About: Bruno Sutkus   Sponge Permalink

An Entity of Type : dbkwik:resource/57M61t8UhqnTfVDn1WHt-A==, within Data Space : 134.155.108.49:8890 associated with source dataset(s)

Bruno Sutkus (lith. Bronius Sutkus, 14 May 1924 – 29 August 2003) was a Lithuanian-German sniper in the 68th Infantry Division of the German Army, on the Eastern Front of World War II, and was credited with 209 kills. Every kill was recorded in an individual "sniper's book" and had to be confirmed by at least one observer and authenticated by the battalion commander. Facsimile copies of various diary pages are reproduced in Sutkus' memoir. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Sutkus held lectures for Lithuanian soldiers and presented his wartime records to Lithuanian officers.

AttributesValues
rdf:type
rdfs:label
  • Bruno Sutkus
rdfs:comment
  • Bruno Sutkus (lith. Bronius Sutkus, 14 May 1924 – 29 August 2003) was a Lithuanian-German sniper in the 68th Infantry Division of the German Army, on the Eastern Front of World War II, and was credited with 209 kills. Every kill was recorded in an individual "sniper's book" and had to be confirmed by at least one observer and authenticated by the battalion commander. Facsimile copies of various diary pages are reproduced in Sutkus' memoir. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Sutkus held lectures for Lithuanian soldiers and presented his wartime records to Lithuanian officers.
sameAs
Unit
  • 68(xsd:integer)
dcterms:subject
dbkwik:military/pr...iPageUsesTemplate
serviceyears
  • --05-08
Birth Date
  • 1924-05-14(xsd:date)
Name
  • Bruno Sutkus
Birth Place
  • Tannenwalde, East Prussia
Awards
death date
  • 2003-08-29(xsd:date)
Rank
Image size
  • 240(xsd:integer)
Battles
abstract
  • Bruno Sutkus (lith. Bronius Sutkus, 14 May 1924 – 29 August 2003) was a Lithuanian-German sniper in the 68th Infantry Division of the German Army, on the Eastern Front of World War II, and was credited with 209 kills. Every kill was recorded in an individual "sniper's book" and had to be confirmed by at least one observer and authenticated by the battalion commander. Facsimile copies of various diary pages are reproduced in Sutkus' memoir. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Sutkus held lectures for Lithuanian soldiers and presented his wartime records to Lithuanian officers. Sutkus was born in Tannenwalde, then a suburb of Königsberg, East Prussia. His father was Lithuanian, which meant that Sutkus was not automatically German, German nationality had to be applied for. Since no application was made he remained officially Stateless until 1941 when he became a naturalized German. He joined the Hitler Youth in 1938, achieving the rank of a Scharführer. When he was 18 years old he became a member of the SA, where his shooting skills were acknowledged, and he was given a rifle to take home and practise marksmanship. Sutkus trained as a sniper from August 1943 through the end of December 1943 at the Sniper School Vilnius, before being assigned to the 196th Grenadier Regiment of the 68th Infantry Division. In January 1945 while recovering from a wound he was promoted and informed that he had been appointed as an instructor at a sniper school. In his autobiography, Sutkus describes that after the war he came into contact with the Lithuanian resistance (cf. Forest Brothers), how he was captured and severely tortured by the KGB. He was in possession of forged documents declaring him to be Stateless and of having worked throughout the war as a farm labourer, but knew the Russians suspected him of having served in the Wehrmacht as a sniper. So Sutkus decided to stay together with several Lithuanians he knew who were deported to Siberia for forced labor, partly to escape Soviet attentions, and expecting deportation anyway. By the time the Russians had the evidence to try him for the war crime of being a sniper, West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer had negotiated amnesties for many Germans being detained in the Soviet Union. He worked on collectives, in the Taiga forests and down the pits at Sheernkov from 1949 until 1971 when he was allowed to relocate to Vilnius. Sutkus went into voluntary banishment to accompany a Lithuanian woman, Antoniena, (d.1995) nineteen years his senior, who had been linked to the Resistance. He had a son, Vytautas, by her in 1951. In 1991 after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Sutkus, now Lithuanian after having been forced to accept Soviet citizenship, visited Germany. In 1994 he received a certificate of German citizenship and passport, and relocated to Germany in 1997.
Alternative Linked Data Views: ODE     Raw Data in: CXML | CSV | RDF ( N-Triples N3/Turtle JSON XML ) | OData ( Atom JSON ) | Microdata ( JSON HTML) | JSON-LD    About   
This material is Open Knowledge   W3C Semantic Web Technology [RDF Data] Valid XHTML + RDFa
OpenLink Virtuoso version 07.20.3217, on Linux (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu), Standard Edition
Data on this page belongs to its respective rights holders.
Virtuoso Faceted Browser Copyright © 2009-2012 OpenLink Software