This book comprises a long letter from a German grandfather to his British grandson about his final days on the Eastern Front as a Wehrmacht soldier retreating from the Red Army's onslaught.
As he acknowledges that Germany is about to suffer its final defeat, he realises that it deserves to. In telling of the confusion and horrors that he and his small band of comrades experienced in a few days, he tries to make sense of his part in blame for Nazi Germany's conduct throughout World War II in times of victory and defeat.
He writes of a sense of guilt but most of all, he feels shame for the part he and others "ordinary" Germans played.
The letter expands to cover the grandfather's experiences before and after the war. How he wanted to become a scientist and felt that the war robbed him of that chance. Later, he describes what happened after his capture and brief internment before returning home and meeting the woman who would become his wife. Large parts of the story are given over to his post war life and there are also occasional chapters in which the British grandson writes about his grandparents.
Basically, this is a memoir of World War II told from the point of view of a German soldier who does his best to explain his own involvement in Nazi Germany's war machine which led to the deaths of millions, mostly civilians who didn't die in battle but were brutally murdered. Whether this one man - and Germans like him - were good or evil is something the reader must decide. This is an absorbing read which poses some disturbing questions which have no easy answers.

I had a few issues with this book, like some it read as being a little contrived. The addition of the grandson's comments were I felt unnecessary in their places but were perhaps worthy of a concluding chapter of their own.
Personally not for me but I can see how it provokes different reactions amongst others.
Thank you to John Murray (Publishers) and NetGalley for the opportunity to give an unbiased review.

What a different perspective you have on WW2 when the protagonist is on the opposite side to your own country. This is a book that challenges preconceptions about the nature of battle and belonging. Fascinating to read - even if the structure feels at times a little contrived.

Thought provoking and stirring. This is the first time I’ve read a war story as seen from a German point of view. The soldiers in this story all came across as ordinary men at war - scared, exhausted and just wanting it all to be over.
I thought it was extremely well written and didn’t create negative feeling for either side. It just told a story of a period in history and gave food for thought.
Definitely one I’d recommend.

Reading about the war, from the 'other side' from first hand experience, made an interesting change. A soldier who really wanted to be a scientist, ending up in a war fighting for his life, and proving that whatever side you are on, there are no real winners in war.

As someone living in germany , I enjoyed reading this book to get more insight into how one German soldier percieved the 2nd world war.

We very often see these kind of memories and stories told by one side only and yet we forget an entire nation of people suffered just as much. This was an eye opener to what life was like for those that we’re forced to suffer like the rest of the world.

Highly recommend.

We Germans is a thoughtful and involving book from an unusual and revealing perspective. It is in the form of a letter from a German veteran of the Eastern Front in the Second World War, responding to his British grandson’s questions about the war. He concentrates on a period of just a few days in autumn 1944 when the long, ruinous retreat from Russia has turned into an undignified, exhausted, straggling scramble to evade the pursuing Russian forces. There are reminiscences and digressions which create a context and also some interventions from the grandson, but this is chiefly a stark, human portrait of defeat, the realisation that he has been fighting for something fundamentally wrong and his attempt to resolve and come to terms with his part in what has happened.

I found it readable and gripping, and also quite profound in places. The handful of main characters are convincing and human, as is their interaction with each other. There are some scenes of real horror and Alexander Starritt evokes very well the revulsion but also, after nearly four years of fighting, the jaded acceptance of his narrator. His analysis of the lack of guilt but sense of genuine shame is very shrewd, I think, as is his discussion of whether having fought for Germany under the Nazis automatically makes one an evil person. These are complex and nuanced questions which are too often seen as simple binary moral issues and I think Starritt brings a wider, thoughtful perspective to the questions.

I did find the interventions from the grandson a distraction and rather a clumsy, unnecessary device – although his thoughts on dealing with his mixed heritage are interesting and worthwhile. In spite of this, I found We Germans a very engrossing read which has left me wiser than I was, I think. Slightly flawed, but still very good and recommended.

(My thanks to John Murray for an ARC via NetGalley.)

