"The Forgotten Soldier" by Guy Sajer

[panzerschreck1]

Hi Doug!

So there is a movie to be made out of it supposedly!
I hope they will pay attention to some details i had mentioned and studied about the GD fighting near Belgorod or Konotop and on other places...
Its been a while but from what i have found out is that allthough Belgorod and Konotop are not really coinciding with hard facts i took a very carefull look at the episodes when he was fighting in Memel and especially everything that happened after the Memel bridgehead is so true and factbased!

Anyone reread my previous posts also the one i have posted about Memel on panzerarchiv.de and retrace it with the book...it all adds up!

I hope some of my research can be used in order to reconstruct certain events.

[Frederick L Clemens]

Doug, the reason you always keep coming back to where you started is that Sajer's book has so many errors of so many different types. It's the nature of the beast. I would contend that even for a "true" account, Sajer has more errors than any other true account and even many fictional accounts. I believe that fact cripples the book as a usable account irreparably.

You can come up with explanations (documented or speculated) for each and every error, but it doesn't remove the errors from the source text. So, you should not be surprised or discouraged, but motivated to change your approach in defending the book. This piecemeal approach to defending the book doesn't work. You can explain one error but then the focus can always shift to another error - because Sajer has so many.

I consider myself to be one of the original critics of the book and remain so. What I thought of doing over 10 years ago, but failed to do, was to post a page by page critique of the contents of the book. To me, that seemed to be the only way to handle the plethora of issues contained within that one book. I think time has proven me correct, as shown in the continuing threads on the subject. No one can adequately defend or criticize this book in a forum thread.

I recommend that you put up a website to:
1) promote your fine books,
2) maintain a running and detailed defense of Sajer's books - going through the book page by page. (Perhaps if you do that and get an complete count of the error rate, you will have more appreciation for us critics.)

[Doug Nash]

Thank you Fred. I was wondering why you had absented yourself from the debate for so long. Welcome back to the fray!
Cheers,
Doug

[Frederick L Clemens]

Something I rarely see mentioned, if at all, in the discussion of the Sajer book is the availability of reference material for Sajer when he wrote his book. The assumption is often made that Sajer wrote his book on his own completely from memory or from fabrication. People act as if the 50's and 60's were the Stone Age when it came to info about WW2.

That is not the case. Sajer was an educated and literate man. He spoke French and German. The 1950's were a Golden Age of publications on WW2, including many of the seminal unit histories. Many news publications contained serializations of new books on the war as they came out.This was a time when obviously the bulk of the veterans of the war were still alive and very active. The first Treffen of the veterans of Panzer Regiment 35 took place in 1951!

Mot importantly, Spaeter's trilogy on Grossdeutschland was published in 1958.

Now, I always found it curious that Spaeter was very loose when it came to dates and locations in some parts of his book, and yet very accurate about GD locations in the later parts of his book. Some people point to that as proof that he really was with GD. But how could Sajer be so accurate in one spot but wildly off in another? Does that make sense? Could Sajer remember 1945 but not 1944 and 1943?

I submit that there are two possible explanations
- Sajer was a vet with a faulty memory who curiously strove to be accurate in one section but didn't give a flip about the rest of the book - despite the availability of cross-checking references - that makes him disrespectful of his readers.
- Sajer was a fabricator who perhaps got a hold of Vol 3 of Spaeter's history and incorporated the info from there to add a little more authenticity to his rousing combat tale.

Either way, I'd like to see the critics and defenders alike, take into account the environment in which he wrote his book. His errors were not made in a vacuum. I've seen other vets who conscientiously attempted to verify their own memories and the results I find to be far superior to the Sajer mess.

