Are our Assault Gun III books plagiarisms?
In the internet forum Missing-Lynx a certain Mr. X, writing under the pseudonym "Jack Reacher" and using a hacked IP-address of a friend of us, stated that both our StuG books would be plagiarism (copies), using books of Thomas Jents and Walter Spielberger, the drawings we should have stolen from Hilary Doyle's publications and we should have only modified them a bit before publishing. Although the discussion moved into a good direction for our work and us - thanks a lot to our readers posting their opinions! - we'd like to place our statement here:
Right from the beginning of our research, we decided to base on primary sources and not on existing literature, to avoid falling in the same traps as other authors did - perhaps we found new ones? The list of sources you'd find here. That we own and know most (if not all) of the existing StuG literature, our readers can be sure. The list of literature is published in Volume I. In addition we'd like to diagnose, that Spielbergers book, with approx. 140 pages covering the StuG III (the other part was about StuG IV, support vehicles e.g.) was the longest piece of writing about the topic, all other publications were much shorter. It would have been quite tricky to publish some 600 pages just copying the other authors, wouldn't it? The photographs we used were from our collection, some archives and lent by some gentle, well known photo collectors.
Concerning the drawings we wanted to publish, we decided to start with a blank sheet, working from scratch. Mr. Hilary Doyle's drawings were absolutely no root for these drawings, not to speak of "modifying them a bit". In addition to that, we publish more and other drawings (most of them in Volume II), than any other author ever did. The differences between Doyle's and our own drawings are so evident, that Mr. X must be blind:
Right from the beginning of our research, we decided to base on primary sources and not on existing literature, to avoid falling in the same traps as other authors did - perhaps we found new ones? The list of sources you'd find here. That we own and know most (if not all) of the existing StuG literature, our readers can be sure. The list of literature is published in Volume I. In addition we'd like to diagnose, that Spielbergers book, with approx. 140 pages covering the StuG III (the other part was about StuG IV, support vehicles e.g.) was the longest piece of writing about the topic, all other publications were much shorter. It would have been quite tricky to publish some 600 pages just copying the other authors, wouldn't it? The photographs we used were from our collection, some archives and lent by some gentle, well known photo collectors.
Concerning the drawings we wanted to publish, we decided to start with a blank sheet, working from scratch. Mr. Hilary Doyle's drawings were absolutely no root for these drawings, not to speak of "modifying them a bit". In addition to that, we publish more and other drawings (most of them in Volume II), than any other author ever did. The differences between Doyle's and our own drawings are so evident, that Mr. X must be blind:
Drawing of Mr. Hillary Doyle
Drawing of History Facts
These are our remarks on the notable thread on Missing-Lynx.
PS: our books are not translated by ourselves, as our language skills are too weak for such a project, but by a professional British translator (who translated among other jobs weapon manuals for SIG).
PS: our books are not translated by ourselves, as our language skills are too weak for such a project, but by a professional British translator (who translated among other jobs weapon manuals for SIG).