DEATH MARCH THROUGH RUSSIA The Memoir of Lothar Herrmann

For students of history, Herrmann’s memoir offers little new insight into the Wehrmacht’s operations on the Eastern Front, though it does note, for instance, that ordinary soldiers increasingly blamed their generals for Germany’s military collapse by July 1944.
Its real value lies in Herrmann’s postwar experience as a Soviet prisoner of war—a perspective that remains poorly understood. As Roger Moorhouse notes in his foreword, such captives “were scarcely commemorated, let alone written about,” often dismissed as painful reminders of defeat. Herrmann’s account joins those of Gottlob Bidermann and Oskar Scheja in documenting the brutal conditions endured by German POWs under Soviet custody.
Raised in Bavaria and shaped by the Reich Labour Service, Herrmann joined a Gebirgsdivision in 1940, fought through southern Ukraine, and was captured in Romania in 1944. Transferred to Soviet labor camps, he survived where two-thirds of his comrades perished, returning home only in 1949. Presented through extensive interviews by Klaus Willmann, this rare memoir offers a vivid, deeply personal perspective on the staggering human cost endured by the three million German soldiers held by the Red Army.