Honor Denied: The Combat Memoirs of SS Radio Operator Karl Metzger
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Written by Karl Metzger and Paul K Harker.
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($26.95)
Editorial Review (from Amazon.com)
We did not aim and fire our rifles for Adolf Hitler or National Socialism. We did it for our fellow comrade soldiers.
At 17 years of age the German military seemed a wise choice to Karl von Metzger. Following enlistment he was sent to Radio School at Kiel to train as a wireless operator on a U-Boat. However, a shortage of radio operators changed his destiny by reassignment to the 2nd SS Das Reich Regiment. Karl participated in the invasion of the Low Countries and France in 1940 and believed in the cultural and historical significance of the war. A transfer to the 5th SS Wiking Regiment in 1941 took him to the Eastern Front where years of brutal combat and mindless suicidal orders forced him to question the political motives of Nazi Germany's war. While growing into manhood under barbaric hand-to-hand combat, merciless firefights and vicious artillery bombardments, Metzger clung to shreds of his boyhood innocence. He watched his comrade soldiers get pulverized by bombs and bullets until he abandoned his faith in the Third Reich with a resolve to survive the war. Metzger fought on the Eastern and Western Fronts through the harshest of conditions. Whereas the war began for him as a boy, it ended for him as a man. This is his story.
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phylo_roadking thinks this book is Terrible.
I'm a site administrator for the Feldgrau military history forum and contrubutor to the AxisHistoryForum research board. For the last few months a group of us have been investigating the content, writing and background of the two books "Directive 19" and Honor Denied" by Paul K Harker.
In the course of this, it was proved beyond doubt that neither Rolf Otto Schiller nor Karl von Metzger existed; these are fictional constructs by Paul Harker from other historical figures' careers and dropped Forrest Gump-like into a number of historical events in WWII germany. Despite the author's claim that hundreds of documents were researched in the course of confirming the "memoirs" of these two gentlemen - when offered MANY chances over the last two years - no corroborating proof of ANY sort was ever forthcoming, nor the names of any of the supposed academics who reviewed the works; apart that is from the author trying to palm off a number of forged documents on a published historian.
Paul Harker is known for creating "sockpuppet" accounts on various forums to talk up his books and stifle any criticism...as well as write fake reviews on various sales sites like Amazon. He's been identified - and admitted in his own blog - as being at various times so far EIGHT different people on the AHF forum - including several who were seeking expert corroboration of faked militaria he was at the time selling thru his "ssarmory" Internet sales outlet. At various times he's claimed his mother was Erwin Rommel's neice, Adolf Eichmann's neice...and even that his grandfather was Adolf Hitler's chauffeur! So far he has claimed - in various faked "names" - a total of ELEVEN members of his immediate family were SS officers or German officers of various ranks, including his own father, in real life a veteran of the US Coast Guard.
In the course of confirming that the two protagonists didn't exist, the investigators came across evidence that Harker's claimed careers are ALL faked - he doesn't hold his claimed MA in Psychology, he doesn't hold a BA in Medieval History, he didn't serve in the US Army in central America ( he didn't finish Basic Training) and the nearest he ever came to his claimed career in teenage psych counselling since leaving the Army is a short time as a RECEPTIONIST in a halfway house project in Cape May, NJ. Nor has he ever appeared onstage with Roger Waters as he used to claim on the Internet, nor has he enjoyed the many years of lecturing in Holocaust Studies in high schools and colleges he has claimed. They even came across proof that all the travel to Europe to interview Schiller was falsified, along with the claimed correspondance.
Sadly - in the process they ALSO came across a great deal of evidence of Harker's own personal anti-Semitism, and Holocaust Denial...and even Neo-Nazism. One investigator was even able to turn up evidence of a very tasteless history of Anti-Semitism dating back to Harker's schooldays, and a VERY nasty episode when Harker's fantasy world crossed into reality and he appeared in court in his home town in Pennsylvania for Impersonating a State Trooper and was given probation.
The full detail on ALL of this - and even Harker's attempts to run his own faked history forum to provide corroboration for his books can be read on Feldgrau, and an Australian researcher called Peter Gibson has been blogging recently on the investigation, and carried out further work himself.
I don't know about you - but I find it personally offensive that anyone should be willing to lie about his father or assorted relatives being A/ dead and B/ Nazis of varying degree...just to make a buck. Or claim that his mother should be related to various Nazis.