Ian Neumann
He is credited with 168 tank kills - more than any other gunner in the German army, more than any tank commander on any front. He was never awarded the Ritterkreuz. The story goes that he was nominated four times and rejected four times, for insubordination, for defending a Soviet prisoner, for refusing to look like a hero. Almost none of this can be documented . One army communiqué, dated 25 April 1944, credits Kurt Knispel with 101 tanks. It is the only official figure that survives. Everything above that number comes from a veterans anthology published in 1990 and from Franz Kurowski, a writer who turned the Panzertruppe into pulp fiction and whose sources have never been found. This book follows Knispel from a Sudeten factory floor to the Ostfront,from the Panzerkampfwagen 38(t) to the Tiger II, and finally to a field near Vrbovec in Moravia, where in 2013 an identity disc came out of the ground. It is the biography of a soldier. It is also the story of how a number becomes a fact, and of what historians are supposed to do when the archive is silent.
