Poorly Done Retrospective

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	• Totenkopf Charles Trang Editions Heimdal, 2007 - 480 pages average customer review:based on 4 reviews view larger image
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Nollig

I pre ordered this item twice, and remained patient for two long periods so as to get the 20% discount, and twice it became unavailable. I feel betrayed by Amazon now that it is available, but only at full price.

Very Informative Book

This book is very informative on Totenkopf the best ive ever seen. If your one of those people that thinks a picture is worth a Thousand words then this book is for you. I own many many many WWII books and had seen what i thought were just about all the picture books on the subject. Trangs book has picture i have never seen with wonderful descriptions and unit operations and battles. A must have book for anyone interested in the Waffen SS and Totenkopf. A second book that I rate as highly as Trangs is Paul Carell's Operation Barbarossa in Photographs which Amazon also sells....both books are a must have for the German WW2 enthusiast.

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It's in english...

First things first, it's written in english, buy with confidence, one of the few Heimdal volumes to be so. It's a massive book (480 pages) with hundreds of photos of the Totenkopf (the premier Waffen SS Division of all time and one of the toughest), the one about which Zhukov once said, "everywhere I went I found the Totenkopf". The despective editorial comes as no surprise, as to this day Waffen SS soldiers are vilified by their enemies. Fighting men of this mettle are no more. Very few formations during WWII would have endured the hardships this unit went through and come out in the end still an effective and cohesive combat unit. Theodor Eicke did a fine job in turning these men into the consumate fighting machine, the embodiment of the finest ideals and qualities of a true fascist and made them the pride of the Waffen SS divisions. Their history need not be retold, Demyansk, Kharkov, Kursk are all soaked with their blood and their memory shall live for ever in as much as the new generations wonder who these men really were and what they fought for... namely, to forsake Europe and the western world from jewish bolshevism.

Besides a fluid and concise narrative of the division's battles it includes a 40 or so pages section devoted to Regiment Thule near the end of the book, this section only is written in both french and english, the rest of the book is in english. The printing quality is excellent and most of the photos are sharp and focused. This book is worth every penny and no true Waffen SS collector can be without it. This book will go fast, so don't wait too long to get your hands on a copy. Well worth the long wait.

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Poorly Done Retrospective

This book is a massive tome of photographs of the SS-Totenkopf Division. The several hundred photographs included in the book are very well organized in chronological order. There were only a very few photographs that did not appear to be of Totenkopf troops, equipment, or personnel. Nonetheless, the book has several very severe shortcomings that do not justify paying the exorbitant price second-hand dealers are now charging for this book, which apparently went rapidly out of print. These shortcoming (defects, really) include:

First, many photos are not very well reproduced. I would go as far as to say that the majority of the photos included are not of very good quality. An exception to this is the inclusion at the end of the book of an ENTIRE ALBUM, approximately 50 pages, of photos of the short-lived, and ever-changing, Thule regiment. These photos are all of exceptionally high quality and may be worth the price of the book itself for some, notwithstanding its other defects.

Second, the introductory chapter on the origins of the Totenkopf divsion is very poorly written and woefully incomplete and inadequate. Unfortunately, this chapter is a precursor of the remaining chapters, which are also not well written because too much focus is placed on the movements of troops and changes in personnel with little explanation of whether the Totenkopf troops actually performed well. Here also, there are exceptions in that it is clear that Totenkopf did not perform well in the invasion of France (when the division was still in its infancy) and it is equally clear that it performed outstandingly well in the closing stages of its time in the Soviet Union (when it was often outnumbered 10 to 1 and faced as many as 24 attacks in the course of a single day, all the while being comprised primarily of replacement troops).

Third, and perhaps most importantly, the translation in this book is atrocious, among the worst I have ever seen. Virtually every sentence of every chapter and every sentence of the caption of every photograph in this book contains several errors in meaning, synapse, spelling, and capitalization that almost renders the text unreadable. Since a major selling point of this book is that it is in English, not French, the purported translation is really quite a disappointment.

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The history of the famous armored division involved in the fighting from the outset in 1939 right up until the end of the war, and also in war crimes analyzed here.

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