Some of the amazing figures claimed by soviet snipers:
Ivan Sidorenko: 500 kills
Fyodor Matveyevich Okhlopkov: 429 kills
Vasily Grigoryevich Zaitsev: 400 kills
Lyudmila Pavlichenko: 309 kills
Nina Alexeyevna Lobkovskaya :308 kills…and there are several others with the 3 number figure, that sounds like a lot
Are they real?
how was the system to comfirm a “kill” in the red army?
I’d especially be skeptical about Zaitsev’s kill record. After all, he claimed to have killed Maj. Konings.
Where have you found such “statistick”?
The Zaitsev never claimed more than 230
We did discuss it already before
http://www.wio.ru/galgrnd/sniper/sniper.htm
Zaitsev have been seriously wounded in spring 1943 so he went on hospital and never come back at front till the end of war.
So his scope was not even in 10 of SOviet top Snipers list.
Zaitsev is just one, what about the rest of the snipers ?
My step granddad told some stories about the sniper menace on the eastern front. IIRC there were 2 incidences in 4 yeasr of frontline experience, he told from. Whereas one of them could also be a “lucky shot” from the other side. The first he told of was a common Landser who was on toilet and got a shot into his buttock. The other was a soldier next to my step granddad who got a bullet into his forehead and was killed instantly.
To be honest, to me those high sniper claims are over claimed by far on either side.
Teorically the german snipers in order to confirm a kill should be companied by a officer or NCO that could observe the hit/kill. Knowing that most of the time the russian sniper hunted alone…well, those are my doubts…:rolleyes:
Soviet snipers NEVER hunted alone dude:)
The any sniper group consists at least from couple of snipers. As wrote Vasilij Zaitsev in his memours- he always went on mission with assistent.
You better doubt in Luftwaffe kills in Eastern front:)It was very interesting to learn their system to confirm the kill.
infact,. kills by germans counterparts,. if announced,. rest assured it was genuine as most of every claims prooven by other branches which the neutrality can justified,.
some of luftwaffe pilots had to reduced their claimed kills due to the fact it was solely self claim,…
Or may be they increased its kills , simply becouse nobody can prove otherwise?
After my knowledge the OKL did not corfirm claims of LW pilot of there was no witness or cam footage. So claims and effective confirmed kill differs alot.
To the sniper thing. I counted up the sniper claims from the highest score down to 194 kill and got roughly 22000 killed Germans only by snipers. That’s 1,5 times a Division. To be honest, I can hardly believe that high amount of German losses alone to snipers - I’m very in doubt about the accuracy of such high claims to such few snipers. That means that snipers alone could decide a battle.:roll:
Source? Also, remember that many of these kill counts would be over 4 years of warfare. For 200 kills, that’s only one a week per sniper - hardly likely to decide a battle. Furthermore, the Germans lost around 4,000,000 dead on the Eastern front, of which these represent around 0.5% of the total - not an entirely implausible figure.
I don’t see a problem with the Soviet figures, particularly as they are over a long time as pdf27 pointed out.
During the much shorter Korean War an Australian sniper is believed [he didn’t count] to have upwards of 150 kills, including 30 in one week as described below.
The Australians had arrived expecting the conflict to become a sniper’s war, and all infantry companies had snipers allocated to them, equipped with their Lithgow manufactured SMLE No. 1 Mk. III* sniping rifles. For some of these men who had fought in the claustrophobic jungles of Borneo and New Guinea, where shooting distances were normally under 100 yards (92 metres), the terrain in Korea appeared almost perfect for sniping, with huge tracts of open land. This enabled Allied snipers to create hides from which they could dominate the surrounding country. Private Ian Robertson, 3rd Battalion Royal Australian Regiment was occupying a high point opposite an enemy–held ridge, which he estimated to be 600 yards (553 metres) away. Estimating ranges at higher altitudes and across valleys is always difficult and, trying to ascertain the point of impact of his bullets, he found that he had to set his scope to maximum elevation, 1,000 yards. Firing into a steady, light headwind, he discovered he could place his shots quite accurately and began to take an interest in the steady flow of Chicom soldiers moving up and down a steep path to the ridge, so he began shooting:
‘When I saw these blokes suddenly drop or fling themselves away or something like that I thought that most of the time it was a near miss — that they were flinging themselves out of the way to give the impression I had hit them … I was able to do it time after time, every time I fired, the figure would disappear. I nutted [worked] it out that when they passed a particular spot, if I fired then, they would run into the bullet. They had to come down at the same speed because of the rough terrain. I tried an experimental shot low down and saw blast of the bullet above the bloke … then I got the measure of them coming up the hill as well. I kept on doing this between other duties … all this went on for a week. They were mortaring a tangle of rocks not far from where I was … I could see through the scope that there were a number of important figures in control of all this, so I cheerfully waited and put another shot in amongst this group, and they’d all disappear. When we finally took the hill I thought “I’ve got to have a look at this thing”. It was only a [rifle] pit that would hold a few fellows but there was a steep drop in front of it. There were about 30 bodies down there in front of the pit. I went a bit like jelly for a minute and thought “oh shit, I’m in a grisly business here”.’
http://www.ospreysniper.com/extract-out-of-nowhere.php
Actually 500 kills for 4 years this is not too much.
Zaitsev claims 225 for three month since november '42 till jenuary '43. But it was period of fierce battle when the average death-rate among the both side was about 5 000 per day.
So Zaitsev’s 2+ of kills per day is not really much.
The average mashine-gunner can hit much more enemy soldiers then sniper.
And consistent with a good sniper firing only a few shots a day, to avoid giving away his position, where he had plenty of targets.
Any idiot with a machine gun can do a lot more damage than a sniper, but they’re not firing in the same circumstances.
A sniper in the field (as distinct from an assassin) is typically seeking a few targets each day which will cause maximum disruption to the enemy, whether by removing leaders or discouraging movement or creating fear and uncertainty, and ideally all of the above to hamper the enemy.
A machine gunner is usually only firing in defence or attack.
On a ‘bullet fired per man’ basis, the sniper is a lot, lot more effective in hampering the enemy outside attack and defence, but not much use in attack or defence compared with a machine gunner and often not all that much more use than an average rifleman.
Hard not to agree with you, mr ex-machine gunner 
Yes, well, I based my comment about ‘any idiot with a machine gun’ on personal experience. 
When working out kill numbers, it is also worth remembering SLA Marshall’s work (Men Against Fire) and his assertion that only around 25% of troops fired a weapon in combat. Assuming that snipers would automatically self-select out those who would not fire but the regular infantry would not, this automatically makes snipers 4x more effective man for man from the word go, again making those figures more believable.
How does the sniper pick the person whose going to fire ? He would pick the target he could see surely. Certainly a lot of forums I visit have discredited a lot of Mashals work.
Forums may discredit it all they like, but a lot of armies still base a lot of their training on it. The British army for instance teaches shooting with “targets will fall when hit”, an innovation brought in as a result of Men Against Fire, and uses a four-man fire trench when in defence for the same reason (they explicitly say they think one man in four will fight no matter what, one will hide no matter what, and the other two will fight if shamed into it by someone else doing so).