When the author, a Nazi flier and great grandson of Chancellor Bismarck, was shot down and captured by the Russians in 1942 he joined a Soviet sponsored anti-fascist group of Germans who had become unsympathetic to Hitler's regime. His personal history is a lengthy, articulate record of his ideological courtship, marriage and divorce from Communism. It also sheds light on the tactics that made East Germany and some of the surrounding satellite countries what they are today. Filled with anecdotes and some pointed character studies of the other Germans and Russians engaged in the group's propaganda work, this is a human as well as a political study and the twists and turns by which the stages of hope, conversion, and disillusionment are reached- make a convincing story. von Einsledel's road led from Stalingrad to Moscow to an East Berlin newsman's job in 1947 and finally to the U.S.A.. His first major ""deviation"" -- in a regime where to excell one day might be to err the next- came on a mission to East Prussia where he tried to explain some Russian misdeeds in logical terms that while still upholding Communism, cut through the Moscow line. Though frequent harangues cover the same kind of material found in the influx of ex-red confessions, sincerity and the nazi angle, call to the documentary value of this book.

The story of Count Heinrich von Einsiedel who was captured by the Russians while flying Bf109s with III/JG-3 in September 1942. He joined the Anti-Nazi Soviet POW movement and served with the Red Army in its drive westward.