Students of military psychology as well as historians will find Peifer’s work of value.
Detailed history of the German soldiers who, for numerous reasons, left the ranks without leave.
In conservative West Germany, courts in the 1950s and ’60s ruled that the commanders of the Wehrmacht and the Nazi regime’s judiciary had ruled fairly when sentencing deserters to be executed, decreeing that “the Wehrmacht had not been any harsher in enforcing military law than had the Americans and British.” That’s not quite right, notes historian Peifer: Whereas an estimated 15,000 German soldiers were condemned to death for the crime, the U.S. “executed precisely one soldier for desertion in World War II.” Peifer begins with a few extended anecdotes on individual German soldiers and what prompted them to desert, even knowing the consequences: One officer who successfully fled to Switzerland enumerated several reasons, from the mass killing of Jews to watching his unit be chewed to bits on the Russian front. He did not, the author adds, “list fear and exhaustion as reasons for his flight…but surely they played a role.” Others had perhaps less noble reasons, simply preferring not to be killed; strangely, as Peifer notes, this proved a successful defense in at least a few cases, albeit in one a soldier was sentenced instead to 15 years of hard labor, enough to convince him to volunteer for frontline service again simply so he could get a bit of food and rest. “He barely survived the war,” Peifer writes, but at least the soldier lived. Interestingly, the author observes, the East German regime was somewhat more forgiving of desertion than was its western counterpart, considering desertion an act of resistance. In all events, and not at all surprisingly, as Peifer records, desertion rates climbed steadily as World War II went on and the morale of German soldiers and their auxiliaries declined.
Students of military psychology as well as historians will find Peifer’s work of value.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780197539668
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2024
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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