1,889 words
Bob Welch
Saving My Enemy
Washington, DC: Regnery History, 2021
Watching Time Team’s Digging Band of Brothers recently reminded me that I really needed to get a move on with my review of Saving My Enemy.
I have a soft spot for this book. I’ve written about it on Amazon and on both my blogs. I’ve told family and friends about it — which is odd, given that I’ve never been a fan of Band of Brothers. I completely missed the series when it originally aired originally, I didn’t finish it when I watched it after reading the book, and I gave the book “only” four stars out of five — which had interesting consequences. So why am I still writing about it two years later? Simple: It is a good story with an important message.
In 2021, long after the initial hype about Band of Brothers had faded, a new book with an Easy Company theme was released: Saving My Enemy by Bob Welch. Welch had worked with Band of Brothers veteran Don Malarkey on his 2008 book Easy Company Soldier. In one of their work sessions, Malarkey unexpectedly mentioned that he had befriended a German soldier after the war. Welch, anxious to meet their deadline, didn’t pay attention. It was only after Don Malarkey’s death in 2017 that his daughter contacted Welch with a proposal for a new book: The story of how her father had befriended a former German soldier long after the war, how this friendship had helped both men cope with their post-traumatic stress disorder, and how this friendship had now extended into the next generation.
When I saw the announcement on Valor Studio‘s website, I knew I would pre-order the book. Because of paper supply issues at the time, it took forever for the print version to be produced. In the meantime, I read the e-book and wrote a review that, in retrospect, was perhaps not as concise as it should have been. But because of that, I was contacted by one of the sons of the German soldier whom I had just read about. After some initial polite criticism of my criticism, we settled into a quite amiable correspondence during which I learned more about the background of both the book-writing process and the story itself. It was lovely. Saving My Enemy has therefore become rather special to me — even though I still stand by my four stars rating.
Don Malarkey and Fritz Engelbert grew up very differently, and not just because they lived on opposite sides of the Atlantic. Don Malarkey was outgoing, fun-loving, and always getting into trouble. Fritz Engelbert was reserved, an introvert, a boy of the generation that almost considered Adolf Hitler a god. When he was old enough, he wanted to join the Waffen-SS, but his father refused to give permission. Fritz thus had to settle for the Wehrmacht, a decision that brought him and Don Malarkey into five miles of each other when both men fought in the Battle of the Bulge.
Bob Welch gives a vivid description of two situations in which Malarkey and Engelbert, both on their own, come across a dead enemy soldier: Malarkey realizes that he had just shot a 16-year-old sniper, while Engelbert finds a dead American soldier out in the snow, eyelashes white with frost. I think it is those scenes that stick in my memory the most.
After the war and, in Engelbert’s case, French captivity, both men settle into civilian life. They get jobs, marry, have children. But the war never leaves them. Each man in his own way tries to deal with what we now know as post-traumatic stress disorder, and which takes different shapes corresponding to each man’s personality. Malarkey seeks refuge in alcohol, Engelbert in work. At odd moments, tempers erupt over seemingly trivial things. Both men contemplate suicide. Engelbert becomes a self-hating German, agonizing over what he perceives as his complicity in an evil regime.
It takes both men decades to open up to their families about their experiences in the war. For Malarkey, the catalyst is mainly Stephen Ambrose’s book Band of Brothers and the HBO series based on it that catapult him to celebrity status. For Engelbert, it is not as straightforward. It starts with a trip to France and Belgium in 1971. Years later, after his retirement, he familiarizes himself with the Internet and becomes active in war-related forums. After some initial reluctance, he agrees to be interviewed on camera in and around Bastogne by a Belgian documentary filmmaker and, despite his fears, he receives a warm welcome from the local community.
When in 2004 Billy Maloney, a Sergeant 1st Class stationed in Germany, proposes a visit from Easy Company veterans to raise the morale of active US troops, he also suggests inviting some German veterans. Fritz Engelbert makes the list.
Welch arranged his book in such a way that, while each chapter is split into Malarkey and Engelbert’s sides of the story, both men’s events and experiences mirror each other. It’s excellently done and, of course, has the reader waiting for the moment when both threads finally intertwine. It’s worth the wait.
