Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying

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Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying

3.89 of 5 stars 3.89 · rating details · 98 ratings · 34 reviews

On a visit to the British National Archive in 2001, Sonke Neitzel made a remarkable discovery: reams of meticulously transcribed conversations among German POWs that had been covertly recorded & recently declassified. Netizel would later find another collection of transcriptions, twice as extensive, in the National Archive in Washington. These were discoveries that wou...more

Hardcover, 448 pages

Published September 25th 2012 by Knopf (first published January 1st 2011)

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May 16, 2013 Bas Kreuger rated it 4 of 5 stars

Disturbing book as it shows how thin the line is between 'normal' civilised peacetime behaviour and (also normal) wartime behavior and thinking.
The best example was at the very end of the book where the attack by American soldiers in Iraq was described from an Apache attack helicopter against unarmed civilians and it was shown how their state of mind was so pre-conditioned that there was hardly any possibility for them to see those unarmed civilians as anything else than armed insurgents. The pi...more

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Apr 09, 2013 Roger rated it 2 of 5 stars

This is a fascinating book with an odd premise. One of the authors, in the course of research, stumbled across the little-known fact that during World War II both the British and Americans bugged their POW camps, and transcribed tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of pages of conversations between the inmates. This was done during the War for intelligence purposes, and after the conflict the transcripts were filed away in archives. This resource is a treasure trove for historians and has, and no...more This is a fascinating book with an odd premise. One of the authors, in the course of research, stumbled across the little-known fact that during World War II both the British and Americans bugged their POW camps, and transcribed tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of pages of conversations between the inmates. This was done during the War for intelligence purposes, and after the conflict the transcripts were filed away in archives. This resource is a treasure trove for historians and has, and no doubt will continue, to spawn scholarly monographs such as this one.

What Neitzel and Welzer have done with the material is to explore whether there was a particularly National Socialist way of making war, or whether the German Army was the same as the other fighting forces of the time.

Something that the authors don't address until the final part of the book, but which seemed obvious to me from the opening chapter was the problem of who is supplying the evidence. The inmates of the camps were by no means a simple cross-section of German Troops - Naval and Air forces were disproportionally strongly represented for much of the War, as the Allies were taking more of them than ground troops prisoner. Of course all of the subjects were taken on the Western, Italian or Middle-Eastern fronts, and while some of them had experience of war in the USSR and Eastern Front, it was by no means representative of the whole of the German combat forces.

There are of course other problems with the provision of evidence of this sort as well - the Allies didn't record every conversation, only the ones that they were interested in keeping, and of course the prisoners may have been telling less than the truth one way or the other, either to put off their captors, or to boast to their fellow inmates.

This doesn't make any of the transcripts any less fascinating for the insights they do provide us. And a lot of those insights are fairly gruesome. It seems many troops were aware of the Final Solution, and many of them had been involved in, or had witnessed mass shootings of Jews. While each soldier is more or less comfortable with what they saw or did, none of them really question the fact that it's taking place. The horrendous actions against partisans also cause little conflict amongst the POW, with troops sometimes expressing happiness over the actions they undertook. In fact what comes out from many of the transcripts is that many troops thought they pretty much had a licence to commit whatever crimes took their fancy.

Many of the troops were also cavalier with any prisoners they took, with some stories here from Normandy of Germans killing GI prisoners because they were Black, or "looked Jewish".

These stories stand out amongst the others in the book that refer to decorations, equipment, superior officers, and the other more mundane aspects of life in a military world.

What surprised me more, after reading the work, was that the authors conclusion is that there was nothing particularly Nazi in the way these soldiers, sailors and airmen fought. While it is fairly clear from the transcripts in the book that there were not many active Nazis in the forces, certainly the stories they told, that they acquiesced to or took part in do actually indicate that the German Armed Forces in World War II were engaged in a different sort of war than the other combatants. We haven't heard stories of Allied troops engaging in mass atrocities against a particular ethnic group (even the Russians didn't kill all the Tatars), we don't hear of other armies murdering POW as a matter of course, and certainly in the US and British armies many troops would have rebelled if they'd been asked to do so. Obviously there were circumstances where these other armies committed atrocities, and got away with it, but in the German Army these were committed as a matter of course, under superior orders.

