About german snipers accuracy etc

[Dandelion]

Originally posted by GAZ:

Some of your questions like what unit where they with? is interesting and would be good to find out - although given the time the interview was taken maybe they did not want to say with many SS and other members still being hunted by the various police and also russian KGB.

Maybe there unit was dodgey or simply had a branded SS name - innocent or not they were marked men.

Well, in your text there they claim to belong to the 3d Mountain division of the "former German army". I guess they mean the army of the Third Reich, but that would highlight that it was a Austro-German army, something few Austrians like to talk about, since they prefer to feel they were victims and not perpetrators in WWII.

This is a very well known and documented division ("Narvik"). The problem is that there was no battallion in that division with 22 army snipers in it as far as can be seen in Kalteneggers works. So I assumed they were reassigned at some point (the text says "the battallion" only). They might have ended up in some army level battallion, I pondered.

Even if these men were accused of a crime or belonged to a unit accused of one, I have never heard of the KGB kidnapping any Austrian warcriminal abroad (the Soviets left Austria in 55 and this was written in the mid 60s as I understand it). No other foreign service either - I only know of the Mossad doing that, and they only hunted high-rankers.

As for stigmas, Austria is hardly a nation were membership in the SS - any branch - was or is socially damaging. Other than in Ottakring perhaps Rather the contrary. In 1970 four of eleven members of the Austrian government were ex-NSDAP, and we all remember Waldheim in the eighties. Regrettably, none of these people were snatched by the KGB.

Though several of the Gebirgsjäger divisions (1st, 5th, 7th SS, 188th) accumulated sentences for warcrimes well in excess of the better known of the Waffen SS division (such as the 1st, 3rd, 5th, 9th, 10th and 12th), the 3rd did not. The division is conspicously absent from the otherwise commonplace accounts of Gebirgsjäger atrocities in the Balkans and Italy. The 3rd seems to be clean.

So I really can't see them being afraid to talk.

You wouldn't have the original German text? Curious about what words they use in it for marksman and sniper, group and indeed battallion. Maybe the oddities are merely "lost in translation" thingies.

Cheerio

Dandelion

[MikeyD]

My only experience with the 3.5x PU sniper site is briefly peering through the one owned by my gun collecting brother-in-law a few years ago. The image was crisp and bright and undistorted. The magnification looked to be enough to efficiently get the job done with a decent field of view. It felt like I'd be able to pop the heads off daisys with that thing if i wanted to. No sign of that old "Russian=2nd class" business.