Sniper

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Camouflaged sniper
Looking through a telescopic sight

A sniper is a person who shoots ambushes at people and other targets, either as a fighter in a war or civil war, or with criminal intent. Originally the term denoted irregular troops such as B. French Franctireurs . German propaganda used it, especially in World War II , to demonize the enemy and thus legitimize the war of extermination against “ Jewish Bolshevism ” and thus against the Jews.

Etymology and conceptual history

The word is first recorded in German around the middle of the 18th century, as a replacement word for the French franc-shooter , which is usually translated as Freischärler or Freischütz . Originally, a sniper was a person who fought on his own as a partisan behind the front line in the enemy area. Acting from hidden positions such as hedges was not mandatory for their fighting style, because the word hedge was not to be understood as the hedge behind which the shooter was hiding. Rather, with hedges since the 16th century in some composites illegal or clandestine actions referred, for example, the rear doctor for medical advice without a license or rear hunters for a hunter who illegally goes outside the hunting season on the prowl.

In the Franco-Prussian War of 1870/71, the concept of troops opposing invaders out of patriotism and organizing and armed themselves for this purpose was largely alien, so that the French franc-tireurs were deeply disliked. Although such troops were set up in the Wars of Liberation with the Freikorps themselves, these opponents are not referred to with the neutral term "Freikärler", but pejoratively as "snipers" in order to support the non-recognition as combatants propagandistically . As a result, they were often either massacred in battle or, if captured, shot dead. Although the combatant status was laid down in the Hague Land Warfare Regulations from 1907 , the designation was retained during the First World War , although international law now offered a certain protection against arbitrary shooting. During World War II , Nazi propaganda also used the term on the Eastern Front . In February 1942, a few months after the attack on the Soviet Union , the Reich Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels , ordered that the term “partisan” be replaced by “bandit” or “sniper” “so as not to give the appearance of heroism ". During the attack on Poland , he had spread numerous false reports about alleged "Jewish snipers". Already in the early phase of Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi propaganda systematically linked the enemy image of the partisan referred to as the "sniper" with that of the Jew, in order to set in motion a retribution logic that resulted in the participation of the Wehrmacht in the Nazi murder of Jews , for example at the Lviv massacre . The stereotype of the “Jewish sniper” even had an impact far beyond the end of the war: the German-Jewish SPD politician Max Ingberg , who was active in the resistance there during the German occupation of Belgium , was attacked after his return to Germany in 1951 with slogans such as “The dirty Jew, he was a sniper in Belgium. In 1991 the national newspaper subsidiary Deutsche Wochenzeitung wrote in a four-part series entitled “The SED and the Jews” about a Jewish anti-fascist that he “trained snipers against the German Wehrmacht in World War II” before he “worked in the GDR participated in the Bolshevization ”. For the extreme right, the “symbolic figure of the anti-German camp” is synthesized in the figure of the “Jewish communist”. In the context of the anti-Semitic genocide, the term “sniper” is so biased that Wolfgang Curilla, for example, only used it in quotation marks in his monograph “The murder of Jews in Poland and the German order police 1939–1945”.

Nazi propaganda pays particular attention to defaming British Prime Minister Winston Churchill personally with the term “sniper”: This is how the Nazi propagandist Karl Anton Rose described him in his pseudobiography Das ist Churchill from 1939 as a sniper, as the young reserve officer Churchill in the Boer war came as a civilian in a skirmish while making use of the weapon. A poster showing a photo of Churchill with a Thompson submachine gun was widely used . The Nazi propaganda manipulated the image by tilting Churchill's head slightly to make it look more threatening, positioned it as if it were lurking behind a corner of a house, and added the words "HECKENSCHÜTZEN" in capital letters. The caricaturist Emil Kneiß also portrayed Churchill in this pose as an alleged sniper. The Nazis' self-generated enemy image of the "sniper" had such a strong impact that in 1941 Adolf Hitler himself decreed that Friedrich Schiller's drama Wilhelm Tell, which had been highly valued by the Fiihrer until then, was so strong was banned from performance and banned from school reading, whereby he explicitly dubbed the Swiss national hero "Swiss snipers".

Differentiation from similar terms

As a sniper soldiers are called, running through selective, targeted use of firearms their combat mission. Police snipers are more precisely called precision shooters. A sniper, on the other hand, is not necessarily a sniper. Even people who are not equipped with precision weapons are called snipers if they fire from a concealed position that is difficult to locate.

The sniper has nothing in common with the sniper who fires from the rear of a fighter jet.

