Expert Guide – Freezing Braunschweiger Safely and Effectively

What would it be like to command a Tiger 1 tank?

In late 44 and into 45: Terrifying.
You have little to fear from the Jabos directly but they do a ruthless job of wiping out your accompanying Panzer Grenadiers and make it extremely difficult for your tanks to be refueled and rearmed. Buttoned up in the tank you’ll know nothing of an attacking pair of Thunderbolts or those hated Typhoons until their rockets start landing.
The percussive crashes of them exploding all round your tank is deafening. Deep down you know only a direct hit with rockets or bombs can really hurt your Tiger but the (long) odds of that happening seem unpalatably short as you screw up your face and pray for the noise to end.
After they have flown away you pop the top hatch and see the devastation for yourself yet again. Every strike erodes the combat power of your detachment and every Panzer Grenadier killed or wounded makes it easier for some enterprising Yankee with a Bazooka or Tommy with a PIAT to put a hollow charge into your flank or rear and you will end up burning to death in your Tiger, as you’ve seen happen to so many of your friends.
Grimly, you try to focus on the job in hand. Your tactics are to snipe off the Allied tanks from distance and then counter attack them as far as you can. They have been the same tactics you’ve used since they landed in France and they’ve pushed you all the way across France, Belgium, Holland and over that damned Remagen Bridge into the Fatherland. Your once proud heavy tank regiment is but a shadow of what it was and it’s ability to mount counter attacks when the initiative is up for grabs is now sorely reduced.
You only narrowly escaped the carnage at the Falaise Gap and had many close friends and their glorious, mighty Big Cats that did not and were ruthlessly pulverised by the Allied bombers.
The golden times of Africa and Italy are long gone.
Back then you could roam around the battlefield with near impunity. The Allied tanks and guns couldn’t hurt you and your support infantry were fresh and rested with good officers. Now they are mainly kids led by older kids who are barely man enough to hold a verdommt MG42. Their smashed Hanomags and Horches are an all too familiar sight now. Everywhere you look there are more burning halftracks. Panzer Grenadiers on foot are slow and it slows up your movements. It feels like the Allied fighter bombers are everywhere.
The memory of North Africa and the Wehrmacht unit you were in makes you smile internally sometimes. The Afrika Korps was a proud army. Politics seemed so far away. You had a good time hunting British tanks there in the blazing heat of Tunisia even though your unit was evacuated to Italy once the battle was eventually lost. It did not really feel like a defeat at the time. The Tiger had been a revelation. Everywhere they had driven the German troops had come up to the roads to stare at it. It was invincible, or it felt that way at the time. Destroying British Grants, Stuarts and Shermans at ranges so far away you can barely see them. Their little main gun rounds going off like child’s bottle rockets against your front armour whilst your big 88mm gun ruled the battlefield.
It is different now.
The Yankees have put a long 76mm into their Shermans that is a much more serious high velocity proposition than the short peashooter they had before. Worse, the Tommys have put a dreaded 17 pound killer into theirs and these haunt your dreams. Every hedgerow or building might have one of those deadly long barrels camouflaged within, just waiting to put a heavy round through your Tiger and dash your head from your shoulders. They say those guns can even kill the new KoenigsTigers and Jagdtigers you have heard so much about.
You started last week with three Tigers in your company and lost two in one day trying in vain to take a ruined village back from the Americans. One was hit in the side by a defilade American anti tank gun nobody saw and burst into flames immediately. Nobody got out of that one. Then your mate Torsten’s Tiger was knocked out by American troops with a close range Bazooka round into its engine. You could only watch as Torsten, his gunner, driver and loader all baled out only to be mercilessly cut to pieces by the Yankee infantry and their gangster guns. If you had enough Panzer Grenadiers to support the advance you would surely have cleared that building and Torsten would still be alive.
The two later model Panzer IVs they sent to replace your losses were repaired hulls with welding that looked like it had been done by a child… and didn’t even last a day. The kids crewing them were not old enough to drive a f*****g car let alone a tank.
The wastefullness of it sickens you.
If you were properly supported and had the fuel and gun ammo you could go and retake that village and the dozens just like it that you’ve had to leave since they crossed into Germany. But there’s not enough fuel, not enough ammo, not enough support. It feels like you’re still fighting solely on the basis of sheer bloodyminded determination to do your duty and hopefully, maybe, help a few of your countrymen and women and kids in those villages and towns the fighting hasn’t reached yet, to get out and save themselves.
You have become very quiet and introverted. You’ve not bathed or shaved for a few days but neither has anyone else and nobody has noticed. You prefer to stay buttoned up in the tank as the sour smell of sweat, cordite and piss in shell casings is better than the cloying stench of rotting horses, burning vehicles and blackened human flesh outside.
Your loader is new. Some kid from the Black Forest. He doesn’t say much either. His predecessor and your friend since Italy, Heinrich from…. Where was he from? Braunschweig?.. … was blown to pieces by yet more of the damned artillery as he was going for a shit in the forest a while ago. Was it two days? Three? Four? Longer? Time seems to have little meaning any more. You stopped counting days and hours and are only counting the main gun rounds they give you every time you stop to rearm.
It is fewer each time.
You used to laugh, wide eyed in wired exaltation when the British rounds used to bounce off your Tiger. Now you cringe, just expecting any moment a round to come arrowing through the turret ring. It isn’t funny any more.
The thing is, this was supposed to be the easy option.
You remember getting your orders in a cafe in Paris over a bottle of red wine and being so thankful you weren’t going East to stand in front of the Soviet steamroller. You try vainly to think how much worse it could possibly be in Poland and across the open ground east of Berlin and simply cannot picture it. This is a small mercy and the only mercy you will get today.
The truth is, for all the singing and marching, you were never really interested in politics. You are in the SS after transferring from the Heer but are not really like those goosestepping morons you used to see so much of, spouting their hatred. You don’t see too many of those these days. A few but not many. Most of them are behind the lines now. Most of your mates are the same as you. You all only got into the SS on merit and because you were a decent tank commander with experience on the Tiger, because you knew the songs and you quite liked the esprit de corps. It is different to the comfortingly grey uniformity of the Heer. Any lingering belief in the wonders of National Socialism has been shaken with the things you’ve seen. That filthy bastard Peiper killing all those American prisoners in Belgium. Your sister division in Normandy being sent to “punish” a French village as reprisals for attacks by the French Resistence that they had no part in or knew anything about. Driving Tiger tanks was great but hanging women and burning children was not what you signed up for.
