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Title: Hitler's Last Courier by Armin D. Lehmann, Armin Dieter Lehmann, Francis H. Goranin, Tony Le Tissier ISBN: 0-7388-3121-2 Publisher: Xlibris Corporation Pub. Date: 15 January, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $26.99 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.74 (27 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A Boy's Survival
Comment: This is an insightful and well written story of a boy's coming of age in Hitler's Germany. He relates the story of how he survives and excels within the belief system in which he was raised and becomes the epitome of Hitler Youth. It shows us there are still many perspectives and stories yet to be discovered about WWII. This story proceeds as smoothly as fiction and it helps make the German people's incomprehensible support of Hitler understandable within the context of this German boy and his family. Beyond the historical perspective, it is a human story of survival and the quest to succeed and to do the what is right. This boy's view of what is "right" is antithetical to those of us post war who view it all with the wisdom of hindsight. It takes this sterotype and gives us more compassion for the German people and how they had to transform their belief system. This author has clearly done that with great success. The suspense builds at the end of the book as with a fine mystery novel and becomes a real page turner. This book will be enjoyed by those who are interested in history and also as an inspiration to young people.
Rating: 5
Summary: Lehmann teaches important lesson
Comment: The very idea of recognizing the validity of anything an admitted Nazi had to say was anathema to me: A Holocaust refugee who landed in America at age ten.
But, Hitler's Last Courier is making a difference. The message of the book is a magnificent paean to the honesty and integrity of the writer.
Armin Lehmann gives us a picture -- in meticulous, almost overly zealous, detail of how the Nazi machine worked in Germany. Idolatry of Hitler took over, became stronger than any religion, and all participants involved cheerfully allowed themselves to be brainwashed.
Little kids judged each others blondness, parents skillfully eliminated any non-Aryan ancestors from family trees. Armin Lehmann omits nothing. He even translates every military and youth-group term into English so that the reader will have a complete picture of the Nazi hierarchy.
As a youngster, it seems that duty and obedience -- part and parcel of many unsuccessful attempts to please his judgmental "SS"father -- were major priorities. And, on he went, to become a teen-age soldier, earning two Iron Cross medals for heroically saving his fellows even when he, himself, was grieviously wounded. His reward, at age 16, was being assigned as Courier in Hitler's final bunker.
So, why celebrate this book, this gray recount of Nazi bureaucracy, of Hitler's propaganda machine, of worship at the Nazi altar? What is there to gain from such an exposition?
In a word, everything!
Because at age 16, when Armin Lehmann was shown the carnage of the extermination camps, the residue of the ovens, the skeletal remains of both the dead and the barely living, he underwent a change that took charge of the rest of his life.
From that moment, he became a fierce advocate for non-violence, for peace, and a dedicated enemy of all hatred. And he has never stopped. He has given his heart and his soul to erasing even the most remote possibility that any kind of hate movement could ever arise again.
He pulls no punches, makes no attempt to deny guilt, fully accepts the karma that has painted his destiny as an activist.
This man is to be respected. Hitler's Last Courier was written for a reason. At this point in time, at this juncture between peace and a possibly deadly World War III, we must all heed the message his message.
This book is for all ages. Every potential skinhead, racist, Aryan Nation member, and homophobic kid on the block needs to read it, learn from it. History, in fact, does not need to repeat itself.
Rating: 3
Summary: Fact or fiction?
Comment: Having read a great many Eastern Front and last days of Berlin accounts, I can't just can't be certain of Lehmann's account.
It seems unbelievable to me that he was a part of Hitler's last public appearance outside of the Bunker, an appearance of which we know photographs do exist - see Hitler Youth, The Hitlerjugend in War and Peace 1933-1945, by Brenda Ralph Lewis, Spellmount, 2000 p185 - and yet there is not one photograph of the event (or indeed any photographs of Lehmann except for 1946 and 2000 pen portraits) contained in the book. For such a keen young photographer, it seems almost as unbelievable that not one of his photographs (or his family's) has survived and/or warranted inclusion in the book.
Finally, having received a shrapnel wound as serious as he seems to depict in early 1945, I find it hard to accept the account of his recovery. He goes from continuing severe pain on walking and fever only days before his release from hospital, to contiuing pain while standing on a train to his grandfather's house on leave, to no mention of any continuing side effects only ten days later when he rejoins his original Kampfgruppe.
Fact or fiction - your guess is as good as mine when you compare this seemingly incredible account to works from Sajer, Voss, Koschorrek or Zoepf.
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Title: The Real Odessa: Smuggling the Nazis to Peron's Argentina by Uki Goni, Yuki Goni ISBN: 1862075816 Publisher: Granta Books Pub. Date: September, 2002 List Price(USD): $27.95 |
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Title: The Labyrinth: Memoirs of Walter Schellenberg, Hitler's Chief of Counterintelligence by Walter Schellenberg, Louis Hagen, Alan Bullock ISBN: 0306809273 Publisher: DaCapo Press Pub. Date: February, 2000 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
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Title: Hitler Sites: A City-By-City Guidebook (Austria, Germany, France, United States) by Steven Lehrer ISBN: 0786410450 Publisher: McFarland & Company Pub. Date: 18 March, 2002 List Price(USD): $55.00 |
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Title: Interrogations: The Nazi Elite in Allied Hands, 1945 by Richard Overy ISBN: 0142001589 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: October, 2002 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
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Title: Until the Final Hour : Hitler's Last Secretary by Traudl Junge ISBN: 1559707283 Publisher: Arcade Publishing Pub. Date: 02 April, 2004 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
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