The point of my question was if it is possible that part of the multiple hundreds of kills attributed to some of the Russian and German snipers of WWII could have included typical warfare close quarters combat kills as well as some executions of combat/non-combat personnel/POWs rather than all actual sniping kills of enemy combatants.
(Had to delete my previous post from the quoted posts above as the forum rejects too many quotes in a row)
While I would question anything the Soviets said back in those says, I can find SOME credibility in the numbers. I don't recall anything on the Russian numbers as being "confirmed kills" but just "kills". And the Eastern Front was war on a scale unlike anything seen before. Just the battle of Stalingrad had a MILLION casualties; that's freaking massive. Hitler lost an entire army. So it most certainly was a target rich environment on both sides.
In the battle of Stalingrad it would be rare for any truly long rang sniping. I'm betting most shots were well under 500m.
One account of Finn Simo Hayha I read said his 505 kills and another 250-300 probables were done with an open sighted Mosin Nagant and a PPsh 41 SMG. And the account I read said that he probably killed more with the PPsh than he did with the Nagant...who knows.
Even if the numbers are fudged by 50%, that's still a lot of killing.