Heinrich had told you around a fire one night of dark tales of an SS Gruppenfuhrer named Dirlewanger or Dirlehoffer or something somewhere in Poland who was responsible for such terrible atrocities against civilians that it made you sick to your stomach. He dishonours your SS and your Fatherland. There are other, yet darker, rumours about giant camps in Poland and Ukraine where enemy prisoners, civilians, Jews and others have been going by the train load to be wiped out en masse. This is not what soldiers should be doing. It isn’t honourable. You hope that these stories are not true. You understand the need to remove Jews and other malcontents from Germany for National Socialism to thrive but surely they do not need to be murdered do they? All of them? It does not sit right with you.
The problem is that as an SS soldier you know the Allies you are fighting know of the bad things done in your name and you know you can expect rough treatment from them, and probably a bullet instead of a billet, if they take you prisoner. You cannot imagine they would listen to your regretful views on how badly things have gone for everyone and how you haven’t ever committed any war crimes when they take you. That bastard Peiper has a lot to answer for.
A guy in the Grenadiers told you about a unit of American natives, redskins, who are said to stalk Germans at night, drag them off to their campfires and scalp them whilst still alive. Himmel, you hope these stories are not true either. Imagine having someone cut your scalp off! The Luger in your holster is unbuttoned, there is one in the chamber. You aren’t going to let them do that to you. Another reason to stay buttoned up in the tank.
Would you have surrendered already if you thought they would let you live, give you a hot meal and somewhere to sleep in peace? Probably.
As it is, you think the best you can dare hope for is a quick death. Not like those poor bastards burning to death in their vehicles. The very idea of it sends chills down your spine. Burning to death is an awful way to die and you’ve seen it far, far too often in these last weeks, months and years.
You try to put a brave face on it as you drive past the exhausted Wehrmacht units on truck and horse and foot heading away from the front. They don’t believe you are going to save them and save Der Fatherland and neither do you. All you can do is kill a few more Americans before they kill everyone here.
You killed an American tank destroyer yesterday. It came right round a corner right when you were looking down the street and your gunner put a round into it straight away. It exploded like a toy. There was a time when you would have rolled right up and tried to engage all his buddies, perhaps push them back and do some good. Not any more. Those Hellcats can kill your Tiger and where there is one American tank there are always more. You had to scuttle away back round the corner before the Americans could get around your flank. It stopped being a battle long ago. It is just a fighting retreat now.
Miles and miles of fighting and retreating.
How much longer does your transmission have in it? How many more miles before the turbocharger goes again? Or how much longer before the fuel trucks simply don’t turn up as they have been caught by the Jabos…?
You are 23 years old and by far the most experienced commander in your company; one of the top commanders in the whole regiment.
But when your Tiger stops moving will they give you another tank? Tigers are now an endangered species in Germany. Perhaps one of those Lang Stug IVs. Hopefully not one of those new death trap Hetzers you see all the time now when you are supported by the rest of the regiment. Whenever you see them, they always are burned out but with the top hatch still closed. They look nigh on impossible to get out of if you get hit. The visibility looks dreadful as well. You thank God that you still have your huge, well-armoured Tiger.
But how much longer can your Tiger hunt?
Maybe when it becomes time to abandon it, they will they just give you a Panzer Grenadier section to command and a truck to carry what the horses cannot?
Frostbite and Panzerfausts or a little Czech-made coffin to burn in?
Neither sound very appealing.
You look through the ports and warn the driver for the fourth time that day to take care to avoid the drainage ditches on both sides of the muddy road as they would surely throw a track if he strays into one. Throwing a track this close to the front would certainly mean having to abandon the tank then and there and this is not something any of your crew are keen to do.
American artillery starts landing on the ridge ahead and flashes off in the treeline to your right suggest they are moving through the trees. An antitank round could come lancing out of the gloom at any moment into your side. You cringe as the explosions get closer…
You order your crew to load an AP round. The Shermans cannot be far away. If you encounter an anti tank gun you’ll use the AP round loaded to sight and pray you can load HE before the enemy gun can knock you out. The tension is thick as treacle. Your Panzer Grenadiers start firing into the trees to your right. What are they shooting at? You cannot tell through the ports and the smoke outside.
You cannot see. There is so much smoke. Where are the American tanks?
Two seconds of silence go by.
There is a stunning impact and a pink flash. Your ears ring.
The tank is full of smoke.
You leap upwards and come flying out of the top hatch and onto a rear deck wreathed in deep orange flame.
You roll in flames to the dirt and feel your shoulder disintegrate as you impact the freezing soil.
The new loader kid leaps off the front deck and is almost cut in half by American heavy machine gun fire.
In agony, you roll into the ditch and watch the whisps of smoke coming off your singed uniform rising up into the sky. The fire didn’t take hold of you. But your shoulder is ruined and the breath seems short in your body.
Your face and neck are pink and sore from the flash and fire.
Your vision swims from the noxious smoke.
Your throat burns.
Not far away a long barreled Sherman, covered with logs and sandbags and tree branches rattles by; undoubtedly the one that killed your Tiger from the left where you weren’t looking. It’s accompanying infantry move like ghosts in the smoke behind. The commander is half out of his hatch, firing the huge heavy machine gun on the top of the turret. The tracers from it go streaking out of view behind. You try to crane your neck to see what he is firing at but pain ceases your movement.
It doesn’t matter now anyway.
You look over at your Tiger.
Perhaps the others got out?
It is burning fiercely now and you watch as the long gun barrel starts to sag as if the cat itself were dying, just as the Fatherland and those grand dreams you all shared, is dying. It looks so unbearably sad that you cannot stop the tears.
You are still crying silently in agony and shock in the ditch when several more American tanks and half tracks clatter past and a bearish American private riding on the back deck of one sees you and puts a BAR clip into you from ten yards before you can react to surrender or ask for help. You feel no pain.
As your life drains into the ditch you wonder how many Tigers are left in the West…
The last comfort you know is the warmth on your face and hands coming off the blazing pyre of the Tiger tank nearby, oddly comforting against the frozen earth and the rapidly spreading dull cold in your body.
So ends the ballad of the Tiger.
Peace.

