By Accident of Geography: The Unusual Saga of an Iowa Farmer Who Saved His Own Life as a Waffen SS Conscript on Hitler’s Eastern Front

How a young ethnic German from Romania, upon finding himself conscripted into a German uniform and facing almost certain death during the collapse of the Eastern Front in World War II, carried out a controversial and risky action to survive both Russia and the Third Reich. Fidel Eipert had never expected to end up an American. But then neither had he thought that circumstances of geography would conspire to involuntarily stuff him into a German Waffen SS uniform and send him to a debacle-in-the-making in Russia. Or that a subsequent risky action to avoid dying for Hitler after close brushes with death would lead to unusual postings that included a frightening reassignment to the commando battalion headquarters of Hitler’s favorite fixer, Otto Skorzeny, and a secretive Alpine mission.

Fidel never learned before he passed on that this mysterious mission was intended to extend the war or he’d have seen the irony in how rather than prolonging the conflict, it sped up discarding his uniform. But then Fidel already intrinsically knew that his entire war era experience was an irony because of the history of his people. In the eighteenth century, his German ancestors had fled frequent and deadly soldiering callups by warring German feudal nobles and kings to carve themselves a homeland out of a dangerous Austrian frontier, only for Fidel’s generation having to flee it 150 years later following the return of compulsory German military service under Hitler.

Read more about this book, its companion volume (The Secret She Carried), and the author on the author’s website at ericheipert.com.