Book question: adventure featuring german soldiers?

A

adventure_al

New member
Ok so my dad was talking about a series of books (sounds as if there was more than one) about a group of german soldiers making their way back to berlin during the war.

Im led to believe the books dont feature so much on the war as the soldiers adventures on the way back, which saw them search for treasure and get involved in various storylines.

The characters with nicknames he remembers them being called 'Big Tiny' and 'The Old Man'.

He thinks they were by Clive Cussler but I've read most of his books and Im fairly certain its not him.

Finally my dad read them around 30-40 years ago so safe to say they will be pretty old.

any ideas?
 
Finn

Finn

Moderator
Staff member
Not bad, I guess. Escapist storytelling with grisly details and lots of testosterone. I've read worse. Though better, too.

They've gathered a small following, become somewhat cult classics, so there are folks who seem to appreciate 'em. They're not exactly prevalent best sellers anymore and should be readily available with little cost, so I guess there's little risk in picking up a copy to see whether it's your cup of tea. Peruse the local public library or an antiquarian bookshop's shelf for used paperbacks.
 
M

Montana Smith

Active member
I'm a fan of Sven Hassel's books.

Ignore Hassel's claims that they're autobiographical, because they're obviously invented tales, some of which occurring in different parts of the world at the same time. The tales are witty and violent.

The Danish writer Erik Haaest went on a rabid crusade to prove that Hassel was an active Nazi in Denmark during the war. However, Hassel's novels are staunchly anti-Nazi, and often anti-war, with the main characters sometimes preferring to get drunk with newfound Russian soldier friends than kill them.

A higher brow alternative might be H.H. Kirst's Gunner Asch novels.
 
M

Montana Smith

Active member
Montana Smith said:
Ignore Hassel's claims that they're autobiographical, because they're obviously invented tales, some of which occurring in different parts of the world at the same time.
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Meant to add that there was no such unit as the 27th (Penal) Panzer Regiment - it's the biggest clue to debunking Hassel's claims.

He's the Indiana Jones of tall tales!

However, the pulp world he created could very well be the same one Indy occupied while on OSS missions...
 
M

Montana Smith

Active member
A series of pictures this morning of somebody's sixth scale German officer using an unusual choice of head sculpt instantly got me thinking of Sven Hassel.

A quick Google brought me back to Porta's Kitchen, a website I haven't visited in years:


Black Soldiers in the German Army​

Possibly the strangest of all Sven Hassel`s strange characters is Stabsgefreiter Albert Mumbuto, the black soldier who appears in the later books. At first this may seem quite absurd but, in a documentary programme shown on British television recently, several German black men were interviewed about their experiences under the Nazi regime and one of these men described how he had been sent call-up papers for the army and, considering himself primarily German, went along to enlist. He was initially turned away because of his "fuzzy hair" (not his skin colour). On his second attempt he was accepted. Sadly there was no photograph shown of him in uniform.

The black population of Germany during the Nazi era stood at around 200,000. They originated from German colonies in Africa and also from liaison between French colonial troops and German women in the occupied Rhineland after WWI. These children were reaching puberty when the Nazis took power and, as with other minorities in Germany, they were subjected to a programme of sterilization.

There were many strange stories in the programme:- a man who went to renew his German passport and was simply told that there were no black Germans so it was impossible to provide him with a new one. He was effectively left with no nationality and took one of the only options left to him by enlisting in the French Foreign Legion. He was then posted to North Africa where he ended up fighting "against his fellow Germans". He now receives a small Legion pension but nothing from his own country.

Others were actors and extras in films; the Nazis made many films in which they were portrayed as benign rulers of African colonies. These actors were quite safe from persecution for the time-being. It seems that there was no fixed policy in the case of black and coloured people under the Nazis. Some families were sent to concentration camps while others were called-up as soldiers or worked as actors.
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I haven't seen the documentary mentioned, though there are some references on this Wiki page:

...a number of blacks served in the Wehrmacht. The number of German blacks was low, but there were some instances of their being enlisted within Nazi organizations like the Hitlerjugend and later the Wehrmacht.[2] In addition, there was an influx of volunteers during the African campaign, which led to the existence of a number of blacks in the Wehrmacht and SS in such units as the Free Arabian Legion.

2. ^ Lusane, pp. 112-113; 189

Lusane, Clarence (2003). Hitler's Black Victims: The Historical Experiences of European Blacks, Africans and African Americans During the Nazi Era. New York: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-93295-5.
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Soldiers of the Free Arabian Legion in Greece, September 1943:

Bundesarchiv_Bild_101I-177-1465-16%2C_Griechenland%2C_Soldaten_der_%22Legion_Freies_Arabien%22.jpg



A few more links around the subject of non-whites in the Wehrmacht and SS:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waffen-SS_foreign_volunteers_and_conscripts

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indische_Legion

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/13th_Waffen_Mountain_Division_of_the_SS_Handschar_(1st_Croatian)
 
WilliamBoyd8

WilliamBoyd8

Active member
That might explain the presence of black actors in the 1943 German film "Munchhausen", and in an earlier German film about explorers in Africa.

:)
 
M

Montana Smith

Active member
WilliamBoyd8 said:
That might explain the presence of black actors in the 1943 German film "Munchhausen", and in an earlier German film about explorers in Africa.

:)
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Indeed.

It's an interesting subject that's largely passed over alongside history carrying a much higher profile.
 
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