Product Description

Alfred Novotny was born in Vienna on 1 April 1924, and was perfectly placed to suffer the ancient Chinese curse: "May you live in interesting times." His times were interesting and deadly, but that he survived them is not the greatest surprise. Rather, what stands out is that Fred never lost his compassion, nor his humanity, nor his mind.

Growing up in 1930s Vienna, the former home of a young, frustrated, and fuming artist named Adolf Hitler, Fred was the stepson of an ardent Social Democrat. As such, he grew up with a visceral and deep dislike and distrust of their rival parties, including the National Socialists, or "Nazis." Although the political situation in Austria throughout the 1930s was stormy, the German annexation of Austria absolutely ended effective opposition to the "New Order."

Attracted by the superficial benefits of unity with Germany and the evident achievements of the Nazis, young Alfred gradually parted ways with his stepfather. He performed his duty to the Reich when called up for service in the Labor Corps, and later proudly served in the most elite division of the German Army in World War II, Panzer-Grenadier Division "Grossdeutschland" ("Greater Germany").

From 1942 forward, Fred saw more than his share of combat. Starting with action as a member of a hurriedly-armed labor detachment in the famous British naval and commando raid at St. Nazaire, France, in March 1942, Fred later joined the Grossdeutschland Division in time to participate in some of the most well-known—and most bloody—battles of the war on the Eastern Front. During the Germans’ last great offensive in the Soviet Union in 1943, Fred fought at Poltava and in the titanic clash of thousands of tanks at Kursk. Wounded there, he later returned to his unit and fought in the long series of fiercely-contested defensive battles that ended only when the Soviets occupied much of eastern and central Germany and Austria. . . and when Hitler and the Thousand Year Reich were finally destroyed.

Like so many members of German units, Fred was happy to surrender to the US Army at the end of the war, but under the terms of inter-Allied agreements reached months before, units which had fought only against the Soviets were turned over to the Red Army, en masse. Thus began the ordeal after the ordeal—2½ years in Soviet prison camps.

After being freed from Soviet captivity, Fred eventually escaped the old world and the old conflicts . . . and started a new life in the United States, free of the competing "isms" of Europe that had wreaked misery on millions.

Supported by detailed commentary by author/historian Marc Rikmenspoel, The Good Soldier contains 62 illustrations, including original diagrams and sketches drawn before the war and during the author's captivity; comprehensive documentary authentication of the author's military service; and extensive wartime photography.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #213626 in Books
• Published on: 2002-10-08
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 160 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780966638998
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Review
"Highly recommended...complements Black Edelweiss and Into the Mountains Dark." -- Armchair General Magazine, September 2005

"[Novotny's] wartime experiences…come vividly to life…{His] sharply etched memories…are compelling in their detail." -- The Peoria Journal-Star (27 October 2002)

About the Author
In the mid-1950s, Fred and his wife emigrated from Austria to the United States. Starting on the wait staff of a hotel in Springfield, Illinois, he eventually rose to partnership in a series of luxury hotels in Illinois and Iowa, and was elected President of the Illinois Hotel Association in 1973. He and his wife, Lisl, have a daughter and two grandchildren, who reside in Toronto.

Customer Reviews

Slim Book That Packs a Punch
"The Good Soldier" is the memoirs of Austrian WWII soldier Fred Novotny. The book's introduction starts off with the proverbial Chinese curse "May you live in interesting times!" Novotny certainly had his share of "interesting times" and it is a tribute to his resilience and fundamental goodness of character that he manages to come out all right in the end with his dignity, humanity and sense of humor intact. This is a story of overcoming great adversary with a happy ending.

Unlike most WWII memoirs, which begin suddenly in 1939 and end abruptly in 1945, "The Good Soldier" spans practically Novotny's entire lifetime. It begins with his childhood in Socialist Vienna, and continues without respite through the Anschluss, his service in the German Labor Service (RAD) and as a machine gunner with the elite
"GrossDeutschland" armored infantry division, his postwar years in a Soviet prison camp, his return to freedom and eventual emigration to the USA, where he ultimately finds peace and personal success.

The book isn't full of "combat erotica" but there are enough anecdotes to get a good sense of what life in the Third Reich was like and how terrible war and the postwar peace could be. The RAD experiences in particular are very interesting, since there is little information published in English about this German paramilitary organization.
Novotny's descriptions of life as a "GrossDeutschland" soldier and the Soviet penal system are fascinating as well. The reader will doubtless be amazed at Novotny's good fortune through some pretty grim situations - as he was himself!

Although only 150-odd pages, "The Good Soldier" is packed with photos, drawings and editor's notes that help the reader get a real sense of Novotny's experiences in the context of the general sweep of WWII history.

