The Second World War was the first military conflict of modern times in which tanks were used as an independent type of weapon and established a new type of warfare – especially on the German side. This was because the German military leadership had recognized the great potential of this new type of weapon. The Nazi propaganda machine was also quick to switch gears and misused successful tank commanders or gunners for its reporting. Well-known examples of this include the Knight’s Cross winner Otto Carius (around 150 confirmed kills of enemy tanks), who survived the war and worked as a pharmacist into old age, and Michael Wittmann, who died in Normandy on August 8, 1944 (almost 140 confirmed destroyed enemy tanks).
But the world’s most successful tank soldier was not an officer. He also never received particularly high honors from the criminal Nazi regime. He was critical of both militarism and the Nazi criminals. He was the proverbial “rifleman’s ass” who simply wanted to survive the war somehow – and yet died shortly before it ended near his home village. Czech historians only discovered his field grave in 2013. Militär Aktuell sheds light on the tragic story of Sergeant Kurt Knispel, who came from an old Austrian German-Moravian family.
Kurt Knispel’s family lived in Salisfeld (Czech: Salisov), a district of Zuckmantel (Czech: Zlaté Hory), in north-eastern Moravia, more precisely in the Olomouc region (Czech: Olomoucký kraj). Until the collapse of the k.u.k. Monarchy with the end of the First World War In 1918, the Knispels were therefore Austrian citizens. Economic times were difficult, many people were very poor and infant mortality was high.
Kurt Knispel was born three years after the end of Austria-Hungaryon September 20, 1921, in Salisfeld. At this time, Bohemia and Moravia were already part of the newly founded First Czechoslovak Republicin which around 3.7 million old Austrians of German mother tongue lived. These so-called Sudeten Germans made up 28 percent of the population in the new multi-ethnic state, making them the second largest population group after the Czechs (48 percent), ahead of the Slovaks (14 percent). Incidentally, the first president of Czechoslovakia was Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, who some historians believe was the illegitimate son of Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph. A DNA analysis was supposed to clarify this in 2017, but at the last minute the genetic analysis of Masaryk’s great-granddaughter Charlotta Kotík was refused.
Unfortunately, little is known about Kurt Knispel’s childhood and youth. He attended elementary school and, as far as we know, loved nature and even proudly planted his own little tree. That has been handed down. As a teenager, the boy completed a technical apprenticeship in a car factory, but it is said that he was not particularly satisfied with his job. When the political situation in Europe came to a head and Nazi Germany, initially on the basis of the Munich Agreement into the Sudetenland (see also the book: “From Reichenberg to Sydney – Memories of War and Peace by an Old Austrian from Bohemia”) and later the so-called “Rest of the Czech Republic” (the Slovakian part of Czechoslovakia formally remained a separate state, but the government there was merely a puppet of the Nazi regime in Berlin), Knispel was just 17 years old and, as a German, automatically became a formal Czechoslovakian citizen.
On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland, sparking the conflagration of the Second World War. For Kurt Knispel, who celebrated his 18th birthday shortly afterwards, all was still well with the world and he was able to enjoy his life as a civilian. But the ongoing war of conquest waged by Nazi Germany meant that the Wehrmacht was always in need of new soldiers – and so Kurt Knispel was called up for military service on September 6, 1940, around two weeks before his 19th birthday. As Knispel had learned a technical trade and was rather short for a man (around 165 centimetres), he was virtually predestined for service in the Panzerwaffe.
He began his service with the 4th company of the tank replacement and training division 15 in Sagan, where he underwent basic training for tank soldiers on the Panzerkampfwagen 1, which was already considered obsolete at the time. This was followed by training as a gunner. In November 1940, the 19-year-old Knispel was transferred to the 3rd company of Panzer Regiment 29, which was subordinate to the 12th Panzer Division, where he served as both a loader and gunner. gunner on the Panzer IV. The Panzer IV, of which more than 8,500 were produced, was the standard tank of the Wehrmacht. At this time, the instructors also noticed for the first time that Knispel had a special feel for distances and could estimate them very well.
After the training, things got serious. Knispel’s division took part in the German invasion of the Soviet Union took part. During the Red Army’s counter-offensive in the winter of 1941/42, Knispel’s division suffered heavy losses and was withdrawn to Estonia to be refreshed. Knispel proved his worth during the fighting, succeeding as a gunner in taking out numerous Russian tanks, guns and vehicles – thus ensuring his own survival and that of his comrades in the tank. On November 4, 1941, Kurt Knispel was also awarded the Iron Cross II Class, known casually as “EK zwo” in military jargon, for his military merits.