Edit: this is a bit of dramatic writing, but conveys the main issues facing Tiger crews in Europe from late 44 onwards. Allied air power, allied artillery, lack of fuel, lack of support, lack of ammunition and an increasing sense that defeat was very much inevitable.
It also gets across the fact that by that time the “invincible” Tigers were most certainly not. The allies were overwhelmingly strong and had developed effective counters to the Big Cats that made what was always a rare beast very much an endangered species. Still lethal yes, but not invincible. All the top German tank aces who died fighting, died in Tigers or King Tigers. It must have been terrifying time. I hope this accurately conveys this. Apologies for any small historical innaccuracies, I’ve already had someone jump all over me in rather unkind and unpleasant tone for one, apologies if there are any others.

FAQ

Can you freeze Braunschweiger sausage?

Braunschweiger is soft, so it’s easily squashed or distorted until then. Braunschweiger will remain food safe for as long as your freezer runs, but in practical terms, it only retains its best flavor for a month or two. When you want to thaw and use a piece of the sausage, it’s best to pull one from the freezer a day ahead of time.

Is Braunschweiger good for You?

In addition to being rich in protein and fat, Braunschweiger is also a good source of micronutrients, including iron, vitamin A, retinol, and vitamin B12. These nutrients are quite beneficial for your health, and consuming Braunschweiger can help to ensure that you are getting enough of them in your diet.

Can you freeze Braunschweiger liverwurst?

Yes, you can freeze Braunschweiger Liverwurst. However, it may be ideal to use a freezer with constant or consistent temperatures. It is also vital to wrap it up and pack it properly before placing it in the freezer. Open Braunschweiger Liverwurst can get contaminated and go bad within a few days, which is something you have to be aware of.

How long does Braunschweiger last in the fridge?

Braunschweiger is a German sausage that can last for up to six months in the fridge. It can also be frozen and reheated later. Store-bought brands come in containers small enough for a single meal or two, and they may last for weeks before expiring. Is the difference between liverwurst and Braunschweiger?