Erwin König

Ed Harris as Major Erwin Konig on Enemy at The Gates (2001)

Erwin König and Heinz Thorvald are names of an apocryphal highly skilled Wehrmacht sniper allegedly killed by the legendary Red Army sniper Vasily Zaytsev during the Battle of Stalingrad.

König is mentioned both in Zaytsev's memoirs Notes of a Sniper and William Craig's 1973 non-fiction book Enemy at the Gates: The Battle for Stalingrad.

Historical authenticity

Zaytsev claims the duel took place over a period of three days in the ruins of Stalingrad. In his own memoirs, Zaytsev refers to him as being a German sniper named Herr Koning (Koning is Dutch for King, cognate to König in German), identified as the head of a sniper school in Berlin, by documents taken from his dead body. This is unconfirmed as German Heer personnel records make no mention of any German sniper called König or Koning.
At the Central Armed Forces Museum in Moscow there is a rifle scope that supposedly belonged to a Wehrmacht sniper called Erwin König. In a post-war visit to Berlin, Zaytsev was allegedly confronted by a woman who told him she was König's daughter, with Soviet authorities quickly evacuating Zaytsev to avoid any confrontation

Fictional versions

A fictionalized account of the duel in the movie Enemy at the Gates portrays Erwin König as the head of the Wehrmacht Sniper School. He is played by Ed Harris and is sent to Stalingrad to take on the increasingly aggressive Soviet snipers. Initially he is successful, killing four of Vasily's partners, but eventually he is outwitted by the Russian. König is depicted as a ruthless Bavarian aristocrat pitted against the shepherd Vasily Zaytsev. In the film he is killed at the Stalingrad train yard by Zaytsev.
American author David L. Robbins used the name of Heinz Thorvald in his 1999 novel War of the Rats. This story portrays Thorvald (König) as an SS-Standartenführer who was originally an instructor at the Wehrmacht underground headquarters in Zossen. However, aside from a few staff officers, no SS division fought in Stalingrad and no active sniper had such a high rank. German snipers were not employed in units but were deployed as Jägers. The Red Army, conversely, deployed snipers in large units up to battalion strength. Zaytsev was a Junior Lieutenant (мла́дший лейтена́нт) and eventually Captain (капита́н) of a Russian sniper unit.(Photo shows German sniper using the mauser 98k rifle with Russian PE scope mounted. This set-up was unusual but local German Waffenmeisters of Infantry Bns, did mount captured Russian optics to the standard German 98k)