Leo Kessler

Leo Kessler is the best-known pen name of Charles Whiting (1926-2007), a British military historian and prolific novelist born in York. He served in the British Army in France, the Low Countries and Germany during the Second World War, later studied history and German at Leeds and worked as a lecturer, journalist and translator.

Writing as Kessler from the 1970s, he produced the long-running SS Wotan series of wartime thrillers following a fictional German assault regiment, along with many other war novels. Under his own name he wrote nonfiction on the war in Europe, and across all his names he published some 350 books.