Book Review- "Tiger" byStephan Cazenave & Rüdiger Warnick

[John P. Moore]

I have finished reading the German-language version of "Tiger!" by Rüdiger Warnick and Stephan Cazenave. My overall evaluation of this book is Outstanding! The authors combined significant archival research with extensive accounts from quite a few unit veterans from 1943 to May 1945 and presented a very good chronological history of the schwere SS-Panzer Abteilung 102/502 and its predecessor, the heavy company of the SS-Panzer Rgt. “Das Reich”. I found their descriptions of the combat actions to be very vivid, especially the thoughts of a panzer crew at the moment their vehicle is struck by an anti-tank round. There are good photos of the effects of anti-tank rounds on the panzers of Hauptsturmführers Karl-Heinz Lorenz and Willy Endemann. Unlike many other books that only briefly cover the period after January 1945, there was quite a bit of detail to be found in this book all the way up through the Halbe Pocket and it was that part of the book that I read first. The authors go into considerable personal detail on all unit officers and most NCOs. They were able to locate photos for all unit officers and most NCOs and I felt that the overall photo quality was very good, despite a few that had been over sharpened in PhotoShop. As another contributor here mentioned earlier, the publisher Heimdal has the rather unusual practice of duplicating photos in the page margins that appeared elsewhere in the book at a larger size. But here the publisher went to an extreme, the same photo of Oberscharführer Ernst Streng appeared 17 times by my count! Other unit members were not far behind. The sentence structure was fairly simple and I believe that the German text would be easy to read by anyone with a basic knowledge of German and the possible accompanyment of Tom Houlihan’s excellent German-English military dictionary.

John

[Jan-Hendrik]

An excellent Volume, even better than the Schneider Volume, as it contains many biographical sketches of members of this unit.

Jan-Hendrik