excellent memoir. I felt it was more authentic then Guy sajer’s forgotton soldier, which has received criticism for its authenticity and the fact that the guy fights for years in GD and ends the war a corporal.
In deadly combat was an eastern front memoir with many brutal, unglamorous events that was written by the author to his men as a way of preserving their history. He was a member of one of the anonoymous german divisions that perished in the soviet union.
bidermann progressed from an anti-tank gun leader to a recon battalion major during the war. out of his orginal 12 man squad, only him and two others survived the war, suffering five or more wounds or maimed.
the last portion of the book details the suffering in the soviet gulag, where a large percentage of the prisoners died from hunger.
an interesting feature in the book is that there are lots of photographs of bidermann and the men of his battalion rather than reproduced run of the mill war photos.