Legal Aspects

The use of snipers against military targets is generally permitted in times of war. Even setting an ambush is not in itself perfidy in the sense of international martial law . Difference Loser or deliberate shelling of civilians, however, represents a war crime . In the siege of Sarajevo for bandaged. B. especially on the Bosnian Serb side numerous snipers. They posted themselves in tall buildings or on mountains and shot at random and indiscriminate vehicles and people. From September 10, 1992 to August 10, 1994, they killed 406 soldiers and 253 civilians, including over 60 children. Several thousand people were injured. The affected street was therefore often called "Sniper Alley" (Bosnian: Snajperska aleja).

Snipers in the original sense of "Freischärler", "Partisan" or "Franc-Tireur" acted in a gray area under international law. The Hague Land Warfare Regulations of 1907, based on the Franc-Tireurs, found a compromise: as a condition for the improvised warrior with improvised uniform to be recognized as a combatant , it requires responsible superiors, a widely visible badge and openly carrying of weapons.

Criminal and terrorist snipers (examples)

In 1966, after a rampage , Charles Whitman holed himself up on the observation deck of a tower on the campus of the University of Austin ( Texas ) and shot several people from up to 400 m away.

In the summer of 2002, John Allen Muhammad and adolescent Lee Boyd Malvo shot dead several people in an ambush near Washington, DC together and seriously injured several others (see Beltway Sniper Attacks ). Prior to their exposure, they were unknown to the media as Beltway Snipers , Washington DC Snipers, or Tarot Card Snipers .

Other well-known snipers:

Victims of sniper attacks included:

During the Northern Ireland conflict, the South Armagh Snipers operated in the Irish border area and shot nine security forces with, in some cases, large-caliber sniper rifles.

Web links

Wiktionary: sniper  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Sniper . Duden online
  2. ^ Friedrich Kluge: Etymological dictionary of the German language . 24th edition. 2002, ISBN 3-11-017473-1 , p. 399
  3. ↑ Hedge Doctor. In: Jacob Grimm , Wilhelm Grimm (Hrsg.): German dictionary . 16 volumes in 32 sub-volumes, 1854–1960. S. Hirzel, Leipzig ( woerterbuchnetz.de ). Hedge hunters . In: Jacob Grimm , Wilhelm Grimm (Hrsg.): German dictionary . 16 volumes in 32 sub-volumes, 1854–1960. S. Hirzel, Leipzig ( woerterbuchnetz.de ).
  4. ↑ Willi A. Boelcke : Do you want total war? The secret Goebbels conferences 1939–1943 . Stuttgart 1967, p. 219
  5. ↑ Harriet Scharnberg: The "Jewish question" in pictures: Anti-Semitism in National Socialist photo reports (studies on the history of violence in the 20th century), Hamburg 2018, Kindle edition without pages, chapter "Jewish snipers" (with footnotes from no. 165)
  6. ↑ Michaela Kipp: "Großreinemachen im Osten": Enemy images in German field post letters in World War II . Frankfurt am Main / New York 2014, pp. 405ff
  7. ↑ Kristan Kossack: The resistance of Minden Jews . In: Westfälische Zeitschrift , 158, 2008, p. 363
  8. ↑ Fabian Virchow: Against civilism: International relations and the military in the political conceptions of the extreme right . Wiesbaden 2006, p. 82 with reference to Daniel Gerson: The Jew as Bolshevik: the revival of a stereotype . In: Anti-youth as a paradigm: Studies on prejudice research . Berlin 2002, pp. 106-112.
  9. ↑ Markus Roth: (Review) (PDF) Compendium of horror . In: Insight , No. 7/2012 (Bulletin of the Fritz Bauer Institute ), p. 62
  10. ^ Franz Karl Rose: This is Churchill . JF Lehmanns Verlag, Munich 1939, p. 28 f.
  11. ^ The Story Behind the Photo of Winston Churchill With Cigar and Tommy Gun in July 1940 . In: Vintage News Daily , April 25, 2019
  12. ^ Winston Churchill with a Tommy Gun during an inspection near Hartlepool, 1940. Rare Historical Photos
  13. ↑ Ortwin Buchbender, Horst Schuh: The weapon that aims at the soul: Psychological warfare 1939-1945 . Stuttgart 1983, p. 82
  14. ↑ der-buzi-maler.de website of the city of Grafenau about Emil Kneiß
  15. ^ Yvonne Maier: Wilhelm Tell is banned . BR calendar sheet, June 3, 2014
  16. ↑ Examples of such aircraft: Petlyakov Pe-8 , Boeing B-52 , Handley Page Halifax (tail rotating tower)