Both men hit it off almost immediately. On the second night, they cry together over beer, confessing all the stored-up pain and guilt they have felt for decades — and they talk each other out of it. From then on, things really change. Fritz in particular becomes a new man, able to hold his head high and accept the good with the bad. Both men and their families meet a few times over the years until infirmity and, ultimately, death put an end to it.
You can buy Savitri Devi’s book, Gold in the Furnace, here.
But the next generation continues the friendship forged by the meeting of the two former enemies. Fritz Engelbert’s sons have become honorary members of the “Band of Brothers family” and, together with Don Malarkey’s daughter, have worked with Bob Welch in the writing of his book. (You can check out some interviews they’ve done on Marianne McNally’s YouTube channel).
It really is a beautiful story, and I highly recommend Saving My Enemy. So why did I give it only four out of five stars? My main point of criticism is that it tries too hard to push a certain narrative for a certain readership. Naturally, Bob Welch aimed his book at Band of Brothers fans, and especially those of the HBO series. It clearly reads like that. And naturally, I am not blaming him for appealing to an American audience, but in doing so, he uses every conceivable cliché when describing National Socialist Germany — just what little Joe American would expect. Of course all little German girls have blonde pigtails and wear Dirndln (aka Bavarian dresses). Of course there is an entirely fictional dialogue between drunken Stormtrooper thugs and a Jewish shop owner during the Reichskristallnacht. Of course even the First World War was about vain German dreams of “European dominance, for political leaders and military higher-ups to be able to lord their sense of righteousness over neighboring countries.” I was strongly reminded of Boniface F. Hanley’s The Last Human Face, which is also full of fictional episodes straight out of “How we imagine it was over there back then.” Thank you, Hollywood. I think I called it a very American style of writing in my Amazon review (no offense). Matthias Engelbert, reasonably so, asked me how else Welch as an American would be writing. Touché. But it’s just so platt, as we call it: flat, cheap. Simplistic history for absolute beginners.
Yet, I don’t want to be too harsh on Bob Welch. It’s really only when it comes to German history that his writing is weak, and even at his worst, you can still recognize the way in which he is using these events to build the overall structure of his story. He does not demonize the Germans, he is clearly sympathetic towards Fritz and his parents, and he makes a point of showing how the war affected all sides in the same ways. He even mentions Eisenhower’s policy towards the German POWs and the fact that many of them spent years in captivity after the war had ended. I suppose Welch was considering a readership not unlike that of Adam Makos pre-A Higher Call: patriotic, full of admiration for American veterans, but woefully uninformed about the other side. And isn’t this the very view the Band of Brothers miniseries is pushing? The American side has nuances. Characters. The German side is just a blank.
Welch thus had to start somewhere, and looking at it from this angle, he did all right. I think Adam Makos did it better — but I am not going to lie: I was tearing up quite a lot when reading Saving My Enemy.
Although Welch does not address it — it’s hard to tell whether he did not want to overcomplicate his narrative or whether he is genuinely unaware of the phenomenon — I can’t help but see something in Fritz and Don’s story that goes beyond the discussion about guilt or innocence.
Fritz, like so many Germans, allowed himself to be beaten down: all that death, all that suffering, and all for nothing — or worse, for an evil cause. The world hates us. Everybody considers us the bad guys. It cripples people internally, even without them knowing it. That is the origin of the self-hating German.
Suddenly, someone from the “outside,” from the supposedly hateful world, comes along and says, “There is nothing to be ashamed about. Germans are great, and Germany is beautiful; you should be proud of it and celebrate your traditions.” I have seen it happen. There are basically two kinds of reactions to it. Either the self-hating German looks at you strangely and thinks, “You have no clue what you’re talking about,” or it’s like a liberation. A heavy burden is suddenly lifted from his or her shoulders. This is what happened to Fritz Engelbert. Nothing any German could have said would have made any difference; it had to come from somebody like Don Malarkey — somebody who, in the German imagination, hated all things German and had good reason to.
