FRINK Linked Data Fragments server

Matches in SemOpenAlex for { <https://semopenalex.org/work/W1523290839> ?p ?o ?g. }

• W1523290839 endingPage "435" @default.
• W1523290839 startingPage "434" @default.
• W1523290839 abstract "Reviewed by: In Final Defense of the Reich: The Destruction of the Sixth SS Mountain Division “Nord.” Robert Weldon Whalen In Final Defense of the Reich: The Destruction of the Sixth SS Mountain Division “Nord.” By Stephen M. Rusiecki. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2010. Pp. xviii + 439. Cloth $42.95. ISBN 978-1591147442. In the 1980s, when Stephen M. Rusiecki was a young officer in the US Army, he was stationed in Germany east of Frankfurt, near Gelnhausen and the Büdingen forest. Working on a history of his unit’s Kaserne, Rusiecki heard older Germans’ grim stories about savage fighting that had raged in the area in the last days of World War II. Rusiecki continued his military career back in the United States, taught English at West Point, and in the 1990s was again stationed in Germany, where he was again drawn to the stories about that ferocious weekend battle that took place around the Büdingen forest during Easter in 1945—a battle virtually ignored in the vast military history of the war. Rusiecki walked the battlefield, interviewed elderly German and American veterans, and hunted through piles of German and American military documents to produce this meticulous and exhaustive account of a brutal battle that other historians had forgotten. The battle was primarily fought between the US Army’s Seventy-first Infantry Division and the German Sixth SS Mountain Division “Nord.” It raged for three days, from April 1–3, 1945, and ended with the destruction of the Sixth SS Mountain Division. Rusiecki’s book is military history in the traditional mode. His narrative is driven by battalions moving here and regiments moving there. Military historians’ newer concerns about the mentalité and cultures of war, for example, or about technology, gender, and homefronts, are not Rusiecki’s primary concerns. His account, to be sure, is filled with individual soldiers’ recollections about that Easter battle, but it is the military operation itself that is the focus of attention. The ten chapters are chronologically arranged, from the creation of the Sixth SS Mountain Division “Nord” to its destruction. Three appendices help the reader navigate the book’s military technicalities: a table of comparative ranks, a glossary of terms and equipment, and an order of battle. A handful of veterans’ histories of the Sixth SS Mountain Division and the Seventy-first Infantry Division already exist, but Rusiecki’s study is the first fully researched account of this little-known battle. It nicely balances a “band-of-brothers”-style narrative keyed to specific soldiers’ experiences with a professional soldier’s interest in larger unit operations, and he tells his story from both the German and the American perspectives. That story is full of surprises—for example, that savage fighting and pitched, large-unit battles continued as late as April 1945; in fact, in Rusiecki’s judgment, “the last six weeks of the war in Europe represented some of the fiercest fighting on record” (xi). The Arctic prelude to the Büdingen forest battle is equally intriguing: the Sixth SS Mountain Division “Nord” was created specifically to fight [End Page 434] in northern Scandinavia, along the Arctic Circle, and Rusiecki provides a brief but fascinating account of the little-known Arctic theater of the German-Russian War. Any history involving a Waffen-SS unit unavoidably becomes entangled in the intense debates about the behavior of both the Wehrmacht in general, and the Waffen-SS in particular, during the war. Rusiecki carefully insists that his approach is strictly descriptive and nonjudgmental; he writes that his “focus has always been on telling the stories of soldiers from both sides—the human aspect of battle. I judge no one, and I tell the story as it is, warts and all. I do not concern myself with anyone’s political beliefs except as they have an impact on the battle itself” (xiv). Nevertheless, In Final Defense of the Reich addresses familiar and contentious issues, at least implicitly: were Waffen-SS troops primarily “SS” or primarily “troops”? And did this Waffen-SS unit participate in the atrocities for which the SS became notorious, and in which the Wehrmacht was often complicit? On the one hand, the..." @default.
• W1523290839 created "2016-06-24" @default.
• W1523290839 creator A5037248151 @default.
• W1523290839 date "2012-05-01" @default.
• W1523290839 modified "2023-09-27" @default.
• W1523290839 title "In Final Defense of the Reich: The Destruction of the Sixth SS Mountain Division “Nord.” (review)" @default.
• W1523290839 doi "https://doi.org/10.1353/gsr.2012.a478076" @default.
• W1523290839 hasPublicationYear "2012" @default.
• W1523290839 type Work @default.
• W1523290839 sameAs 1523290839 @default.
• W1523290839 citedByCount "0" @default.
• W1523290839 crossrefType "journal-article" @default.
• W1523290839 hasAuthorship W1523290839A5037248151 @default.
• W1523290839 hasConcept C137355542 @default.
• W1523290839 hasConcept C154775046 @default.
• W1523290839 hasConcept C166957645 @default.
• W1523290839 hasConcept C190989730 @default.
• W1523290839 hasConcept C195244886 @default.
• W1523290839 hasConcept C198766705 @default.
• W1523290839 hasConcept C205649164 @default.
• W1523290839 hasConcept C2777189325 @default.
• W1523290839 hasConcept C2778627824 @default.
• W1523290839 hasConcept C5021368 @default.
• W1523290839 hasConcept C81631423 @default.
• W1523290839 hasConcept C95457728 @default.
• W1523290839 hasConceptScore W1523290839C137355542 @default.
• W1523290839 hasConceptScore W1523290839C154775046 @default.
• W1523290839 hasConceptScore W1523290839C166957645 @default.
• W1523290839 hasConceptScore W1523290839C190989730 @default.
• W1523290839 hasConceptScore W1523290839C195244886 @default.
• W1523290839 hasConceptScore W1523290839C198766705 @default.
• W1523290839 hasConceptScore W1523290839C205649164 @default.
• W1523290839 hasConceptScore W1523290839C2777189325 @default.
• W1523290839 hasConceptScore W1523290839C2778627824 @default.
• W1523290839 hasConceptScore W1523290839C5021368 @default.
• W1523290839 hasConceptScore W1523290839C81631423 @default.
• W1523290839 hasConceptScore W1523290839C95457728 @default.
• W1523290839 hasIssue "2" @default.
• W1523290839 hasLocation W15232908391 @default.
• W1523290839 hasOpenAccess W1523290839 @default.
• W1523290839 hasPrimaryLocation W15232908391 @default.
• W1523290839 hasRelatedWork W1490246627 @default.
• W1523290839 hasRelatedWork W1552490334 @default.
• W1523290839 hasRelatedWork W1977138445 @default.
• W1523290839 hasRelatedWork W2335414318 @default.
• W1523290839 hasRelatedWork W2994023542 @default.
• W1523290839 hasRelatedWork W341607837 @default.
• W1523290839 hasRelatedWork W4206669199 @default.
• W1523290839 hasRelatedWork W4244178372 @default.
• W1523290839 hasRelatedWork W603425662 @default.
• W1523290839 hasRelatedWork W210079500 @default.
• W1523290839 hasVolume "35" @default.
• W1523290839 isParatext "false" @default.
• W1523290839 isRetracted "false" @default.
• W1523290839 magId "1523290839" @default.
• W1523290839 workType "article" @default.