Between August 1944 and May 1945, Soviet soldiers began falling dead at impossible distances on the Eastern Front. One of them dropped at 1,100 m, the equivalent of 10 football fields away. Over the next 10 months, he was followed by 344 others. General Paul Clatt officially documented that a single marksman had eliminated the equivalent of two complete Red Army companies, more than 200 men.

But the sniper German commanders recommended for the Knights Cross wasn’t a war veteran. He was Mateos Hetsenau, a 19-year-old Austrian farm boy who grew up hunting deer and elk with his father in the Alps. How exactly did the techniques he learned tracking animals in the frozen mountains of Brixen Imtala make him capable of a shot that few snipers could execute? To understand how Mateos Hessenau could do this, you first need to understand the war he was fighting.

By August 1944, the Eastern Front had become a nightmare for the Vermacht. The Soviet summer offensive, Operation Barratzian, had shattered Army Group Center. The Red Army was advancing through Poland, driving toward the Reich’s borders with overwhelming force. The German army was no longer the conquering machine that had stormed across Europe in 1941.

Now they were fighting a desperate defensive war, trying to slow an enemy that outnumbered them in men, tanks, and artillery. The numbers tell the story. The Soviet offensives of 1944 deployed millions of soldiers. They had industrial capacity the Germans couldn’t match. They had recovered from the catastrophic losses of 1941 and 1942.

And now they were bringing the full weight of their wartime production to bear. The Vermacht divisions defending the Carpathian Mountains, Hungary and Slovakia were under strength, exhausted, and fighting without air support. German soldiers knew they were losing. The question was no longer if they would retreat, but how long they could hold each position before being overwhelmed.

But there was one factor the Soviets hadn’t fully accounted for. The terrain, the Carpathian mountains and the mountain ranges of Slovakia were harsh, unforgiving landscapes. Dense forests, deep snow, steep slopes that made vehicle movement nearly impossible. This was terrain that favored defenders who knew how to use it.

Terrain that favored men who had grown up in mountains. And Mateos Hetsenau had been born in the Austrian Alps. And in the middle of this collapsing front, there was a quiet farm boy from Brixen Imtala, Mateos Hetsenau, born December 23rd of 1924 in a small village in the Kitsbool Alps. His father, Zimon Hetsau, was a hunter who fed his family by hunting deer, elk, and wild turkey in the mountains.

His mother, Magdalena, came from generations of Austrian peasant families. From the time Matos was a child, he learned to shoot and hunt with his father on the mountain slopes. His childhood wasn’t military training. It was survival. In the Alps, if you wanted to eat meat, you hunted it yourself. Simon taught his son how to track animals through snow, how to read terrain, how to predict where a deer would move based on wind direction, time of day, and the layout of the forest.

He taught him to remain motionless for hours in freezing cold, waiting for the perfect moment. He taught him camouflage, silence, patience. And most importantly, he taught him to shoot accurately in conditions that would make most men’s hands shake. These weren’t abstract military concepts to Matteos.

They were the reality of putting food on the table. When you’re hunting in the Alps, you don’t get multiple chances. Game is scarce. Ammunition is expensive. You learn to make the first shot count because there might not be a second one. You learn to calculate wind drift because a missed shot means your family goes hungry. You learn to stay hidden because spooked prey disappears into the forest and doesn’t come back.

In 1942 at age 17, Matteos was conscripted into the German army. He served initially with the 141st Mountain Infantry Reinforcement Battalion in Kofstein. After basic training, he was briefly released and returned to civilian life. Then from January 1943 to July 1944, he trained as a gabergger, a mountain infantry soldier, learning mortar and artillery operations.

But it was between March and July 1944 that he received formal sniper training at the Troop Yubong plat’s Zetala Alpa in Stymark. The Vermacht Sniper Program taught doctrine, fieldcraft, target selection, how to work in twoman teams, how to calculate range using mil dots. The program was thorough, professional, and based on years of combat experience.

But for Mata, much of it was simply putting military terminology to techniques his father had already taught him. The instructors taught patience. Mataas had spent entire days motionless in the snow, waiting for a deer. The instructors taught camouflage. Mata had learned to blend into alpine forests before he could read.

