Tiger Tracks - The Classic Panzer Memoir

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 was 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, Stalin tanks, 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 post-war German public. Some readers 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 semi-autobiographical accounts of warfare in World War 2: a crescendo of horror, grim survival and a fatalistic acceptance of the panzer man’s destiny.

“Among the most impressive narratives of the Eastern Front that I have read. The pages are alive with characters - their machines, their struggles, their decisions and their pain. Readers will finish the book haunted and truly moved, the mark of a great story."
- Chris Ziedler, the English translator of ‘SS Panzer SS Voices.’

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 - available now on Amazon.