Sniper on the Eastern Front

This book is a rare first-hand account by a ruthlessly efficient German sniper of life and death during the bitter conflict that followed the Nazi invasion of Russia. Its author, Josef Sepp Allerberger, was an Austrian conscript who qualified as a Wehrmacht machine-gunner and was drafted to the Southern sector of the Front in July 1942.

Wounded at Voroshilovsk, he experimented so successfully with a captured Russian sniper-rifle while convalescing and returned to his unit as his regiments only sniper specialist. In the grueling months that followed, as the German Army was forced to withdraw under almost constant pressure from the Russians, Allerberger became the second most successful German sniper and one of the very few private soldiers to be awarded with the coveted Knights Cross.

This harrowing and graphic memoir provides a vivid insight to the atrocious conditions and brutal cruelty of this campaign. There was, we learn, no place for chivalry and few prisoners survived long after capture. Allerberger describes the cunning, discipline and fieldcraft that not only saw him survive during the near constant action but made him such a relentless assassin.