Incredibly compelling, if not entirely believable, memoir from Waffen SS general

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	• Grenadiers: The Story Of Waffen SS General Kurt 'Panzer' Meyer (Stackpole Military History) Kurt Meyer Stackpole Books, 2005 - 436 pages average customer review:based on 15 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Incredibly compelling, if not entirely believable, memoir from Waffen SS general

This Stackpole reprint/translation of Waffen SS General Kurt Meyer's memoirs can only be classified as incredible. Any serious student of WWII cannot be considered well read without having gone through this book. As some of the less favorable reviews state, Meyer gives a rose-colored view of his service, but if you accept up front the limitations of this work, it is otherwise an incredible account of hard fighting in virtually every major front of the war. For military history buffs, the book combines the best aspects of Baron Marbot's and General Lettow von Vorbeck's memoirs.

For those who are reading this review who don't know who Kurt Meyer was, he was a Waffen SS officer who started the war in Poland as a company commander, fought in France and Greece, took command of the LSSAH recon battalion at the commencement of Barbarossa, was heavily involved in the fighting around Kharkov several years later, and was ultimately transfered to the 12th SS Panzer Division (the Hitler Youth), first as a regimental commander, then as the division commander when Fritz Witt was killed during a naval barrage. This book is divided into four main sections. The first covers Meyer's service prior to Barbarossa, the second his role in Russia, the third his time with the 12th SS PD fighting (primarily) the Canadians, and the fourth he recounts his trial for war crimes, his time on death row, and his subsequent emprisonment and release.

This book is not a broad overview of any segment of the war. Meyer's goal is to recount his role and recollections in the various campaigns with which he fought. Throughout the book he presents the reader with a can-do, never quite attitude fired by duty. There are many remarkable insights into many major players on the German side as well as events. For example, he denounces the men who tried to assassinate Hitler as terrorists. He also has lots of interesting insights into the campaign in Russia as well as the tactical and strategic failings in Normandy. The human side of Panzer Meyer comes through in the final section as he relates his emotions at (from his viewpoint) being unjustly condemned and concern for his family.

There are definitely some serious limitations to this work as legitimate history. I certainly wouldn't take Meyer's word at face value on virtually any point he discusses (he is certainly writing to justify both his and his comrades actions during the war), and he carefully omits discussion about several unpleasant realities of the war. In particular, I think his claim that the Waffen SS stands apart from the SD and Allgemeine SS to be simply ludicrous. He may or may not have personally been involved in some of the unspeakable crimes committed by the SS, but his sweeping claim that the Waffen SS represents only the best in German soldiers and that the great crimes were committed only by the other organs of the SS to be easily refutable. His rosy colored descriptions of the treatment of Soviet POWs also smacks as totally unbelievable given what the fate of most of these prisoners was if they were captured by the SS. There is also no discussion whatsoever of the general political support given to the Nazi regime by the SS of all stripes.

Limitations aside though, this is a great book. Anyone with any interest in the ETO will enjoy this book. It is compelling and easy to read, I couldn't put it down.

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Compelling

I read this book within 3 days and found it an exceptional view from the other side of the hedgerow! If you are interested in the personal aspects of elite soldiers and the tough decisions that have to be made on the spot - this is the book for you. I gave it 4 stars because it lacked MAPS! I don't know about other readers but I read the text and maps side by side. Enjoy.

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a soldier's soldier

Grenadiers is (mostly) the combat autobiography of Kurt 'Panzer' Meyer, one of Nazi Germany's most highly decorated soldiers. The book begins on the first day of World War II, and continues through Meyer's capture in France in 1944, his war crimes trial, his decade of imprisonment, and through his release.

Up until the point of his capture, the story focuses on the mostly small unit actions Meyer commanded in Poland, France, Yugoslavia, Greece, Russia, and then again in France through the Normandy invasion, battles for Caen and the Falaise Gap. One learns about his personal life (wife and four small children, with a fifth born after his capture) and pre-war life only through asides and glancing comments; Meyer hammers relentlessly on detailed combat operations, what he saw, why he acted, and what the results were on the front. As a front-line commander he saw plenty. Meyer earned the reverence of his troops, the respect of his superiors and enemies, and the hatred of his eventual captors through dogged aggression, competence, charisma, a little luck, and a great deal of personal bravery. If one enjoys reading a sometimes hour-by-hour account of small unit exploits over 300 pages, this is a great book to read by someone who has a legitimate right to claim he saw it all.

