I was extremely fortunate growing up in my shithole backwater redneck rural farmtown, in the middle of the Free State province. Even by the time the mid-2000s arrived, the little mothball of a town was already crumbling in infrastructure. The township is currently known as THE most corrupt and shithole-esk municipality in the entire province, which is quite an achievement.
The trash lorries were never repaired or maintained, so that by 2010, all of them were brokenshit downtrodden, so that one of the local farmers had to donate a 2nd hand tractor with a wagon, just so that the town could ferry it's fricking ever growing heaps of black bags away from everybody's home.
And yet, the one exceptional privilege I had growing up, was that our Town Hall had a truly magnificent Public Library, which had collection of both fiction & non-fiction books well beyond what such a godforsaken shitheap town like ours ever deserved. All because the Head Librarian woman was an afrikaans ballbuster who beat up any whoreson who ever dared to abuse books in her sight.
It was here where I discovered a large collection of dilapidated Sven Hassel novels. During this time the Satanic Panic was in full swing, so conservacuck busybodies were prowling about the town to denounce any of the church's denomination, who's kids were reading such satanic shit such as Harry Potter or Digimon. Even doctor who books became anathema for god fearing folks.
So I knew I had to keep secret the Sven Hassel books I took out from the Library, because of their extremely gruesome front covers.
Or the massive amounts of Nazi imagery
So as a teenager, these types of books were very clearly the type of shit which would be WAY above the PG13 age-restriction, in which your parents would ban/forbid you from watching horror or gore movies like Aliens or Predator. It was clear for me and many who grew up in conservative/religious households, we would only ever be allowed to read adult material like this once we were outside of the thumb of influence of our parents.
So we read it in secret. For whatever reason, Sven Hassel appeared to have been popular for many Afrikaans young men, in many towns over in Safrica. I even managed to befriend some old stoner guy, who owned a metric shitload of WW2 novels written in the past century, like holy smokes this guy had every single WW2 fiction and non-fiction book about WW2 ever written, in ALL kinds of states! Some were in mint condition, and other books, like the Sven Hassel books he gave to me, were yellowed-out delipidated books from the 1970s!!
So many young men were falling in this History Buff (aka exclusively fricking WW2 shit 
) and collecting WW2 stories from afar. And Sven Hassel had this weird underground mass popularity for young afrikaans men 16-24 young adult age group.
The reason? Because Sven Hassel novels were all incredibly brutal, as in brutality incarnate.
WHAT WERE SVEN HASSLE NOVELS ABOUT:
So what on earth 
hat were Sven Hassel books about?? They were all WW2 fiction novels revolving around penal battalions sent to their deaths, usually towards the Eastern Front against the Soviet Union, IN ww2. They depicted a cast of lowlifes, criminals, traitors and political dissidents who had fallen into the bad side of the Nazi regime, and were given one final chance of "redemption" from the eyes of the brutal regime, and subsequently always given the most suicidal front of the frontline position and jobs.
The protagonist penal Wehrmacht soldiers in Sven Hassel novels were quite unique in this time period of books, after WW2, and before the internet-era where facts could be checked from Smartphones. Being on the obvious "Bad Guy's" side of WW2, the protagonists were anything but heroic, they were the primeval anti-heroes.
And while anti-war novels with anti-hero archtypes existed from books like "All-Quiet-on-the-Western-Front" or Biggles the WW1 Biplane Bong antihero had existed in supreme abundance since the conclusion of the 1st World War, there were decisive differences between the characterization of books written from protagonists of WW1 & WW2.
WW1 anti-hero literature involved the dramatization of the futility and absurdity of war, and the cruelty of sending young men to die in Old men's conflicts. WW1 antihero and antiwar themes were more universal and "unpolitical" in terms of their timelessness.
The theming of WW2 was vastly different, considering the vast amounts of genocides taking places throughout the war, and NOT just from the Nazis. Croatians were busy slaughtering their Serbian Neighbours the moment the Wehrmacht gave them the opportunity. Belarussian partisans inflicted as much suffering upon their kin as Gestapo death squads, and Slavic families were culled based on whether they made the mistake of not supporting communists or nazis enough. There was a much greater sense of indefensible cruelty and warmongering, and was reflected as such in fiction.
