Sniper at Monte Cassino: "Sometimes I hear them still screaming."

"Sometimes I can still hear them screaming," Josef Altmann said more than 50 years after the Battle of Monte Cassino, lost in thought. He instinctively flinched, ducked to the side, apparently seeking cover from an imaginary approaching shell.

As a member of Regiment 361, the former foreign legionnaire witnessed the merciless fighting on the Gustav Line and around Monte Cassino. The war had reached an unimaginable level of cruelty, and death struck mercilessly every day.

Altmann was quickly trained as a sniper and immediately sent to the front. He recognizes the faces of his victims through the telescopic sight. His hands start to shake, his heart races. Goose bumps covered his body. Fear, misery, the loss of his closest comrades and the screams of the dying made him pull the trigger despite his initial doubts.

Josef Altmann tells his story without pathos, free of heroism and frighteningly close to reality.

This book is an unflinching factual account and should serve as a memorial against war.

W. T. Wallenda's debut novel "Die Frontsoldaten von Monte Cassino" was already a minor international success. It tells the story of Mathias Wallenda, who was forcibly recruited in 1939 and served in theaters of war in France, the Balkans, Africa and Italy.

The author went on to write some 40 novels of various genres for two major German publishers.

In his books about the Second World War, he deals with difficult contemporary history in an informative way.

The Author comments:

The Second World War was one of the darkest chapters in the history of mankind. There must never be another holocaust or genocide like in Rwanda. The sad example of the bloody civil war in Yugoslavia, which kept the whole of Europe in suspense in the 1990s, shows how forgetful humanity is. We must shed light on the situation, we must not deny anything and we must take rigorous action against injustice.

While researching my books, I also talked to war veterans. As someone born after the war, I am not in a position to judge individual fates - I do not express collective guilt, but let the stories be told by the people who experienced them, and tell them without judgment.

Nowhere did I see brilliance or heroism in the eyes of the narrators. I only saw men who had experienced terrible things and had received no psychological support. Telling their story is/was perhaps the only way for them to detach themselves from it all, without trying to redeem themselves.

Many of the young men who were drafted at that time can also be seen as victims of the Nazis. They were fed false ideologies, torn from their families, and burned out on the front lines. Their tenacious struggle at the front, their suffering and death, made the actions of the death squads in the hinterland possible.

The Author:

"EVERY WAR IS A CRIME! I can only repeat myself: NEVER AGAIN WAR - NEVER AGAIN WAR - NEVER AGAIN NAZI REGIME - NEVER AGAIN HOLOCAUST - NEVER AGAIN CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY - WE MUST NOT FORGET BUT LEARN FROM HISTORY !!!!".