[phylo_roadking]

The 1950's were a Golden Age of publications on WW2, including many of the seminal unit histories. Many news publications contained serializations of new books on the war as they came out.This was a time when obviously the bulk of the veterans of the war were still alive and very active

This is perfectly true - and is something VERY often forgotten now by modern commentators - Smelser and Davies come to mind. Not only was there an amazing of amount of material being published in various media - there was ALSO...and perhaps MORE importantly...a much greater mass-market demand for the material driving the publishing industry to pick this all up. People as a whole were hungry for details of the war - veterans for others' reminiscences, small boys for their fathers' and relatives deeds, people as a whole for the heroes and deeds they get now from the telly or the comic book. And as long as there was a marketplace for it all - there was REAL money to be made, and writers of memoirs/diaries/personal campaign and event histories ALL enjoyed a heyday.

As well as the Axis side, the decade saw the publication of the VAST bulk of Allied "official regimental histories" and service histories - the majority now forgotten about - but also the more "personal" element; look for example at the first edition dates on RAF fighter pilots' or bomber crews' memoirs, Crete veterans' memoirs, D-Day veterans', Combined Ops, merchant sailors', or the more popularist SOE or Miliitary Intelligence memoirs that didn't fall foul of any government confidentiality laws LOL The vast majority are products of the 1950s. People with a point to make- the likes of Churchill, or Cunningham in the Med - got their say in early in the late '40's....and much later a different generation of retired "rankers" got their say in the 1960s and 1970s as they had the TIME to write...but the 1950's was definitely the heyday of subalterns and middle-ranking officers who had at last had more time on their hands to go into print.

[Frederick L Clemens]

Yes, i can give one more example. I was at the BAMA in Freiburg last week and was reading thru a file on the background to the making of the 11.PD division history. One letter from von Wietersheim, the former division commander, struck me. In 1965!!, he was bemoaning the fact that the division history was not yet written and he feared that the point of no return had been reached where there were no longer enough vets left who would make it financially viable to publish the history.

Thus, turning this back to Sajer - I make my case that Sajer well deserves the criticism he receives, even if his story is "true". Sajer published a sloppy account at a time when many other vets were taking great pains to accurately record the history of the war. Sajer could have written a good novel or an accurate account - he chose to do neither.

[Doug Nash]

Fred,
as you well know, Sajer was a private. A low-ranking guy, like you and I both were at one time. Von Wietersheim and most of the rest of the writers we have noted here were officers or NCOs during the war, who had better access to information than a private would. Since he volunteered when he was 16 years old, it is safe to say that he did not complete the standard French grammar school education - add to that is the fact that his education was disrupted by the events of May 1940, when he and the rest of his family became refugees. He was not a college educated graduate in 1942, or 1945, and doesn't claim to have ever completed any college course. In every respect, he was probably like most of the rest of his countrymen, of average intelligence, and of limited education.
Sajer's mother tongue was French. He became more proficient in German the longer the war lasted, but in 1945 was abruptly forced to revert back to French. Think about that for a moment - you're 16 years old, you speak German poorly, and you, by your own volition, go to war in a foreign army whose language you only partially understand. Think about the psychological and emotional shocks he must have endured from that fact alone. OK, fast forward 10 years - you're sitting in your Paris flat, suffering from the aftereffects of dysentery and most likely PTSD, and you need to write about your experiences as a way of achieving some sort of emotional catharsis. You want to write about what happened to you and what you saw and endured. So you pick up a pen (at night - he had a day job as an illustrator) and write late into the evening. You have no internet, no Borders, no Books-a-million, no Barnes and Noble, and all the bookstores or libraries only have (naturally) French reference works on the war. You are not connected to the military historian community, and you have no diary that you kept. So you go by your own memory, perhaps an atlas, some old newspapers, and probably some French reference books on the war to go by, most of which are slanted or biased. Although Spaeter had published his 3-volume set of the GD in 1958, you don't have that, don't even know it exists. But you have your vivid memories of what happened, and are pretty sure of the order in which they happened. You write your memories in a series of spiral bound notebooks and set them aside and move on to other things. 10 years later a friend who works for a right-wing French language Belgian periodical (I also know that person) convinces you to allow parts of your memoire to be published in a serialized format. For whatever reason, your stories generate a great deal of acclaim, perhaps because it resonates with a large segment of the population in Belgium (and France) that is still coming to grips with the larger meanings of the war and their role in it. It is noticed by the French publishing industry, and Editions Robert Laffont buys the rights to it and publishes it to wide acclaim.
I can't vouch for the editing of the book, and we already know that the various translations are rife with errors. Sajer himself won't vouch for the accuracy of everything he wrote, but did tell me that he wrote down everything as best as he could remember. He said that most of the time he didn't know where the hell he was, but tried to nail down the locality as much as his memory would allow. He said he didn't write the complete history of the Russian Campaign or the history of the GD. He wrote his own story, his own memoire, focusing on what he saw and experienced, especially from an emotional standpoint. He didn't write to satisfy rivet-counters or modern day historians - he wrote it for himself. And if you find value in that, then good for you. If you don't, then there are plenty of other more accurate accounts out there to read instead. But again, if you want to know what it was like for the average German Landser - not NCO, not officer, not General - what it was like for the poor dumb b-stards stuck in that hell, how it feels to be cold, hungry, frightened and sick, as well as hopeless, then it's still a damned good read and still stands the test of time for that very reason.
If not, or if the readership of this forum doesn't get the gist of the argument, go back to the beginning of this thread, back to page one, and start reading the whole thing again.
Fred and I will disagree on this until hell freezes over or until Putin becomes a humanitarian, whichever comes first, and we respectfully agree to disagree. But I am still convinced in the overwhelming authenticity of Sajer's work and still recommend it to anyone who wants to experience combat on the Eastern Front, albeit vicariously, from the foxholes-eye view.
Cheers all,
Doug Nash