It's a fast but satisfying read. I quite enjoyed "The Good Soldier" and would recommend it to anyone interested in personal accounts of the Second World War.

Warfare for the common man
The stark realities of World War II need no embellishment, but do require explanation to be more than numbing accounts of dramatic events in an increasingly remote and unfamiliar era. In "The Good Soldier," Alfred Novotny focuses on the sometimes brutal, often sad, but always revealing events of his wartime experiences, wrapped meaningfully and engrossingly within the context of the rest of his life.

Growing up in a working class Austrian Socialist family during the depression era, at 14, Novotny learned something of the brighter side of life in his work as an apprentice server in an exclusive Vienna restaurant. Before long, Novotny found himself drafted into the German Labor Service and ultimately, the German Army's most elite division.

Novotny's images of military life and war are at once haunting and full of vitality. He describes the fiercely demanding training he received in the recruit depot of the "Grossdeutschland" Panzer-Grenadier Division during which two of his fellow trainees committed suicide. In his foxhole at the front, he is joined by a brand-new replacement who has barely uttered his name in greeting before he is immediately blown to pieces by a Soviet artillery shell. Sent home on leave after being wounded, the author is reunited with some old friends from the restaurant, one of whom has lost a hand in combat, another an arm, and another both legs. Novotny tastefully and humorously recounts the intense drive of the life force in fleeting moments of lovemaking that occur amidst the desperation and deprivation of war. That same will to survive despite bloodthirsty lice and other parasites (including the tapeworm he unknowingly hosted through two years of combat) carried him through years of hard labor amid the squalor, disease, and lethal environment of a Soviet prison camp after the war.

Those seeking a professionally rendered treatise on tactics or strategy will not find it here, although in my opinion, the Aberjona Press has recently produced some of the finest of that genre that are currently in print. However, what makes "The Good Soldier" unusually valuable is not only its depth of life-perspective and unusual personal detail, but its exceptional and perhaps unintentional portrayal of how an especially elite formation was forged and sustained from average draftees. This is not another story about daring airborne volunteers, or highly-motivated rangers, or carefully selected commandos. Neither is it the story of an average unit with typical experiences. All of those are interesting and useful, but none are as fascinating as this story about a young Viennese waiter becoming a good soldier in an exceptional and world-renowned military unit. This unique outcome was the result of a process that is little understood and often ignored. Yet is was exactly this process, and not the extremist politics or lunatic racism of the Third Reich, that made the Wehrmacht so formidable. As only a product of that process can, Fred Novotny honestly, forthrightly, and authentically provides an unsurpassed glimpse into that transformation that produced so many "good soldiers."

The Good Soldier
I am fortunate to know Fred...or so I thought. His soft Austrian accent adds so much to his saga. His ever present awkward gait that has been with him like so many memories I now understand. Always sincere, pensive and with an instrospective intensity he writes as he speaks.
It's not history retold from the 'other side's' perspective that redefines ones attitude. It's that one is reading what amounts to the diary of an Austrian German boy soldier in Hitler's army whose purpose was the exact opposite of every Allied soldier who told their story. Thousands of 'good soldiers' spent horrible periods of time in battle, in hospitals, as prisoners in war camps, or sadly prisoners of their own minds and memories. Novotny's only bitterness is aimed not at his military foes and blended with purposeful stealth into the late stage of his book.
The unabashed honesty of Fred's story is compelling and civilian as well as military. As a young waiter before being drafted he describes how he and several coworkers essentially steal some famous salami. They get found out, each slapped in the face and Novotny gets three weeks in the potato cellar. Like the rest of his story there is no faux remorse. He relates the salami saga because it says something about him; what that means he leaves to the reader.
In a 'dacha' in Russia they find an American Gramophone and one 78rpm record. Schockingly it happens to be one of his favorites, "Stormy Weather". This eventual American Austrian loved Harry James and Louis Armstrong.
Describing how that left leg was wounded he mentions that there were 8 other bullets hitting his equipment including his helmet he didn't get far enough into the hole he was digging. Many a 'hero'have conjured up details of great bravery. Fred says, "Someone was looking out after me." Honesty and heroism make strange bedfellows.
Speaking of strange bedfellows perhaps the most revealing tale in the book is Novotny's remembrance of his encounter with a young woman which he pleads as "another incident of love in war". It cannot be retold with any more seriousness or hilariousness than what you read in the book. This example of sheer determination in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles may be the best description of Fred's will and he did it almost all by himself.
Toward post war Germany he levels this paraphraed pointed observation: to those who fought your war you gave two free street car tickets to take us to officials, two 15 cent cigarette packages, find your own job, help yourself, and your mental problems are your own. A troubling and revealing view.

What Fred says is crystal clear and what he means is craftily expressed. It would be difficult for any reader to close this book with the same mindset with which it was opened.