“Meine Ehre Heist Treue” (“My honor is called loyalty”) - this inscription adorned the belt buckles of SS soldiers. The author of this book, a Funker (radio operator) of the 5th SS Viking Division, one of the most combative and honored units of the Third Reich, also wore such a belt. Formed on the eve of the Great Patriotic War, this division invaded the USSR as part of Army Group South, fought near Ternopil and Zhitomir, reached Grozny in 1942, and at the beginning of 1944 miraculously escaped from the Cherkassy cauldron, losing more than half of its personnel. composition. Gunter Fleischmann himself was “lucky” to receive a serious wound back in Grozny, which saved him from the extermination battles of 1943 and inglorious death in encirclement. Only then did he finally realize that those who launched a war of conquest against the USSR, throwing German youth into the merciless carnage of the Eastern Front, have no honor and do not deserve loyalty. This poignant book is a cruel and true story about the horrors of war and the dead Kriegskameraden (comrades in arms) ), about bloody battles and heavy losses, about one’s own delusions and belated insight, about a nightmarish life and monstrous death on the Eastern Front.