Sven Hassel was the pen name of the Danish-born Børge Willy Redsted Pedersen (19 April 1917 – 21 September 2012) known for his bestselling novels about German soldiers fighting in World War II. In Denmark he used the pen name Sven Hazel. He is one of the bestselling Danish authors, possibly second only to Hans Christian Andersen.
Hassel claimed his authorship was based on being a veteran of the German Wehrmacht who had fought in the Battle of Berlin in 1945 until he surrendered to the Soviets. However, numerous post-war investigations have proven him to be a military impostor with false claims and outright fabrications. In fact Hassel (as Pedersen) was a Danish criminal who did join the German Army but was incarcerated for having lied about his convictions. He was not captured in Berlin because he was in prison in Denmark. In the post-war period he gave a false testament which led to the arrest and imprisonment of innocent people.
Hassel claimed that at the age of 14 he joined the merchant navy as a cabin boy and worked on ships until his military service in 1936. He said that he then joined the German Army and served in tank units during World War II.
Hassel claimed to have surrendered to Soviet troops in Berlin in 1945 and to have spent the following years in prisoner-of-war camps in various countries. Independent sources state that he was arrested in Denmark in 1945 after the liberation and was held in prison there, first as a suspect and then as a convicted criminal. Hassel was released from prison in 1949 after having served four years out of his ten-year prison sentence.
After his release, Hassel claimed he planned to join the French Foreign Legion until he met his future wife. He and Laura Dorthea Guldbæk Jensen, a divorced film translator from Nørre Tranders who was four years his senior, married in Copenhagen in January 1951.
In 1964, he moved to Barcelona, Spain, where he lived until his death.
In 1953 his debut novel Legion of the Damned was published under the pen name Sven Hazel by Grafisk Forlag after their consultant Georgjedde (Georg Gjedde-Simonsen) had abbreviated and rewritten the manuscript.
Hassel's books are written in the first person, with Hassel himself as a character, though not necessarily the lead character. The books describe the exploits of a 27th (Penal) Panzer Regiment composed of expendable soldiers – sentenced criminals, court-martialed soldiers and political undesirables. In addition to Sven, they include Alfred Kalb, "Legionnaire" (ex-member of the French Foreign Legion); Wolfgang Creutzfeldt, a giant of a man ironically named Tiny (variously Little John in some of the books); barracks fixer and shrewd thief Joseph Porta; older sergeant Willie Beier, "Old Un" or "Old Man"; Julius Heide, a Nazi fanatic, Barcelona Blom, a veteran of both sides of the Spanish Civil War, Gregor Martin, who was a removals man before the war, Chief Mechanic Wolf, and Staff Sergeant Hoffman, a non-commissioned officer. They serve on many fronts, including northern Finland, USSR, Italy (Monte Cassino), Greece (The Bloody Road to Death), the Balkans, and France (Liquidate Paris, set during and after the Normandy Invasion). Most of the action occurs in the USSR. Due to errors in chronology, the regiment fights in several places, hundreds of kilometres apart, at the same time. In some of the books the 27th Regiment does guard duty for the Gestapo in Hamburg (Assignment Gestapo) and also at the military prison at Torgau (March Battalion).
Hassel claimed that, while his novels were essentially works of fiction, his characters were based on real people and some events were related to historical events. His view of war is brutal. In his books, soldiers fight only to survive, with the Geneva Convention rarely being observed on the Eastern front. People are killed by chance or with very little reason. Occasional pleasant events and peaceful meetings are brutally cut short. Unsympathetic Prussian officers constantly threaten their men with courts-martial and execute them with little provocation. Disgruntled soldiers occasionally kill their own officers to get rid of them. By graphically portraying war as violent and hopeless in such manner, Hassel's books have been said to contain an anti-war message.
In total he published 14 novels which have been translated into 18 languages. In 1987 his book Wheels of Terror was made into a film of the same title and also known as The Misfit Brigade.
Hassel's books are particularly popular in the United Kingdom, where he sold 15 million of the 53 million sold worldwide. In contrast his books are not deemed suitable for the public libraries in his home country Denmark where a 2011 opinion piece on literature in Dagbladet Information described Hassel as a traitor and his debut novel as the worst book ever with its characters plagiarized from All Quiet on the Western Front.
On 23 August 1942 the resistance newspaper De Frie Danske reported that on 13 August a Cadillac registered to DNSAP leader Frits Clausen had crashed in Copenhagen. A "Børge Petersen" involved in the crash first disappeared but was later apprehended and awaited trial. DNSAP subsequently issued a statement that due to his prior convictions Børge Petersen was not and could never be a member of DNSAP. De Frie Danske opined that if this statement were true there would hardly be any members at all in DNSAP. The author Erik Haaest claimed that the criminal record of Børge Willy Redsted Pedersen shows that he was the aforementioned "Børge Petersen" and that he in connection with the car crash impersonated a police officer and that he was living at Høffdingsvej 21 with his parents. Haaest's implication is that Pedersen's claim that he was a naturalized German citizen fighting with the German armed forces is contradicted by his arrest in Copenhagen as a civilian with several prior convictions.
On 10 October 1963 journalist George Kringelbach revealed in his radio programme Natredaktionen on P3 that Sven Hazel was a pen name for the convicted traitor Børge Willy Redsted Pedersen. Further, Kringelbach claimed that while Pedersen might have been in Germany during the war, it was not in a penal battalion. Rather, during the war he had been working for a German intelligence agency which collaborated with HIPO. Hassel's publisher Grafisk Forlag subsequently offered all book dealers a refund for his most recent book and ceased collaboration with him. Pedersen therefore formed his own publishing company Bellum (Latin for 'War'), which published the remainder of his books.
The controversial Danish writer Erik Haaest disputed Hassel's claims for many years. According to Haaest, the author never served on the Eastern front but spent the majority of World War II in occupied Denmark and his knowledge of warfare comes second-hand from Danish Waffen-SS veterans whom he met after the end of the war. Haaest claims that during the war period, Hassel was in fact a member of the HIPO Corps or Hilfspolizei, an auxiliary Danish police force created by the Gestapo, consisting of collaborators. Haaest also alleges that Hassel's first novel was ghostwritten and that, when it became a success, he employed his wife to write the rest of his books.
In 1976 Hassel threatened Haaest with a lawsuit for defamation in reaction to Haasts' publication of the book Hazel. En Hitler-agents fantastiske historie (Danish for 'Hazel. A Hitler agent's fantastic story'). A review of Haaest's book quotes Hassel's own statements and writes that his sentence of 10 years prison for treason was given primarily because he was an informant for the German occupation force in Denmark and argues that he could not both have been an informant in Copenhagen and been fighting deep inside Soviet territory.
In 2010 the Danish public service television channel DR2 dedicated one of its five episodes on scandals in Denmark to Hassel. The program explained that he at first was wildly popular among his Danish readers and celebrated as a Danish Ernest Hemingway, until in 1963 he was exposed as a fraud with a dubious wartime past. He became an outcast and had go into exile to continue publishing. The national Danish Radio which aired the exposure were subsequently forced to issue a retraction after Hassel provided corroborating documentation of his wartime service. With more than 50 million books sold, he is the most sold Danish author ever but never received recognition or forgiveness.