[Annelie]

He wrote his own story, his own memoire, focusing on what he saw and experienced, especially from an emotional standpoint. He didn't write to satisfy rivet-counters or modern day historians - he wrote it for himself.

But I am still convinced in the overwhelming authenticity of Sajer's work and still recommend it to anyone who wants to experience combat on the Eastern Front, albeit vicariously, from the foxholes-eye view.

Thankyou for input, it brought everything into focus for me.
As with most whom wrote their memoires they too wrote their story for themselves and families and it helps to realize
from whence they come and how it affected them.

I too am aware I am reading an memoire not an Historical
reference book and will continue to read memoires this way.

[Frederick L Clemens]

Doug, your version of how the book came to be is a lot like Sajer's book. It is hard to tell where the facts end and the speculation begins.

Much of what you write about the publishing history of the book is new to me and probably to others, but I simply don't buy the depiction of Sajer living in an information vacuum or the "I was just a private" story. Sajer was living in one of the most literate countries in the world and if he was in Paris, one of the centers of information. Simple privates do not write their memoirs, otherwise we would have millions of memoirs from them. Sajer is an intellectual and bears the responsibility for creating an intellectually conscientious and honest work.

I also don't think it is reasonable for you to label his critics as "rivet-counters". When a person points out the red flag of someone claiming to have been a student pilot in a Ju-87 without having had at least a year of flight schooling beforehand - that isn't rivet-counting. That's holding someone accountable to historical truth - faulty memory, bad translation, or whatever.

[Doug Nash]

Fred,
Like I've said a few times before, I respect your opinion but must disagree with you. Should I ever meet him during filming, I shall pose some of your questions to him, for I, too, am curious about a few minor things. Until then, we shall have to deal with what we have until the perfect WWII memoir comes along (but don't hold your breath!).
Cheers,
Doug

[John P. Moore]

I'm in complete agreement with the explanations that Doug Nash has offered today. Sajer did not set out to write the definitive history of the GD Division, but only his recollection of his experiences in the military. I have heard war stories from quite a few German veterans and their descriptions of dates and places did not always match up with what was found in official documents in their personnel files that were not available to them for consultation at the time. That's just how things were.

