Sven Hassel

Sven Hassel , also Sven Hazel , actually Børge Willy Redsted Arbing (born April 19, 1917 in Nyhuse, Frederiksborg Amt , Denmark ; † September 21, 2012 in Barcelona , Spain ), was a Danish trivial author.

Life

Hassel was born as Børge Willy Redsted Pedersen into a working class family. The family name was later changed to Arbing. As a young man, he emigrated to Germany as a result of unemployment. He had, according to himself as well as the information provided by his publishers, acquired German citizenship and joined the Wehrmacht as a volunteer in 1938 . There he was deployed in various units, especially on the Eastern Front, at the end of the war he was captured and imprisoned in several camps.

After the end of the war, as later journalistic research revealed, he was sentenced to death for his activities for the German occupiers in Denmark. This sentence had been reduced to ten years in prison, of which he only served four through an amnesty. In 1949 Arbing / Hassel was again at large. Aside from political crimes, he had a criminal record for various minor offenses, which is why the Danish writer Rubén Palma has described him as a "petty criminal".

In 1963, the Danish journalist Georg Kringelbach discovered that during the war Hassel was not deployed in a punitive battalion for desertion as stated, but had worked for a Danish intelligence service (ET) similar to the SD , which worked closely with the Danish "auxiliary police" (HIPO ) worked together. In 1976, the Danish journalist Erik Haaest revealed that Hassel had been a member of the “ Schalburg Corps”.

After Kringelbach's revelations, Hassel emigrated to French-speaking Spain in 1964 . He settled in Barcelona and founded the publishing house "Bellum" there.

On literary importance

Arbing published his first writings in the 1950s. He took the author's name Hassel (in Denmark: Hazel, in the Slavic-speaking area: Hasel). He published a total of 14 novels from 1953 (“De Fordømtes Legion”) to 1984 (“Kommissæren”). Many have been translated into other languages, two also into German. Her exclusive subject is events on the front lines of World War II . Hassel achieved high print runs, which are estimated at more than 50 million. He always emphasized that his writings were based on his own experience. In 2011, the Danish historian Claus Bundgård Christensen assumed that Hassel had never been to the Eastern Front, the preferred setting for the books, because he did not portray the war in a realistic way. That is "simple fraud". Hassel's novels have no background of their own.

The New York Times saw it similarly when it published a detailed obituary on the occasion of Hassel's death. She referred to "questionable battlefield scenarios" in which German soldiers would fight members of the Red Army in the morning and members of the French resistance in the afternoon. Hassel's novels are “pulp fiction” of the 1960s and 70s for a male age group for whom war-themed computer games are now being produced.

The two novels translated into German (Die Galgenvögel - War Book, 1965; Aktion Priesterkrebs - Monte Cassino, 1966) were published by the publisher of the “pseudo-historical representations from the right-wing camp”, the journalist and publisher Siegfriedkap-Hardenberg . In 1987 the Danish producer Just Betzer filmed Hassel's novel “Døden på larvefødder” with Oliver Reed and David Carradine under two English titles (“The Misfit Brigade” and “Wheels of Terror”). The film was a failure.

Fonts

• The Gallows Birds - War Book. Verlag Blick und Bild / S. Cap KG, Velbert 1965, most recently Goldmann-Taschenbuch, Munich 1987, ISBN 3-442-08877-1 .
• Action priest collar - Monte Cassino. Verlag Blick und Bild / S. Cap KG, Velbert 1966.

Web links

• Sven Hassel in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• Own web presence on svenhassel.net
• Porta's Kitchen on svenhassel.info

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Fødte Mandkøn . In: Hillerød Kirkebog 1917–1921 ( Danish ) 1917, p. 3.
2. ↑ For autobiography and information about the publisher see: Personal article Sven Hazel in: [1] ; Michael Hassel, My father, Sven, in: The Sven Hassel Collection, London 2013, unpag.
3. ↑ Rubén Palma: Sven Hazel - dansk litteraturs grimmeste ælling , archived copy ( memento of the original from September 25, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . 
4. ↑ For legends see: Personal article Sven Hazel in: [2] ; Michael Hassel, My father, Sven, in: The Sven Hassel Collection, London 2013, unpag.
5. ↑ Based on : Online version of Den Store Danske , encyclopedia from Gyldendal Verlag, Copenhagen: [3] .
6. ↑ Erik Haaest: Sven Hazel mysterious. Guldfugl på larvefødder , Bogan, Højbjerg 2010, ISBN 9788774665014 . See also: Sold 50 million war novels, but Sven Hazel remained controversial until his death , nordschleswiger.dk ( Memento from February 22, 2014 in the Internet Archive ), December 23, 2012.
7. ↑ Unless otherwise stated: Ritzau , Kulørt dansk krigsforfatter er død. Den storsælgende danske krigsforfatter Sven Hazel blev 95 år, Jyllands Posten, 23 September 2012, see: Archived copy ( memento of the original from 24 December 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . 
8. ^ Paul Vitello, Sven Hassel, Novelist Who Depicted Nazi Soldiers' Lives, Dies at 95, in: New York Times, October 6, 2012, see: [4] .
9. ↑ Walther L. Bernecker , The historical processing of the Spanish civil war in (West) German historiography, in: Wolfgang Asholt / Rüdiger Reinecke / Susanne Schlünder (eds.): The Spanish civil war in the GDR. Strategies for intermedial memory formation, Frankfurt 2009, pp. 35–55, here: p. 44.
10. ↑ All information, unless otherwise stated, see: Ritzau, Kulørt dansk krigsforfatter er død. Den storsælgende danske krigsforfatter Sven Hazel blev 95 år, Jyllands Posten, 23 September 2012, see: Archived copy ( memento of the original from 24 December 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. .