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The rebellious steel tiger rider Kurt Knispel

2021-05-15T12:44:47.117Z


Considered the greatest German tank ace of World War II, scruffy and undisciplined, he did not pass a sergeant and was denied the Knight's Cross


The ace of the German tankers Kurt Knispel with his characteristic long hair and beard.

Of the three great German tankers with whom I have had (literary) intimacy, Otto Carius, Michael Wittmann and Kurt Knispel, that armored trident that rode the monstrous Tiger tanks (I leave aside

Panzer

Von Luck, who served as a General Staff officer ), my favorite, if one can have a favorite German tanker, is the last one: Knispel.

It is true that my relationship with Carius has been special: I wrote his obituary when he died in 2015 at the age of 92, which obviously I did not have the opportunity to do with the other two aces, who fell fighting in 1944 and 1945, respectively, Wittmann commanding a Tiger I and Knispel an improved Tiger II, a

Königstiger

(popularly King Tiger or Royal Tiger although the exact German translation is "Bengal tiger").

More information

  • The intimate life of the most legendary Panzer commander

  • Otto Carius, the last ace of the 'panzer' of World War II

I understand that it raises more than one eyebrow my unrepentant interest, unusual in the Culture section of EL PAÍS, for the German tankers of the Second World War and their steel mounts. It is hard for me to understand myself. The politically correct thing to do would be for tanks to give me a grudge, like most, or to be more concerned with the British tanker poet Keith Douglas, whose moving memoirs ("How can you live among this obsolescent race of heroes, and not cry?")

Of El Alamein a Zem Zem,

published by Javier Marías in Reino de Redonda in 2012; or the fart, flamboyant, hooligan and definitely likeable protohippy sergeant Oddball (Donald Sutherland)

from Kelly's Violent

(

why don't you knock it off with them negative waves? ”). But anyway, life takes you where it takes you and I started as a child with the German tanks when my older brother stayed with everything else, from the Shermans (like Oddball's) and the Crusaders (like Douglas's) to the soccer ball and the best Madelmans, not to mention the pride of my parents. It is possible, now that I think about it, that my fixation with the Third Reich tankers is Freudian and comes from having felt neglected or unloved: Guderian and Von Manteuffel would be puzzled to know.

My first battle tank, like that of others of my generation, was the 1/72 scale Airfix buildable model, in a plastic bag, of the Tiger I, the most famous armored vehicle in history, with its huge 88 cannon. mm.

five and a half meters long —that's a high-end range—, whose cucumber was capable of going through five walls of a house and piercing the enemy tank ambushed behind it.

I still remember how difficult it was to attach the chains to the model without getting your fingers caught in the Imedio glue that you then had to pry off with your teeth: a metaphor for the cold weather on the eastern front.

Then came the 1/35 Tamiya: the Pzkw III, the Panther, the Tiger II with the evocative Masami Onishi drawing on the box, and so many others.

A sentimental education from Panzer.

A German Tiger II Königstiger heavy tank.

My knowledge of the more atrocious side of armored warfare increased exponentially with the novels of Sven Hassel (ie

The Panzers of Death

), who compulsively read in the schoolyard trying to find some consolation from the relentless harassment they subjected us to relentlessly. old. Much later, I had the opportunity to visit the writer at his home in Barcelona and contemplate his tanker insignia that he kept in his room. When they fell prisoners, the German tankers used to tear off and eat the badge they wore on the lapels of their uniform, which was the skull with pink fillet and which the Russians, not very subtle in matters of iconography (Ivan was not Panovsky), confused with that of the SS, with the consequences that can be imagined.

Other milestones in relation to the German tanks were the Tiger I of the corrupt

SS-Oberscharführer

who played Karl-Otto Alberty in said

Kelly 's

Heroes

, and more recently they faced in Ramelle the troops of Tom Hanks in

Saving Private Ryan

. In both cases, despite the resemblance, they were actually Soviet T-34s characterized by the famous Panzer. Instead, the Tiger I protagonist of the shocking combat scene with three Shermans in

Fury-Hearts of Steel

, the movie with Brad Pitt, is authentic: the last of its kind that still works and was loaned (thank you from here) by the Tank Museum in Bovington, Dorset.