Some of these reviews suggest that Meyer's book is not expecially well written. Well, no, he's not Hemingway; he's a soldier. Nonetheless I thought Meyer made the points he wanted to make very well; his themes are respect for his men, love of country, the bonding between officers and men through shared sacrifice, the value of community (very much including family). He also demonstrates a fair knowledge of military history and culture, a feeling of sharing the military tradition with previous generations. I think that getting this clearly and unambiguously through the story of the war is not so easy. Meyer's writing is much more readable than that of a number of academics on the same subjects.

More interesting, because somewhat more rare, is Meyer's retelling the story of his war crimes trial and subsequent death sentence, commuted to life, finally commuted to 14 years (10 years after good time). Meyer's respect for all of his opponents (well maybe not the French) includes the Canadians he fought at Caen; but his disdain for armchair soldiers and politicians who took over the trials after the fighting was over is also clear. He resents being put on trial at all, based on 'evidence' (clearly fabricated in this case) of refusal to take prisoners, or of having shot Canadian prisoners (done before he was commander, and of which he could not even have been aware), especially when he has seen personally the same crimes perpetrated both in Russia and by the western allies to German victims. He strongly contests the Allied fiction that only beasts fought for the Germans, and only angels on the side of the Allies. His resentment towards this kind of victor's justice, and his gratitude towards those who at great effort and expense worked to his eventual release, shows him at his most emotional (not much).

To Meyer's credit, for the short time he lived after his release (Meyer died on his 51st birthday) he worked not to gripe about the past, but to push for a better (peaceful) future. It would have been interesting to see how he would have done had he lived as long as Rudel or Skorzeny (or Degrelle).

Finally, there is additional material by Hubert Meyer (Divisional Chief of Staff of 12-SS PzDiv HJ), covering not only a brief summary of the story of HitlerJugend Division till the end of the war, but of much greater interest, more background on Panzermeyer's past, and his personality, motivations, and what made him the leader he was. Hubert Meyer does not write as well as Kurt Meyer, but this material is well worth reading in terms of illuminating just what made Panzermeyer tick. Add this to other sources on the subject, and compare to Kurt Meyer's descriptions of what took place; it is hard not to come away impressed by at least the military qualities of the man. Now, the politics, that is something else entirely.

An excellent book for your military history bookshelf.

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Panzermeyer!

Like a lot of you reading this, I have read innumerable books about the Second World War, most of them from the German perspective. The majority of these were testaments by former army officers or, in the latter instances, Party-government bigwigs. GRENADIERS was the first work I had ever bought penned by a former SS man, in this case Kurt "Panzer" Meyer. I was very interested to see what an ex-member of two notorious Waffen-SS divisions, the "Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler" and the "Hitlerjugend", would have to say...not merely about his combat experiences but about Hitler, National Socialism, and the war in general.

GRENADIERS exists on several levels simultaneously: a pure combat memior by a man who saw a hell of a lot of it, a treatise on the relationship of the Waffen-SS to its putative parent body, the Gestamt or "Total" SS, a spirited defense of the Waffen-SS against the "libels" leveled against it by the victorious Allies and by the postwar German government, and a memior of Meyer's trial for war crimes, his imprisonment (originally a death sentence) and his eventual release. On all these levels it succeeds...so much so that it permenently changed my view of the Waffen-SS. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

As a combat memior, the book is highly entertaining. It begins in media res, with Meyer's antitank unit rumbling into Poland in September 1939, and continues at a steady clip through the campaigns in France (1940) the Balkans (1941), Russia (1941 - 1943) and finally Normandy (1944), during which time he served with many legendary Waffen-SS frontfighters, including Fritz Witt, Max Wünsche, Michael Wittmann, Gerd Bremer, Theodor Wisch, and Sepp Dietrich. Meyer, who finished his career as the acting commander of the 12th SS Panzer Division, offers almost no biographical information about himself, and seldom "flashes back" to his peacetime existence. For the most part he is simply recounting tales of battle at the head of an elite recon unit as it was transferred from one hotspot to another all over Europe. Because Meyer's troops were motorized, riding on motorcycles, amphibious wagons, armored cars or assault guns, his accounts tend to be like his style of fighting: straight-ahead, breathless and fast-paced (not for nothing was his original nickname "Schneller" Meyer). He's an exciting narrator, if not a very skilled one, and he manages to convey a lot about his personality and philosophy of war without lecturing the reader. His accounts of the Russian and '44 French campaigns are particularly interesting to students of those theaters; he often speaks of the physical and psychological burdens placed on the German soldier by Russia's brutal climate and vast spaces, and of similar strains imposed in the West by the Allies overwhelming superiority of material. He writes without bitterness, and with a strong sense of respect to his own troops and to their opponents, be they Poles, Russians, Canadians (the French don't compare too well).

