Guy Sajer

Guy Sajer (né Guy Mouminoux, born 13 January 1927 in Paris), is a French writer, author of Le soldat oublié (1965, translated as The Forgotten Soldier), and a cartoonist under the pen names Dimitri, and Dimitri Lahache. He is the son of a French father and a German mother: Sajer is his mother's maiden name.

Sajer wrote about his experience on the Eastern Front during World War II in his book Le soldat oublié (1965; The Forgotten Soldier). He states that he was an inhabitant of Alsace drafted into the German Wehrmacht at age 16, and that he fought in the elite Großdeutschland Division during World War II. The accuracy and authenticity of the book have been disputed by some historians. Some of the details Sajer mentions are incorrect, while other are impossible to verify due to the lack of surviving witnesses and documents.

The most frequently cited inaccuracy is Sajer's statement that, after being awarded the coveted Grossdeutschland Division cuff title, he and a friend were ordered to sew it on their left sleeves, when it was actually sewn on the right sleeve. Edwin Kennedy wrote that this error was "unimaginable" for a former member of such an elite German unit. Sajer also discusses campaign locations in vague terms and never with specific dates. For example, he asserts that during the summer of 1942 he was briefly assigned to a Luftwaffe training unit in Chemnitz commanded by famed Stuka ace Hans-Ulrich Rudel, but according to Rudel himself, his training unit was actually in Graz, Austria, during the whole of 1942. Sajer mentions seeing "the formidable Focke-Wulf [...] 195s, which could soar up quickly," taking off from an airfield outside Berlin, when no such aircraft ever existed (a Focke-Wulf projekt 195, a heavy transport, was in the pipeline, but never got off the drawing board). Finally, the names of most of Sajer's companions and leaders do not appear on official rolls in the Bundesarchiv, nor are they known to the Grossdeutschland Veterans Association, whose leader, Helmuth Spaeter, was one of the first to question whether Sajer actually served in the Grossdeutschland Division as he claimed.

...
Wikipedia