Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway shot 122 German POWs

25.09.2006 - 23:04

Ernest Hemingway, 1954 Nobel Prize winner for literature ( "The Old Man and the Sea"). He loved the thrill of danger and the sweetish smell of blood.

Big game hunter in Africa. War correspondent after the Allied landings in Normandy in 1944. friend of Fidel Castro. Bullfighting fanatics. Nickname "Papa".

Previously, he was considered a prototype of the fearless macho. But he was also a cowardly killer who shot unarmed soldiers in the war?

The "Focus" editor Rainer Schmitz *) has re-spotted his letters and yellowed leaves old biographies. O-Ton Hemingway on 27 August 1947, his war experiences to his publisher Charles Scribner:

"Once I have a particularly naughty SS herb folded (cabbage = contemptuous term for German, Red.). When I told him that I would kill him ... but the guy said: You will not kill me. Because you are afraid and because you belong to a degenerate bastard race. It also violates the Geneva Convention. "

Hemingway continues - as if he had screwed his feelings to the freezing point:

"You're wrong, brother, I said to him and shot him three times quickly in the stomach, and then when he went to his knees, I shot him in the skull so that the brain came out of his mouth - or from the nose, I believe."

Hemingway accompanied the war ended a US Infantry Division with the rank of officer.  He also works for the US secret service OSS, the predecessor organization of the CIA.  In Rambouillet 50 kilometers from Paris, he interrogated German prisoners, provides a private arsenal together and away from his uniform the signs of war correspondent.

At his lover and later wife Mary Welsh, he writes from the front: "We have it here very nice and funny, many deaths, German loot, much shooting and a lot of fights."

On June 2, 1950 Hemingway reports the American literature professor Arthur Mizener (1907-88) from Cornell University (US state of New York), he killed 122 German.

One of them tried to escape on a bicycle. The retreating German was "about the age of my son Patrick" (born 1928), ie 16 or 17 years old.

With the standard rifle of the US Army M1 Hemingway had shot him from behind by the back. The ball (US .30 caliber) tore the liver of young Germans.

Witnesses for the fatal shots were never reported. Wanted Hemingway brag or he was the killer, as he describes?

"I kill like" was his motto. "Kill that gives you aesthetic pleasure and pride," he wrote in 1932, "has always been one of the greatest pleasures of a portion of the human race."

On July 2, 1961, he kills himself - with a hunting rifle at his home in Ketchum (US state of Idaho). Supposedly he has the trigger operated with the big toe ...

* "What happened to Schiller's skull? Everything you do not know about literature ", calibration fount, 39,90 Euro