According to some sources, his unit moved to Germany in the spring of 1942 to be equipped with the new F2 version of the Panzer IV. Other documents state that it was deployed in Russia during this period. One thing is certain: From August, Knispel, as a member of the III. section of the Panzer Regiment 4 of the 13th Panzer Division, took part in what was known as the “Fall Blau” which began at the end of June on the Eastern Front. The operation was primarily focused on Voronezh. It later extended across the Seversky Donets to the Don bend. It reached its climax in mid-September 1942 with the German advance into the Caucasus and as far as the lower Volga.
His outstanding ability to estimate distances with enormous precision once again came to the fore in these battles and made Knispel a veritable “sniper” among the tankmen, who was able to destroy twelve Soviet tanks within a short space of time. He is said to have succeeded in shooting down several tanks at a range of three kilometers. He was then promoted to lance corporal – a higher rank was also associated with higher pay.
Knispel was described by his comrades as “selfless”, as a “good buddy” and as someone “you can always rely on”. At the same time, as far as can be seen from the available documents about him, he did not think much of military order and Nazi ideology. He wore his hair unusually long for a soldier, was often unshaven and the appearance of his uniform was a proverbial horror for many officers. Loud discussions with higher ranks about his flippant demeanor and undisciplined appearance are said to have been the order of the day. On several occasions, he was only saved from a court martial by his benevolent immediate superiors, who turned a blind eye to Knispel’s successes and overlooked his appearance.
Knispel was undoubtedly a non-conformist who would certainly have preferred to roam the countryside at home in Moravia rather than face death and fight for his own survival every day in the service of a criminal regime. The German journalist Florian Stark from the left-liberal newspaper “Die Zeit” once wrote about him: “With his crumpled shirt, his goatee and his long hair, Kurt Knispel looked more like a hippie who had somehow not managed to pass the conscientious objection exam at the end of the 1970s. But there was no such alternative in his day.” A pretty accurate description. Many photos show Knispel as the epitome of an exhausted “front pig”.
In Krakow, Knipsel once beat up a Nazi when he saw the SS man abusing a defenceless man (some sources speak of a concentration camp inmate, others of a Soviet prisoner of war). This could have had serious consequences for Knispel, including the death penalty, but his superiors refused to hand him over to the furious SS henchmen. One of several examples of Knispel’s unconventional character, which was apparently also characterized by a strong sense of justice.
However, with his conspicuously “unsoldierly” behavior on record, Knispel had ruined any prospect of an officer’s career. While other militarily successful tank soldiers such as Michael Wittmann or Otto Carius climbed the career ladder within the military, soon becoming officers and receiving award after award, Knispel always remained a simple soldier. Allegedly (the available documents contradict each other here), his superiors are said to have nominated Knispel a total of four times for the Knight’s Crossone of the highest German decorations – but the Nazi leadership always refused to award it to him, which Knipsel himself was probably quite indifferent to, as was his low rank.
While most soldiers who served at the front for a long time were wounded several times, some of them seriously, Knispel was lucky during all those years in combat. Not once did he suffer an injury in combat that would have required hospitalization. Nevertheless, in November 1942 he had to stay in hospital for a longer period – albeit due to illness.
After his recovery, Knispel trained as a gunner on the new Panzerkampfwagen VI, the legendary “Tiger”, which was feared by the enemy, retrained. From April 1943, he fought in the 1st Company of Heavy Tank Division 503 on the Eastern Front in southern Russia. During the Operation Citadel Knispel shot down no fewer than 27 Red Army tanks in the Kursk arc. On July 24, 1943, he was awarded the Iron Cross First Class (“EK eins”), which had to be worn on the left side of his uniform blouse – and became internationally known to a wide audience thanks to the 1977 film “Steiner – the Iron Cross” with James Coburn as “Feldwebel Steiner”. Knispel and his comrades continued to serve at the front in the years that followed.
In the spring of 1944, Knispel destroyed his 100th enemy tank, a number that few other tankers in the world had achieved up to that point. On April 25, 1944, his name was even mentioned in the Wehrmacht report: “The non-commissioned officer Knispel in a heavy tank division in the east shot down 101 tanks in the period from July 1942 to March 1944.” This was to be the only time that Nazi propaganda used the name of the soldier, who was so unpopular with the leadership, for its own purposes. For it is also significant that Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels mentioned other successful soldiers in his notes, but did not say a word about Kurt Knispel.
