I'd always avoided these books because the covers put me off, they always seem a bit 'Yay the SS!' Hence my surprise when the book was actually extremely condemnatory of the SS and the whole German regime at the time.

So quite why the book designers decided to put Sven HaSSel emblazoned in bold on the cover I do not know. The guy clearly hated the SS, in fact he recounts with relish the number of times on the Eastern Front that the German army and Russians would stop shooting at each other for a while in order to shoot up SS units that had just arrived on the line, before continuing to shoot at each other.

As a novel it didn't quite work, too much jumping around, and the narrative structure itself is weak. But as a snapshot into history I liked it very much. I wonder how auto-biographical it was.