Originally published in West Germany in 1950, the book was translated into many languages (into English by Anthony G. Powell in 1956),[1] and has been issued in numerous editions.
The letters were then impounded, opened, stripped of identification and sorted by content, before eventually being stored in archives.
[2] Unlike the usual military history accounts focusing on mass armies of anonymous men, the reader is presented with the personal tragedies of individual soldiers, the "single human being ... in the face of death", getting a tangible impression of the horrors of war.
[citation needed] German jurist and legal scholar Wilhelm Raimund Beyer has questioned the authenticity of the letters.
[4][5] The letters refuse to admit the complete hopelessness of the 6th Army, and in fact (cited from letters never to be delivered, either pulled from corpses or retained by advancing Soviet troops), even the German Luftwaffe were being mauled by inadequate Russian fighter planes.