Sven Hassel was the pen name of the Danish-born Børge Willy Redsted Pedersen (19 April 1917 – 21 September 2012)[1] known for his novels about German soldiers fighting in World War II.
[5] Hassel claimed to have surrendered to Soviet troops in Berlin in 1945 and to have spent the following years in prisoner-of-war camps in various countries,[5] independent sources state that he was arrested in Denmark in 1945 after the liberation and was held in prison there, first as a suspect and then as a convicted criminal.
[6] He and Laura Dorthea Guldbæk Jensen, a divorced film translator from Nørre Tranders who was four years his senior, married in Copenhagen in January 1951.
[1] In 1953 his debut novel Legion of the Damned was published under the pen name Sven Hazel by Grafisk Forlag[7] after their consultant Georgjedde (Georg Gjedde-Simonsen) had abbreviated and rewritten the manuscript.
In addition to Sven, they include Alfred Kalb, "Legionnaire" (ex-member of the French Foreign Legion); Wolfgang Creutzfeldt, a giant of a man ironically named Tiny (variously Little John in some of the books); barracks fixer and shrewd thief Joseph Porta; older sergeant Willie Beier, "Old Un" or "Old Man"; Julius Heide, a Nazi fanatic, Barcelona Blom, a veteran of both sides of the Spanish Civil War, Gregor Martin, who was a removals man before the war, Chief Mechanic Wolf, and Staff Sergeant Hoffman, a non-commissioned officer.
They serve on many fronts, including northern Finland, USSR, Italy (Monte Cassino), Greece (The Bloody Road to Death), the Balkans, and France (Liquidate Paris, set during and after the Normandy Invasion).
[13] On 10 October 1963 journalist George Kringelbach revealed in his radio programme Natredaktionen on P3 that Sven Hazel was a pen name for the convicted traitor Børge Willy Redsted Pedersen.
Haaest claims that during the war period, Hassel was in fact a member of the HIPO Corps or Hilfspolizei, an auxiliary Danish police force created by the Gestapo, consisting of collaborators.
The national Danish Radio which aired the exposure were subsequently forced to issue a retraction after Hassel provided corroborating documentation of his wartime service.
In 1963 the radio journalist George Kringelbach had participated in a reception Hassel gave to celebrate his ten years as a vastly successful writer.
When during his late night radio programme Kringelbach subsequently revealed that Sven Hassel was a fictitious person and that the author was a convicted traitor, a major scandal ensued.
However, the newspaper goes on to explain that the author Haaest in 1976 had interviewed Hassel's defence attorney, member of parliament and mayor of Copenhagen Edel Saunte.
[4] In 2012 the Danish World War II historian Claus Bundgård Christensen was quoted for his assertion that Hassel never served on the Eastern front and that his books are a fraud and not based on his personal experiences.
Den Falske Løjtnant asserts that documents about Pedersen had been stolen by an employee of the Danish national state archive and only returned by his widow in 2017.
The book concludes that Pedersen had attempted to join the Waffen SS in 1941 and had been rejected because of his criminal record in Denmark (bicycle thefts, posing as an army officer - hence the title).
He did successfully join the Wehrmacht in 1942 under a false name, where he did indeed serve in Ukraine in a panzer unit, and that he was indeed sent to a penal battalion for pretending to have been a veteran of the Spanish Civil War.
The book also asserts that he was involved in various dishonest and subversive activities associated with the Danish legal follow-up to the war, which led to innocent people being prosecuted.