Erwin König

Zaytsev's personal account is the only source for the story. No other historical documentation exists and no secondary source for the events in question exists. None of the Germans mentioned by Zaytsev including König, König's daughter, or the German prisoner of war who Zaytsev says identified König have ever been identified in other records.

The story of the Soviet discovery of König's arrival came from a German soldier who had been interrogated by the Soviet forces (as stated in Zaytsev's memoirs). Also Zaytsev claims in his memoir to have found the enemy sniper in a run-down industrial area, locating him under a sheet of scrap metal by the glint of his enemy's rifle scope. He then claims to have taken the scope as a souvenir.

In his memoirs, Zaytsev refers to him as being a German sniper named Herr Koning ("Koning" is Dutch for King, cognate to König in German), identified as the head of a sniper school in Berlin, by documents taken from his dead body. This is unconfirmed as German Heer personnel records make no mention of any German sniper called König or Koning. It was also stated by Zaytsev that the existence of König came from an unidentified German prisoner.

A fictionalized account of the duel in the film Enemy at the Gates portrays Erwin König—played by Ed Harris—as the head of the Wehrmacht Sniper School.[6] He is sent to Stalingrad to take on the increasingly aggressive Soviet snipers.[7] Initially he is successful, killing four of Zaytsev's partners, but eventually he is outwitted by the Russian, portrayed by Jude Law.[8] König is depicted in fictional accounts as a ruthless Bavarian aristocrat pitted against Zaytsev. In the end of the film, he is killed at the Stalingrad train yard.

Erwin König also appears in War of the Rats, a 1999 novel by David L. Robbins, in which he is depicted as an SS Colonel named Heinz Thorvald.

Ramón Rosanas wrote a comic about the conflict between Zaytsev and König.[9]