Sniper Ace is Bruno Sutkus’ account of his time as a German sniper in the 68th Infantry Division in the on the Eastern Front. During his six months service from May 1944 to early 1945, he was credited with 209 ‘kills’, making him a top sniper in the Wehrmacht.[1]
Sutkus was born in 1924, growing up in rural East Prussia, near the Lithuanian border, where his parents were farm labourers.[2] He believed that ‘my early life on the German-Lithuanian frontier was a pre-military training’ where he learnt to hunt, camouflage himself and prepared him for the hardships of military service.[3] In the later stages of the war, Sutkus was captured by the Red Army only leaving Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989.
The account is a chronological memoir written after his return from Russia in the 1990s. The value of the book lies in the detail Sutkus’ gives on the nature and conditions in which he shot his tally of victims. He gives minute detail on the range, circumstances and type of person he shot based on the official records he submitted to substantiate each ‘kill’. The book also gives interesting detail about how Sutkus’ exploits were detailed in official propaganda activities.
NOTES
[1] Bruno Sutkus, Sniper Ace (London: Frontline, 2018), p.xix.
[2] Ibid., p.3.
[3] Ibid., pp.39, 5.