'A Good German Is a Dead German': Someone Else's War

“Kill the German!”—it seemed that this chant from Ilya Ehrenburg should have been the motto of any “person who gets transported” into the Great Patriotic War. But what if you were unlucky enough to be transferred not into the consciousness of one of our fighters, but into the body of a Hitler officer? What’s it like to find yourself in the skin of a Wehrmacht lieutenant in the middle of the Rzhev meat grinder? What do you do if you’re wearing German field-gray, and your trenches are being attacked by Soviet infantry? Raise your hands? But here they don’t take prisoners. Refuse to fight? They’ll shoot you against a wall. Shoot over the heads of Red Army soldiers? But they won’t show you mercy either—you’re the same “rotten fascist filth” they need to “drive a bullet into the forehead”!
Do you have the courage to admit to yourself: “I was killed near Rzhev”? Are you ready to sacrifice your own life not in order to change history, but on the contrary—so that the past remains unchanged?!