I find the last chapter disturbing as well - "War as work", which describes in detail the footage provided by Wikileaks showing an ISAF gunship identifying a group of civilians as combatants and killing them. The authors use this to show how easy it is to make a mistake on the battlefield when working in the frame of reference of a firefight. I had the feeling (and this could just be me) that the authors were trying to equate many of the crimes described by the POW earlier in the book to this phenomenon. I think the transcripts they quote show in the vast majority of cases that there is no similarity between many things discussed by the POW and this incident.

With all my reservations, I found this still to be a book well-worth reading, with a lot to say about how the war was fought, what German Soldiers thought, and the lengths the Allies went to in gathering information.(less)

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Apr 04, 2013 Matthew Tree rated it 3 of 5 stars

During World War II, the British and Americans bugged the living quarters of several thousand selected German and Italian POWs who they suspected could provide interesting information for the Allied war effort. The protocols or transcripts of these conversations, only recently discovered and released, give an extraordinary insight into the mentality of the soldiers fighting on the Fascist/Nazi side. We discover, among other things, that right from the beginning of the war, German airmen saw Brit...more During World War II, the British and Americans bugged the living quarters of several thousand selected German and Italian POWs who they suspected could provide interesting information for the Allied war effort. The protocols or transcripts of these conversations, only recently discovered and released, give an extraordinary insight into the mentality of the soldiers fighting on the Fascist/Nazi side. We discover, among other things, that right from the beginning of the war, German airmen saw British civilian targets as legitimate (one describes, with a certain delight, shooting down mothers with prams); that rape was a common event in the territories occupied by the Germans (Jewish women especially were raped repeatedly before being shot along with their families); and that ordinary German soldiers may have shown different reactions to the mass shootings of Jews on Polish and Soviet territory in what is now classified as the first stage of the Holocaust (one million killed) - ranging from glee to disgust - but that very, very few of them questioned that these shootings and live burnings needed to take place and to be organised by German officials. On the contrary, they took them for granted. (The Allies, by the way, hid this information - which includes perpetrators' confessions of rape and murder - from the German post-war prosecutors, not wishing to reveal how it had been obtained). The presentation here of this exceptional material, however, is marred - in this reader's opinion, at least - by the theoretical straitjacket in which the book's authors have forced their material into. Again and again, we are treated to a sociological analysis about how all soldiers are basically the same, about how their frames of reference can always lead them to commit acts of violence in wartime etc. While some at least of this may be true, it doesn't explain why on the Nazi side, this militaristic frame of reference led not only to the odd war crime but to the attempted elimination of an entire people who could under no rational circumstances be considered a miitary threat. The protocols, however, are dotted with clues as to why this was the case: the virulently anti-Semitic comments which indicate that this particular form of prejudice (which was personal, not ideological) played a vital role in conditioning the actions of German soldiers (and their allies) in the occupied territories. BY contrast, for example, the Russians invading Germany who were, notoriously, responsible for the rapes of thousands of German women, made no systematic tit-for-tat attempt to wipe out the entire German nation from the face of the earth: an option which in the heat of that particular historical moment might not have seemed overly undesirable. In short: the chit-chat of the German prisoners reveals far more about the first stage of the Holocaust than the authors have chosen to concede, and it might have been better if the words of these prisoners had not been spoken over by their academic compilers and self-appointed interpreters.(less)

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Feb 06, 2013 Charles Weinblatt rated it 4 of 5 stars

“They seized three year-old Jewish children by the hair, held them up and shot them with a pistol. The Latvians and German soldiers were standing there, looking on. The whole thing sounds just like a fairy story. If one were to destroy all the Jews in the world simultaneously, there would not remain a single accuser” (laughing).

During World War II, a large number of German soldiers were captured and interrogated by British Intelligence agents. The authors of this book uncovered almost 800 pages...more

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Lewis Weinstein Does Soldaten deal with how these Germans got to be the way they were?
Feb 09, 2013 07:07pm

Charles Weinblatt Thanks for asking, Lew. The authors devoted a fair amount of time proffering analysis. The average German’s attitude towards Jews was horrendous. Afte...more Thanks for asking, Lew. The authors devoted a fair amount of time proffering analysis. The average German’s attitude towards Jews was horrendous. After all, anti-Semitism in most of Europe, the Middle East and Russia was rampant in the early 20th Century. Hitler and Nazi propagandists had little trouble persuading Germans and the European public that it was their duty to exterminate the Jewish people. The average German distrusted and hated Jews. Pogroms had been endemic and not just in Germany, but also Poland, Russia and many other European nations. Nazis gave Jew-haters an out. As long as the concentration and death camps were not nearby (most were in Poland), the annihilation of the Jews was out of sight and out of mind.