In June of the same year, the battle-hardened Knispel was given command of a brand new Panzerkampfwagen VI Tiger II, better known as the Königstiger. Although the Königstiger was technically a masterpiece of engineering, at a price of over 300,000 Reichsmark it was extremely expensive and costly to produce and maintain. From November 1943 to March 1945, therefore, only just under 500 Tiger IIs were built. The British Tank Museum in Bovington nevertheless writes about the King Tiger on its homepage: “Although outnumbered and prone to mechanical and mobility problems due to its size and weight, the Tiger II’s combination of devastating firepower and thick sloping armor made it a serious opponent for the Allied forces on the rare occasions it was encountered on the battlefield.” The Bovington Armored Museum also owns the only roadworthy Tiger I in the world. This Tiger I was even used for the filming of the 2014 war movie “Heart of Steel” with Brad Pitt.
But back to Kurt Knispel. There are different accounts of his deployment as commander of the King Tiger. According to the documents of the “German WASt office” Knispel’s unit (the 1st Company of Panzer-Abteilung 503) continued to be deployed on the Eastern Front, while Thomas Hauser in his article “Feldwebel Kurt Knispel. The uncomfortable one. Militär & Geschichte Nr. 5, 2022” writes that Knispel fought against the Allies on the Western Front in the summer of 1944. What is certain is that the unit was integrated into the “Feldherrnhalle” tank corps in December 1944 and took part in the Wehrmacht’s heavy retreat battles in Hungary and Slovakia in January/February 1945.
One of his superiors, Alfred Rubbel – himself with around 60 confirmed tank kills in the Second World War – who later made it to the rank of lieutenant colonel in the West German army, described Knispel as a man who never gave up, even in seemingly hopeless situations.
Kurt Knispel was promoted from lance corporal to sergeant sometime in April 1945 (according to the “German WASt Office”, no exact date is known, but other sources repeatedly cite April 27, 1945 as the date of his promotion). At this time, the German units were retreating on all fronts and many soldiers were fighting for survival. Kurt Knispel’s Königstiger and several other tanks were now stationed in southern Moravia, more precisely in the Znojmo region, now known for its fine wines and beautiful countryside.
On April 28, 1945, Knispel encountered Red Army tanks near Wostitz (Czech: Vlasatice), about 14 kilometers from today’s Austrian border. The exact circumstances of his death are not exactly clear, but according to the available eyewitness accounts and the forensic findings on his mortal remains, it is very likely that Sergeant Kurt Knispel was first hit in the chest by Russian machine gun bullets as he stood in the open commander’s hatch of his Königstiger. He immediately collapsed with a pain-filled face. Comrades rescued the blood-covered Knispel from the tank in the midst of the battle, while the machine gun salvos echoed all around, the smell of gun smoke lingered in the air and at the same time more grenades exploded, the splinters of which posed a deadly danger to the soldiers.
It was one of these pieces of shrapnel that hit Kurt Knispel severely after he had already been wounded by machine gun fire. His men managed to transport the popular comrade to a makeshift field hospital in Urbau (Czech: Vrbovec), almost 40 kilometers away, but it was too late. Knispel was officially declared dead in this emergency hospital set up in the elementary school built in 1906/1907 opposite the picturesque parish church of St. John’s Beheading and then buried together with other mortally wounded German soldiers in a field grave near the town’s regular cemetery. He was only 23 years old and died just 240 kilometers from the village of his birth.
By the time of his death, Kurt Knispel had 168 confirmed kills of enemy tanks – 126 of them as a gunner, 42 as a commander. However, the actual number is likely to have been significantly higher at around 200, as surviving veterans later stated that he credited some of his own kills to younger comrades in order to boost their self-confidence.
The war in Europe ended just a few days after Knispel’s death, on May 7, 1945. Kurt Knispel’s field grave and the final resting places of many German soldiers on the territory of Czechoslovakia were forgotten and in some cases deliberately destroyed. The new Czechoslovak government under Edvard Beneš took advantage of the victory over Nazi Germany and the liberation of their country to put their plans, which had been in place since 1918, to expel all German-speaking Old Austrians from Bohemia and Moravia into action. “Throw the Germans out of their homes and make room for ours! All Germans must disappear! What we wanted to do in 1918, we will do now! We already wanted to deport all Germans back then. But Germany had not yet been destroyed and England held our hands, but now everything must be done!” Beneš shouted to a frenetically cheering crowd in the South Bohemian town of Tábor on June 3, 1945, for example. Incidentally, the Hungarian minority in Czechoslovakia was also affected by the expulsion fantasies of the nationalist Beneš. In 2013, the then Czech presidential candidate Karel Schwarzenberg (1937-2023) said publicly that, by modern standards, Beneš would probably have to answer for his actions at the time before the war crimes tribunal in The Hague.