That Tiger is the famous 131, the first captured intact - in Djebel Djaffa, Tunisia, in 1943 - by a British intelligence team sent by Churchill to hunt him down.

Drawing for the Tamiya Tiger II model kit by Masami Onishi.

The trail of the Panzers is also followed in the comics, from the seminal

War

Exploits comics

to

Motofumi Kobayashi's

The Black Knight

(Glénat, 2011) about the imaginary one-eyed commander of armored forces Ernst Von Bauer.

Newer, and sensational,

Krieg Machine

, from Pécau, Mavriv, Andronik and Blanchard (Norma, 2021), has as its protagonists two tank officers - one of them with a disfigured face, after burning his car in Kursk, hidden behind a disturbing leather mask - who live adventures aboard your Tigers. Splendidly documented and drawn, and inspired by the life of another chariot ace, Johannes Bölter (139 tanks destroyed, Knight's Cross) the album includes a passage in which Wittmann is demystified by presenting him at Villers-Bocage, his

finest hour

, as arrogant and careless.

When speaking of the influence that tanks have had on me, I cannot help but point out the fact that I have been part, as an illustrious, reluctant and complaining member, of an armored division, the Brunete, in moments of unity, the 1981-82 course, which no one will consider its

finest hour,

precisely. However, I have worn the old black tank cap, a garment difficult to use where they are, and I have stood guard day after day in front of a German Panzer, a Pzkw III that you know why (perhaps to give bad ideas) presided over the Entrance to the Brunete headquarters in El Pardo, from where we left on 23-F for the particular Blitzkrieg of Pardo Zancada. That night in Congress I too was about to eat the Military Police insignia of the armored division, but they were metal.

Worthy of Sven Hassel

Returning to Kurt Knispel, origin of these lines, the legendary ace of aces of the tankers, presents features worthy of the characters of Sven Hassel: Porta, El Legionario or Hermanito.

Also a point from Donald Sutherland

from Kelly's Violent.

Knispel is much less popular than Wittmann (138 wins), who nevertheless has (very) against him that he was from the SS, or that Carius (150), and that he surpassed all his Panzer colleagues with a

confirmed

score

of 168 tanks destroyed (126 directly as gunner for their armor), possibly quite a few more.

Kurt Knispel (1921-1945) was certainly a quirky guy, especially for a successful Wehrmacht tanker. His hair was unusually long on a German army soldier, he was scruffy, in uniform anyway (only the yellow top hat was missing), he used to sport a beard, he had a tattoo and apparently he often passed regulations and discipline by the bottom of the tank and manifested indifference or animosity (as far as possible when you go in a Tiger) for the Nazi ideology. The fact is that despite being the ace of aces the German propaganda ignored him. He did not get promoted to officer, staying at Feldwebel (first sergeant) and was denied the famous Knight's Cross that he undoubtedly deserved and that Wittmann and Carius had. Hitler would not have wanted to take the photo handing it to such a scruffy and stubborn guy. What's more,He was of Czech origin, born in a small town in the Sudetenland. All of which did not stop him from becoming a nightmare for enemy crews, especially the Soviets. And it is that Knispel had a diabolical ability for where he put his eye to put the tank projectiles, faithful to the slogan of firing the first or at least being the first to hit the target. In the midst of the armored melés, with the T-34s attacking in veritable herds, he was able to keep his cool and observe in the deafening chaos clean targets, firing lines, impact surfaces, weak points: he mastered the lethal geometry of the battle, which Arturo Pérez-Reverte would say. Once, it is said, he hit a T-34 two miles away. He knew well the G-spot (!) Of Russian tanks,that it was the ring that joins the turret with the body of the armored one and that if you hit it there you would decapitate it.

Kurt Knispel's Königstiger car.

There is not as much information about Knispel as about his comrades, although the controversial Franz Kurowski (whose long career as author includes a lot of

military

pulp

and having been editor of the newspaper of the Afrika Korps veterans association) and an enthusiastic young man

have written about him.