John

[B Hellqvist]

Despite the IMO rude dismissal by one of the moderators here, and leaving the discussion to its endless tug-of-war, I've decided to post the rest of my comments on TFS. Here's something for you to mull over, and if I'm repeating some of the info that has surfaced earlier in this thread, I beg forgiveness.


Chapter 10

This chapter takes place sometime in October, as Sajer mentions that it is almost three months to his 18th birthday. While on his soon-to-be-terminated leave, he meets a veteran soldier who tells him that he was a prisoner of war in Holland for a couple of years after WW1. Holland/the Netherlands was neutral during WW1, but German soldiers were interned there.


Chapter 11

Sajer is told that GD is stationed near Vinnitsa, but that his company is some 150 km further away. In real life, GD was fighting east of Krivoi Rog, over 400 km from Vinnitsa.

Sajer learns that new tanks are coated with an antimagnetic paste; this is correct, as Zimmerit was applied on tanks beginning earlier in the autumn of 1943. He also learns that the Russians have copied the Panzerfaust; this isn’t correct.


Chapter 12

On page 386, Sajer notes a German halftrack with an “anti-tank machine gun”. Perhaps it is a 20 mm autocannon for AA use, deployed against ground targets. The Soviet tank engaged by it isn’t impressed…


Chapter 13

The winter of 1943-44 was milder than previous winters, so the temperatures quoted might be exaggerated. The town of Boporievska (or something similar-sounding) cannot be found among Ukrainian towns and cities larger than 2,500 inhabitants (present).

Three IS-2 Stalin tanks drop by around the New Year, offering a rare glimpse of a tank that didn’t make its battlefield debut until later in the spring of 1944… They are fired upon by PaK 36 37 mm AT guns, a weapon deemed obsolete and no found in the GD TOE; PaK 38 50 mm AT guns were fielded by GD instead.

There’s no mention of the transfer of GD to Kirovograd.

Page 418: ”The front on the Rumanian border had held.” This was, according to Sajer, the result of the battles in January 1944. Funny, as historically the fighting was some 200 km to the east. Soviet troops didn’t reach the Rumanian border until April.


Chapter 14

Sajer is spending a couple of months (January – March) in a camp south of Lvov (then in Poland). The camp is situated near the village Sueka. There’s a village named Sivka-Voynilov by the Dniester, which is 80 km south-east of Lvov. No mention of GD’s battles at Kirovograd and Rovnoye. He also refers to “the carnage at Vinnitsa”. The city was taken by the Russians on 20 March, so for once Sajer’s chronology is in agreement with history. Also, his mention of the new uniforms (M44’s) is correct; while it wasn’t introduced until September that year, GD was one of several divisions which had received it for field tests. Many replacements wore it. The new quality of the cloth is also correct, as the uniforms were made out of a wool/cellulose blend. The mention of “Brandenburg disciplinary battalions” is false, though – the Brandenburg units were highly trained commandos (later in the war more like regular field units).