Pretty much fricking zero perspectives made the day from the frontline kraut trooper's view in heroic or unheroic fiction in WW2 for pretty understandable reasons. The few exceptions like The-Forgotten-Soldier of Guy Sajer, a French Alsatian bastard whom was pressganged into the Wehrmacht due to his kraut ancestry, has a far more sympathetic theme in which unwilling participants found themselves swept into the maelstrom of the Nazi wars, and the subsequent horror and suffering they endured on the Eastern Front against their wills.
Sven Hassel was unique in the sense that the perspective was from the most base and barbaric men of the Wehrmacht.
Sven Hassel novels had a lot of dark themes, and would have been described as Grimdark if the moniker existed. Good men perish constantly for very little reason. A recurring meme is that the most noble and selfless of the Penal Battalion men, the best leaders and sergeants and men who try to look out for their fellow penal soldiers, tend to die like flies, whilst the lowest scum continue to survives the suicidal assaults like cockroaches. 
The maelstrom of the Eastern Front was legendary, but for those of us in Safrica, with finite resources, no internet and no access to European libraries, we had no capacity to gauge or experience it.
The Eastern Front housed some of the most ferocious battles fought in recorded human history, with death tolls and numbers ranging from the 100 000s to millions, a scope unthinkable for boers in a country, where our demographic barely numbered over 2 million, and yet twice than number of Russians were taught to have perished in Nazi POW camps alone, the amount of combat deaths on the Eastern Front alone numbered on a scale so depraved it defied imagination.
But because of the Cold War's censorship in South Africa, and censorship's momentum long after the fall of the Soviet Union, most of us took the word of Sven Hassel at face value, in terms of how he depicted events of the Eastern Front. We had absolutely no way of fact-checking his novels, or being capable of researching otherwise.
The sheer ferocity of the Eastern Front was captured in black-and-white pictures of mass-graves and the skeletons of cities reduced to rubble by Stukas and carpet bombing. Thus the sheer banality and brutality of description of warfare within Sven Hassel novels, gave him a lot of credence with people for like half a century, both in Safrican and Europe itself.
SVEN HASSEL BECAME FAMOUS:
Sven propelled himself to international fame, when he published "The Legion of the Darned" in 1953. The book provided an account of life as a German soldier on the Eastern Front, it opens with the author (book written in 1st person view) being tried and convicted as a deserter, and as a result being sent to a concentration camp.
The main character Sven as himself, spends a large amount of time suffering under the Nazi regime's prison system. He's recruited in bomb disposal for unexploded Bong aircraft-bombs,
before abruptly being "pardoned" and dispatched to a penal combat unit. Sven meets a bunch of degenerates who becomes his saviors throughout his misadventures and horrific ordeal on the Eastern Front, and the book climaxes as virtually everyone except the protagonist is gradually wiped out by the near end of the war in 1945, as Sven remains the lone survivor of the entire penal battalion of several hundred men, and is forced as the remaining veteran, to become company-commander, and train and equip the scrap of germany - old men and sickly teenagers.
Book got a bunch of accolades and positive criticism, and went on to be translated into a boatload of languages, including Dutch & English, which is found in Safrica. Legion of the Darned would become the first in a series of fourteen fiction novels detailing the misadventures and wartime experiences of Sven Hassel, as his own alter ego.
The books are pretty much interchangeable, with all of them occurring in different theaters of the Eastern Front, with a few exceptions, like when fictional Sven and the company of penal degenerates found themselves on an Italian troop transport bombed, and left afloat on open water, and endured much hardship stranded in the middle of the Mediterranean.
According to Sven, the books were fiction, but largely based upon real experiences which he had endured as an actual combat veteran captured by the Soviets in the final days of the Battle for Berlin in 1945, and then released amongst the few lucky fricks who survived Soviet detention.
The 1st book in particular has been reprinted for like 70 years.
BOOK MADE INTO FILM:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093546/
One of his bestsellers, the "Wheels of Terror", got made into the film "The Misfit Brigade".
Basically kraut version of Dirty Dozen. Not.....really.....good in my opinion.....
