Discover what it takes to survive the worst life has to offer. Hans Gruber's life defines the term, "survival of the fittest". Strategically utilizing every ounce of his physical and mental capacity, Hans perseveres through: a chaotic, dysfunctional childhood; the horrors of war; seven years of abuse as a Russian POW; and the trials and tribulations of immigration. His stamina, courage, and ingenuity enable him to overcome the forces of evil confronting him in the form of Nazism, Communism, and the occult. Hans' journey spans eighty-nine years from 1924 to the present, and it represents a microcosm of the aftermath of WWI and WWII. The U.S.A. is a nation of immigrants, a melting pot of ethnicity, and a composition of its parts. Hans Gruber's life is a small, unique component of that composition, but all Americans can enjoy my Odyssey thru Hell because it depicts one man's triumphant quest against all odds to live the American Dream.

I was only seventeen years old when the knock on the door came late one night. The French police barged in, arresting me and my father as members of the French Resistance. After months of incarceration in French prisons, two thousand inmates were jammed into twenty rail cars. Our destination was Buchenwald, the most horrific camp in Nazi Germany, where we were viewed by our SS keepers as expendable sub-humans and forced to work as slave laborers. I was beaten and starved. I witnessed brutal tortures and senseless murders. But I survived.

From Incarceration to Repatriation explores the lives and memories of the nearly 1.5 million German POWs who were held by the Soviet Union during and after World War II and released in phases through 1956, seven years longer than the prisoners of any other Allied nation. Susan C. I. Grunewald argues that Soviet leadership deliberately kept able-bodied German POWs to supplement their labor force after the end of the war. The Soviet Union lost 27 million citizens and a quarter of its physical assets during the war, motivating Soviet leadership to harness the labor of German POWs for as long as possible. Engaging with recently declassified documents in former Soviet archives, archival material from multiple German governments, as well as innovative use of digital humanities methods and geographic information system (GIS) mapping, Grunewald demonstrates that Soviet authorities detained German POWs primarily for economic rather than punitive reasons. In fact, the GIS mapping of the historical materials makes it clear that most of the four thousand POW camps across the USSR were strategically located near industrial, infrastructure, and natural resource sites that were critical to postwar economic reconstruction. From Incarceration to Repatriation is the first book to draw together the distinct fields of Soviet and German history to provide a more nuanced and comprehensive understanding of German POW captivity in the USSR during and after World War II. Attending to the ways that the memory of German POWs remains in circulation in both the former Soviet Union and Germany, Grunewald tracks the political repercussions of war commemoration.