Reviews

An Iron Wind: Europe Under Hitler by Peter Fritzsche

bherrera's review against another edition

5.0

Wow! This book was very dense and I needed to take breaks, but man it brings to light what World War II was like to the ordinary citizens of Europe. We as Americans don’t really understand what the people went through there. Yes we had family members go off to war and we had loss, it we didn’t have war on our doorstep. We didn’t have air raids at night and worry about our cities being destroyed in the middle of the night. Europeans had to worry about that and it was a whole different world to them. Butler and the SS were ruthless and inhuman. It comes out in the many journals of those that had to endure Germany’s wrath. What hitler and Germany did sounds very similar to what our current administration is trying to accomplish. The parallels are uncanny and history does repeat itself. Nationalism was strong in Germany and their main targets were not only the Jewish people, but scientists, teachers, anyone educated, handicapped people and homosexual people. To accomplish their end goal they started off by segregating undesirable people into certain parts of the occupied cities. The main ones talked about in this book were Warsaw, Paris and Amsterdam. Then the relocated these people to what were called ghettos. Finally the SS started rounding people up to take to the concentration camps. First it was all children under 10 and people over 65. They were killed immediately as they were of no use, then it was everyone else. The diary entries were horrific and sad. The diary entries of the german citizens were sad as well. Even though we vilify Germany as a whole, there were surprisingly many citizens that did it agree with what hitler and his gestapo were doing, but they were helpless to do anything because the citizens them selves were so fractured in their beliefs.
Overall this book is a very hard read and a way different look into what WWII was like for ordinary European citizens. What is even more scary is that there are many parallels to what is going on in our politics currently.