But what Soldaten reveals is the certain knowledge that Germans understood what was happening with Jews. Captured Germans, even those captured early in the war, proved knowledgeable about concentration camps and death camps, or at least death "vans." The old German argument, “We did not know what was happening to the Jews,” falls apart in these recorded conversations, especially when the POWs believed that they were not being observed. Talking amongst themselves in barracks and dining halls, they repeatedly expressed knowledge of the genocide. Moreover, German POWs, especially flyers, spoke openly of their desire to murder innocent civilians. If Soldaten opens our eyes to something new, it would be how happy Germans were to bomb and strafe Allied civilians, especially Brits.

A handful of German officers considered the extermination of Jews “dishonorable.” Many of them agreed that murdering women and children was repugnant. But even then, they agreed that Jewish women should be made to serve German soldiers sexually, because the poor German soldiers had to have their male needs met. They spoke openly about raping "beautiful Jewesses" because it was their "right to do so." If this does not turn your stomach, I’m not sure what will. The manifest hypocrisy of this argument is far from lost upon the interrogating Allies, much less the authors. The pervasive German POW view was that Jews had to be destroyed completely (as “a race”) and that it was their job to do it, although few expressed an interest in taking part personally.

It is interesting to note that while today most people refer to Judaism as a religion, one that can be joined or departed at will, wartime Germans considered Jews a race, condemned to be destroyed because of its genetic imprint.

The book also confirms that many times, especially in Eastern Europe and Russia; the Germans transferred some of the killing to local groups, such as Einsatzgruppen and Cossacks. It seems that in every European city, village and town, there were plenty of men who desperately wanted to take part in murdering Jews. No doubt many of these men and their ancestors had taken part in past pogroms against Jewish civilians. Thus, incarcerating Jews, stealing their money and valuables, raping Jewish women and murdering Jewish children had been cherished activities, passed on from generation to generation.

Soldaten is a chilling book because for the first time we hear German soldiers in their own voices (speaking amongst themselves in situations deemed private) discussing the importance of exterminating the Jewish race. If these POWs had any reservations, it was about using too much ammunition or not being able to complete the task of making all of Europe Judenrien; or that the genocide took too much time away from fighting the Allies on the front lines.

No longer can Germans escape from responsibility by suggesting that they were unaware that Jewish men, women and children were being butchered by the millions. The soldiers knew. They bragged about it. They told their families and friends about it. Soldaten proves that knowledge of the Nazi extermination of the Jewish people was widespread. Thus German civilians also bear some major responsibility for the genocide, or at least for failure in trying to stop it.

One might argue that intolerance could be more pervasive among a random group of soldiers than among a more benign group, say professors. Yet where were the professors, physicians or lawyers when their universities, hospitals and courts became Judenrien? Why did so few of them stand in the doorway when Jews were forcibly removed? Why did so few hide Jews or prevent their capture. In reality, most Germans were only too proud to turn in their Jewish neighbors to the Gestapo.

Soldaten is a sad recollection of German POWS bragging about how many civilians they murdered (not only Jews, but British, American, Canadian and French civilians, etc.). They truly believed that Germany should rule the world – that Germans were superior in every way. Ironically, while hiding behind their belief in German racial superiority, their actions proved that they were the worst perpetrator of genocide in history. Hearing it come from their mouths is the core of this book’s value.(less)
Feb 10, 2013 02:13pm

Nov 19, 2012 David Bird rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: in-extremis

This is an important book. It makes one sit a little less complacently in one's skin. It has the courage to trace a line from ordinary humanity to the ordinary German soldier to the commission of atrocities.

One is reminded throughout that it's a German academic book; infelicities of translation abound. But being reminded of its Germanness is often a good thing, because one also realizes that the authors, had they been in a different generation, would have been likely to have been combatants rat...more This is an important book. It makes one sit a little less complacently in one's skin. It has the courage to trace a line from ordinary humanity to the ordinary German soldier to the commission of atrocities.

