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.