Spanish author, Efraín Herrera Marchena, who has published not only a biography of the tanker with many data and too many personal reflections but also a novel,

Kurt Knispel, the knight without a cross

, both books written in a style that he does with literature and even syntax what Knispel did with the T-34s.

Kurt Knispel, the biography

, which can be purchased on Amazon, is signed by alimón Herrera and the Czech Vlastmil Schildberger, curator of the Moravian Museum and specialist in the character and who identified in 2013 the remains of the ill-fated tanker, recognized for his plate of military identification. It was then discovered that he had a healed vertebral injury, suffered from painful periostitis and his teeth left much to be desired. Annoyances that paled before the piece of Soviet shrapnel on his skull.

Herrera, hagiographic, attributes to the tanker, in addition to being a good people, having sent drinks and supplies to the Wiking division of the SS and defending a deportee in striped pajamas, perhaps a Jew, in an episode of confrontation next to a train. with the Nazi guards similar to the stereotypical good German military men that appear in the novels and movies

The Eagle

and

Odessa have arrived.

Knispel is, in any case, one of those unusual soldiers of the III Reich that leaves you somewhat perplexed, like the hunting and submarine aces respectively Hans Marseille and Teddy Suhren, two other somewhat brainless rebels who liked to party. A bit of the lineage of the unbelieving and fictitious Sergeant Steiner

of the Iron Cross,

who denied the medals and the glory.

God forbid we idealize a military man from the elite of the war machine of the genocidal Hitler regime, but maybe Kurt Knispel was a decent guy.

Assuming there could be decency and not even humanity in the Dantesque tank fights of WWII, and on the side of the bad guys.

The horror of the armored battle

In one of the best books on

tank

warfare,

Tank Men

by Robert Kershaw (Platea, 2011), testimonies are collected that vaccinate one of any temptation to empathize with that world of the Panzerwaffe. The heads of the commanders, who carried them out in the turrets to better see what was happening, flew as in the French Revolution. Chariots were on fire and crews scorched inside at furnace temperatures with howls that could be heard across the battlefield as they gave off a hideous stench of burning flesh. One of the many tremendous cases is that of the head of a T-34 that when hit by the cannon of a Tiger was split in half: from the waist down it fell into the tank, to the bewilderment of the crew, while the upper part of the body jumped out and lay on the ground, the tanker still alive,staring disconsolately around and clawing at the ground with his fingers.

Vignettes from 'Krieg Machine', by Norma Editorial

Knispel, who worked as an apprentice in a car factory, enlisted in the armored in 1940, participated in the invasion of the USSR at the age of 20 and fought in numerous scenarios on the Eastern front, from Leningrad to the Caucasus, destroying Russian tanks by the piece. . Much of his service he did as a gunner for different types of tanks. Apparently it was so good that it could fire without authorization from the tank commander. In 1943 he took the course to carry the Tiger I and joined with one, the 133 (later the 301), the famous 503rd Panzer Heavy Battalion, with which he fought in Kursk. After receiving the new Tiger II in 1944 - an armored car with more modern lines than the Tiger I and which was even more frightening - on the back of which he crossed Paris, he participated in the very hard battles around Caen that followed the Normandy landing.Transferred to the hesitant Hungary, where he met Otto Skorzeny in Budapest, he was mortally wounded in the turret of his Königstiger, the 132, on April 30, 1945 fighting near his home in Vlasatice, Moravia, and after having breakfast two last tanks Russians.

Forensic analysis of his remains indicates that a piece of shrapnel entered his head through one eye. He was reportedly transferred still alive to a field hospital in Vrbovec, where he died at the age of 23, ten days before the end of the war. He was buried in a mass grave in his underwear. He left an illegitimate son born during the conflict. After his exhumation in 2013, he was reburied in the German military cemetery in Brno. There he continues, trying to make his legend of steel, flesh and indiscipline prevail over the crushing chains of history, the atrocious guilt of his side and the dust of the I forget.

Source: elparis

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