Reluctant Accomplice is a volume of the wartime letters of Dr. Konrad Jarausch, a German high-school teacher of religion and history who served in a reserve battalion of Hitler's army in Poland and Russia, where he died of typhoid in 1942. He wrote most of these letters to his wife, Elisabeth. His son, acclaimed German historian Konrad H. Jarausch, brings them together here to tell the gripping story of a patriotic soldier of the Third Reich who, through witnessing its atrocities in the East, begins to doubt the war's moral legitimacy. These letters grow increasingly critical, and their vivid descriptions of the mass deaths of Russian POWs are chilling. They reveal the inner conflicts of ordinary Germans who became reluctant accomplices in Hitler's merciless war of annihilation, yet sometimes managed to discover a shared humanity with its suffering victims, a bond that could transcend race, nationalism, and the enmity of war.

Preface vii Foreword by Richard Kohn xiii In Search of a Father: Deaing with the Legacy of Nazi Complicity 1 Part I: The Polish Campaign 45 Letters from Poland, September 1939 to January 1940 53 Part II: Training Recruits 139 Letters from Poland and Germany, January 1940 to August 1941 146 Part III: War of Annihilation in Russia 237 Letters from Russia, August 1941 to January 1942 246 Acknowledgments 367 Notes to "In Search of a Father" 369 Selected Suggestions for Further Reading 381 Index 383