A truly eye opening book, we only ever read books or see films portraying the various wars from the perspective of the victors and the heroes, it was really enjoyable to read the what it was like for the Germans during the war

We Germans is a fascinating and often gritty account of a young German soldier’s experiences on the Eastern campaign. Told as a long form letter to his grandson – who had asked how his grandfather’s generation could have allowed the atrocities of WWII – it gives a ruthlessly honest, unflinching and poignant answer to the question of ‘how?’ It shows that the dissemination of information was not even handed or liberal. While the soldier does not plead ignorance of innocence, his account does make you understand how a person can be swept up in huge events, unable to see their shape from the inside. This is an important book that does not seek to justify but to understand.

Thanks to John Murray Press and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.


"We Germans" is a an accomplished forensic examination of the human condition - thoughtful and erudite.

Alexander Staritt's "We Germans" is one of the most powerful, urgent novels about the human condition I have read in a long while. The premise is straightforward: a dialogue in letter form between a young British man and his German grandfather about the latter's experiences of World War II, on the Eastern Front. Whilst we know much about the fierce, depraved conditions of this theatre of battle, normally stories are told about the sheer wickedness, if not downright evil, of the punishment battalions, the mass slaughter of Jews and the wholesale murder of inhabitants of the former Soviet States. There is an element of this in "We Germans", too, but this novel is not about the calculated and planned murderous acts of the Third Reich, it is about how a young man, who dreamed of becoming a scientist, became part of the broader brushstrokes of history - that collective view of nations and states with their winners and losers and simple binaries of good and evil, that often forget the individual at the heart of the collective. This is emphatically a story of the individual. How perfectly ordinary individuals can do extraordinary things. How we all, given the right conditions, can lose that scrap of conscience that, to a greater or lesser degree, make us human. War is ugly, depraved, and perhaps it is not possible to judge any individual action in the mist of such chaotic inhumanity by the standards of the more passive rhythms of peacetime. Who knows? Perhaps this is the overwhelming point of "We Germans". We rush to judgement at our peril. Indeed, there are no easy answers about the eponymous collective guilt Germans are supposed to feel for the ancestral carnage of the war and the 'banality of evil' that was an intrinsic part of the Holocaust. Perhaps other readers will take different lessons from this book. I hope so, "We Germans" deserves our consideration.

My first Netgalley book!

I'll be honest, to start with I wasn't entirely sure if this was fiction or non-fiction. That will teach me to read the blurb properly!

I don't want to say I enjoyed the book due to the subject matter but this book was definitely one that stuck with me when I wasn't reading it. It's the first I've read showing the other sides view of WW2 and especially from the Eastern side of fighting rather than the Western Front.

I did struggle at times with the grammar, there were parts of the story telling where it was hard to differentiate who was talking and I ended up skimming through these parts.

This is a fascinating read. I don't know much about Germany's Eastern campaign in WWII, except that it was grim. This book really shows you how grim it was, and how vile the atrocities were that were committed there. It's also an interesting reflection on complicity and responsibility. Who is responsible for these acts? The soldiers who commit them, but also the people who put them there, and by extension, the people who put THEM there.

I've always been interested in what it was like for ordinary Germans in WWII. This book shows you how easy it would be to just "go along" with things, and also how - when the rules completely break down, when you're starving, when everybody's trying to kill you - you can become something very different to the person you started out as.

I was drawn to this book as it tells the story of a young German soldier's experience in the war, a perspective that I have always been curious about.

The writing was beautiful, emotional and gripping. The experience is told in letter form, following a request from a grandson to his grandfather to hear about his war experience. Begrudgingly it is shared, the recollections still raw. It really hits home that the men on the ground for Germany did not know the full extent of what was going on. Their experiences varied depending on where they fought.

This novel does not glamourise or plead ignorance, it is honest. He does not pretend he didn't see anything, he does not pretend he never killed anyone. This brings to life the daily grind of war, the confusion and the shame felt both during and afterwards.

A very good read, I highly recommend it. Thank you to @netgalley for the opportunity to review.

Released on May 14th 2020.

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Very heartfelt book to read. I really enjoyed it. It had such a poignant story to tell. It was well written and flowed very well. It was one of the best reads of the year