Kurt Knispel

Kurt Knispel was born on 20 September 1921 in Salisfeld, a hamlet near Zuckmantel (now Zlaté Hory) in the district of Freiwaldau, in the German-speaking border region of Czechoslovakia. He came from a German-Moravian family. After school he trained at a car factory where his father also worked.

After Nazi Germany annexed the Sudetenland in 1938, German-speaking men from the region became subject to German conscription. On 15 May 1940 Knispel was called up to a training unit for armoured troops at Sagan (Silesia), where he trained on the Panzer I and then as a gunner. According to his instructors he could judge distances remarkably accurately.

From November 1940 Knispel served as a loader and gunner on a Panzer IV in Panzer Regiment 29 of the 12th Panzer Division. With this division he took part in the invasion of the Soviet Union from 22 June 1941: the encirclement battles at Białystok-Minsk and Smolensk and then the advance on Leningrad. After the Soviet counter-offensive of winter 1941–1942 the badly damaged division was withdrawn to Estonia.

In 1942 he fought with the 13th Panzer Division in the summer offensive 'Case Blue' towards the Caucasus; he was promoted to Unteroffizier and received the Iron Cross second class. After an illness he trained on the new Tiger tank and joined Heavy Panzer Battalion 503 in April 1943, with which he took part in Operation Citadel at Kursk in July 1943; afterwards he received the Iron Cross first class.

The Wehrmacht report of 25 April 1944 stated that 'Unteroffizier Knispel' had knocked out 101 tanks between July 1942 and March 1944; on 20 May 1944 he received the German Cross in Gold. From June 1944 he commanded a Tiger II, first in Normandy and from October 1944 in Hungary, against the Red Army's offensive near Debrecen.

Knispel grew up in the German-speaking border region of Czechoslovakia, where tensions between the German-speaking minority and the Czechoslovak state were stoked by Nazi propaganda in the 1930s. The Munich Agreement of 1938 gave the Sudetenland to Germany; in March 1939 Germany occupied the rest of Bohemia and Moravia.

On the Eastern Front Germany waged a racial war of annihilation, with the mass murder of Jews, prisoners of war and civilians. Heavy tank battalions such as Heavy Panzer Battalion 503 were sent from front to front as 'fire brigades'. German propaganda turned successful tank crews into heroes, and the Wehrmacht report named individual soldiers to support morale.

In military history, Knispel's career is above all an example of how heavy tank battalions were used from Kursk to Hungary. His name only became widely known after the war, when popular books about 'Panzer aces' presented him as the most successful tank gunner of the war, with 168 kills (126 as gunner and 42 as commander) and about 30 unconfirmed.

Historian Roman Töppel interviewed his former superior Alfred Rubbel, who stated that in Heavy Panzer Battalion 503 it was 'not customary' to count destroyed tanks or attribute them to a single soldier. Rubbel called several claims by the author Franz Kurowski invented, including that Knispel had been nominated four times for the Knight's Cross without success. Stories of tank kills in 1941 are also implausible, because Knispel was then assigned as a radio operator.

On 28 April 1945, the day after his promotion to Feldwebel, his Tiger II was hit near Vrbovec in southern Moravia in a fight with Soviet tanks; the ammunition on board exploded. Knispel was standing in the turret hatch and suffered a severe head wound from a shell fragment. His crew took him to a field hospital, where he died two hours later, ten days before the end of the war in Europe.

In 2012 Czech amateur historians located his burial site; in April 2013 archaeologists of the Moravian Museum found his remains together with those of other German soldiers near the church of Vrbovec, identified by his identity tag. On 12 November 2014 the German War Graves Commission reburied him in the German military section of Brno Central Cemetery. Among historians his post-war reputation as a 'tank ace' is regarded as largely unproven.