Stefan Rostov Sabres in the Snow

[andydecker]

Stefan Rostov - Sabres in the Snow 1985 (written by Shaun Hutson)

It is winter 1943 and the once victorious armies of the Third Reich are on the retreat, burning, slaughtering and destroying everything in their path. Under the command of Captain Josef Kleisler, an SS unit massacred the villagers of Prokev.

But seventeen-year-old Anatole Boniak survives, and taking refuge in the hills, he conceives a deep and brooding hatred for the SS Captain. It is an obsession that will end in a violent confrontation and colour the Russian snows with the crimson stain of blood.

As a Hutson fan I have some of his war novels.

Translated war pulps never were a thing here in Germany. That is not to say there weren´t war-pulps on the market; it is quite a difficult and imho sordid topic.

One the one hand deciptions of the swastika are still against the law. (There are of course exceptions for historical purposes, and of course nobody can keep it out of movies. Still even if it isn´t always enforced, this can get mainstream fiction publications into hot water quickly. Some of Marvel´s Captain America comics were banned just because of this.)

On the other hand there is for instance the weekly pulp The Landser, which was created in the mid-fifties and still reprinted today. It is pseudo-documental garbage of the worst kind which actually manages to take the politics of the Nazis out of the war. Ugh.

But nobody published series from writers like Leo Kessler. The only writer who could sell his war-novels in later years was Alexander Kent who first became immensly popular with his historical Bolitho series. Which is still in print. Later they did some of his WWII nautical novels.