The author's grandfather despised the Nazis. The son of a Bavarian farmer, an experienced political activist and anti-fascist, he was held in a Gestapo prison for over a year, where his fingers were broken. He was then sent to fight in a senseless war for six years, robbing him of more than a decade of his life. In contrast, the author's father believed in Hitler and National Socialism as a teenager and young man. It was all he knew. He had grown up in Nazi Germany and spent his entire conscious life there. He would fight to the bitter end, almost to the last hour, for the man to whom he had sworn an oath. Even as Germany lay in flames and exhausted troops made up of old men and teenagers desperately tried to hold back the advancing Red Army and American forces, he had no intention of stopping. He had sworn to fight for Germany until the last bullet. When the last shot was fired from his submachine gun, there were three bullets left. This very personal story traces the experiences of two men who fought for the German army on the Eastern Front during the Second World War one a committed young paratrooper, the other a former political prisoner who had been forced into service.