Meyer makes some very interesting points about the average Waffen-SS man in his outfit. He notes that they were very young (19 years old on average for privates), that 62% of them had been in technical or skilled trades before the war, and that very few of them had actually been members of the Allgemeine (General) SS before the war began. "These young men," he insists. "Fought for Germany and certainly did not die for a political party." Their motivations for joining the Waffen-SS were made from simpler stuff: it had the most attractive uniforms, its exploits were ballyhooed in the German press and it was regarded universally as an elite unit...all powerful motivators to young men looking for glory.

Meyer, who was captured in 1944 and tried for war crimes immediately after the war, recounts his trial with some bitterness, and not merely because he was, as were most German POWs of any standing, badly mistreated in captivity. Having taken great pains to show that he fought chivalrously at all times, he regarded the trial as a humiliation and a disgrace, the moreso because most of the evidence against him was based on heresay, perjury and ex post facto jurisprudence. Having his sentence commuted from death to life imprisonment was, in fact, worse than death for him, since he was incarcerated not in a POW camp or even a place like Spandau Prison but in an ordinary Canadian hooscow - with rapists, arsonists and murderers as cellmates. The agonizing struggle to obtain his release, waged in part by the Canadian press (which righteously pointed out that Canada had violated its own laws in convicting Meyer), and his life as a spokesman for HIAG in West Germany (the Waffen-SS veterans' association, dedicated to securing military benefits for Waffen-SS veterans) close out the book on a more or less uplifting note...though the reader may find himself exhausted emotionally by the time the last page is read. Meyer's journey is truly a punishing one.

It is a defense of the Waffen-SS, however, that the book is most intriguing. Meyer points out - repeatedly - that the Waffen-SS had relatively little to do with its parent body, and was merely a military organization in a slightly different uniform. The picture painted by history - of a band of murderous racial fanatics, screaming "Sieg Heil!" as they shot prisoners in the neck, is (Meyer insists) nonsense. Doubtless there were men of this type in Waffen-SS units, but as Meyer points out, nearly all of his opponents routinely shot prisoners in cold blood, bombed defenseless towns and used civilians as human shields - including, he adds pointedly, the Western Allies, who have tended throughout history to portray themselves as knights in shining armor.

The book isn't perfect. Meyer touches on the murders committed by his men in Normandy only in terms of explaining, after the fact, how he was disgusted by them and ordered an investigation into their commission; he tells the reader nothing about his life before the war or why he ended up in the SS in the first place (he was transferred from a Police unit, the German Police becoming part of the SS in 1936) and his style of writing is amateurish, though not without talent. None of this, however, was a significant detraction from GRENADIERS, which in the final analysis is not so much a memior but a tribute to the 900,000 men who, whatever their motivations or war records, were collectively dubbed "criminals" in 1945...and have spent, along with their families, dealing with the fallout of this sweeping judgement. But as Meyer is quick to point out, the ultimate verdict on a soldier comes from his opponent, and as one Canadian soldier exclaimed: "The SS were a bad bunch of bastards, but were they ever soldiers!"

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3

German General Kurt "Panzer" Meyer's autobiography is a fascinating insight into the mind of one of Germany's most highly decorated and successful soldiers of World War II. If you love small-unit actions, this is the book for you. Follow Meyer with the 1st SS-Panzer Division "Leibstandarte" and the 12th SS-Panzer Division "Hitlerjugend," from the first day of the war in Poland, through service in France, Russia, and Greece, up until his capture in Normandy in 1944 and his postwar trials and tribulations.

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