1. Franz Kurowski was a German author of fiction and non-fiction who specialised in World War II topics.
23 Facts About Franz Kurowski
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Franz Kurowski is best known for producing apologist, revisionist and semi-fictional works on the history of the war, including the popular English-language series Panzer Aces and Infantry Aces.
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Franz Kurowski wrote 400 books for children and adults, under his own name and various pseudonyms.
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Franz Kurowski wrote, among other things, for the weekly pulp war stories series Der Landser.
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Franz Kurowski produced numerous accounts featuring the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS, providing laudatory and non-peer reviewed wartime chronicles of military units and highly decorated personnel.
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Franz Kurowski's books have strong denialist tendencies; he held onto Nazi propaganda's military and civilian statistics and presented history devoid of any crimes by the Wehrmacht or the Waffen-SS.
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From 1989 to 1996, Franz Kurowski was editor-in-chief of the far-right publication Nation Europa, then named Deutsche Monatshefte.
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Franz Kurowski wrote for the weekly pulp series Der Landser.
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Franz Kurowski's works were published in Germany since 1958, but remained inaccessible to English-speaking audiences.
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Franz Kurowski gives the readers an almost heroic version of the German soldier, guiltless of any war crimes, actually incapable of such behavior.
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The series features a famous "panzer ace" Michael Wittmann, who enjoyed cult status in the popular perceptions of the Waffen-SS, along with the actions of another "ace", Franz Kurowski Bake, in the Cherkassy Pocket.
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In Franz Kurowski's retelling, after fighting unit after unit of the Red Army, Bake is able to establish a corridor to the trapped German forces, while "wiping out" the attacking Soviets.
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Franz Kurowski produced numerous books featuring highly decorated personnel of the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS, including Luftwaffe pilots and U-boat commanders of Nazi Germany's navy.
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Franz Kurowski's works include books about fighter aces Hans-Joachim Marseille, Otto Kittel, Heinrich Bar, and Joachim Muncheberg, along with the "panzer ace" Kurt Knispel.
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Franz Kurowski wrote extensively about successful U-boat commanders, "U-boat aces" in his terminology, including Helmut Witte, Johann Mohr, and Heinrich Lehmann-Willenbrock.
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Franz Kurowski followed up with the 1967 Graue Wolfe in blauer See.
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Franz Kurowski played a key role in the revisionist series So war der Zweite Weltkrieg, a seven-volume pseudo history of World War II.
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Franz Kurowski wrote several books that discuss the February 1945 Allied air raids on Dresden.
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Such official calculations, as described by Franz Kurowski, did not exist.
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Franz Kurowski's works strive to provide an experience of the war "as it happened", but his writing style often leads to embellishments and half-truths.
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Franz Kurowski described Kurowski as a "pulp-novelist" and a "hack-writer".
22.
Hadley writes that Franz Kurowski heavily relies on already published materials, such as in his work Knights of the Seven Seas.
23.
Smelser and Davies conclude that "Franz Kurowski's accounts are laudatory texts that cast the German soldier in an extraordinarily favorable light".