Legion of the Damned [Import] [Paperback]

Sven Hassel (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: CORGI CHILDRENS; reprint edition (1969)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0552072419
• ISBN-13: 978-0263822397
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 4.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,355,549 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars First of a Good (Not-Quite) Series, September 14, 2005

By 

Richard B. Luhrs (Jackson Heights, NY United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Legion of the Damned (Cassell Military Paperbacks) (Mass Market Paperback)

LEGION OF THE DAMNED, the first, most famous and ostensibly most autobiographical of Sven Hassel's fourteen World War II novels, doesn't really qualify as the start of a series. While Hassel himself serves as the narrator of all of his works, and many characters introduced here do indeed reappear in most or all of his subsequent books, the relationship between LEGION and the (more genuine) series of stories which followed it is only tangential.

For one thing, most of the aforementioned characters have died in battle by the time LEGION reaches its harrowing - and, in my own opinion, beautifully written - final pages, in effect rising from the grave to take up their roles in Hassel's later books. The tone of LEGION is likewise more somber, more sorrowful and far more intensely bitter than that of any of its "sequels," dark as they frequently are.

The lingering question of just who Sven Hassel is/was, and what if anything he did as a Danish Wehrmacht soldier during the Second World War, constitutes an intriguing mystery in its own right; but for the moment I'll take the man at blurb-value and assume that his alleged experiences in a penal battalion (to which he was sent after deserting the regular German army in 1939) are more or less genuine. He certainly crafts a hell of a story, regardless: LEGION and all of his subsequent books offer up an admixture of nauseous violence, slapstick humor, disillusioned nihilism and earnest longing which makes the Hollywood concept of "The Good War" look as silly, simple and manipulative as it really is. LEGION probably accomplishes this best, as the later books do tend to give their primary group of characters a sort of bulletproof, swashbuckling veneer which frequently undermines the quality of the stories themselves.

All of Hassel's books follow a set structural pattern: brief snippets of real-life wartime horror, running from a few lines to several pages, precede each chapter and are often (though not always) expanded and/or commented upon in fictional form therein. The characters - Hassel himself, the Old Man (Hassel's sergeant) and Porta (the rogue soldier), plus later additions like Tiny (the simpleminded giant), Heide (the Nazi) and the Legionnaire (no explanation necessary), kill vast numbers of people, steal and consume huge quantities of goods and ruminate over their luckless lot and the disgraceful politics which have brought them to it. It sounds formulaic, and indeed can get repetitive after a while; but there's no denying the profound power of the cumulative effect.

What is perhaps most refreshing and impressive about Hassel's books is the fact that he utilizes a group of Wehrmacht soldiers not as the fulcrum for yet another tired exposition of the evils of Nazism, but for an anlysis of the far greater and vaster evil of war itself - all war, at all times, in all places. To be sure, these men aren't heroes, nor even antiheroes in the sense we've come to recognize. They kill, spare and joke with equal ease, make life hellish even for one another and are always on the lookout for the least bit of gain. Much of their behavior, of course, is excusable in its context, but not all of it. As a result, we are left to contemplate the full complexity of war, and by extension the full complexity of man, as our ostensible protagonists alternately touch, amuse and repel us. This is a powerful experience, and if it doesn't always make for great literature it certainly never sinks to the level of potboilers.

LEGION OF THE DAMNED is ultimately about more than its author's identity or past, and should be read for what it has to offer as a book independent of war-buff minutiae. Those who appreciate its admittedly rough-edged message are advised to seek out other Sven Hassel novels for what is, I can assure you, one hell of a ride through the battlefield. Sehr gut!

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars dark humor, June 18, 2004

By 

C. D. Hyatt "into88" (Friendswood, TX United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Legion of the Damned (Cassell Military Paperbacks) (Mass Market Paperback)

The first half of this novel reads almost like a work of satire,
ridicule mixed with the horror of being incarcerated in a prison camp mixed with the humor of those who dared to defy the
regime with their own individualism. In the end, the Reich needed every man they could get regardless of their personal or political proclivities and the ensuing experiences form the second half of the book which is pure horror.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Window into brutality, September 5, 2009

By 

Tony Roberts (Bristol, United Kingdom) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Legion of the Damned (Cassell Military Paperbacks) (Mass Market Paperback)

As a teenager I read virtually all Sven Hassel's novels and enjoyed them as good old war stories. But over the years my perception of things, as many of us find, changed and I recently wanted to re-read those books, so bought Legion of the Damned and went through the story once more, but with an extra 30 years of life behind me.

My recall of the sadness of it all was not misplaced. This story ultimately is a tragedy; not merely of the loss of many of the close friends and comrades of Sven as he struggles to retain some humanity throughout the madness of what he experienced, but also of the futility and waste of societies, human life and animals.

In many ways Legion is a two-parter. The first part concerns the processing through heartless camps designed to slaughter opponents of the fascist system, or even those unfortunate to evoke the wrath, envy or other slight, imagined or real, of those running the fascist apparatus. Hassel is a deserter who is caught and ends up in an 'extermination camp',to quote the commandant. He survives only to be put into a penal regiment, a force made up of criminals and outcasts, expendable individuals not wanted in the Nazi society.

Its almost impossible to comprehend the brutality displayed within these pages, almost a fictional scene its that alien to our ways and morals. But it happened. And as a social history it should never be forgotten lest it occurs again. Hassel's description of the treatment he and others received is not gratuitous or indifferent of prose - he witnessed and experienced it and this comes through the pages. It can only have come from the pen of someone who did.

Then the story switches to life in the penal regiment. Sven finds the comradeship of all those rejects of society warm, genuine and a saviour to his soul. Even though these men fought in the wehrmacht, I find I'm rooting for them to survive. Hated by their own political system and faced with death from an implacable enemy, Hassel and his friends battle to survive the slaughter of the Eastern Front. Their exploits are hilarious at times, frightening on other occasions. Of course, they begin to die one by one, and even when allowed home on leave, tragedy is never far away and two women he loves die - one by Nazi thugs, the other by allied air raid - and his circle of friends shrinks.

The book would appear to cover the years 1940 to 1944, and ends rather in the air. It doesn't end with the war's end, and with Hassel's own capture by the Soviets in Berlin in 1945 which happened for real. No, it ends on a train with Hassel and his commander shaking hands after a harrowing incident in 1944. I would have preferred Hassel to complete his story which would have closed the chapter on it all, yet somehow I feel slightly cheated by the ending. And in addition, the last couple of chapters appear rushed and compressed in comparison with what came before. I do know that Hassel was switched from Russian to American, British and Danish prisons in the 1950s when he wrote this story, so maybe this affected him.

Overall, a 4-star rating for a book that stands out in the series he wrote as being the most authentic and realistic. The rest would seem to be more of fictional novel type of stories and not as real as this one, which is why this stands out as the best in my opinion of the entire set Hassel wrote.