Looking at what is going on in the world right now, I cannot help but think that, in a way, Germany was a very early guinea pig in a subtle form of psychological warfare. I’m not saying that much of it was actually planned — I know some people may disagree with this — but it certainly served as a useful blueprint for how to destroy a nation, a people, and even a race.
So what is the antidote? Obviously, mutual encouragement and healthy pride. Joy in what you are and represent. Your people are great. Your country is beautiful. Be proud of it. Keep and celebrate your traditions and history.
On that night in Bastogne, Malarkey and Engelbert had done something profound, and totally unplanned: given each other a second chance. New life.
In Don’s eyes, Fritz was the manifestation of the sixteen-year-old German soldier he’d killed come back to say, It’s OK. And in Fritz’s eyes, Don was the manifestation of Seligmann Hony and the little girl at Lutrebois, come back to say, You’re forgiven. Absolution for the sins that both men had carried for sixty years. They had been two drowning men treading water — until they miraculously rescued each other.
24 comments
Interesting review, thanks. Are you familiar with Hans Helmut Kirst? I read some of his Gunner Asch series as a boy back in the 60s. (My father, a World War II vet who respected the Germans he had fought against in Tunisia & Sicily, had several English paperback versions on his bookshelf.) Kirst – a former German Army officer & Nazi party member himself – was (as I remember) anti-Nazi in Gunner Asch, but not at all suffused with guilt about World War II, or with being a German. Of course, as a mature man during the war & after, Kirst wasn’t as vulnerable to the psychological warfare (not subtle at all, IMO) waged against the German people since 1945, which seems to have had its greatest & most poisonous impact on the “generation of 68” (born after WWII), if my current occasional reading of German authored books is accurate. In contrast to Kirst, is it even possible to write a World War II novel in Germany now which does not wallow in guilt & self-hatred?
I’ve heard of Kirst (his 08/15 has become a familiar expression), but I’ve never read any of his books.
There are some novels now that go for a neutral or pro-German stance, but they are fringe and mostly amateurish. The more you get into mainstream literature, you might find “good” German characters and a decent portrayal of events, but inevitably there will be shootings of civilians, evil officers, and the protagonists’ realization that they were wrong all along…
The “Alt-68er”, as we call them here, are a special breed among their generation. Not all of their contemporaries took the radical approach, or they came around after a while. The radicals had become a mocked cliché already when I went to school in the 80s and 90s – I had a few of them as teachers, and they really lived up to their reputation; it was almost funny. But yes, much of what we observe now in German society and German behavior originates with their movement.
Thanks for your reply. The Gunner Asch series by Kirst was very male oriented, hardly great literature (more “pot-boilerish”) very similar to thousands of similar war-adventure books here that older boys, young men, & middle-agers used to find entertaining – back when men still read. The only other “serious” German novelist I’ve read from the post-war era is Heinrich Boll. There do seem to be a few historians in Germany, such as Holger Afflerbach (On a Knife Edge: How Germany Lost the First World War) whose outlook is not completely distorted by guilt or political correctness. I’ve pretty much given up watching German movies. If you know of any worth seeing let us know!
The Third Reich might not have been trying to take over the world(I don’t believe they were), but they were certainly trying to take over Europe. At this point how can one deny it? Lebensraum in the East, making Russian Slavs a helot slave class, exterminating Poles, all while the rest of Europe would be under the control of their hand picked vassal rulers. Or is all of that Evil American propaganda?
Well, I don’t think it is American propaganda necessarily, but it is certainly ((somebody’s)) propaganda
Not an argument, also it’s triple parentheses, not double.
I don’t deny it. German behavior in Poland & Russia was barbaric. But to me, the most salient barbarism of the war was that of Britain & the USA, who were fanatically determined to prevent Germany from rising from a middle-rank power to a great power, to become a true rival to the British Empire & the American economic powerhouse. So fanatically determined that they were unwilling to make peace with Hitler after he offered quite reasonable terms after the defeat of France. So fanatically determined they were willing to arm the demonic Soviet-Bolshevik regime to the teeth to kill Germans, to themselves bomb German cities & civilians to ash, & to permanently cripple Germany psychologically with the mind-virus of German guilt & irremediable evil. The same mind-virus that is now being used against all gentile white people, everywhere. I wonder what the gentile whites from 80 yrs ago who participated in its creation – not just Roosevelt, Churchill, Eden & other top leaders – but millions of ordinary whites all over the English speaking world who bought into the myth of innate German evil, would think about what this same mind-virus – the myth of innate white evil – has done to their own countries, cities, neighborhoods, workplaces, schools & families.
