Kurt Knispel was born on September 20, 1921, in the small village of Salfield, territory that after the First World War had been absorbed into the new state of Czechoslovakia. He was of German descent, and like many ethnic Germans in the Sudetenland, he grew up in a region that became a point of bitter contention between Prague and Berlin. Adolf Hitler cast himself as the champion of all ethnic Germans in Europe and promised to reclaim the Sudetenland, where three million of them lived. When Knispel was seventeen, the German army marched into his homeland as liberators.
He had little interest in politics, but he believed in doing his duty for his parent country, and that country was now Hitler’s Germany. Knispel took up an apprenticeship at a car factory, learning basic engineering while the Wehrmacht pushed into Poland and then western Europe. He was known in his community as headstrong and tough, charismatic with girls but frequently clashing with authority. With the war showing no signs of ending, he completed his apprenticeship in 1940 and followed his heart into the army.
His training and his height of just over 160 centimeters made him an ideal candidate for the armored units, which needed smaller men for their cramped early panzers. He was sent to the panzer replacement training battalion at Zagan, where he learned the basic steps of soldiering and practiced tank operation on obsolete Panzer Is and IIs, along with a few older Panzer IIIs, until graduating on September 30, 1940. He was assigned to the third company of the 29th Panzer Regiment. The obsolete training tanks were gone, and Knispel found himself as a gunner on the short-barreled 75-millimeter versions of the Panzer IV.
He quickly impressed his superiors with his gunnery, but still green, he was relegated to the vital yet unglamorous role of loader for his crew. His unit redeployed to southern Europe for the Balkans campaign, but to his disappointment, they missed combat. Then news filtered down that they would soon strike eastward against the vast Soviet Union. On the morning of June 22, 1941, at approximately 2:15, Knispel was awakened near the German-Soviet border and told that Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, was about to begin.
He and his comrades were eager for action, and with the German army seemingly unstoppable, they expected the campaign to be over by Christmas. His first taste of combat came that afternoon, when he loaded shells into his Panzer IV’s 75-millimeter gun and fired on Soviet troops hunkered down in a nearby village. Over the coming days, the unit advanced toward Minsk, enjoying consistent success despite a few close calls, including his tank taking several hits from Soviet armor. Having grown up in the Sudetenland, Knispel had learned rudimentary Russian, and this helped his superiors when dealing with the local population.
In August 1941, his division was transferred to the northern front. On August 25, while operating south of Leningrad, the gunner in his vehicle was hit during their first encounter with the legendary Soviet T-34. Knispel immediately took his place and trained the gun on a T-34 that had appeared as if from nowhere, knocking it out with a superbly aimed shot. At the time, his fellow gunners called it a lucky shot, but they soon realized luck had nothing to do with it.
It was untrained skill. Now permanently a gunner, Knispel increased his score in the coming weeks as the German army faced dogged Soviet resistance around Leningrad. Any thought of the invasion being over by Christmas was soon revealed as fantasy. His senses became highly tuned to locating the enemy, and he seemed to have an almost clairvoyant ability to spot camouflaged tanks or movement at night.
On one occasion, he destroyed a T-34 after spotting the faint glow of a crew member’s lit cigarette. As Soviet armor appeared in ever-greater numbers, he built a reputation among panzer crews for being untouchable, coming out of many battles unscathed, this despite the fact that his Panzer IV was initially ill-suited to combat with the T-34 and the KV series heavy tanks. His courage was not confined to the inside of a tank. He personally led several scouting missions, and on November 13, 1941, he destroyed a T-34 by laying an anti-tank mine in the path of an oncoming tank while taking fire from infantry.
For his actions on December 16, 1941, he was awarded the Iron Cross Second Class. But celebrations were short-lived. The Germans were forced to begin retreating westward toward Estonia in the face of fresh Soviet offensives and disrupted supply lines. The Soviet air force, maturing from its lackluster opening performance, became an increasing problem, and German panzer crews especially feared the potent Il-2 attack plane.
In January 1942, his unit was re-equipped with the long-barreled 75-millimeter Panzer IV, which was much better suited to tank combat, though still not ideal against the heaviest Soviet armor. Fighting in dense woodland, the Germans were forever plagued by ambushes, but Knispel always seemed to know where the enemy was. During one fight, his tank was knocked out, and he and his crew scrambled to nearby panzers. Briefly, he commanded one of them for the first time.
He had proven himself a true ace as a gunner and was well respected by his comrades. He had even been mentioned in radio broadcasts to the German people, one of the highest honors in German society. He should have been on the fast track to glory. However, an incident would forever hang over him like a shadow within the Nazi leadership, curtailing his prospects from then on.
After a period of rest and re-equipping with improved Panzer IVs, Knispel and his commander Alfred Rubbel were transiting back to the eastern front in mid-1942. Outside Krakow in Poland, he spotted a prisoner from a nearby concentration camp being beaten by a guard. Knispel demanded the guard stop, and when he refused, Knispel pulled a pistol on him. The guard attempted to train his own weapon on Knispel, but the panzer gunner yanked it out of his hands and struck the guard in the face.