One is reminded throughout that it's a German academic book; infelicities of translation abound. But being reminded of its Germanness is often a good thing, because one also realizes that the authors, had they been in a different generation, would have been likely to have been combatants rather than students of the war.

The source material for the book provides a unique perspective: it is based on transcripts of surreptitiously recorded conversations among German POWs made during the war; while there is occasional involvement of a British or American agent posing as a soldier to elicit specific types of information, the men believed they were speaking to comrades, and therefore take for granted the frames of reference prevailing at the time, without the self-justification to outsiders, interrogators, or posterity that one would find in other oral history.

The mixture of military history and social psychology means that this work won't please those who like a straightforward military history--one Amazon review criticized the authors for using thematic rather than chronological and geographic organization. The degree to which such a comment betrays a failure to grasp the essential of the work is stunning: their point is that a sample of humans will respond, within a range, based on the context in which they find themselves.

I have always been fascinated with the experiences, perspectives, and self-justifications of humans functioning in extreme circumstances, and the Nazi period represents an interesting case study of this. One realizes that Speer was, in his autobiography (Inside the Third Reich), carefully finding the space on the Venn diagram where "Nazi experience" and "conventional western European outlook" intersected. In such a situation a clever person can tell true stories without telling the whole truth.

The verdict of the authors is that the capacity to commit atrocities is far closer to the surface of most people than most people would like to allow. We want, as a society, to treat massacres of civilians as exceptional, but the reality is different.

(less)

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Nov 15, 2012 Erik Graff rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: everyone, esp. those thinking of enlistment

Recommended to Erik by: Kelly Kingdon

Shelves: psychology

This book, coauthored by an historian and a psychologist, represents an overview of secret recordings made of German POWs during WWII. It is at once a history as well as a psycho-social study of the military mentality during war. While its focus is on German soldiers, its conclusions draw upon hosts of other studies which, together, suggest there is more in common between the forces of belligerant countries than there is difference. While its focus is on combat, the German attempts at genocide a...more

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Oct 22, 2012 Diana rated it 4 of 5 stars

During WWII, British and American captors secretly recorded the private conversations of German POWs in the hopes of gleaning valuable intelligence. This book is a translation from the German of some of these conversations.

Revealed therein are the prisoners' attitudes towards war as well as their own personal experiences. Particularly of interest to the authors, one a historian and the other a psychologist, is the fact that contrary to what was stated at the Nuremberg trials, they were well awa...more

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Jan 10, 2013 carl theaker rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: ww2

Though the title of this book includes the enticing

'The Secret World War 2 transcripts of German POWs'

there are precious few of the actual transcripts included,
perhaps a dozen or two of the 365 pages.

The two German authors, one an historian the other a social
psychologist, typically take a sentence or two from a protocol
(conversation) and examine it in the reference framework (reality)
of the soldiers and explain what they think it all means in the
world of violence, war and the culture of the R...more

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Nov 22, 2012 Hadrian marked it as to-read

>the transcripts of conversations between German prisoners of war, secretly recorded by the British and American intelligence services, offer a vivid and at times surprising insight into the mentality of the German military.

>Between 1940 and 1945, in camps specifically set up for this purpose, the British and Americans bugged about 13,000 German and several hundred Italian soldiers of all ranks and services. The goal was to discover military secrets of potentially strategic importance. Sel...more

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Dec 26, 2012 M.R. Dowsing rated it 4 of 5 stars

Co-written by a historian and a social psychologist, this book examines recently discovered transcripts of surreptitiously recorded conversations between German prisoners of war during WW2. The prisoners themselves are a fairly mixed bunch; some are highly astute, others incredibly stupid, some critical of the Nazi regime, others fanatical believers. For many of the prisoners, being witness to violent deaths was routine, and this is reflected in the shockingly casual way they talk about killing....more

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Aug 21, 2012 Ericafoferica rated it 4 of 5 stars

I won this book as a Goodreads Firstreads giveaway.

