Karin Gunnemann-Schoeller

The War in Letters Karin Gunnemann-Schoeller

Drawing on hundreds of letters written by her father as well as on personal and family memories, the author tells a multilayered story of WWII. At the center is one man's personal struggle to make sense of his life and to preserve his faith and his hope for rebuilding while serving as an officer in the German army through the horror and destruction of the war. At another level the story provides a unique eyewitness account of the military effort to establish Hitler's Third Reich, beginning with the occupations of Poland and France through the disastrous attempt to conquer the Soviet Union at the cost of millions of lives, ending with the German army's retreat and defeat. Woven through all are her family's efforts to cope with six years of her father's absence, the anxiety as the war in the East worsened, the ever-increasing physical privations, and the eventual gathering of the extended family, fleeing for refuge from bombed cities, in the Landhaus built by her great-grandparents at the foothills of the Alps. In a separate chapter the author gives a vivid account of her family's encounter with the American soldiers who were camped around their house and were now, at the end of the war, seen as liberators.