Many of his comrades saw it as a demonstration of Knispel’s sense of honor, but his superiors did not see it that way. A few days later, military police attempted to arrest him but were prevented from doing so by members of the unit, who declared they would have to arrest the whole division as well. This was only the beginning of his falling out with the powers over him, particularly the more fanatical members of the German armed forces. In one incident, he stole coffee and cognac from sleeping Waffen-SS men and distributed them around the unit.
By the end of 1942, news of the battle at Stalingrad reached him, and he expected they would be deployed to help relieve the encircled Sixth Army. Instead, they were told they would be relinquishing their Panzer IVs and returning to Germany to re-equip, this time with the new wonder tank, the Tiger. Training on the Tiger with its devastating 88-millimeter gun, Knispel found that the new vehicle exceeded every expectation, and he was eager to unleash it on the Soviets. The invasion of the Caucasus and the subsequent battle for Stalingrad had failed, and the German army was now stuck in a slow but steady retreat.
By the time Knispel arrived with the Tigers in mid-1943, the Tiger could not have arrived at a better time for the Germans. They used their superior armor and firepower to help hold off Soviet advances long enough for the main German force to withdraw. Knispel once remarked that the last thing a soldier wants is a fair fight, and one-on-one, there was little at that time that could match the Tiger’s power. For Knispel, the eastern front was a target-rich environment in which he excelled, knocking out 27 Soviet tanks in and around the Kursk bulge alone.
But he again found himself facing the ire of the German leadership when he refused to follow an order from a Waffen-SS officer to open fire on a Soviet tank that was retreating with a number of civilians on board. Only his skill and the respect of his comrades seemed to spare him any real punishment. His most famous achievement was knocking out a T-34 at a range of three kilometers, almost two miles, an impressive feat by any standard. While most men in his position might have tried to keep their heads down after becoming unpopular with their commanding officers, Knispel seemed to relish their contempt.
He frequently let his hair grow, styled a goatee beard instead of shaving, and sported a tattoo, all of which flew in the face of strict German army regulations. Despite pleas from his fellow tankers to conform, Knispel was his own man. As such, he was seen as an undesirable topic for German propaganda, which had a preconceived notion of what a German hero should look like, and he was not it. In early 1944, while lesser-able tank crews were projected onto German cinema screens, Knispel was trundling through the mud and debris of Ukraine, passing 100 kills in May 1944.
His unit was then withdrawn from the eastern front and sent to the training camp at Ordruf. Now a tank commander, he would be one of those spearheading the introduction of an even more powerful tank, the Tiger II, otherwise known as the Royal or King Tiger. On paper, this new armored fighting machine looked set to turn Germany’s fortunes around. It was even better protected than its predecessor, with thick sloping armor, and equipped with an improved version of the 88-millimeter gun.
Less than a month after arriving at Ordruf, news came that the western allies had successfully established a beachhead in Normandy, and the new Tigers were needed to push them back into the sea. Fighting in the west in 1944 was totally different from anything he had done thus far. Knispel had to contend with overwhelming allied air superiority, making movement around the countryside in daylight almost suicidal, even for the formidably armored King Tigers. Within two months of deployment to the west, not even Knispel’s skills could save his battalion from almost total destruction, losing all their brand-new tanks.
Re-equipped again in September, Knispel returned to the eastern front, where the situation was no better. Nevertheless, he threw himself into his duty and was as always in the thick of the fighting. It was here that the King Tiger’s greatest weakness was exposed: its lack of mobility. It was so large and heavy that it often could not cross small bridges, traverse narrow roads, or keep up with the main German force retreating westward in the chaos of the Third Reich’s final days.
As if the sheer scale of the Soviet forces were not enough, they were now also fielding the heavy Stalin tanks that could match the King Tiger in combat, while the sky was at times seemingly blackened by Soviet fighter-bombers hunting German armor. On April 28, 1945, Knispel and his crew were engaged in combat with Soviet forces in central Czechoslovakia, the land in which he was born. On that day, he destroyed a Soviet tank, bringing his tally to 168 kills. His tank was soon damaged by Soviet self-propelled guns, forcing him to abandon it.
He was aided out of the hatch by the commander of another King Tiger, who was killed in the process by a Soviet sniper. Knispel took command of his dead comrade’s tank, but this too was soon knocked out by superior Soviet forces, forcing the tank crews to abandon their vehicles. During their retreat, mortars began landing on their position, and Knispel was seriously wounded. Although with help he made it to a nearby German field hospital, there was little the doctors could do for him, and he died a few hours later.
Just ten days after that, the war in Europe ended. Knispel’s final tally is contested by many historians. Based on testimony from the men who fought with him, many claim the score is significantly higher, because Knispel would only count vehicles he knew for certain were destroyed, and many more were likely taken out of the fight that he did not account for. Another factor often considered is that as a leader, Knispel liked to inspire his less experienced men by weakening an enemy and then affording them the kill shot.
If these factors are taken into consideration, his real tally of total and shared kills is actually much closer to 200, making him the greatest tank ace in history.