Your Loyal and Loving Son: The Letters of Tank Gunner Karl Fuchs, 1933—1941

These are the compelling letters of Karl Fuchs, an ordinary German soldier who was completely convinced of the righteousness of his cause and who wrote them free of the recriminations and hindsight arising from the bitterness of defeat. Combining enthusiastic expressions of loyalty to the führer and the Fatherland with messages of love for his family and requests for necessities from home, they provide a personal look at a youth typical of his time, one whose fervent and naive nationalism was of the very sort that later fanned the flames of the Holocaust.Throughout Your Loyal and Loving Son, young Fuchs remains an idealist, confident in his concept of duty. Yet his letters clearly support the general assertion that many Germans who backed the Third Reich did so neither out of opportunistic self-interest nor nihilistic delight in destruction, but instead in the hope for a better future. Killed on the Eastern Front, Fuchs did not live to see his son, the infant to whom he wrote and who as an adult compiled these letters for publication. With an introduction and annotations by eminent historian Dennis Showalter, this collection will help make those early war years more comprehensible to contemporary readers.

Karl Fuchs’s son, Horst F. Richardson, Ph.D., has taught German, literature, and drama at Colorado College since 1965. He lives in Colorado Springs.

Dennis E. Showalter, Ph.D., has taught history at Colorado College since 1969 and is a former president of the Society for Military History. He has also served as distinguished visiting professor at both the United States Military Academy at West Point and the United States Air Force Academy as well as the H. L. Oppenheimer Professor at the Marine Corps University. His books include Tannenberg: Clash of Empires and The Wars of Frederick the Great. He also lives in Colorado Springs.