Saturday, March 03, 2007

I'm a shock trooper in a stupor, yes I am

Yesterday, while gathering my library selections, my eyes fell upon a book that seemed out of place. It looked quite like the pulpy volumes you used to find at five and dimes. Take a gander at the cover. Not only does the cover feature garish colors and explosive action, but the two esses in the author's last name are styled like that of the Schutzstaffel, Waffen no doubt. Now, Nazi imagery is often used in book marketing, but it is often used as a threating icon. In this case, the Nazis are associated with the author's name.

What makes that all the more peculiar is the the author, a Dane who claims Eastern front experience, may have been a member of the Gestapo! According to reviews, his books take a anti-Nazi, anti-war line (to a point, of course, people read them for the battle action) so I wonder if they are meant to atone for prior sins.

I remain amazed that there are people who take a murky approach to the Nazis. Here we have re-enactors of the first SS Panzer division, a unit of which perpetrated the Malmedy massacre. The we have books like Watch on the Rhine. In this book, aliens invade Germany, so the leadership decides to reanimate the Waffen SS, to fight the aliens. Personally I think reanimating Blucher or Moltkes the Elder's armies, since they actually won wars, without perpetrating mass atrocities across an entire continent. But that's just me.

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