Heroes For Sale

I’d read the book by H.H. Kirst back in high school, but for the longest time could not find it – it was in storage since 1990.  Finally we went through our boxes and I fished it out and read it again for the first time since then.  My review is below.

            In the meantime, I went looking online for it and determined that a completely different story by the same name, as a movie, came out in 1933 (Kirst’s book dates from 1980).

Movie.  A pair of US soldiers in WWI suffer odd fates.   Thomas Holmes is captured by the Germans and although conscientiously treated by their excellent military doctors, winds up addicted to morphine, which compromises his ability to get work back in the US when he returns.   However, his friend, out of shame – he got credit for a heroic act which Holmes committed, but never had the nerve to tell the truth about what happened, so he feels like a fraud – gets him a job.  A Red, Max, spouts angry revolutionary jargon until he strikes it rich from patents for labor-saving devices, then he turns into the very capitalist pig he once denounced.  Later, the Great Depression strikes, and Holmes winds up as yet another hobo tramping across America in search of a job.  The film is much more cynical, but considerably more realistic, than the overrated Depression film “It’s A Wonderful Life”.  So much crap happens to Holmes, yet he remains a sympathetic character throughout the entire film.

Book.   This was a much later book written by Kirst, who served as a Wehrmacht officer during WWII and wrote many, many stories on that topic.  This book focuses on an extravagant training camp, AFSIC Kampfental, in southern Germany in 1944.  The main character is Corporal Singer, a clever slacker who manages to keep himself from being promoted to sergeant but generally tends to do pretty well for himself without being too cynical.   The story injects situation reports on Germany’s waning fortunes as the war progressed and intriguing biographies of the major characters. 

There’s even an SS officer who is, quite naturally, not portrayed very likeably, and who discloses details about the “Final Solution”; the book seems to imply that most Germans in the Wehrmacht only learned of it late in 1944 after most of the Jews had already been killed.  But Kirst is also honest enough to imply that a substantial element of “hear no evil, see no evil” had been present up until that point.

            My favorite part is when they censor the trainees’ mail and discover one who isn’t impressed with the Fuhrer:  “The man’s just a jumped up corporal, taking it out on the world because the Army, which was commanded by morons and still is, never saw fit to make him an officer….” [FREEDOM!]

Naturally, between the two of them I’m more favorably disposed to the WWII story from a German perspective, but the movie was well worth watching.  While I’m on the topic of Germans feeling sorry for themselves over WWII, there’s also Forgotten Soldier, by Guy Sajer (an Alsatian soldier who was as much French as German), and Legion of the Damned, by Sven Hassel (Danish volunteer in the Wehrmacht).   I’ve already reviewed The Devil’s Guard at length earlier, the true story of Waffen SS veterans fighting the Viet Minh as part of the French Foreign Legion.