My Grandfather Johann was an AA gunner on the eastern front. Having managed to survive the entire war he was walking home on the autobahn two days before the armistice and was captured by an American patrol. He spent the next year as a POW.
He was actually lucky though. The American unit that over ran his home town of Altenbuch apparently picked off several of his fellow Altenbuchers returning home from the war as they walked up the road to the town. Their graves along with the rest of the towns dead from that war are in an overgrown little plot located on the opposite hill from the town cemetary. He took me to see it when I was a youngster.
