Historical Accuracy
Historian Antony Beevor suggests in his book, Stalingrad, that, while Zaitsev was a real person, the story of his duel (dramatised in the film) with König is fictional. Although William Craig's book Enemy at the Gates: The Battle for Stalingrad includes a "sniper's duel" between Zaitsev and König, the sequence of events in the film is fictional. Zaitsev, in an interview claims to have engaged in a sniper duel over a number of days. Zaitsev states that after killing the German sniper, and on collecting his tags, he found that he had killed the head of the Berlin Sniper School.
Read more about this topic: Enemy At The Gates
Famous quotes containing the words historical and/or accuracy:
“In public buildings set aside for the care and maintenance of the goods of the middle ages, a staff of civil service art attendants praise all the dead, irrelevant scribblings and scrawlings that, at best, have only historical interest for idiots and layabouts.”
—George Grosz (1893–1959)
“U.S. international and security policy ... has as its primary goal the preservation of what we might call “the Fifth Freedom,” understood crudely but with a fair degree of accuracy as the freedom to rob, to exploit and to dominate, to undertake any course of action to ensure that existing privilege is protected and advanced.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)