The instructors taught how to read terrain. Mata had been predicting animal movement through mountain slopes since childhood. When he was deployed to the Eastern Front in August 1944, he carried two rifles. His primary weapon was a Carabina 98K boltaction rifle fitted with a 6x scope. This was the standard German sniper rifle.

Accurate and reliable. His secondary weapon was a G43 semi-automatic rifle with a fourtime ZF4 scope. The G43 was faster for closer engagements, though less precise at extreme range. Both rifles would become instruments of extraordinary lethality in his hands. But the rifles themselves weren’t the trick.

The trick was how Matus used the skills Simon had taught him in the Alps and applied them to hunting men instead of animals. In the Vermacht sniper doctrine, there were rules, proper camouflage positions, calculated fields of fire, twoman spotter shooter teams. All of it was based on military logic refined through combat on the Eastern front.

But Mata brought something different. He brought a hunter’s logic. When the Vermacht taught target prioritization, they focused on military value. Officers, radio operators, machine gun crews. These were the targets that disrupted enemy formations and created tactical advantages. Matteas understood this perfectly.

His confirmed kills included a disproportionate number of Soviet officers and commanders. He would occasionally infiltrate behind enemy lines specifically to eliminate command personnel. But his understanding went deeper than military doctrine. From hunting he understood patience on a level most soldiers didn’t.

A deer won’t present a perfect shot immediately. You wait. You watch its pattern. You let it settle into a false sense of security. Then, when it stops in the exact position you predicted, you take the shot. Mata applied this to Soviet officers. He would watch their movements, study their routines, notice when they felt safe enough to stand upright, to check a map, to light a cigarette.

Then when they stopped in that moment of vulnerability, he would fire. One shot from a position they never saw, and by the time they understood what had happened, he was gone. The second part of the hunter’s logic was understanding terrain better than his prey. In the Alps, a hunter learns to read landscape in three dimensions.

He knows which ridgeel lines provide concealment, which slopes funnel animals into predictable routes, which positions give you the longest sight lines while keeping you invisible. The Carpathian mountains and the forests of Slovakia weren’t identical to the Austrian Alps, but they were similar enough. Matus could look at a hillside and immediately understand where Soviet soldiers would move, where their officers would establish command posts, and where he could position himself to remain undetected.

The third element was his comfort in extreme conditions. Soviet soldiers advancing through mountain terrain in 1944 and 1945 were cold, exhausted, and miserable. The weather was brutal. Snow, ice, freezing temperatures that made metal burn your skin when you touched it. For them, it was suffering. For Matus, it was Tuesday.

He had spent his entire childhood in conditions like this. He knew how to remain motionless for hours in the cold without his body seizing up. He knew how to control his breathing so the vapor wouldn’t give away his position. He knew exactly how snow and wind would affect bullet trajectory because he’d been compensating for it since he was a boy.

And finally, there was the fundamental rule he’d learned from his father. Never fire twice from the same position. When you’re hunting, if you miss your first shot and the animal runs, you don’t stay in place hoping for another chance. The game knows where you are now. You’ve lost your advantage. The same logic applied to combat.

Matus would take his shot and then he would immediately relocate. By the time Soviet soldiers figured out the direction of the shot, he was already 200 m away. Selecting his next position. This combination created something terrifying. A sniper who could remain invisible in terrain he understood instinctively. who could predict enemy movement with a hunter’s intuition, who never gave the Soviets a chance to locate him, and who when he did fire, almost never missed.

His routine was brutal. He would wake before dawn and move into position while darkness still provided cover. He would select a spot that gave him overlapping fields of fire, good concealment, and multiple escape routes. Then he would wait for hours, motionless, watching Soviet positions through his scope, studying patterns, identifying targets.

An officer checking a map at 400 m, one shot. A machine gun crew setting up a position at 250 m, two shots. A Soviet sniper whose scope glinted in the sunlight at 600 m. one shot. Mata didn’t engage randomly. Every target was chosen for maximum tactical impact. Kill the officers and the unit loses coordination.

