Two Books About Germans…

Dividends Forever
3 min readOct 2, 2024

By sheer coincidence, I recently read two books about the Imperial German military. Each title had a completely different tone and viewpoint on the subject matter. But both books were incredibly interesting and well worth a read.

Here are a few insights and takeaways from each title…

1. The Wolf: How One German Raider Terrorized the Allies in the Most Epic Voyage of WWI

While most people are familiar with U-Boats and submarine warfare, there’s a less remembered policy called “commerce raiding.”

Commerce raiders were state-sanctioned gentlemen-pirates who sailed the high-seas, capturing merchant vessels and sinking cargo that was destined for enemy nations. And unlike later forms of submarine warfare, commerce raiders avoided killing the crews of ships they attacked — typically capturing these sailors and safely unloading them at the nearest neutral port. The New York Times even praised German raider captains for their fair treatment of prisoners.

The Wolf is a book about the SMS Wolf, a German commerce raider which slipped past Allied naval blockades and sailed into the Pacific.

What I found most interesting about this book was the fact that “fake news” and institutionally-aligned misinformation campaigns were a…

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