Between 1945 and 1946, around three million of the so-called Sudeten Germans were expropriated without compensation expropriated and subsequently expelled from Czechoslovakia, in some cases brutally. According to the Sudeten German Landsmannschaft in Austria, 241,000 people, mostly old people, women and children, lost their lives through abuse, hunger and disease or were murdered by Czech partisans. This figure is also consistent with the information provided by Laurence Steinhardt, US ambassador in Prague from 1945 to 1948, who gave the figure of 240,000. The official Czech Republic, on the other hand, only estimates a maximum of 30,000 deaths as a result of the expulsion, known as “Odsun” in Czech. Kurt Knispel’s family were among the victims of the expulsion.
However, even though the Beneš Decrees, which legally legitimized the expulsion, are still formally valid today, the climate has fortunately changed to one of international understanding and mutual respect. Over the decades, and especially after the fall of the Iron Curtain at the end of the 1980s, close contacts and friendships have developed between Czechs and expellees from the Sudetenland and their descendants. Since then, not only have war memorials from the First World War been renovated in the areas of the Czech Republic once populated by Sudeten Germans, some of which have been taken out of cellars and warehouses and re-erected, but attempts have also been made to locate soldiers’ graves from the Second World War and to identify those buried there in order to finally give their families and descendants certainty after decades of uncertainty. More than 20 years ago, the author himself was able to accompany such a German-Austrian-Czech exhumation operation (during which, unfortunately, no remains were found at the specified location) in South Moravia.
In 2013, a group of Czech historians succeeded in locating Kurt Knispel’s field grave, which also contained the remains of other fallen Germans. The Czech historian, restorer and author Vlastimil Schildberger from the Moravian Museum in Brno (Czech: Brno), who unfortunately died far too early in 2020 at the age of only 58 and was also an active member of the Brno Military History Association and founder and commander of the Brno Rifle Corps, rendered great services in this regard.
With the support of the German War Graves Commission it was Schildberger who carried out the exhumation of Kurt Knispel and several other German soldiers between April 8 and 10, 2013. While the German and Austrian media barely took notice, Czech journalists reported extensively on the sensational discovery of the grave of the most successful tank soldier in world history.
Kurt Knispel’s identification tag was also found and his identification was confirmed beyond doubt on the basis of physical characteristics such as his short stature. His remains were then reburied in the German military cemetery in the central cemetery of the city of Brno. Visitors placed a picture of Knispel on his grave cross and decorated it with tank models. Since 2013, Kurt Knispel’s final resting place has been regularly visited by soldiers from all over the world, who pay their respects to the most successful tank soldier in history in this way – from soldier to soldier.
In 2016, for example, former US Army Major Neil Morisson (then 72 years old) visited Brno for a commemoration of the Battle of Austerlitz (1805). Morisson has Scottish ancestors and is active in a traditional Scots Guards organization in his spare time. In this uniform, he visited the grave of Kurt Knispel together with several comrades and saluted there, as can be read on a Czech website. as can be read on a Czech website and documented with pictures. To this day, Czech media and amateur historians continue to focus on Kurt Knispel, who remained a human being in dark times and who met his fate so tragically just a few days before the end of the war.
His friend and comrade Alfred Rubbel (1921-2013) once said of this young man after Knispel’s death: “As a person, Kurt Knispel was willing to help selflessly. He shared his food and drink with his comrades and, if necessary, even the shirt off his back. All of us who knew him felt safe in attack or defense, regardless of whether Knispel was in front or behind us. He never left anyone out, no matter what the situation.”
It is a pity that this charismatic soldier was not allowed to survive the war and tell posterity about the enormous importance of peace, which is currently under greater threat in Europe than at any time since the end of the Second World War.
The author would like to thank the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge for their support in his research. We would also like to thank the mayor of Urbau/Vrbovec in South Moravia, Mr. Jiří Písař, who provided information and photographic material – děkuji vám za podporu, pane starosto.
