Sniper on the Eastern Front: The Memoirs of Sepp Allerberger, Knight's Cross | 
 enlarge | Author: Albrecht Wacker
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Category: Book
List Price: $34.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  72 reviews
Sales Rank: 14516
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 196
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6 x 1.1
ISBN: 1844153177
Dewey Decimal Number: 940.542147
EAN: 9781844153176
ASIN: 1844153177
Publication Date: March 2006
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Product Description
Josef "Sepp" Allerberger was the second most successful sniper of the German Wehrmacht and one of the few private soldiers to be honoured with the award of the Knight's Cross.
An Austrian conscript, after qualifying as a machine gunner he was drafted to the southern sector of the Russian Front in July 1942. Wounded at Voroshilovsk, he experimented with a Russian sniper-rifle while convalescing and so impressed his superiors with his proficiency that he was returned to the front on his regiment's only sniper specialist.
In this sometimes harrowing memoir, Allerberger provides an excellent introduction to the commitment in fieldcraft, discipline and routine required of the sniper, a man apart. There was no place for chivalry on the Russian Front. Away from the film cameras, no prisoner survived long after surrendering. Russian snipers had used the illegal explosive bullet since 1941, and Hitler eventually authorised its issue in 1944. The result was a battlefield of horror.
Allerberger was a cold-blooded killer, but few will find a place in their hearts for the soldiers of the Red Army against whom he fought.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 67 more reviews...
 excellent read but questionable veracity, perhaps we were duped August 16, 2008
This book is so well written that I did not want to put it down, a comment at least one and probably many other readers have posted here. It has a stilted, blunt, visceral style that conveys the human condition much more effectively, realistically, and believably than Faulkner or Hemingway or any famous writer I can think of. That is why I am disappointed at the questionable veracity of the story. First, the subject's true identity is kept hidden. At this point in time it is probably not important to do such a thing and so I wonder what the real reason might be. Is there, or was there, any Sepp Allerberger at all? Second, you know very well that he could not have remembered the hundreds of intricate details that are described in the story. This must have been made up in an ad hoc fashion to spice up the account, perhaps by the writer, whose background seems nebulous despite some other titles credited to his name, which is misspelled on a title page.
I do recommend this book but suggest that it might well be a fiction that could have been truth. The Russians were certainly as bestial as they are portrayed.
Excellent read for WWII July 14, 2008
This book shows how brutal the Eastern front really was. This book at times is very gruesome but very necessary to show how this war was fought and how brutal war can be. Definitely worth while to pick up.
 sniper on the eastern front May 30, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I enjoyed the book. I dont like reading books that are written in the 3rd party, so this read cleanly and you felt as though you where there. The descriptions of his actions where very detailed. Some of the horrors of war where mentioned in the book, such as the treatment of civilians during occupied russian territory, and I believe these stories must be told. For anyone who is interested in reading a good 1st person account of their own experiences, you will enjoy it.
Horror Show May 6, 2008
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
I admit that I had relatively low expectations for Albrecht Wacker's SNIPER ON THE EASTERN FRONT. The rather lame title led me to believe that this was a modern-day "Landser-hilfe", that is to say, a badly written, cliched, guts-without-glory war tale of the type that proliferated on post-WWII German bookshelves. Nothing could be further from the truth. SNIPER is probably the most engrossing book I've ever read about life and death on the Eastern Front, and one of the harshest looks at war ever printed.
SNIPER is the story of "Sepp Allenberger", who served three years as a German Army sniper in Russia. The name is a nom de plume, since if Allenberger's identity were commonly known in Germany he would, given the antimilitaristic spirit of the modern-day Germans, suffer according social ostracism. (The unofficial compact w/WWII vets is, "You don't talk about your heroics, and we won't pillory you for fighting in Hitler's army.") Allenberger's military career began in wholly ordinary fashion; he was a drafted soldier from a small town who served in the infantry during the invasion of Russia. Not too long after he arrived there, however, Allenberger got his hands on a sniper rifle and demonstrated that he had a special talent for placing bullets precisely where he wanted them to go.
Young Sepp (he really was just a kid) was a self-taught hunter of human beings, the Germans being laggard in their understanding of sniping as a tool of modern warfare. By the time he was finally sent to sniper school, he was already an expert at killing from a distance. The book is unclear just how many Russians fell victim to his weapon, but in one day alone he accounted for twenty-one Red Army soldiers, so a figure of two or three hundred is probably conservative. As a sniper, he was marked for a very horrible kind of death should he ever be captured, and only after discovering the fates of several of his comrades did he learn that self-effacement would make him live longer. Much of Wacker's prose (which is often stiff, as he's a technical writer by trade) is spent describing the life, philosophy and methodology of snipers, but overall, the book is simply one soldier's tale of combat in the East. And a terrifying one at that.
There is probably no horror that can be committed by human beings that Allenberger didn't witness firsthand - the torture and mutilation of prisoners, the casual execution of innocent people out of sheer bloody-mindedness, the slow death of comrades from festering wounds, and in two of the books' most appalling sequences, organized cannibalism and a gang-rape/murder which was almost impossible to finish reading. Many people "get" that the Russo-German War (1941 - 1945) was an appalling massacre from start to finish, resulting in more than 32 million dead, but it is one thing to see the figures and another to be dragged through the bloody muck of the holocaust by one who was there. The suffering of the ordinary front-line soldier, who was underfed, poorly clothed, covered with lice, and perpetually exhausted even during "quiet" spells on the front, is hard to concieve, but Wacker, whose pen gets sharper as he warms to his subject, made me concieve it.
SNIPER is a terse and engrossing soldier's story which I would highly recommend to anyone looking for an honest understanding of the Eastern Front. But it is not for the faint of heart.
Innocence Lost April 26, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
One needs a strong stomach to read this book. If anyone had any doubts that the Eastern Front in World War 2 was a meat grinder this book should remove those doubts. It is the story of an 18 year old conscript sent to the Eastern Front in 1943 as a machine gunner in a light infantry regiment. He soon realises that machine gunners had a short life in war and after having shown some skill with a captured Soviet sniper rifle returns to combat as a sniper.
Learning quickly he managed to survive the retreat of the German forces but witnesses horrific events in the process which are described in detail. It is not easy reading, not only because of the descriptions but it is also written by the author in a very Germanic manner which emphasises the blood and toil. The author has a background in small arms and spent some time interviewing Joseph "Sepp" Allerberger for the book. He hints that Allerberger has had some problems in later life from the trauma he witnessed but there is little detail. Nor does he detail what Allerberger did after the war which would have rounded out the story.
It is worth the read for a number of reasons; the description of the fighting from a different perspective, the insights into the type of sniping during World War 2 and the brutality of the Eastern Front.
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