RE: The Drug Store
HAL, your welcome..
Carius was a distinguished Tiger commander with around 150 or so kills (mostly Soviet) during the war. He was also in the field encountering MANY Russian tanks much like a hunter might find himself in a forest overflowing with deer. Being more than just an average competent Tiger commander, as a result, he destroyed many tanks and killed a lot of Russians.
His first hand accounts of combat in Tigers are interesting to hear, but at the same time, which hadn't been brought up by anyone on here recently are his opinions on several aspects of the war, as expressed through his book.
Here are a few other responses to his book "Tigers in the Mud":
"Carius was absolutely contemptuous of the American troops he faced during and after the war. He seemed resentful that the US didn't fight the way he wanted them to! It was "unfair" that the US had the industrial wherewithal to produce plenty of artillery and airplanes, and could thus fight primarily by taking full advantage of abundant artillery and air attacks. He was contemptuous that the US pounded and "softened up" German positions before attacking with troops or tanks instead of just sending them straight in to "die well".
Yet it seems Herr Apotheker Carius saw nothing wrong or unfair about how earlier in the war he and his crew sat protected in their, at-the-time, invulnerable Tiger as they machine-gunned, blew-up, crushed and buried alive hundreds, perhaps thousands, of exposed Russian infantrymen. Carius seems unconcerned with the possibility that he had an unfair advantage when his Tiger's 88mm gun made scrap metal out of the thinner-armored and completely outclassed T-34s and Sherman tanks he faced. Funny how that works, isn't it?"
"I found it particularly interesting how Carius's most vociferous contempt was heaped, not on the American army, but on his own countrymen. Unlike most German writers who looked with dismay at the sufferings the war brought to their own civilian population, Carius expresses his disgust for the German civilians as the war wound down in the last few months of 1945. He was appalled that Germans would seek to save what they could from an obviously lost cause - even if it meant to cooperate with the Americans. He was of the opinion, much like Hitler, that to die fighting to the last man, woman, and child would have been a far nobler end of the German nation."