Reading Habits #10: Controversial books

I’m currently reading a historical fiction about WWII by a writer who has been accused of never having written it. Do I continue to read it? I know I will because the book is so fascinating in a shocking and terrifying way that I can’t stop now.

The book is The Legion of the Damned, 1957, the first of several WWII novels written by Sven Hassel, a controversial Danish-born writer. His novels have been compared to pulp fiction.

The accuser is Erik Haaest, an equally controversial Danish journalist who apparently hated Sven Hassel and denounced all his books on several grounds.

Both Hassel and Haaest died in 2012.

The Legion of the Damned (‘Fordømtes Legion’ in Danish) is the first-person account of a deserter in the German Army narrated over years. It begins with his arrest by the dreaded SS and incarceration in a concentration camp and later transfer to a penal concentration camp where he is trained like an animal to fight on the Russian front. Anyone who is held captive in a penal camp is better off dead. Not half-dead, but dead. The deserter is a courageous German soldier who is put through weeks of brutal and inhuman training with little water, food or sleep. After the training, which is described in graphic detail, our “hero” is posted to a penal battalion that must fight a terrifying war through Europe and the Russian front. The deserter wears a uniform adorned with ordinary unit badges. He is not entitled to other ribbons even if he has earned them.

I’m still on page 59 of the 186-page novel. In just those pages I have asked myself a dozen times: how can any man treat another like this? Yet they did, in this war and in every other war, or genocide, before and after.

Sven Hassel tells us that the narrator of The Legion of the Damned is none other than Sven himself who came back from the war and recounted his experiences through fourteen translated books which sold very well in the sixties and seventies. He has been forgotten since then.

Hassel’s literary success was, however, marred by the controversy: Erik Haaest, whose father was involved with the Danish Resistance, believed that Hassel never went to war, that he stayed put in occupied Denmark, spoke to those who actually fought the war on the Russian front, had the first book ghostwritten, and got his wife to write the rest. Not only that, Haaest was also convinced that Sven was actually Børge Pedersen, a member of the auxiliary Danish police force created by the Gestapo. Apparently, Hassel did not deny he was Pedersen. 

Although the internet gives some credence to Haaest’s version, there is no evidence that Hassel, described as an anti-war writer, did not author the books and tell the world his frightening wartime stories.

For the reader there is a way out of the dilemma: if you even remotely believe Erik Haaest’s account, then read the book as war fiction. All of Sven Hassel's novels, translated into some twenty-five languages and sold in the millions, were immensely popular and at least some of them need to be read. I'm basing my opinion on 59 pages and just this one book.

But would you read a book whose authorship is questioned? I would in this case.


For previous Reading Habits, see under Labels.