The Holocaust : From a Survivor of Verdun

New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1972. A beautiful copy. Bright, shiny, clean, square, and tight. Sharp corners. The Dust Jacket is NOT price clipped (5.95). No chips. No tears. No owner's name or bookplate. No remainder mark. Pages are fresh and crisp. Memoir of a German soldier who spent five years in uniform, May 1915 to January 1920, including over a year in the trenches of the Argonne Forest, two months in the sector of Verdun, and then forty months in French captivity. But it was the four days in the battle of Verdun had an affect on his future that remained with him to the present day. Rear panel of the Dust Jacket has a photo of the author's squad in June 1916. He notes that within 4 months all but he had perished. Bound in the original black cloth, lettered in silver on the spine. From the Dust Jacket: "In 1915 William Hermanns went to war. He was a young, idealistic patriot who dreamed of an elegant uniform, of the Iron Cross, of strutting into Paris alongside his Kaiser. Within a year he found himself in the surreal mire of mud and dead bodies that was the battlefield of Verdun. In the eight months prior to Willie Hermann's arrival, Crown Prince Frederick had ordered wave upon wave of men against the French fortifications -- the result had been nearly one million deaths, and Frederick had earned the name of 'the smiling assassin of Verdun.' The battle remains to this day the bloodiest in the history of warfare. THE HOLOCAUST is the story of a volunteer who woke from a reverie of medals and martial glory to the horrors of poison gas, trench warfare, and war's irreparable disruption of everyday life. It was during the first days of his forty months imprisonment that Hermanns began to examine and write of the disastrous effects of the war on himself and on the lives of his comrades and enemies. In the 1930s he was forced to smuggle the manuscript out of Nazi Germany, where talk of Verdun was considered defeatist and traitorous." Keywords: WWI. Trench warfare. Autobiography. . First Edition (so stated). Hard Cover. Fine condition/Fine dust jacket.. Illus. by Bacon, Paul (jacket design). 8vo. xii, 141pp. .