Herman Schmidt’s Diary of a German Soldier 1939-1945 is more a memoir rather than a diary; the title is misleading.
Schmidt was drafted into the German army in September 1939 at the age of 39.[1] The majority of his service was in various menial roles around the horse supply unit for the 18th Army in Salzburg, Austria. His objective was to ‘was not to make the army my vocation but survive without being maimed. The best way to stay under the radar’.[2] He largely did this until March 1945 when he was called up for frontline duty and has a brief contact with Soviet forces in Hungry before making his way back home where he surrendered to the Americans.
A brief account of a rather non-eventful war but it gives a counter-perspective to many other frontline narratives.
Notes
[1] Herman Schmidt, Diary of a German Soldier 1939-1945 (Amazon, n.d.), p.8.
[2] Ibid., p.15.