Kill the machine gunners and the German infantry can advance. Kill the enemy snipers and your own men can move more freely. The statistics became impossible. Between August 1944 and May 1945, Matteos Hetsenhower recorded 345 confirmed kills. Confirmed meant witnessed by an officer or verified through afteraction reports.

The actual number was almost certainly higher. The German military only counted kills that could be definitively proven. And in the chaos of the Eastern Front’s final year, many kills went unrecorded. Some estimates suggest his true count could have been double. 345 confirmed kills in 10 months. That’s more than one per day on average.

For context, most snipers in World War II who achieved 100 or more kills did so over years of combat. Mata reached 345 in less than a year. The math is staggering. It means that on average, every single day for 10 months, somewhere on the Eastern Front, a Soviet soldier was killed by this 19-year-old Austrian farm boy. But the most legendary aspect of Hetsau’s record wasn’t the quantity.

It was the 1,100 m shot. 1100 m. That’s 1,200 yd. 10 football fields. At that distance, your target looks like a tiny speck. Wind drift becomes massive. Bullet drop is measured in meters, not centm. The slightest error in calculation, the smallest tremble in your hands, and you miss by 10 ft. Most military snipers of that era considered 800 m to be the practical limit of their weapons.

Beyond that, the shot became more luck than skill. Mata made it not once as a fluke, but as a confirmed, documented kill. How? The same way he’d made 500 me shots on mountain deer. As a teenager, he understood trajectory instinctively. He’d spent years watching how wind affects a bullet’s path through mountain valleys.

He’d learned to read air currents from how they moved snow and vegetation. He knew how much to compensate for elevation because he’d been shooting uphill and downhill his entire life. And he had the absolute confidence that comes from thousands of hours of practice in conditions most soldiers found unbearable. The military term for what Hetsau achieved is force multiplication.

One soldier acting alone can make an entire enemy company combat ineffective. General Paul Clatt’s official recommendation for the Knights Cross stated explicitly that Hetsenau’s confirmed kills totaled two enemy companies. That’s approximately 200 to 300 men. Two complete Soviet rifle companies eliminated by one Austrian farm boy with a hunting rifle and a scope.

But the impact wasn’t just numerical. It was psychological. Soviet officers began falling dead without warning. Machine gun positions that should have been safe suddenly became death traps. Soldiers advancing through what they thought was secure terrain would watch their comrades drop, killed by a shot they never heard coming from a position they couldn’t locate.

This creates paranoia. It destroys morale. Men become afraid to move, afraid to stand upright, afraid of every tree line and every ridge line because any one of them might hide the ghost that’s been hunting them. For the Soviet soldiers fighting in the Carpathians and Slovakia in late 1944 and early 1945, there was no way to know which sniper had killed their friends.

They didn’t know his name. They didn’t know he was 19 years old. They didn’t know he’d learned to shoot hunting deer with his father. All they knew was that men kept dying and nobody could stop it. On November 6th, 1944, Soviet artillery opened up on German positions in Hungary. This wasn’t precision fire. This was saturation bombardment.

Shells rained down, turning the landscape into a crated hellscape of mud, snow, and shrapnel. Most soldiers would hunker down, cover their heads, and pray they didn’t take a direct hit. Matteas Hessenau stayed in position. He remained in his hide, waiting for the barrage to end, knowing that when it did, Soviet infantry would advance and officers would emerge to coordinate the attack. That’s when he would fire.

He was wounded that day. The official record lists him as receiving a wound badge in black after suffering trauma from artillery on November 6th, 1944. Artillery trauma doesn’t mean a direct hit. If it had been, he wouldn’t have survived. It means concussive force, shrapnel wounds, blast injuries that leave you bleeding, disoriented, and possibly permanently damaged.

For most soldiers, that’s the end of their combat career. They’re evacuated to a field hospital, treated, and if they survive, they’re sent to rear echelon duties or discharged. Mateus Hetsenau went back to the front line. Between November 1944 and May 1945, he continued fighting, continued hunting.

The kill count kept rising, even wounded, even knowing that Soviet artillery had tried to kill him and might succeed next time. He returned to the mountains and the forests and kept doing what his father had taught him to do. Track, wait, shoot. By early 1945, the Vermacht was collapsing. The Soviets were advancing into Germany itself.

