The German soldiers called him Zeppi. This is a story about a young Austrian sniper soldier who fought in the German army and killed 257 Soviet soldiers. And this is only confirmed, fixed data, there may have been more. Zeppi became the second most successful Wehrmacht sniper, second only to MattiAs HetzenAuer, also an Austrian, who had 345 confirmed, destroyed enemy soldiers on his account. Joseph Allerberger.
The future German sniper was born in Austria in 1924, in a simple peasant family. His father worked all his life as an ordinary carpenter and from childhood taught his son to the family business. Closer to adulthood, Josef had already mastered the skills of carpentry quite well.
When the guy turned 18, he, like all his peers, was drafted into the German army. The guy got into the mountain rifle division, where he was a machine gunner.
Josef was well aware that if he remained a machine gunner, he would die very soon. According to Allerberger, the losses among the machine gunners were much higher than the average for the infantry, since the enemy sought first of all to suppress the machine gun with artillery, rifle or sniper fire.
After five days, I lost the last remnants of my youthful innocence. The experience of bloody battles left its mark on my face, so that I now looked ten years older. Our 8th company was reduced in number to only twenty people. From my group, only I and the commander of our company survived. I lost my sense of time and felt no more fear or pity. I became a product of the events that took place around me, driven by a primitive instinct to survive in the face of grueling battles, hunger and thirst. Josef told later.
While fighting fierce battles near Voroshilovsk, Luhansk region of Ukraine, machine gunner AllerbErger was wounded, a bullet hit him in the arm.
After being wounded, he was transferred to serve closer to the headquarters, to lighter work. There he restored broken carbine butts and sorted weapons as an assistant gunsmith officer.
And then one day a Soviet Mosin sniper rifle fell into Joseph's hands, the guy really wanted to shoot from it, which he asked the non-commissioned officer to do. Allerberger immediately showed excellent results as a shooter. He realized that this is exactly what he would like to do in this war. Be a sniper!
The restoration of health lasted fourteen days, after which Josef had to return to the company. In parting, the non-commissioned officer gave him a Soviet three-ruler.
In August 1943, Josef returned to the company, from the sergeant he received a black badge "For the wound" and award documents. AllerbErger managed not to get into the camp of machine gunners. Now he is a sniper!
Soon Josef was summoned by the commander and given the task of destroying the Soviet sniper. He has long haunted the German soldiers. The very first shot from the Mosin rifle was accurate. The Germans rushed into battle. After a hundred meters, Allerberg and his colleagues discovered the body of a dead sniper. The bullet hit right in the eye, leaving a huge hole in the head. The killed Soviet shooter was very young. Josef felt sick at the sight of his first victim. At that moment, as he himself recalled, he was overwhelmed with feelings of guilt, pride and horror. However, none of his colleagues tried to condemn him.
There were not enough sniper weapons in the Wehrmacht, and many snipers had to use captured ones. “While the German army continued to use the old pre-war optical sights, the Red Army developed modern sniper weapons and trained a huge number of snipers,” AllerbeYerger noted.
Shooting of snipers, not only German, but also Soviet, was usually carried out on the enemy's corps. It was hard to hit the head. By shooting into the body, the sniper increased his chances of hitting. In addition, hitting the hull also incapacitated the enemy and helped not to notice the shooter.
Allerberger gave many examples of how successfully a sniper rifle can be used against infantry, incapacitating soldiers.
There is a lot of "dirty truth of war" in the sniper's memoirs. For example, according to Josef, snipers were closely monitoring the trenches, waiting for the moment when one of the enemy soldiers would appear there in full growth, for example, to throw out a can of excrement. Each kill of a Russian Zeppi was recorded by means of notches on the butt. At the same time, during the battles, Allerberger sought not to kill the enemy, but to wound him in the torso. The Red Army soldiers experienced unbearable pain, and their cries had a demoralizing effect on their colleagues.
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#The Great Patriotic War
#World War II
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