The Eastern Front was by far the most vicious and awful front of the war, and so his descriptions of Stalingrad and Bagration are amazing in how unlikely his survival seems to be. In addition, the maps used in the book are poorly drawn and don't really provide much of a sense of location to the battles described. He becomes acquainted with the leading Bolsheviks and begins a romance with Trotsky's secretary Evgenia who will become his second wife. The author was a keen recruit at initial training and his excitement at the first encounter with the enemy in the Russian Steppe is obvious.

The details are sobering and challenges the perspective that all German WW2 soldiers were bloodthirsty barbarians.

The author gives a more balanced description of his Soviet enemies than some German memoirs, largely avoiding the clichéd descriptions of mindless hordes advancing with commissars at the rear that blight other accounts. Serving in the German army on the Eastern front from 1942 to 1945, Gunther Koschorrek wrote small notes as a form of a diary. The biggest surprise of many will be the chaotic nature of the German front lines for most of the time. The only war crimes Koschorrek mentions that are perpetrated by the Germans is the execution of wounded Soviet soldiers on the front line by a single German officer. I also preferred the broad experience he had in many theaters of battle besides engagements in the Soviet Union.

But by the time of publication the author, now an old man, seems to have added the parts about Soviet troops slaughtering their own people (while German troops were innocent as lambs) and having personally witnessed, coincidence of coincidences, the most well-known massacre committed by Soviet troops against German civilians, the one at Nemmersdorf, which was widely touted in Nazi propaganda at the time. Also, one reviewer has suggested that the account may be suspect in certain areas, especially about the veracity of Koschorrek’s recollections of witnessing the aftermath of the October 1944 Soviet massacre in the East Prussian town of Nemmersdorf. It may be that Korschorrek, as a frontline soldier fighting for his life in the phase of German retreats, did not or only marginally get in contact with crimes of his own side. I also was put off by the art, depicting a fairly prominent swastika, perhaps designed for a certain subset of readers who this will no doubt appeal to. The endless and often pointless deaths of his comrades becomes depressing and crushing even for the reader, I do not want to imagine how it was for the real soldiers.His memoir relates these horrific experiences and it draws the reader in so that he feels that he too is in the frontline standing next to the author.