In honour of Remembrance Day, also called Veterans’ Day and Armistice Day, here is an excerpt, part of a World War II soldier’s account of the reality of being a prisoner of the nazis.

Into Germany—Episode 92 of the first podcast to focus on the full story of the Eastern Front of World War 2 – Beyond Barbarossa: The Eastern Front of World War 2
The Red Army continues its continual advance onto German soil—and the flight of German civilians and military.
Map 1: The siege of Kongisberg
Map 2: Samland
The Samland Peninsula in 1905, showing city and town names still present in 1945.
Map 3: The (second) East Prussian Offensive
Map 4: The advance across Poland
Historical photos
Franklin Roosevelt meets Winston Churchill in Malta, 2 February 1945
Civilians from Konigsberg walk across frozen Vistula Lagoon, January 1945
CIvilians flee Lodz, Poland, January 1945
Red Army arrives in Lodz, Poland, January 1945
Hitler shakes hands with Col. Claus von Stauffenberg at the “Wolf’s Lair," July 1944.
Ruins of the Wolfsschanze, “Wolf’s Lair,” Hitler’s headquarters in East Prussia
Sources
Antony Beevor, The Second World War. New York, NY, USA: Little, Brown and Company, 2012.
Scott Bury, Walking Out of War: Volume 3 of the Eastern Front Trilogy. Ottawa, Canada: The Written Word, 2017.
Evan Mawdsley, Thunder in the East: The Nazi-Soviet War, 1941–1945. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016.
Anthony Tucker-Jones, Slaughter on the Eastern Front: Hitler and Stalin’s War, 1941–1945. Stroud, Gloucestershire, UK: The History Press, 2017.
David Sumner, Europe at War: A podcast about lesser-known battles of the Second World War. https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/europe-at-war-a-ww2-podcast/id1788043665
Larysa Zariczniak, Wandering the Edge: Ukrainian history and culture https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/wandering-the-edge/id1547149262
David Sumner, Europe at War: A WW2 podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/europe-at-war-a-ww2-podcast/id1788043665
Morse code by Thane Brown
Music composed and recorded by Nicolas Bury
This excerpt came from Army of Worn Soles: Volume 1 of the Eastern Front Trilogy, the true story of a Canadian drafted into the Soviet Red Army, 1941–1945.
Learn more about Army of Worn Soles.
