At the end of 1941, when the gunner of the anti-tank artillery battalion of the 22nd Panzer Division, Heinrich Metelman, arrived on the Eastern Front, this graduate of the Hitler Youth and a convinced Nazi experienced euphoria from the triumphant victories of the Wehrmacht and believed in the military genius of Hitler. However, delight soon gave way to bewilderment and then disappointment. The war in Russia was too different from the bright propaganda pictures. And Metelman saw it from the darkest side. Victories gave way to catastrophic defeats. The 22nd Panzer Division was defeated at Stalingrad. Metelman himself miraculously managed to escape from the cauldron. By this time, he had lost faith in the Nazi regime and sincerely fell in love with the Russian people. Despite the strictest prohibition, Heinrich Metelman secretly kept a diary throughout the war - both in the trenches of Stalingrad, and during the bloody battle for the Crimea, and in the chaos of the retreat across Poland and Germany. Several tattered notebooks form the basis of this unique memoir. They allowed the author, already in his old age, to restore pictures of fierce battles and the harsh life of a soldier and to sincerely, in great detail, talk about what life and death on the Eastern Front were really like.