Wolfgang Faust was the driver of a Tiger I tank with the Wehrmacht Heavy Panzer Battalions, seeing extensive combat action on the Eastern Front in 1943-45. This memoir is his brutal and deeply personal account of the Russian Front’s appalling carnage.
Depicting a running tank engagement lasting 72 hours, Faust describes how his Tiger unit fought pitched battles in the snows of Western Russia against the full might of the Red Army: the T34s, the Stalin tanks, the Sturmovik bombers, and the feared Katyusha rocket brigades. His astonishing testimony reveals the merciless decisions that panzer crews made in action, the devastating power of their weaponry, and the many ways that men met their deaths in the snow and ice of the Ostfront.
First published in the late 1940s, this memoir’s savage realism shocked the postwar German public. Some were outraged at the book’s final scenes while others wrote that “now, at last, I know what our men did in the East”.
Today it stands as one of the great semiautobiographical accounts of warfare in World War II – a crescendo of horror, grim survival, and a fatalistic acceptance of the panzer man’s destiny.
Originally published in the German Federal Republic as Panzerdammerung (Panzer Twilight).
The only other surviving memoir by this author is The Last Panther – an astonishing account of panzer warfare in the final hours of the Third Reich.
Most likely fiction not memoir My opinion is this is fiction. A fake memoir. Try to find out anything on Wolfgang Faust. In this “book” two battles are described but no locations or unit identification is given. Why? so you can’t follow up and discover that they never happened and no one can find out that someone with this name never fought in these battles if you can even find out where they were.Â
A Novel . . . . . . and not a very good one. Obviously this is not really a memoir, or anything of the sort. The clincher as to its entirely fictional nature is that “Wolfgang Faust” describes two major tank battles between Tiger tanks and the Joseph Stalin tanks, but the Joseph Stalin tank he describes–an inverted soup-dish turret and a wedge-shaped cast iron front block on the hull, is the IS-3 and it was not manufactured until May, 1945 when the war was over. So both of these battles were…
Highly implausible war-porn, posing as a “memoir” I started reading this book with high hopes. Tiger Tracks purports to be a memoir written by a veteran of the Panzer force, but it became quickly apparent that it’s really a very gory and lurid piece of fiction being fobbed off as fact on those who don’t know any better.”Wolfgang Faust” is conveniently a pseudonym, so the true author’s military service records could never be checked. He is the lone survivor of the Kampfgruppe he starts the book with, so the veracity (or it’s lack)…