(Steps down from soapbox, takes drag off cigarette.)
Danzig wasn’t about taking over anybody except stateless Germans who were some of the most devoted Nazis — and for obvious reasons. Plus, everybody had already agreed that Danzig was German, and yet the Poles refused to budge with even a simple road and rail right-of-way between the Heimat and East Prussia. The Polish colonels were asking for it when the Panzers and Stukas “bolted out of Silesia” as Leon Degrelle put it.
Also, Hitler never wanted war with England and France, let alone with the United States. And he would have preferred avoiding war with Soviet Russia, but was not going to hand over Romanian oil fields or trade with Turkey to the Russian sphere even if he was unwilling to fight over the Baltics.
Hitler realized, however, that he had overplayed his hand when the Entente actually declared war after the opening of hostilities with Poland. But it didn’t matter because, as he told his Generals and Admirals at the Obersalzberg on the eve of war, that the stakes were more than just Danzig. The Allies were dead set against peace with a sovereign Germany and would insist on their war one day. The Soviets could also wait to strike against Germany at any time once the Allies made them a solid gold offer.
After Germany defeated France, First Lord of the Admiralty Sir Winston knew that the Kriegsmarine would never be strong enough to support a German invasion of England, and from Signals intercepts Churchill knew that this was never seriously contemplated at any time — but the new Prime Minister continued to play up the “Sealion” threat, which is still canonical today.
Churchill also knew that the last thing that the Roosevelt regime and its (((advisors))) wanted was peace negotiations with Germany. He also knew that Britannia would have to play second or third fiddle if they really wanted to destroy Germany.
Unlike Churchill and Albion, Hitler was confident that an intact Germany was economically competitive on world markets. Hitler had very little interest in restoration of the old German-African colonies, and zero interest in imperial expansion prior to the Second World War, when it became a military necessity.
Germany invaded Denmark and Norway because Albion was mining Norwegian waterways to end German trade with neutrals such as Sweden, and to establish extended Allied bases. And in the East, countries like Slovakia and Romania specifically asked for German protection against Soviet designs.
Armaments Minister Albert Speer, who served twenty years after the war in Spandau prison, argued that German imperial policy was slow getting established because Hitler never envisioned a long imperial war. The European Economic Community, for example, got its start from the belated Axis wartime consolidation of resources, such as the coal and steel industries of the BeNeLux countries.
The idea that Hitler wanted to exterminate or enslave the Slavs is wartime propaganda — and the Table Talks, while interesting, is not a trustworthy historical source.
And lastly, to quote my late friend, Columbia-educated engineer and Revisionist Friedrich Paul Berg:
Nazi Gassings Never Happened! Nobody was Gassed!
Yeah, war is always full of infamy. World War II was full of egregious mistakes, but there were plenty of guilty parties to go around. Hitler certainly doesn’t squeak but he comes out cleaner than most.
🙂
The unpublished sequel to Mein Kampf, found after the war but written in the late 1920’s talks about lebensraum and how Hitler had no interest in “Germanizing” the Slavs as it would, in his view, ruin the true German Volk. Then during the war there was Generalplan Ost, which went into further detail about what was to be done regarding conquered territory in the East. After Stalingrad and other setbacks, much of this stuff was put on the backburner because they were in a two front war and losing. Near the end of the war Germany likely would have accepted part Jewish, African pygmies as true “Aryans” as long as they could hold a sturmgewehr. That doesn’t mean that was the original, ideal plan in the summer of 1939.
There is no reason to think the Table Talks are not an accurate representation of Hitler’s plans to turn the Russians and Ukrainians into helots and colonize their lands with Germans.
Generalplan Ost has been thoroughly debunked. They never see Allied plans as draconian, nor through the same wartime lens and fog. We don’t believe the old superstitions for the most part, but we must believe in the Holocaust.
