Wheels of Terror
The author, who died in 2012, was born in Denmark but served in the Wehrmacht during the Second World War. In his visceral and violent fiction about life (and then mostly, death) for the average German solider in the war, he should therefore know just how awful it was. There is, however, an element of uncertainty about Hassel’s war claims, with some writers arguing that his war record is itself mostly fiction.
The narrator (Hassel) is serving in a penal panzer regiment. The story starts when the disparate group of unwilling soldiers is training on new tanks and has to assist in rescuing and clearing up after a massive Allied air raid on a northern German city. Then they are sent back to the Eastern Front, involved in the desperate rearguard action to stem the Soviet advance through captured USSR territory. Because these are so-called state criminals, they have no love for the Nazi regime, and indeed hate anything associated with the party or the regime.
It is a brutal, crude and shocking account. The soldiers live in a Hobbesian state of nature, where life is cheap and anything goes. Hassel seems to want to put to bed the idea of the militarily noble and efficient Wehrmacht. Instead, it is chaos, selfishness and utter nastiness. The soldiers seem to live a charmed life – surviving by sheer brutality and fortune. It is not wonderfully crafted fiction, but the raw narrative makes it compelling in itself.
