Sven Hassel

Sven Hassel was the pen name of Danish writer Børge Willy Redsted Pedersen, born in 1917 and best known for novels portraying German soldiers during the Second World War. His first book, Legion of the Damned, was published in Denmark in 1953 and introduced a recurring narrator and his comrades in a Wehrmacht penal unit. Hassel presented much of the series as derived from his own military experiences, although the extent and nature of his wartime service have been disputed. He later lived in Spain and continued writing until his death in 2012.

Hassel wrote fourteen connected war novels, including Wheels of Terror, Comrades of War, Assignment Gestapo, Monte Cassino, Liquidate Paris!, SS General and Bloody Road to Death. The books follow Porta, Tiny, the Legionnaire, the Old Man and other soldiers through the Eastern Front, Italy and occupied Europe, combining brutal combat, barrack-room humour and hostility towards military authority. Although marketed as realistic and autobiographical, the novels are better treated as graphic anti-war adventure fiction than as dependable accounts of particular campaigns. The series became an international publishing success, reportedly selling more than fifty million copies.