Thank you very much Eric-Jan for confirming my suspicions. Much as I admire Iron Coffins, the fact remains that Herbert Werner consistently refused any interviews in later years. This would not make any sense unless he had reasons to be evasive. Otherwise, as everyone who has read Iron Coffins knows, the book is extraordinarily detailed to a degree that would only be possible if H. Werner had either possessed a superhuman memory or kept diaries throughout (and the circumstances mentioned towards the end of the book put this out of the question). I do not enjoy in the least qualifying the reputation of a war hero but it may be just that he simply neglected clarifying the fictional elements in his story and then it became very difficult for him to do it when everybody had accepted his book as a history document -which perhaps it was never meant to be.