Chapter 15

The whole Bessarabian/Rumanian chapter is highly dubious. Sajer claims that some GD units were spread over Bessarabia (the region between Rumania and Ukraine), while the bulk of the division was fighting north of Lvov and in the north-eastern part of Byelorussia. Sajer’s own company and two other companies were involved in anti-partisan warfare in Bessarabia. This chapter takes place in April and May, Sajer even mentions that a band of partisans had been located by the end of May. It might be of interest that historically, the bulk of the division was engaged in combat in northern Bessarabia (about 700 km from NE Byelorussia) during April and May, and after that the fighting around Târgul Frumos by the end of April and the larger part of May (the main Battle of Târgul Frumos took place on 2-7 May). Sajer doesn’t say which battalion he belongs to, but if he still was in the 1. Battalion of the PzGr-Reg GD, then it was present at the Battle of Târgul Frumos. 15 june, GD (minus parts of the PzReg GD and PzFüs-Reg GD) was transferred to an area 100 km south of Jassy (Iasi), where it remained for R&R until 24 July. Meanwhile, Sajer’s rump battalion appears to have been cut loose, left on its own in anti-partisan warfare, and after Captain Weisreidau’s death it disintegrates. They are even ordered to march north (p. 453), which doesn’t make sense, as their own lines were to the west. Some pages later they are nearing the Rumanian border, so they must’ve turned left somewhere along the way. Sajer’s group is part of a column of stragglers, stumbling across the Ukrainian steppe. There’s mention of 30 soldiers dying of starvation; somehow, I find that less probable. Later, they reach a city called Reghin in Rumania, some 280 km to the south of the camp by the Dniester as the bird flies. Sajer says it was called “Arlau, or Erlau” back then; Erlau was the German name for the city of Eger in Hungary, some 300 km further west. It has been suggested that “Arlau” could be the Rumanian town Hârlău, about 25 km north of Jassy. How Sajer could confuse Hârlău with Reghin isn’t clear, but Hârlău makes more sense geographically. It is less probable that partisans were active in Bessarabia, and if they were, it had been the task of the Rumanian army to suppress them. Sajer doesn’t mention how he came to be rejoined with the rest of GD, which was resting 200 km east by south-east.

All told, the chapter, which is another powerful description of the depravations of war, doesn’t make much sense, unless one takes into account his poor sense of dates, places and other essentials. His woozy recollections of anything but personal details and emotions, makes it impossible to corroborate his claims as to his whereabouts during long periods of time. Large parts of his trek must have been in terrain behind enemy lines. This chapter made me seriously doubt the veracity of his account; he might have experienced some of it, but all of it…?


Chapter 16

Again, Sajer isn’t with the main body of GD. The Division is fighting in Lithuania, but he writes that he rejoins his regiment somewhere near Danzig (according to hints in the text). He refers to Volkssturm units, but as those were raised in late October 1944, it doesn’t fit with his descriptions of the Soviet advances to the Baltic coast. On page 484, it appears like his unit ends up south of the Soviet thrust to the coast, which was reached on 9 October, and thus not in the Memel bridgehead.


Chapter 17

On page 497, it is apparent that Sajer must have confused things in the previous chapter, as his position is now north of a Soviet thrust to the coast, and that Memel is the closest option. The date is probably around 10 October. He mentions that English and Canadian prisoners are caught up in the chaos of Memel; it could be possible that they came from Stalag Luft 6 at Heydekrug (Silute in Lithuania), but the PoWs were evacuated to Stalag Luft 4 in the summer of 1944. There was another PoW camp farther south (Oflag 53) that was active longer, but it isn’t clear which nationalities were held there.

Sajer mentions receiving a new firearm, “the new P.M. which the Volkssturm had recently distributed – an extremely effective weapon which combined features of both the F.M and the old P.M.” It is obvious that the translator hasn’t figured out a couple of pretty easy abbreviations, ”F.M.” = ”fusil mitrailleur” (machinegun or automatic rifle), and ”P.M.” = ”pistolet mitrailleur” (submachine gun). Sajer has confused the cheap automatic weapon used in limited numbers by the Volkssturm, the Volksgewehr VG 1-5, with the MP44 assault rifle. Besides, the VG 1-5 wasn’t produced until January 1945 in Thuringia, and it is doubtful that it could’ve reached Memel before the Germans evacuated the city.

“Großdeutschland” was evacuated from the Memel bridgehead, beginning on 26 November. The last GD units left on 4 December, reaching Königsberg by boat. Sajer sees the heavy cruiser “Prinz Eugen” provide naval bombardment of Soviet units, but he must be mistaken; “Prinz Eugen” was in Gotenhafen for maintenance during December, and didn’t see action again until 29-31 January, when she was deployed north of Königsberg. By this time, Sajer had left Memel (probably in early December), so he must’ve seen another warship.