SVEN'S STYLE:
In spite of the drama to come, Sven Hassel was a spectacularly unique and engaging writer, he genuinely did have merits and talents as an author. He had the capacity to make exceedingly grim subjectmatter as enthralling, and many readers describe themselves as being bewitched by Sven, and continuing to read the continual atrocities depicted in his books, as if unable to look away from a car crash.
So the author is well liked and his books are often highly rated on websites like Amazon and Goodreads. And in a vacuum, as literary dark war fiction, they stand on their own as above average reviewed.
THE DRAMA: HISTORIC INACCURACY
So uhh, what's the problem? The issue is that pretty much every single one of Sven Hassel's 14 novels are all very VERY historically inaccurate. And while history is often coloured by bias, and Hollywood often takes liberties to tell stories and make movies, and holes can be punctured into pretty much all war fiction ever written, Sven is unfortunately in a league of his own, in terms of extremely levels of untruth and historic inaccuracy!
For those of us reading Sven Hassel novels in 
in the age before internet (2010 
) we genuinely took Sven's accounts at face value. Sven had eplicitly implied that while his books were fictional, they were based upon wartime experiences he personally endured, along with stories he had accumulated from his fellow soldiers.
But for those turbo neurodivergents whom studied WW2 and/or managed to acquire the fabled technology of Interwebs, you could come to conclusions about Sven Hassels's extreme levels of historic distortions pretty quickly. Additionally when I had the privilege to be have access to the University of Cape Town's library, I could also to my dismay 
determine that whilst I loved the Hassel novels, that Sven was pretty much full of shit. 
Even worse for Sven Hassel fans is the truly depraved and massive rabbit hole 
of the many lies and untruths of Sven Hassel's life, and that since the beginning from as far back as 1953, Sven has had detractors whom documented his inaccuracies.
But because there was no internet, and because there were few ways to verify this shit one way or another, it pretty much didn't obtain momentum before 2000!
Like holy shit hold on to your pants! 
https://www.svenhassel.com/biography/
According to Sven and his family estate (since even before the Internet-era and before he had a website), he claimed that at the age of 14 he joined the merchant navy as a cabin boy and worked on ships until his military service in 1936 he joined the Werhmacht because he was brokenshit poor at the time, and served until the end of the war in tanker units.
According to Sven it was in these panzer units where he met many batshit insane and colourful colleagues which inspired his equally batshit insane characters. He also claimed he had been sentenced to 10 years imprisonment in Danish prison for treason postwar, because he had served in Kraut forces which occupied Denmark. 
Now according to Sven himself, as earlier stated, he had been apprehended by the Soviets in Berlin after unconditional surrender of werhmacht to the allies; and that he had spent multiple years hopping between POW camps postwar, from Soviet to French, and onwards.
BUT, local Danish newspapers had investigated postwar records, and determined that he had in fact been immediately arrested in Denmark in 1945 after the liberation and was held in prison there, first as a suspect and then as a convicted criminal, again because he had supposedly partook on occupying Denmark. And that he was released in 1949 after serving 4/10 years, as the Danish authorities gave amnesty to all Wehrmacht prisoners, as it cost more to house the frickers, than just let them be. According to the Danish papers, he had never been in either Soviet or french captivity
https://politiken.dk/navne/doedsfald/art5435426/Kul%C3%B8rt-dansk-krigsforfatter-er-d%C3%B8d
DANISH DOCUMENTARY CALLS SVEN A FRAUD: 
https://www.dr.dk/presse/dr2-tager-seerne-bag-om-skandalen
Translated into English as best could with online Translator.
The basic story was that the reason Sven Hassel fricked off to Spain during the latter end of his life, was not because Hassel enjoyed Spanish countrysides so much, but because he had been culturally ostracized by his countrymen, and actual veterans of war - for both those who fought for the Wehrmaght and the Danish forces. They had called him out for his historic inaccuracy and apparent untruth about his non-service on the eastern front!
