Günter K. Koschorrek

Günter K. Koschorrek (* 1923 in Gelsenkirchen ) is a former German soldier in the 24th Panzer Division in World War II and the author of several books. He did not record his war experiences in Stalingrad in his book Forget the Time of Thorns .

Life

At the age of nine, Günther Koschorrek and his family moved to his family's East Prussian homeland. There he passed his secondary school leaving certificate and attended a business school and helped his mother's business. He then attended the Itzehoe motorsport school to obtain a military driver's license. In February 1942 he was drafted into the Wehrmacht and trained in Insterburg , East Prussia, until October . He then joined the fighting force 1.KD / 24. Panzer divisions deployed in Stalingrad . The then 19-year-old Koschorrek was used as a machine gunner and escaped with his unit shortly before Christmas 1942 from the boiler. In April 1945 he was taken to the hospital in Marienbad, wounded . At the end of June he was released from American captivity there. After the war Koschorrek worked in managerial positions in business. After finding his war records in 1995, he wrote the book “Don't forget the time of thorns”, for which he received an award from WDR in 1996 .

In his book, Koschorrek asserts, among other things, that Soviet troops carried out massacres of their own civilian population, accused of collaboration with the enemy, which the author witnessed during the retreat of German troops from the Inhul River to Vosnesensk on the southern Bug (Mikolayiv Oblast, Ukraine ) claims to have been in March 1944. According to Koschorrek, these atrocities were said to have been blamed on the German troops. There is no mention of such incidents in any other source, although at the time of the publication of Koschorrek's book, Franz W. Seidler, among others, spoke of a Stalin order according to which Soviet commandos, among other things, disguised as Germans were to carry out massacres of their own population ( so-called "Torchman's Order" of November 27, 1941). Research by the historians Christian Hartmann and Jürgen Zarusky revealed that this version of the Stalin order mentioned was a forgery. The actual order was only about the destruction of dwellings in order to deprive the German invaders of winter opportunities. Koschorrek also claims to have seen bodies of civilians murdered in the Nemmersdorf massacre , and his descriptions correspond to those of the Nazi propaganda at the time.

Works

• Don't forget the time of the thorns (in English: Blood red snow )
• Front pig

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Stalingrad 1942 on Spiegel.de
2. ↑ ^{a b} Don't forget the time of the thorns (PDF; 64 kB) on Volksbund.de (accessed on May 24, 2012)
3. ↑ Christian Hartmann / Jürgen Zarusky, "Stalin's 'Fackelmänner -ordnung' of November 1941. A falsified document." In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 2000 issue 4, pp. 667–674, PDF . The original order of the order, translated from Russian, is reproduced on pp. 673–674. The authors note the following about Seidler (p. 671): "Despite the explanation:" The original of the order has not yet been sent to the author by the National Archives ", in the corresponding footnote one can see Seidler, who in contrast to the" private historian "Becker After all, a professor of modern history - now emeritus - is not to be spared the accusation of adopting unchecked information from unscientific works and thus giving a right-wing extremist propaganda invention the appearance of scientific seriousness. "
4. ↑ See Lisa Kleine, "Up to this day enigmatic What happened 70 years ago in Nemmersdorf?", Focus online, Tuesday, October 21, 2014, 10:06 am