Chapter 18

In this chapter, Sajer’s account makes more sense. He spends about three weeks in Pillau, referring to the “January cold”. He mentions a “metal cross” on a slight rise outside the town; there really was a stone cross raised in 1830 to commemorate the martyrdom of Saint Adalbert, and which was later destroyed by the Soviets. Later, he manages to make it to Danzig, where he hears rumours about the sinking of a refugee ship, the “Wilhelm Gustloff” (sunk on 30 January).

While Sajer is in Pillau, Danzig and Gotenhafen, PzGr-Reg GD and PzFüs-Reg GD fought south of Königsberg. The remnants of the regiments were evacuated on 29 March from Balga to Pillau and continued combat. Sajer describes the Soviet attacks on Gotenhafen, which dates the text to the last week of March. Gotenhafen fell to the Soviets on 28 March.


Chaper 19

Sajer and the others arrive to Hela. He learns that it is Sunday the 28th or 29th of March (the last Sunday of March 1945 was the 25th). On 1 April, he boards the hospital ship ”Pretoria” and sails for Denmark, escorted by a battleship. There was really a “Pretoria” that sailed for Denmark on that day, and which was escorted by a battleship, probably “Lützow”.

As an aside, it is worth noting that Sajer mentions that his German is now much better than his French, which is in line with an earlier comment on page 214. Some people have commented that Sajer’s German remained poor during his Wehrmacht service, but that isn’t true.


Epilogue

Sajer mentions that after the war, he served in the French Army. There is evidence that he served for 10 months in the French Navy.

The End

[Frederick L Clemens]

Überhauptnichtsführer,

That is exactly the type of detailed run through that the whole Sajer controversy deserves. I get so frustrated with the excuse making. Yes, I'm aware that most veterans aren't interested or capable of writing the history of their unit. But a careful examination of Sajer's book shows an astounding number of concrete assertions and it isn't "rivet-counting" to look at those assertions with a critical eye. In some places, Sajer is very accurate about things that a "mere private" would not know - and in other places he is truly wacky about things that were the lifeblood of the infantryman. It does not add up as simple mistakes, gentlemen.

My own opinion is that Sajer did avail himself of reference material in order to jazz up the content - but like an amateur writing in an unfamiliar profession, sometimes he uses the info correctly and other times he shows his true colors. See Tom Clancy's early stuff for examples - that is before he had professional writers writing for him.

[B Hellqvist]

Regarding Sajer's experience of the Stuka, he doesn't say that he flew the plane, even as a passenger. "[B]ut those few moments on board the JU-87" might refer to him simply sitting in the pilot's seat while the plane was parked. Still, it doesn't seem like there was a Luftwaffe base in Chemnitz, so the question is where that Stuka was parked...

[Frederick L Clemens]

Regarding Sajer's experience of the Stuka, he doesn't say that he flew the plane, even as a passenger. "[B]ut those few moments on board the JU-87" might refer to him simply sitting in the pilot's seat while the plane was parked. Still, it doesn't seem like there was a Luftwaffe base in Chemnitz, so the question is where that Stuka was parked...

That is a classic Clintonian defense. He didn't say he "flew" the plane, he only said he was "in" the plane as a student pilot.

So let's be clear about this - NO FRIGGIN STUDENT PILOT GOT ANYWHERE NEAR A FRONT-LINE COMBAT AIRCRAFT FOR AT LEAST A YEAR ONCE HE WAS ACCEPTED INTO FLIGHT TRAINING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

For Sajer to have claimed to have been in a Stuka as a student pilot - flying, sitting, or whacking off - he is simply lying. Anyone who defends him on that point - and we are talking about PAGE ONE of his stinking memoirs, has not a clue about the Luftwaffe pilot training program.

A REAL student pilot would have first discussed his passion for flying as a youth, his glider training, his flight physical, his ground schooling, his first time in a trainer aircraft, etc, etc, etc - before he would ever have claimed to have been in a frontline aircraft.

As you can tell, I have a strong opinion on this point.