The author’s grandfather despised the Nazis. A farmer’s son from Bavaria, a seasoned political activist and anti-fascist, he was put in a Gestapo prison for over a year, and his fingers were broken. Then they sent him to fight in a pointless war for six years and stole more than a decade of his life.

By contrast the author’s father, as a teenager and a young man, believed in Hitler and National Socialism. That’s all he knew. He had grown up and spent the entirety of his conscious life in Nazi Germany. He would fight for the man he had sworn an oath to until the very end, nearly to the last hour. Even as Germany was in flames and depleted ragtag units of old men and teenagers desperately tried to hold off the advancing Red Army and American forces, he didn’t intend to stop. He had pledged to fight for Germany to the last bullet. When the last shot from his submachine gun was fired, there were three bullets left.

This deeply personal history traces the experiences of two men who fought for the German Army on the Eastern Front during World War II—one a devoted young paratrooper, the other a former political prisoner coerced into service.