Legion of the Damned – Book One

Porta narrowed his green, piggy eyes. – I shall tell you, dear fellow. If you are a Party
member you will obey the Führer’s commandment that the good of the whole comes
before that of the individual. And therefore, you will say something like this: “Brave
warriors of the 27th Fire-and-Sword Regiment! To help you to fight even better for
Führer and People, I, in my gratitude, will make you a gift of the bottle of rum that Herr
Joseph Porta, by God’s Grace Obergefreiter, in his infinite goodness wished to give to
my unworthy person. Wasn’t that just what you were wanting to say? Weren’t those
very words trembling on the tip of your tongue? Dear fellow, we thank you from the
bottom of our hearts, and now you may fuck off!

Porta flung out his hand with a magnificent flourish, raised his cap and shouted, “Grüss
Gott!”

As soon as the wretched Nazi railwayman had gone, furiously gnashing his teeth, we
opened the parcel.

There were five bottles of wine, there was a whole roast of pork; there were two roast
chickens, and there was…

Sven Hassel was sent to a penal regiment in the German Wehrmacht where he served
during the Second World War. When the war ended in 1945, he began writing Legion
of the Damned during his time as a prisoner of war. With a brutal realism he describes
the atrocities of war and the crimes of the nazis. He manages to give an important
voice to the soldiers that gave their lives and were used as pawns that is both cynical
and ingrained with an intelligent and coarse sense of humor.

His fourteen World War II books, which draw on his own encounters and experiences
as a soldier, have sold over 53 million copies worldwide and have been published in
more than 50 countries.