An Iron Wind Audiobook By Peter Fritzsche cover art

An Iron Wind

Europe Under Hitler

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An Iron Wind

By: Peter Fritzsche
Narrated by: Sean Runnette
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World War II reached into the homes and lives of ordinary people in an unprecedented way. Civilians made up the vast majority of those killed by war. On Europe's home front, the war brought the German blitzkrieg, followed by long occupations and the racial genocide of the Holocaust. In An Iron Wind, historian Peter Fritzsche draws on first-person accounts to show how civilians in occupied Europe struggled to understand this maelstrom. As Germany targeted Europe's Jews for deportation and death, confusion and mistrust reigned. People tried desperately to make sense of the horrors around them, but the stories they told themselves often justified a selfish indifference to their neighbors' fates.

Piecing together the broken words of World War II's witnesses and victims - probing what they saw and what they failed to see - Fritzsche offers a haunting picture of the most violent conflict in human history.

©2016 Peter Fritzsche (P)2016 Tantor 20th Century Europe Military Modern Wars & Conflicts World War II War Holocaust Imperialism

Critic reviews

"Fritzsche is adept at utilizing contemporary literature, memoirs, and correspondence to reconstruct the intellectual impact of Nazi occupation." (Library Journal)
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The writing suffers from the drone of the seemingly open mouthed narrator. His overly somber slow and monotone reading makes it difficult to even begin to flush out the authors points. It is like listening to someone who is not interested in what he is doing trying to read while real tired and may not finish the sentence before he floats off to dream land. This is about a lot of important but horrendous events that people recorded sometimes with their last life's breath. SOUND INTERESTED GOMER!

The content is nothing new but attempts to be.

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I gave this book 4 hours... hours of my life - and it's still has yet to pick up the pace. I'm done with it - it's just a boring dull book. I love history - I love long in depth books - but what I hate are authors who think paint a scene, then repaint and repaint it yet again each time using more words to do so because their 3rd grade teacher once told them they were good at writing. This book moves at a snails pace and more than a 1/3rd of the way through the book it has yet to even get to what I thought I was getting, the story of what it was like to live in Europe under NAZI control, or fear of NAZI control. The book just drones on and on and it's not helped by the reader who not only reads very slowly, but in a completely non-changing monotone voice. I've certainly heard worse readers, much worse, and perhaps the tone is more because of the content, but man... I rarely give up on books and now this is two in a row for Audible, luckily they let you return books. I have a lot of books with Audible, maybe 600 or more I think, and over more than a decade this will be my 12th return, that should tell you something.

The author repeatedly presents his own commentary about issues over and over again and says nothing interesting or unexpected - and really a good author shouldn't ever need to give commentary unless it's at the beginning or end of the book as the story itself should tell the story and get the point across. However that's the issue, there's no story here, there's no flow, it reads like a collection of thoughts rambled together - when what I wanted was first hand accounts of how people lived, not 20 mins on the book The Western Front.

Dull

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