Mooney, Peter/Sametreiter, Kurt Panzerkommandant. Band 1: Kurt Sametreiter

First volume of the series Panzerkommandant. Album Photos, which traces the military careers of German tank soldiers in the Second World War using personal albums and unpublished memoirs. In this first volume, you will learn more about the fate of Kurt Sametreiter, a young Austrian who joined the army at the age of 15, was awarded the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross in 1943 and became an officer in the Waffen-SS tank forces until his death in 2017. This book tells not only the extraordinary story of Kurt Sametreiter, but also that of Heinz Klose, a young man from Danzig who became a non-commissioned officer and fell on the Russian front in 1944. The fates of these two young men, who seemed to have everything to separate them, Kurt from Austria and Heinz from north-eastern Germany, were linked by the war and then torn apart again. They became friends and brothers in arms in the same tank destroyer company of the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler, and Kurt married Heinz's sister Ulla, thus becoming his brother-in-law. We accompany Kurt Sametreiter and his friend Heinz step by step through the war, from the first days of the conflict with the German invasion of Danzig, through the campaigns in the West (France) and the Balkans, to the Eastern Front from 1941 to 1944, the Battle of Normandy and the end of the Second World War in Europe.