From Hitler's Army

BEYOND DEFEAT (312 pp.)--Hans Richter--Putnam ($3).

From Germany, after World War I, came some of the most memorable of all accounts of that war (The Case of Sergeant Grischa, All Quiet on the Western Front, etc.). Beyond Defeat is no Grischa or All Quiet, but it is the first of the German World War II novels to reach the U.S., and as such it is an important book.

Author Hans Richter, 42, an anti-Nazi who was drafted into Hitler's army, was captured at Cassino and shipped off to a prison camp in the U.S. In its glowering animosity to Naziism and its painful and perplexed discussions of the dilemmas facing anti-Nazi Germans, his book bears all the bitter marks of a man trying to write his way out of an ordeal.

"Auf Wiedersehen . . ." The opening scenes show a German company moving up to the Cassino front. The major character, Pfc. Guehler, obviously a facsimile of Author Richter, believes that the Nazi army is doomed; his buddies are beginning to doubt the Fuehrer's omnipotence. Some German soldiers, hoping to be captured, greet each other with the wisecrack, "Auf Wiedersehen in Kanada."

On the Cassino slopes, Guehler's outfit is torn to shreds by U.S. artillery. Prodded by Guehler, the few remaining men surrender. At this point Beyond Defeat picks up in excitement, for now there begins a new war, subterranean and ferocious, between those German prisoners still loyal to the Fuhrer and those who would cast off the Nazi curse.

When interrogated by U.S. officers, most of the prisoners refuse to talk, but Guehler gives his estimate of German casualties at Cassino. Only when asked to identify German positions does he refuse. As a Socialist, he welcomes Hitler's defeat, but as a German he feels that "every position I give away means 30 to 40 direct hits for my comrades . . ." The job of rooting out Naziism from the German heart, he believes, must be done only by the Germans themselves. .

Guehler's first chance comes aboard a prison ship on Christmas Eve. In the hold, a Nazi begins to harangue the prisoners, but the anti-Nazis drown him out by singing Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht. Cheered by this little victory, the anti-Nazis feel that, with America ahead, they may yet know freedom.

But in the U.S. prison camp they are painfully disappointed. The older prisoners, Afrika Korps veterans, scorn the Cassino captives as traitors and. cowards. A shadow Gestapo, working under the inexperienced eyes of the U.S. guards, rules the prisoners through terror. When the anti-Nazis appeal for protection to the

U.S. commanding officer, he brushes them off with some mumble about the Geneva Convention.

A Race Apart. Guehler and his friends decide that because the Americans have never lived under terror they cannot really understand how the Nazis operate. "Since I've got to know the Amis," says one of them, "I've realized we must settle with the Nazis by ourselves . . . For most of the Amis, you're either a Nazi or a traitor. They're a race apart from us." The anti-Nazi prisoners then decide to form an underground of their own in order to break the Nazi hold.

Beyond Defeat is not a great novel. Its characterization is rudimentary, its style raw, its construction disorderly. But no other book has yet shown so closely how German troops felt and thought in the last, lost stages of the war.

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