The war was clearly lost. German units were surrendering on mass. Entire divisions were being encircled and destroyed. But in the mountains of Slovakia and the forests of the Carpathians, Mateas Hetsau was still fighting, still killing Soviet soldiers with clinical precision, still making the Red Army pay for every meter of ground they took.

On April 17th, 1945, 3 weeks before the war in Europe ended, the Vermacht awarded him the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross. This was Germany’s highest military honor, equivalent to the Medal of Honor or the Victoria Cross. It was awarded for extraordinary battlefield valor and achievement. The official citation signed by General Loyant Paul Clatt stated, “His numerous kills as a sniper, which totaled two enemy companies without fear for his own safety under artillery fire and enemy attacks.

” two enemy companies. The German military was meticulous about records, especially regarding high honors. That number wasn’t an estimate. It was calculated from confirmed kills witnessed by officers and verified through afteraction reports. 345 Soviet soldiers killed by one teenager with a rifle. But there was another recognition even rarer than the Knight’s Cross.

Mateus Hetsal received the snipers badge in gold. The Vermachar had thousands of snipers during World War II. Men who had dozens, sometimes over a hundred confirmed kills. The snipers badge came in different grades based on achievement. Silver badges were uncommon. Gold badges were nearly impossible to earn.

Only three men in the entire Vermacht received the sniper badge in gold during the entire war. Three out of an army of millions. Mateus Hetsau was one of them. This wasn’t propaganda. This wasn’t exaggeration for morale purposes. By April 1945, Germany was weeks from total defeat. They weren’t handing out medals to boost public confidence.

These awards were recognition of documented battlefield achievement by a military that despite its monstrous ideology maintained rigorous standards for combat decorations. The war ended in May 1945. Matus Hetsenau survived. Unlike Simo Heiha, who was nearly killed by a Soviet explosive round to the face, Hetsau made it through the war alive and relatively intact despite his artillery injuries.

He was 20 years old. He had killed 345 men, and now the war was over. Here’s what we know. Marteas Hetszanau was one of the most lethal snipers in military history. In terms of kills per month of active combat, his rate exceeds almost every other sniper in World War II. He achieved this not through years of military service, but in 10 months, 10 months of hunting Soviet soldiers the same way he’d hunted deer in the Austrian Alps.

The legacy of men like Hetsau is complicated. We’re talking about the Vermacht which fought for Nazi Germany, one of the most evil regimes in human history. There’s no glory in that cause. But the individual story reveals something important about warfare that military historians have documented again and again.

The most effective soldiers aren’t always the ones with the best formal training. Sometimes they’re the ones who bring skills from completely different contexts and apply them in ways doctrine never predicted. Mateus Hetsau wasn’t a career soldier. He wasn’t a military academy graduate. He wasn’t a professional warrior who trained his entire life for combat.

He was a farm boy who learned to shoot hunting animals with his father in the mountains. And when he was thrust into the most brutal war in human history, those hunting skills, the patience, the terrain reading, the precision shooting in harsh conditions, the understanding that you only get one shot made him one of the deadliest snipers the world has ever seen.

The German high command recognized this. That’s why they gave him their highest honors. Not because of ideology, but because in the brutal calculus of military effectiveness, this 19-year-old Austrian hunter had accomplished something extraordinary. He had single-handedly eliminated two complete Soviet rifle companies. In the desperate final months of the war, when Germany was losing on every front, Mateos Hetsenau gave them 10 months where Soviet commanders had to account for the fact that advancing through certain terrain meant their

officers would be killed by an invisible marksman they couldn’t locate and couldn’t stop. 345 confirmed kills. A 1,100 meter shot that should have been impossible. The sniper’s badge in gold. One of only three awarded in the entire Vermacht. The Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross signed by his commanding general 3 weeks before the war ended.

These aren’t myths. These aren’t exaggerations. These are documented facts from military records. And it all started because a boy learned to hunt deer with his father in the Austrian Alps. If you found this story fascinating, please hit the like button, subscribe to the channel because we’re dedicated to finding these forgotten stories from World War II and telling them the way they deserve to be told.

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