Indeed, Jarausch wrote on July 2, 1940, “It is nice to go through the fields now. The rye is already ripe on the light soil. The buckwheat blooms, and in the trees, May beetles swarm. Unfortunately something especially beautiful is already disappearing: the flax blossoms. When the delicate blue flowers head the slightly bent stems in the morning light, then a piece of heaven appears to be mirrored on the earth. And thus in these quiet walks I find something of a release that makes it easier to continue here” (p. 230). Yet, as soon as he is back in Germany (near the Netherlands border) on August 9, 1940, he writes, “Everything shines in cleanliness. . . . It is somehow a happiness, after the Polish time now again to experience German life in its beautiful security and its richness. . . . The farmyards, like the houses of the thoroughly down-to-earth workers, so clean and orderly” (p. 233). The völkisch traveler soon closes his mind's eye to what he saw only a few weeks past.

Is a reviewer allowed personal comments about an edition of personal documents? The reviewer was born a month after the son who presents his father's wartime letters. Like that son, who never knew his father, my first years of life were mostly without a father since both men were in military service on the eastern front. But Jarausch's father died in January 1942 while mine survived. Jarausch's father, though not well-off, came from the profusely writing middle class, attended university to study theology, and taught in a higher school. My father came from a peasant background, saw the insides of a school for a short time, trained as a carpenter, and worked from adolescence onward. Jarausch's father left a mountain of paper; my father left a literary void. Yet, many of the questions of import about both lives are the same: What did they know of the mass deaths around them, to what extent did they participate, and could they have acted other than they did? Should those of higher education and rank be held to more rigorous standards? Their life trajectories provide an overlap and an historical irony. Both experienced occupied Poland, but for very different reasons since Jarausch's father helped train Wehrmacht soldiers (perhaps even my father who was also in a signals unit), moving ever further east to just south of where my family started its westward moves. My father was among the ethnic Germans whose diasporas' existence ended with German occupation and the racial sorting of borderland populations. Jarausch's father's letters from occupied Poland provide insight on the landscape and social circumstances of the area in which my family had lived among Poles and Jews for four generations, but whose contours had rarely been recorded. The letters offer descriptions that are otherwise difficult to find, and some challenge stereotypes of Poles, Russians, and their habits. Hence, thanks are owed to Konrad H. Jarausch for making the letters public.