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Authoritative reviews of transportation books and media

Archives for: July 2010, 27

07/27/10

04:10:44 pm, by sabu advani

, 769 words, 88 views

Categories: Automobiles, Racing, Rally, History, Award Winner

Hitler’s Motor Racing Battles by E Reuss

2007 Motor Presse Club’s Motor Book of the Year

Hitler’s Motor Racing Battles:
The Silver Arrows under the Swastika
by Eberhard Reuss

“Let us correct the myths and perforce scratch the gloss of the racing legends. For beneath the silver that outshines everything there is a kind of brown stain, which can be attributed not to rust, but to suppressed history.”

Ever since producing a 1999 documentary on this subject for German television the author perceived a vacuum in the literature about the famous Auto Union and Mercedes-Benz Silver Arrows of the pre-World War Two period. Lots of books examine the cars and drivers, and while all provide some basic commentary about the political situation in Germany, none fully exhaust the subject of the “direct involvement of the Nazi regime in financing the teams and using them as naked propaganda.”

To this day, so many decades after the war, the subject of Nazism and the Third Reich remain—and understandably so—a particular German preoccupation both on the individual and the collective level.