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Chain Dogs: The German Army Military Police of World War II
pp. x 112.paperback edition
124 pages, Paperback
First published February 1, 1994
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December 30, 2013
This was an interesting book, but disappointing in some ways. I'm a sucker for history subjects that haven't received much coverage, so when I saw this book about German military police in World War II, I was pretty excited. It turns out that the book is not so much a general history of the Feldgendarmerie, but more of a biographical sketch of four men who served as Feldgendarms.
While the stories of the four men followed in this book are interesting, unfortunately their narratives are not very detailed or complete. This may be due to sparse material to work with, but a large part of the text is just taken up with an overview narrative of World War II in Europe. Even if Witter didn't have a lot of detail on the specific experiences of these men, he could have written a far more relevant narrative. Since he knew what units they were attached to, he could have related in the narrative what was going on in the times and areas to which these units were posted. Instead, it's just an amateurishly written narrative (I've never seen so many exclamations in a history book before!) about WWII with a few random facts about these Feldgendarms thrown it. There are parts of the narrative where Witter obviously had more material to work with, and these are more fleshed out, covering mostly pre-war years, the end of the war, and post-war years.
While the narrative text of Chain Dogs is pretty poor, the real strength of the book is it's illustrations. There's a wealth of photos and copies of wartime documents included in this book, and they do a lot more to shed light on the story of the men written about than the text does. There's also an index of Felgendarmerie units in the back of the book, that could be quite useful for someone doing research on the subject.
Overall, unless you're really interested in this specific topic, this book isn't really worth seeking out. The narrative text doesn't really shed much light on it's biographical subjects, and isn't very well written, but the photos and index included could be useful for someone doing research.
While the stories of the four men followed in this book are interesting, unfortunately their narratives are not very detailed or complete. This may be due to sparse material to work with, but a large part of the text is just taken up with an overview narrative of World War II in Europe. Even if Witter didn't have a lot of detail on the specific experiences of these men, he could have written a far more relevant narrative. Since he knew what units they were attached to, he could have related in the narrative what was going on in the times and areas to which these units were posted. Instead, it's just an amateurishly written narrative (I've never seen so many exclamations in a history book before!) about WWII with a few random facts about these Feldgendarms thrown it. There are parts of the narrative where Witter obviously had more material to work with, and these are more fleshed out, covering mostly pre-war years, the end of the war, and post-war years.
While the narrative text of Chain Dogs is pretty poor, the real strength of the book is it's illustrations. There's a wealth of photos and copies of wartime documents included in this book, and they do a lot more to shed light on the story of the men written about than the text does. There's also an index of Felgendarmerie units in the back of the book, that could be quite useful for someone doing research on the subject.
Overall, unless you're really interested in this specific topic, this book isn't really worth seeking out. The narrative text doesn't really shed much light on it's biographical subjects, and isn't very well written, but the photos and index included could be useful for someone doing research.
Displaying 1 of 1 review