Blitzkrieg in a Tiger Tank

Friday 1st September 1939: seventeen-year-old Richard Freiherr von Rosen listens to Hitler's speech in the Reichstag about the attack on Poland on the radio. He is not at all enthusiastic about the war, but like many of his peers, he is filled with a sense of duty and a desire to prove himself. Soon afterwards, he reports to the tank units, where he wants to pursue a career as an active duty officer. His wish is fulfilled in October 1940 with a call-up order to the 35th Panzer Regiment stationed in Bamberg.
After demanding basic training and an intensive course for officer cadets, the young conscript is now preparing in France and the Rhineland for the upcoming deployment into the war. With the rank of officer candidate, he is finally transferred with his 35th Panzer Regiment to the Warthelager training ground in Poznań at the end of April 1941. On 22nd June 1941, Operation Barbarossa begins for von Rosen as a gunner in a Panzer III tank in the war against the Soviet Union. He is deployed as part of the 4th Panzer Division and Army Group Centre and receives his baptism of fire in the heavy fighting of his regiment at Stary Bykhov and is wounded a little later. After recovering and being transferred to the 502nd Heavy Panzer Battalion, he fights from January 1943 in a Tiger tank, first in the Kalmyk Steppe. In the same year, von Rosen, now a lieutenant and platoon leader of the 3rd Company of the 503rd Tiger Battalion, takes part in Operation Citadel, the largest tank battle of the Second World War. In the summer of 1944, he is transferred to the invasion front, where the Wehrmacht is to stop the advance of numerous Allied tank units.
However, the experienced tank man soon mercilessly feels the enemy's superiority in the air. After his battalion is re-equipped in Sennelager, he is transferred, now as a company commander and commander of one of the Königstigers (Tiger II), to the crumbling front in Hungary. There he suffers his fifth wound at the beginning of 1945 and experiences the end of the war at home. Major General Richard Freiherr von Rosen made a career in the Bundeswehr and in NATO after the war. His narrative, written on the basis of diary entries, gives a detailed picture of tank warfare on the Eastern and Western Fronts. The book is supplemented with numerous photographs.