INACCURACIES
https://web.archive.org/web/20170925180602/http://www.litteratursiden.dk/blogs/ruben-palma/20121021
Again translated from Danish as best could. Upon his obituary some Danish historians went out of their way to highlight inaccuracies:
(1) Like many of the penal Battalion men in Hassel novels being furbished with Tiger tanks, which as absurd, as the Wehrmacht knew their extreme value, and Tigers were only ever furbished towards tanker Aces whom had proven themselves, NOT fricking random penal battalions whom would at best be furbished with Stugs or Panzer 4s when sent into teh suicical front engagements against enemy formations.
(2) Just like with Das Boot, pretty much everyone in the penal legions were anti-nazi and anti-Hitler, which is a perpetual clean Wehrmacght myth. Most soldiers were loyal or ambivalent, and only became bitter during the closing years
(3) There is great falsehood towards kraut POWs escaping very easily from Soviet detention centers and gulags. While kraut soldiers regularly escaped Soviet military detention, they were ruthlessly guarded, and were not these caricatures of dysfunction, in which all the menial labourers were happy-go-lucky fools whos just scraped to get by, and kraut prisoners could just walk out with timing.. Whilst other depictions of POW camps as slavedriving starving centers are more accurate.
(4) While combat is accurately depicted as ferocious chaotic hellzones accurately, often penal battalions are given equipment and weaponry not accurate to specific theaters on the Eastern Front - things easily picked out by actual veterans, as absurd glaring errors. Gewehr 43s were rare, and not doled out to penal fricks, only for elite SS or Werhmaght troops. Instead mausers or Karabiner 98k (regular chambered rifle) were the most common foot trooper weapon, whom were usually organized around the well-performing MG42. Kraut platoons (20-50 men) were usually organized to have their machine gun as the central keystone weapon around which the platoon was built, with their rifles and submachine guns as the supporting suppression weapons, because of how extraordinarily effective the MG42/41 machinegun was, not the other way around.
SVEN HASSEL STILL LARGELY POPULAR IN BONGLAND AND ANGLOSPHERE:
The thing is that in spite of all of this dramaram within Denmark, where Sven is largely seen as a fraud and hack, these detractors are largely localized, while in England he is still largely highly regraded, and fricking journos take his personal website at absolute face value! 
Here's guardian actually doing legwork for Sven's obituary in 2012
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/oct/02/sven-hassel
=====(from TheGuardian)
On the lurid covers of the later paperback British editions, the double s in Hassel's name was printed as the double lightning-flash symbol of Heinrich Himmler's SS. Billed as worm's-eye-views of warfare from the German standpoint, the books contain some crude humour and a great deal more cruelty and brutality β they are war comics without the pictures, devoured especially by teenage boys.
Mystery surrounds the events of Hassel's own life, not least because he appears as a character in his own books. By his own account he was born Sven Pedersen in Fredensborg, Denmark, and later adopted his mother's maiden name.
Historians dug holes in Hassel's novels, especially his accounts of German military units. The 27th Panzer regiment, for example, was not, as described, a punishment unit or German version of The Dirty Dozen. Hassel's account of his own life β and his war experience in particular β was also disputed by some, including the journ*list Erik Haaest.
There were allegations that Hassel had links to the Danish Nazi party and that he spent most of the war in Denmark, picking up his combat stories from veterans of the Danish Waffen-SS. 
=====(end quote)
====(from Independant)
When I was a child, my father guiltily read Sven Hassel's paperbacks, keeping them in his bedside table where the children wouldn't find them. Gruesomely illustrated with photographs of concentration camp inmates and tanks rolling over corpses, they seemed to represent the populist voice of war experience, but a question mark remains over Hassel's real identity.
However, there's another side to the story. Hassel's critics have been disputing his claims for years, saying that his identity was falsified for another purpose; he never served in a Panzer Division at all but was in fact a Danish Nazi who patched together his books from stories told to him by Danish Waffen SS veterans after 1945, having spent most of the Second World War in occupied Denmark.
[This is where things get really weird 
Unfortunately, his biggest critic, the writer Erik Haaest, was discredited after denying that there were ever concentration camps. Even worse, Haaest's version of Hassel's life, in which Hassel runs a porn empire and gets his wife to write his novels 
====(end quote)
Yeah apparently some of Sven's detractors were holocaust deniers and wingnut weirdos themselves 
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