Pocket book of tanks, 1926

The “Taschenbuch der Tanks” was first published in 1926 and was one of the first German-language books to deal with the new tank technology. In it, the author Fritz Heigl looked at the “nature, recognition and combat” of tanks from different nations. However, it was not a purely technical description, but a work with strong political roots in the times.

Fritz Heigl was born in 1895 in Pragerhof in Austria-Hungary (now Pragersko, Slovenia). When the First World War began, he was in the second semester of his studies at the Vienna University of Technology. He enlisted as a one-year volunteer and thus began his military career. He served in the field artillery and infantry. Heigl was wounded and decorated several times and saw the end of the war, now as a first lieutenant, in a military hospital. He was transferred to the reserves and received a small pension after the war. He resumed his engineering studies and worked as a research assistant at the Lehrkanzlei für Wärmekraftmaschinen. Heigl completed his doctorate in 1927 on gun carriage construction and was eventually promoted to Major in the Austrian Army Reserve. In 1930, he became a private lecturer at the Technical University, but died just two months later from a liver ailment.

His main interest was in new armored fighting vehicles, but Austria was forbidden by the Treaty of Saint-Germain to buy or develop armored vehicles. Only lightly armored cars were permitted and were used by the Austrian army for training purposes. Heigl was able to gain practical experience between 1924 and 1926, for example, when he designed six armored cars for the army based on truck chassis. These training armored cars were used for training purposes. Heigl was able to test various types of armor, camouflage coatings and turret designs on them. These tests also served to find out whether the school armored cars could be equipped with armored steel instead of sheet iron “in an emergency” in order to convert them into makeshift armored cars.

From 1921, Fritz Heigl published in various specialist journals such as the “Militärwissenschaftliche Rundschau” on topics such as the development of artillery, camouflage and the use and technology of the new tanks. In 1926, he published his “Taschenbuch der Tanks”, followed a year later by a supplementary volume and, shortly before his death, its second edition. It became an international reference work. In addition to the technically knowledgeable description of the vehicles in combination with tactical questions, this was also due to the wealth of detail. This was probably only possible thanks to the support of the German authorities, who possibly even contributed to the printing costs. Heigl dedicated his work “primarily to the German and Austrian armies”. The German publishing house J. F. Lehmanns published military science works at this time, but had already been known for its racial ideological and anti-Semitic writings since the 1910s. These were also advertised in the Taschenbuch der Tanks. The publisher Julius Friedrich Lehmann had been a member of the NSDAP since 1920 and took part in the Hitler Putsch in 1923.

One of the focal points of Heigl’s book, combat, resulted from the fact that the German and Austrian military were particularly interested in anti-tank defense issues due to the lack of their own vehicles. Heigl describes the use of tanks in the First World War and their defense in particular detail, but omits the Swedish Stridsvagn. He justifies this with the “unbroken friendly attitude of the Swedish people, who were related by blood”. In fact, the Stridsvagn were the LK IIs secretly sold by Germany to Sweden in 1921, which should actually have been destroyed according to the Treaty of Versailles. Heigl concealed this fact, but the origin of the Stridsvagn would have been obvious to experts on the basis of his accompanying crack drawings.

After Fritz Heigl’s death, further, expanded editions were published in his name by various authors as “Heigl’s Taschenbuchs der Tanks”.

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(short) stories from the depot

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