As far as Hitler’s “second book,” he was never satisfied with it and never authorized any sequels. To say that it is a rough draft of his changing wartime views is being generous.
Also, I have read the (((Gerhard Weinberg))) version of the second book, and I don’t remember any smoking guns except that it understandably has a less favorable opinion of the United States under the Roosevelt and Morgenthau regime.
Senator Alan Cranston (D – CA), who actually ran for President in 1984 on some kind of no-nukes platform, was in 1939 a sneaky journalist that tried to publish bits of Mein Kampf taken out of context and with Cranston’s own interpretations and annotations. Hitler sued him in an American court and won. Seems like a lot of Leftists want to misquote Hitler.
As far as Table Talks, it is hearsay at best — and besides, people say a lot of things between the spinach and strudel courses. Even Leftist historians admit that it has authenticity problems, has multiple authors — and it was certainly never published in Hitler’s lifetime. Furthermore, these were never official dictations, just people taking notes on napkins. It is hard to tell Hitler from his admirers and critics. Hitler’s authorship is just not valid.
For example, so many tried to read Hitler’s words into their own gospel that in meetings with generals and others, the Kriegsherr had to have professional transcribers from the Foreign Office make the official record of what was actually said, and sometimes even this needed to be corrected.
Historians are free to interpret the available evidence as they wish, but I’m not a big fan of most of them and their Marxist politics — pretty much a requirement for any kind of academic position nowadays. They have good reason to lie about the Big-H, and to lie about Hitler. Even David Irving often found him hard to fathom. But he was neither a Demon nor a God.
🙂
We aren’t going to see eye to eye on this and that’s fine. Regarding the second Hitler book, Gerhard Weinberg was only the editor. The translation was by Krista Smith. I just double checked my copy. You mentioned FDR but he wasn’t president when Hitler wrote the book in the mid to late ’20s.
P.S. to K. (10/19/2023) since further nested comments have expired.
Yes, we can agree to disagree on this.
FDR was a protégé of the “World Redeemer” (Hitler’s words) Thomas Woodrow Wilson.
Also, Hitler’s views towards Russia in the 1920s were colored by the Judeo-Bolshevik Revolution and by postwar German Versailles frustrations, and in any case was fairly standard for the original German Drang nach Osten Rightwing nationalism of the time — leading up to the Great War, where once the Tsar mobilized his quasi-colonial “Russian Steamroller” the proverbial nuclear option switch had to be flipped. And once Germans and Russians were at war, the Tsar’s imperial troops did not acquit themselves so well.
To say that the Bolsheviks were less backwards in many ways than the regime of the Holy Tsar of all the Russias is really saying something, but unfortunately true — and losing the pointless war on the field did not help to sustain that regime. Lenin was right to trade non-Russian provinces for a separate peace at Brest-Litovsk.
In any case, Hitler was not pathologically anti-Slav. He was quite proud of the Czech contribution to his war machine, for example. But he envisioned an imperial foreign policy only with great reluctance — and probably to the great detriment of his anti-Communist crusade.
Chancellor Hitler originally hoped for friendship with a nationalist Poland, and Second Reich Germans had dutifully helped them against the Tsarist Empire.
But the Entente promised a lot to its catspaws — of which they were rarely willing to make good on. All the Entente really wanted was to fight Germany cheaply and to restore their own hegemony on the continent. And they were willing to sell their souls to the USA and to the Soviet Union if necessary. David Irving was correct to argue that Winston Churchill did the most to torpedo his beloved British Empire.
Hitler didn’t fight the war to Genocide Slavs and Jews.
That is enemy propaganda and the Faith of our times. In some Western countries you can go to jail for what I just said — which is why White Nationalists should take heed to what Revisionists have been saying with increasing scholarship.
Plus, Judeo-Bolshevism was indeed a concrete and profound threat to the entire continent. Marxism of some rainbow stripe is a threat to all nations today except maybe Israel. And it is not just some academics in the West who are fellow-travellers of the whatever-school, but just about all of them. This kind of Multikulti progress is what our traitorous elites actively aspire to.