I must say it took me quite awhile to finish due to the large amounts of information and analysis. However, I will say that the book gives quite an insight to the minds of the German Nazis during World War II. It comes as no shock what most of the Germans thought of the Jews, but to actually read what some of these soldiers really felt was heart wrenching. I was surprised to read transcripts of officers in high command who followed through with...more

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May 11, 2013 Thomas rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is an excellent book. There is a lot of information that runs counter to a lot of what we commonly believe about the actions of the common German soldier in WWII. The sources of the information, however, are totally believable. There are also examples from more recent conflicts that indicate that German soldiers weren't all that different from soldiers from other countries, and at other times (including the present). My own experience as a soldier backs this up. American soldiers aren't ove...more

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Apr 06, 2013 Justin rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is an extraordinary insight into the minds and experiences of German military personnel in the Second World War. Based on a heretofore untapped wealth of material recorded secretly between German prisoners of war (and indeed Italian and Japanese POWs as well - both covered briefly) conversing with each other in British and US POW camps, there is an extraordinary candidacy and immediacy that is not present in other sources; letters, diaries, interviews and memoirs inevitably present a differ...more

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Aug 13, 2012 Jessica rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: first-reads

I won this book as part of a Goodreads Firstreads giveaway.

It took me a while to get through this book because of the large amount of information, as well as analysis behind it. The details provided by the POWs is very interested. It was a little chilling to see how nonchalantly they shared stories and memories but in the context of war, it really isn't. These were men doing their job. The analysis provided by Neitzel and Welzer is thought provoking. You can tell that the authors didn't just wan...more

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Nov 27, 2012 UChicagoLaw added it

Shelves: 2012-faculty-recommendations, faculty-recommendations

"Reports transcripts of secretly recorded conversations among German POWs from World War II. It’s by a psychologist and a historian, and provides a completely new window on the war. Unlike autobiographical or interview based accounts these show how soldiers thought about what they were doing, what they knew about the holocaust, their conception of war crimes, and their attitudes toward killing. It’s a fascinating and horrific account." - Tom Ginsburg

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Jan 07, 2012 Matti Karjalainen rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: kotikirjasto, 2-maailmansota, sota, historia, tietokirjat, psykologia-filosofia, holokausti, natsit

Sönke Neitzelin ja Harald Welzerin "Sotilaat: taistelemisesta, tappamisesta ja kuolemisesta" (Gummerus, 2011) on kiinnostava tietokirja, jossa käsitellään saksalaisten ja osin myös italialaisten sotavankien näkemyksiä sotilaan elämästä toisen maailmansodan eri rintamilla.

Liittoutuneet keräsivät kirjan käsittelemän aineiston salakuuntelemalla sotavankien - niin tavallisten rivimiesten kuin korkeiden upseerienkin - käymiä keskusteluja, ja saivat näin todennäköisesti haltuunsa sellaista tietoa, jo...more

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Jan 10, 2013 Gabriele Goldstone rated it 4 of 5 stars

I couldn't stop reading this book. I kept thinking of my dad (and other family members) - the Luftwaffe pilots, Eastern Front soldiers, POWs. This book has helped fill in some of the blanks. Quite a lot of ground is covered. And it's a book I'm sure I'll refer to back over and over. My favorite quote is on page 337 by Willy Peter Reese: "Just like winter clothing covers up almost all of you except for your eyes, the fact of being a soldier only allowed space for tiny bits of individuality." So g...more

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Feb 27, 2013 Christoph rated it 5 of 5 stars

Extremely well-researched and written, Neitzel and Welzer unflinchingly account for the actions of Wehrmacht soldiers during World War II, while considering the psychological and human needs for group membership as a mechanism for individual survival being a deus ex machina behind the apparent blind following of orders that so condemns the individuals behind these actions against the backdrop of The Holocaust.

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Oct 10, 2012 Lilith Saintcrow rated it 3 of 5 stars

I was a little taken aback on p257 with the authors' assertion that had most Wehrmacht soldiers on the Eastern front during the Soviet advances in the latter half of the war capitulated, they "would have survived". Considering that they would have been sent to the Gulag, I can only think this is a too-rosy estimation of the situation.

Otherwise, a decent read that opened up a great deal of food for thought.

