The Russian Penal Soldier of the Wehrmacht

9 hrs. 28 min.

Language Russian

Author Genrikh Erlikh

Narrator Dmitry Filimonov

Description

A штрафбат is a штрафбат everywhere—both in the USSR and in Hitler’s Germany. Only in the German penal battalion there’s no chance to escape the deadly circle: there, a criminal record isn’t erased by blood—there are endless levels of trials, and spilled blood is counted as credit points.

And who will help a штрафник if he was born in Russia, raised in the Third Reich, if he is German—but the native Volga is what he dreams about? If it’s the bloody summer of 1943—under his boots is Russian land, on his shoulder is a German Mauser rifle, and ahead is the Kursk Bulge?

How to survive, how to remain human, if you’re torn between two Motherlands—if you are russisch deutscber, a Russian German, a rank-and-file of the 570th test battalion of the Wehrmacht?

This novel offers a rare chance to look at the Great Patriotic War from the other side—through the eyes of a German man condemned to death, who went through the most terrible battles of the Eastern Front as part of one of the penal battalions that the Germans themselves dubbed “companies of ascent.”