Blood Red Snow: The Memoirs of a German Soldier on the Eastern Front Audiobook

Gunter Koschorrek wrote his illicit diary on any scraps of paper he could lay his hands on. As keeping a diary was strictly forbidden, he sewed the pages into the lining of his thick winter coat and deposited them with his mother on infrequent trips home on leave. The diary went missing and it was when he was reunited with his daughter in America some forty years later that it came to light and became Blood Red Snow.

The author was a keen recruit at initial training and his excitement at the first encounter with the enemy in the Russian Steppe is obvious. The horror and confusion of fighting in the streets of Stalingrad are brought to life by his descriptions of the others in his unit; their differing manners and techniques for dealing with the squalor and death. He is also posted to Romania and Italy, assignments he remembers fondly compared to his time on the Eastern Front.

This book stands as a memorial to the huge numbers on both sides who did not survive and is, over five decades later, the fulfillment of a responsibility he feels to honor the memory of those who perished. Gunter K. Koschorrek was a machine-gunner on the Russian front in WWII. He lives in Germany, having retired from his job as managing director of a sales company.

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"A truly exceptional book that I predict will eventually become a major motion picture. Few books reflect more realistically the first hand experience of a German infantry soldier on the retreat from Russia. You get the sense of hopeless as he wait for death in a fox hole while a T-34 Russian tank spins its tank treads inches above your head. Alternatively, exhausted from lack of food and walking for days in the mud, he is prepared to lay down in the mud and wait for death, until a friend finds two horses to assist in their travels. The fact that he survive the war is a tribute to his will to survive when so many others did not. "

— Herb Schilling (5 out of 5 stars)