🙂
Pre 1946 the idea of land transfers was relatively commonplace, certainly in Eastern Europe. Massive changes had taken place during and after the Great War. The idea of the German nation pushing back their Slavic neighbours into their essentially limitless hinterland, whilst not likely to win friends, was perfectly reasonable statecraft for a real nation, constrained for territory, living in the real world with real ambition. This policy was not too dissimilar to the Anglo-Scottish colonizations of America, Australia and Africa but it was fatally in conflict with the Jewish/Anglo plans for world hegemony.
It is immoral, of course, and disgusting because at the expense of other whites.
The plan was actually much worse than what happened to the Indian tribes as the National Socialist plan was in some cases outright genocidal, no reservations for them. Not to mention we had Apaches, Navajo and Comanche who were way worse a threat than Poles and Russians were to the Germans.
@Greg Johnson
Immoral? This was purely a continuation of European politics as it had been played for centuries, albeit with vastly increased firepower. The Jewish-influenced West chose to support Stalin over Hitler, refused all overtures for peace in 1941, demanded unconditional surrender in 1943 and destroyed the priceless patrimony and the lives of millions of non-combatant Germans in 1944 and 1945. Now that was immoral.
@K
I was not aware that there was clear evidence of a plan to kill Slavs, although I must say I haven’t read the Table Talk which apparently alludes to rough treatment in the East. I would be interested if you have any sources you can recommend.
I forget if it was Band of Brothers or one of Stephen Ambrose’s other WW2 books, but I really gave him credit for having the honesty and courage to say that the American WW2 veterans he talked to liked the Germans better than the other Europeans they met during WW2. (Germans > French > Italians > Arabs)
There was a similar feel to Audie Murphy’s movie To Hell and Back – unabashed American admiration for their German adversary’s skill and courage
Dear Clarissa, this is off-topic to your article, but I appreciate your focus on Germany. I enjoy the foreign dispatches here at Counter-Currents.
I’ve always felt a vague sadness thinking of Germany. Germans have given the world so much, in art, philosophy, music, science, technology… and it pains me to see them as a defeated people on a path to self-destruction. Few peoples have such potential as the Germans have repeatedly demonstrated, for better or worse, and the world would be so much poorer without them. I suppose there’s no real point to this message, but I sincerely hope we can turn this around somehow…
There is a real point to your message – thank you! I very much feel the same way. As a follower of the Grail Message (no, it has nothing to do with Wagner…), I have a special view of the whole situation, but I’d rather not go into all that here; too “esoteric”. 😉
But as we all know, this self-destructive behavior has spread far beyond Germany now. So I guess that is what the story of Don Malarkey and Fritz Engelbert is such a good metaphor of: We have to try beating this thing together, or we won’t beat it at all.
Thank you for a good review of an interesting book. Do you know any authentic books about WWII from the German side? I recommend Ernest Von Salomon’s The Outlaws and the book It can not be Stormed. And about Adolf Hitler, The Artist Within the Warlord and August Kubizek’s book The Young Hitler. Do you know these books?
You may like WW2 Stories channel on Youtube. It contains many audiobooks of German WWII veterans who wrote their memories, also of French veterans.
“Looking at what is going on in the world right now, I cannot help but think that, in a way, Germany was a very early guinea pig in a subtle form of psychological warfare.”
That seems to be one of the things that the Frankfurt School character Herbert Marcuse and Frank Leopold Neumann (Venona codename RUFF) were arranging back then. This is while these Communist subversives were members of the OSS (precursor to the CIA) and getting a paycheck from my government.
This is a reply to Antipodean. The main thing I would point to is Generalplan Ost, which I have referenced before. You could, of course, deny that that was real. I find that to be an untenable position to take, for various reasons. German soldiers, Werhmacht, not only SS, sure did kill an enormous amount of civilian Slavs, it’s as if that was the plan all along! Also, the second Hitler book, not the tabletalks, is pretty clear about what is to be done in the East for lebensraum. I should point out that whether someone likes German National Socialism or not means nothing to me. I’m part German on both sides and I have no (known) Slavic ancestry, so I feel I’m pretty impartial about this. My view is that if Hitler and the NatSocs simply chilled out in the years 1936-1939 a real Germany would still exist today.
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