By Accident of Geography: How a Reluctant Waffen SS Soldier Extracted Himself from Hitler's World Wa

The unusual chronicle of an East European Waffen SS conscript whose determination not to die for Hitler on the Eastern Front of World War II launched him on an extraordinary journey that ended on an American farm.

Fidel Eipert hadn't always been an Iowa farmer, or even an American. While a young man, circumstance of geography conspired to plop him on World War II's Eastern Front in a German Waffen SS uniform. Close brushes with death there made him determined not to die for Hitler.

Fidel never tried to hide this enemy past from his American friends. Quite simply, none asked, or they'd have learned his ethnic German heritage in a formerly Austrian part of Romania had condemned him to the Nazi service. His resolve to survive bought him a reprieve from the front to safer posts around the German Reich until a reassignment sent him to the aggressive commando battalion of Hitler's favorite fixer, Otto Skorzeny. Paradoxically, Skorzeny's involvement in a last-ditch guerilla zone of resistance set Fidel on a path to a place he'd never heard of-Iowa.

Fidel has long since passed on, but not his story. The swath of history detailing how Fidel's Donauschwaben (Volksdeutsche/ethnic German) ancestors tamed an Austrian frontier at great cost after fleeing feudal German military servitude, only to find Fidel's generation re-exposed to compulsory German service under Hitler, begged to be told. His saga about life on the losing side in the war era, as personalized by the experiences of soldiers and civilians imperiled by suicidal combat, deadly Soviet slave labor, and relentless postwar communist persecution, still holds lessons for us today.

By Accident of Geography, like its previously published companion volume titled The Secret She Carried-a book which relayed the story of the author's mother-tells an unforgettable story. One of ordinary people distinguished by the extraordinary things they saw and endured because they found themselves trapped on the losing side during the apocalyptic period known as World War II.