Kurt Knispel

Kurt Knispel
Born	(1921-09-20)20 September 1921 Salisfeld, Czechoslovakia
Died	28 April 1945(1945-04-28) (aged 23) Urbau, German occupied Czechoslovakia
Allegiance	Germany
Service / branch	Wehrmacht
Years of service	1940–1945
Rank	Feldwebel
Unit	12th Panzer Division 503rd Heavy Panzer Battalion
Battles / wars	World War II
Awards	German Cross in Gold

You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in German. (November 2024) Click [show] for important translation instructions. View a machine-translated version of the German article. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 2,074 articles in the main category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing German Wikipedia article at [[:de:Kurt Knispel]]; see its history for attribution. You may also add the template {{Translated|de|Kurt Knispel}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia's notability guideline for biographies. Please help to demonstrate the notability of the topic by citing reliable secondary sources that are independent of the topic and provide significant coverage of it beyond a mere trivial mention. If notability cannot be shown, the article is likely to be merged, redirected, or deleted. Find sources: "Kurt Knispel" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (August 2023) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Kurt Knispel (20 September 1921 – 28 April 1945^[1]) was a German tank commander during World War II.

Knispel was severely wounded on 28 April 1945 by shrapnel to his head when his Tiger II was hit in battle by Soviet tanks. He died two hours later in a German field hospital.^[2]

On 10 April 2013, Czech authorities said that Knispel's remains were found with 15 other German soldiers behind a church wall in Vrbovec, identified by his dog tags.^[3]

On 12 November 2014, the German War Graves Commission reburied his remains at the Central Brno military cemetery in Brno.^[4] He was buried with 41 other German soldiers who died in Moravia and Silesia.^[5]

Knispel was profiled extensively in the second installment of the popular historical fiction series Panzer Aces, written by Franz Kurowski. Alfred Rubbel, Knispel's superior officer during the war, challenged Kurowski's retelling of Knispel's alleged tank kills and awards. Rubbel described Kurowski's writing on Knispel as "a sheer outrage. What he wrote in there, it is all made up. Alone the quotes he puts in my mouth. It is all completely untrue."^[6][7]