SS Sturmmann Fritz Christen, a gunner in the second Company of the SSKT tank-destroyer battalion, provided an even better example of how the individual Totenkopf soldier fought under extreme pressure. Christen's battery was located just north of Lushno on the morning of September 24, and took the full brunt of the first Soviet armored assault. During the initial engagement every SS soldier in the battery except Christen was killed. He stayed with his gun and kept firing feverishly until he had knocked out six Russian tanks and driven off the others. For the next two days Christen remained alone in the emplacement with his 50 mm cannon and repeatedly drove back Russian infantry and tank attacks while exposed to a constant hail of artillery, mortar, and machine gun fire. Cut off completely from the rest of his unit and the division, without food or water, Christen hung on grimly and refused to abandon his post - a lone breakwater around which the Russian tide surged and receded. During the hours of darkness he carried shells to his gun from the disabled batteries around him and blazed away at enemy tanks and infantry by dawn. When the Totenkopfdivision's counterattack finally drove the Russians out of Lushno on September 27, Christen's astonished SS comrades found him still crouched behind his anti-tank gun. The field in front of the gun emplacement he had held alone for nearly three days was littered with corpses and the blasted wreckage of Russian tanks. In seventy-two hours Fritz Christen by himself knocked out thirteen Soviet tanks and killed nearly 100 enemy soldiers. For this astonishing feat of individual heroism, Eicke awarded Christen the Iron Cross, First Class and recommended him simultaneously for the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross. Christen was subsequently flown to Rastenburg and decorated personally by Hitler as the first enlisted man in the Totenkopfdivision to receive this prestigious, coveted medal.