Through Blood and Brotherhood

On April 6, 1941, German troops along with Italian, Hungarian, and Bulgarian military units invaded the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. In less than two weeks the Kingdom would be defeated, setting the stage for a bloody civil war that the occupying Axis forces desperately tried—and needed—to control. Based on years of research, this book provides a distinctive account of what happened in the relatively unknown and under-researched Yugoslavian theatre of conflict in World War II. Based on the detailed diaries of Gottfried Weber, a naïve patriotic teen from a small town in Saxony who is willingly drafted into the German Wehrmacht and sent to Yugoslavia for occupation duty. This is the story of an emerging adult struggling to keep a sense of youthful normalcy during war, balancing friendships and romance with his daily life in combat and trying to stay alive. But the book is more. Weber’s accounts are woven into the historical record, while personal interviews from his comrades and enemies that