This book is not just “trench truth”, but a report from the underworld. These are the revelations of a 17-year-old Todeskandidat (suicide bomber), drafted into the Wehrmacht in the spring of 1945, when Hitler put virtually the entire male population of Germany, from teenagers to old men, under arms, and threw them to slaughter, under the tracks of Soviet tanks. On April 16, Helmut Altner, together with the same youths who did not have time to undergo military training, came under a crushing blow from the Red Army, which began the assault on Berlin. Untrained recruits were killed in the first battle - Altner was the only one among them who was lucky enough to survive. Together with the remnants of his company, he retreated into the city and fought for another ten days in the tunnels of the Berlin subway, participated in the desperate battles for Spandau and the Imperial Stadium, and in the last attempt of the remnants of the garrison to break through to the west. And again Altner was lucky - he did not perish in the hell of street fighting, did not die under hurricane fire that mowed down the retreating Germans in the thousands. Wounded in the leg, Altner surrendered to Russian soldiers... These memoirs, written immediately after the war, are rightfully considered one of the best books about the last days of the Third Reich. This is the terrible truth about the battle for Berlin, about the bloody Todestanz (dance of death) and the painful Todeskampf (agony) of Hitler's Reich...