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Nov 07, 2011 Ragna rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Die Autoren haben Abhörprotokolle aus britischen Gefängnissen ausgewertet, in denen im Zweiten Weltkrieg deutsche Soldaten gefangen gehalten wurden. Das Buch ist also sicherlich hochspannend für alle Geschichtsinteressierten. Aber auch Laien bekommen Antworten auf diese ewigen Fragen: "Wie konnten damals nur so viele mitmachen?" "Wie kann es sein, dass es keinen großen Aufstand gegen die Nazis gab?" "Wie konnte es zu den grausamen Kriegsverbrechen kommen?" usw.
Mit dem Buch habe ich mich trotzde...more

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Aug 26, 2012 Jim rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: first-reads, wwii

I read the English translation of this book, which was originally written in German. The basis of this work were previously unknown recordings of the conversations of German WWII POW’s that researcher Neitzel discovered in the British National Archive. Welzer provides a psychological perspective. It is scary how routine the business of war, fighting and killing, was for these POW’s. They looked at war as their job and for the most part believed the Nazi propaganda of German superiority. Some eve...more

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Apr 04, 2013 Carl Hubbard rated it 4 of 5 stars

This book was full of challenging content. A psychologist's view of conversations covertly recorded between German POW's in camps in England and the US. Having read many books on war and knowing how many prisoners were killed out of hand during battles and the violence visited on unarmed civilians - it was even more depressing to read as a voyeur on a wartime conversation describing these events in detail, recalled by first and second-hand by witnesses of this brutality. Neitzel's viewpoint gave...more

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Nov 15, 2012 Adam rated it 2 of 5 stars

What did I think? I can't rate this book because of what the book is about. This book was very difficult for me to read because of the content. This book illustrates the depravity, morbid, disgustingly repugnant, gruesome actions taken by the Germans against Jews, Russians, and civilians during WWII. The personal accounts of German soldiers chillingly describes the sadistic methods and frames of mind while murdering innocent people. Seems that to many Germans murdering Jews and others was more s...more

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Nov 04, 2012 Patricia L. added it

Shelves: abandoned

I had to abandon this book after reading about 20% of it,

I read some of the German prisoners' remarks about killing sorties and decided I didn't want to read more of their philosphical views about those they killed. Their opinions seem to be a result of a culture of bigotry and bias, much of it through military and cultural brain washing. Sometimes I just cannot read about the filth and evil in this world, past or present. I wanted to try to better understand the mindsets of those murderous Naz...more

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Mar 12, 2013 Joakim rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2013

Thoughts:
-The German soldiers were brainwashed by an extreme ideology, and the inevitable groupthink in the battlefield amplified the cruelties of the soldiers. Killing became a chore for them, living became secondary to the survival of the Reich, and dying became the most honorable thing to do.
-This book is crucial for understanding the minds of the German soldiers. All the memoirs of ex-Nazi's are often watered down for the masses. Only in the uninhibited conversations amongst the POW's can be...more

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Nov 22, 2012 David O'Neill rated it 3 of 5 stars

Worth a read, a good insight in to the incredible depravity of the average German soldier at the time. If you want a broader overview of the Holocaust/WWII check out Bloodlands Europe Between Hitler and Stalin or Savage Continent

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Dec 17, 2012 Nancy rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: war, psychology, fascism, translation, germany, history

This is not an easy book to read. It is both shocking and revealing as it discusses the atrocities committed in World War II. I’ve read quite a few books, both fiction and non-fiction, about World War II and have always found it difficult to understand how human beings can treat others with such disregard for their humanity, in fact, at times, even enjoy it. By examining covert surveillance tapes of conversations between German and Italian POWs during WW II, the authors, an historian and a psych...more

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Feb 01, 2013 Michael Flanagan rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: ww-2

For me this book ticked all the boxes and was a highly enjoyable read. It takes the time to explain the mind set of Werchmat soldiers and explains how the normalization of violence experienced by any front line troops occurs. A fantastic study into the world during the war and those who fought it. Through the transcripts of German POW's the author pulls apart the social and human aspects of war and soldiers and shows it in a crystal clear perspective. This book should be mandatory reading of any...more

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Jan 29, 2013 Triv S. rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction

I really enjoyed this but I do feel like they could've cut down on the analyzing and included more conversations. Anyway, it was really interesting.

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Jan 18, 2013 Jason rated it 3 of 5 stars

Very dense, more of a psycology book than a history book.

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“In World War II, some Japanese soldiers preferred to take their own lives rather become prisoners of war. In Saipan hundreds of civilians jumped to their deaths over cliffs in order to avoid falling into American hands. Even in life-or-death situations cultural ties and duties often outweigh the instinct for survival. This is why people die in the attempt to rescue a dog from drowning, or decide to become suicide bombers.” — 1 person liked it

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