[CarrotAndStick]

Oh my! That's one frightening experience! What happened later? Was he arrested?

Thanks for taking the trouble to explain this.

[beaver fever]

No he settled the claim but as I found out later he wasn't just your friendly German mechanic.

He was one of only 10,000 members of the Wehrmacht who managed to make it home from Stalingrad out of a force of 600,000 and he walked every step of the way back to the homeland.

He was one tough hombre. I shudder to think of how many Russians he killed on his way home.

Like I said the look in his eye was something I'll never forget. The man was afraid of nothing. I was just an annoyance, a fly that he could squash if he bothered to pay attention to at all. The irony is after I found out about his background later I had to concede a great deal of respect for the guy. There is a very good German language film called Stalingrad. I recommend it. The Germans that made it back from Stalingrad were tough MFers you gotta give them that.