Sniper on the Eastern Front: The Memoirs of Sepp Allerberger, Knight's Cross

144 Pages·2006·0.92 MB·English

by  Albrecht Wacker

First published in Great Britain in 2005 by Pen & Sword Military an imprint of
Pen & Sword Books Ltd
47 Church Street
Barnsley
South Yorkshire
S70 2AS
Copyright © Geoffrey Brooks, 2005
ISBN: 9781844153176
Digital Edition ISBN: 9781848846937
The right of Geoffrey Brooks to be identified as Author of this Work has been
asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act
1988.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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I dedicate this book to my daughter,
Angie Valeria Brooks-Canepa
Contents
Introduction

Chapter 1: Machine-Gunner at the Ukraine Front, September 1943
Chapter 2: A Sniper Emerges
Chapter 3: A Taste of Trench Warfare at Nikopol
Chapter 4: Retreat from Nikopol
Chapter 5: More Horrors on the Road to Ingulez
Chapter 6: Desperate Defence at Bakalov: Killing Horses, Cossacks,
Women Snipers and Our Own
Chapter 7: Balmy Days on the Dniester
Chapter 8: Respite: Sniper Training at Judenburg, Summer 1944
Chapter 9: Rumania, August 1944: The Stab in the Back
Chapter 10: Into Hungary: The Soviet Liberators as I Came to Know
Them
Chapter 11: Partisans at the Saw-Mill: I Win the Knights Cross
Chapter 12: The Last Ditch: Flying Courts and the Long Trudge Home

Index
The route followed by Josef Sepp Allerberger from the battle of Redkina
Gap near Voroshilovsk, July 1943
Introduction
This book relates the wartime career of Wehrmacht sniper Josef ‘Sepp’
Allerberger, an Austrian conscript who served on the Eastern Front from July
1943 until May 1945. Although never rising above the rank of private, he was
awarded the Knights Cross and is listed as the second highest scoring
Wehrmacht marksman in the field with 257 confirmed kills.
Austrians such as Allerberger who served in the Wehrmacht had German
nationality. On 12 March 1938, German forces entered Austria for the purpose of
annexing the country into the German Reich. On 18 March 1938, the Reichstag
passed the Law for the Reincorporation of Austria into the Reich
(Reichsgesetzblatt I, p. 262, and BliV 1938 No. 12). This enabled frontier and
customs posts to be dismantled, and to all intents and purposes, Austrian citizens
obtained a status of nationality which rendered them liable, amongst other
things, to conscription into the Wehrmacht.
This book is based largely on interviews given by Allerberger to Albrecht
Wacker and others for the book Im Auge des Jägers (VS-Books, Herne, 2000),
and on earlier question and answer sessions he gave, as for example in the
official Austrian military publication Truppendienst (Hauptmann Hans
Widhofner, 1967). The principal background source used has been General Paul
Klatt’s Die 3. Gebirgsdivision.
I have preferred the autobiographical form for this book since in my opinion
the narrative is best cast in the first person if the manner in which information
was collated enables the material to be written as a personal memoir. The
biographical approach can be appropriated as a vehicle for the expression of the
political opinions of authors, particularly modern German liberal authors, which
are not, and never were, held by the subject, but appear to be attributed to him to
satisfy the requirements of political correctness. In the original German volume,
as an aid to concealing Allerberger’s identity, a pseudonym was employed, all
sensitive family photographs masked, his country of origin stated as Germany
instead of Austria and certain dates doctored on the grounds that ‘German
snipers, even in their own country, are reviled as ruthless murderers, and for this
reason it is essential to protect the subject with anonymity’. Within a day or so of
receiving Wacker’s book I identified the subject Allerberger by briefly surfing
the Internet for information on Wehrmacht snipers and accordingly I have no
confidence that Wacker’s precautions would be likely to baffle for long a really
determined revenge-seeker.
In the Epilogue to the Wacker book, Allerberger asks the critical question,
‘Was it right, what we did? Was there an alternative under the given
circumstances?’ One has to consider very carefully this question, for Allerberger
has had the benefit of sixty years’ exposure to Western propaganda that it was
‘not right’, and yet he is still a ‘don’t know’. This uncertainty has its roots in the
hypocrisy of condemning one political regime for its excesses and aggression,
and not the other.
The 1924 Soviet Constitution had as its aim ‘one worldwide socialist Soviet
Republic’. Lenin and Stalin made no secret of their desire for a second European
war to establish a communist Europe. The Soviet build-up towards this end
began long before they embarked upon the road in 1939 with the occupation of
eastern Poland, and in 1940 the Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. In
his recent book, The Icebreaker, Viktor Suvorov (the former military spy
Vladimir Bogdanovich Resun) makes the case that Soviet military theory was
based on offence and the conquest of territory ‘for the world revolution’.
Operation Groza (Thunderstorm), the invasion of Europe to the Atlantic, was
scheduled to begin on 6 July 1941. The statement of General S.P. Ivanov, Chief
of the General Staff Academy of the USSR armed forces in 1974 that ‘the Nazi
High Command succeeded in forestalling our troops literally two weeks before
the war began’ seems eloquent enough proof of this allegation, and more
recently Russian academic historians Vladimir Nevezhin and Mikhail Meltiujov
have found archive material that supports Suvorov’s allegation.
From the earliest beginnings of the National Sozialistische Deutsche
Arbeiter Party or NSDAP (The Nazi Party), the primary aim had been the
destruction of Bolshevism. This was for religious reasons as well as political.
The hidden religious basis of National Socialism was reincarnation without a
heaven (Hitler’s table talk, 13 December 1941). Judeo-Christianity was nothing
but communism (Hitler’s table talk, 30 November 1944) and modern
Bolshevism was nothing but Christianity without the metaphysical trappings
(Hitler’s table talk, 14 December 1941). Hitler saw himself as the Grail knight,
Parsifal, the prophet of man’s rebirth in a new form, his task being to elevate
mankind for the global struggle to eventually escape the cycle of reincarnation.
The secret name of his Berghof residence, Gralsburg – fortress of the Grail –
seems to confirm this (Hitler’s table talk, 2 February 1942). Hitler’s dedication
to a Buddhist philosophy is obvious from the fact that throughout the Great War
he carried the five works of the philosopher Schopenhauer in his gas mask case
(Hitler’s table talk, 19 May 1944) and knew large tracts of them by heart. He
thought as a pantheist and a mystic, since he perceived God as being the sum