Book description
It stood at the top of the hill, dominating the Russian landscape -
menacing, impenetrable - the O. G.P. U Prison. They were told to take it
anyway they could, with machine guns, flame-throwers, entrenching tools,
their bare hands. They were used to war, to blood, death, the vilest
savagery that man could devise. But the O. G.P. U. Prison was something
different - a hell they hadn't met before, a bastion, an inferno that
rained blood and butchery on Porta, the Legionnaire, Tiny, Barcelona,
the men of the Panzer battalion who no longer had tanks, only a creeping
barrage of death. Born in 1917 in Fredensborg, Denmark, Sven Hassel
joined the merchant navy at the age of 14. He did his compulsory year's
military service in the Danish forces in 1936 and then, facing
unemployment, joined the German army. He served throughout World War II
on all fronts except North Africa. Wounded eight times, he ended the war
in a Russian prison camp. He wrote LEGION OF THE DAMNED while being
transferred between American, British and Danish prisons before making a
new life for himself in Spain. His world war books have sold over 53
million copies worldwide.
