Rudolf Pencz

It could be argued that this book is worth reading from a certain antiquarian viewpoint, as one follows the fate of the Volksdeutsche community of Hungary once pressed into German military service, except that the author has relatively little to say about the unit in actual battle; though one learns quite a lot of what it took to pull an infantry division together at the end of the war. What Pencz really wants to vent about is how unjust the Trianon settlement was to Hungary, or the ferocity of Tito's partisans, not to mention the disloyalty of the Czech Republic in regards to turning on the ethnic German folks in their midst. There is not one admission of the role of the Hitlerian regime in terms of unleashing the disaster that befell Europe or of the willingness of the Horthy Regime in Hungary to exploit the situation. It would almost be funny except there are folks in contemporary Hungary who are throwing this sort of rhetoric around in the pursuit of irredentist politics; nothing good will come of this. I was trying to give the author some benefit of the doubt until the point where he took the Czechs to task for failing to respect the Munich Accord.… (meer)