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    Legion of the Damned
    Unavailable
    Legion of the Damned
    Unavailable
    Legion of the Damned
    Audiobook8 hours

    Legion of the Damned

    Written by Sven Hassel

    Narrated by Rupert Degas

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    Convicted of deserting the German army, Sven Hassel is sent to a penal regiment on the Russian Front. He and his comrades are regarded as expendable, cannon fodder in the battle against the implacable Red Army. Outnumbered and outgunned, they fight their way across the frozen steppe....

    This iconic anti-war novel is a testament to the atrocities suffered by the lone soldier in the fight for survival. Sven Hassel's unflinching narrative is based on his own experiences in the German Army. He began writing his first novel, Legion of the Damned, in a prisoner of war camp at the end of the Second World War. Read by Rupert Degas.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHachette UK Audio
    Release dateMay 29, 2014
    ISBN9781409155089
    Unavailable
    Legion of the Damned

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    Reviews for Legion of the Damned

    3.5/5

    79 ratings3 reviews

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    • 4/5
      A gritty read with some scenes not for the squeamish.
    • 3/5
      A book I was really looking to forward to reading. After looking at many reviews describing his works as 'war porn' and 'gratuitously violent' I hoped that I was going to be in for something special. Unfortunately this was not the case.The first few chapters details the barbarity in the prison camps and lengths many people had to go to just to survive, but from this point I started to find the book a bit of a chore. The short paragraphs at the start of a chapter were often bewildering and occasionally had no resemblence to the plot.When the action comes it is thick and fast but for me the parts in between are just far too long and boring. Other reviewers have commented on historical inaccuracies etc etc etc, I know nothing of these, and this is probably a testament to how boring I actually found the text - I just couldn't be bothered to find out.
    • 2/5
      For Sven Hassel’s Legion of the Damned, it was more interesting researching the author than reading the book. This is the first in a series of WWII books about a Danish soldier serving in the German army, purporting to be autobiographical. The book recounts the bloody and violent adventures of a group of German soldiers in a penal battalion on the Russian front. It doesn’t take too long to realize everything is a little off; weapons are incorrect for the time period, dates are missing, locations seem deliberately vague.It seems like – the case was never really settled but the evidence seems pretty strong – the author’s actual World War 2 service was in a collaborationist Danish paramilitary unit, he never left Denmark, and he served a prison term as a traitor after the war. It’s further claimed that the characters and plot elements were plagiarized from All Quiet on the Western Front; that the novels were actually ghost-written by the author’s wife, a Danish journalist; and that the author collected many of the stories and anecdotes from Waffen SS members he met in Denmark.The Hassel books were immensely popular – he is the second most published Danish author, after Hans Christian Andersen. I suspect there’s a certain element of guilty pleasure there – “war porn”. Legion of the Damned is the only one I’ve read thus far; its treatment of the Soviet Union is pretty surprising. Supposedly commissars are jolly sorts that let a German POW go when he beats them at cards, and in a Soviet prison camp you can sign out overnight to visit the girls in the neighboring village. This must have been a hell of a surprise to Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov. I suppose my OCD will compel me to read the rest of these. Not really looking forward to it, though.