Hans Mann, born in 1926, reports without taboos on life as a young person in the Third Reich. The eyewitness spent years in the intellectual ghetto of the Nazis, absorbing the idea of freedom through BBC London. He recounts the horrors of war and the long Russian captivity after the war. The author attempts to answer the key question of why and with what relentlessness the Germans persisted until their downfall, distancing himself from overly simplistic explanations.