Greg McCarty
Posts: 234
Joined: 6/15/2000 From: woodbury,mn,usa Status: offline
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quote:
Originally posted by Fabs:
The 21st Panzer Division was certainly not made up of convicts, and did not fight in Russia in 1941, 1942, 1943 or 1944.
It was one of Rommel's Afrikakorps divisions, and fought agains the Allies in north Africam Italy and Normandy.
It never fought in Russia, and fought on the Eastern Front only at the end of the war, where its bulk was made prisoner by the Russians.
I don't know much about the 22nd Panzer Division.
Convicts and other such personnell tended to fight in penal battaions. These were infantry units mostly, and were given the rottenest jobs and poor equipment.
This business of a Panzer Division made up entirely of convicts and given the most dangerous jobs is pure fiction, as are most of Sven Hassel's stories.
He can't have served in Cassino, as the line there was held by Fallschirmjaeger and elements of two Panzer-grenadier Divisions.
No Panzer Division took part in the battle of Cassino, as the terrain was totally unsuitable.
He just seized on popular episodes of the war and inserted his bunch of misfits into it, to get a good war pot-boiler for naive little boys like me to feast on.
They did make good reading, I'm almost ashamed to admit.
The movie sucked.
Read a number of Sven's books way back when.
It was not a division; it was the 21st Penal Panzer Regiment. And even that was probably
ficticious. I can't imagine the Whermacht entrusting a precious resource like tanks to convicts. Sven H. was a great story teller, but he has been pretty much debunked as an actual soldier. The story goes that he spent a short period in a bicycle unit. He spent much of his civilian life during the war in bars talking "bull" with German troops. The time was not wasted, as is evidenced by his prolific writing. There is even a photo of him somewhere on the net dressed in what is said to be a bogus, and inappropriately decorated panzer officers uniform. He evidently passed himself off this way for a time. According to testimony of people who knew him, he was something of a "Ner-do-well" with a history of petty crime convictions. But --his writing was
evidently successful to a degree, but by all accounts he did not serve in the German army.
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Greg. It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees. --Zapata
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