The Unusual Saga of an Iowa Farmer Who Saved His Own Life as a Waffen SS Conscript on Hitler’s Eastern Front

A young ethnic German man and his extended family in Eastern Europe find themselves caught up in the violence of World War II when they are involuntarily relegated to Hitler’s cause by his government. In the struggle for survival, not everyone pulls through.

Like its previously published companion volume (The Secret She Carried), which relayed the traumatic experiences of the author’s mother and those close to her in their ethnic German Sudetenland homeland during the apocalyptic World War II era, By Accident of Geography tells the equally compelling story of the author’s father, who likewise grew up in an East European ethnic German village.

Fidel Eipert would eventually become an Iowa farmer, but while still a young man found himself involuntarily relegated to the German cause, stuffed into the infantry uniform of the infamous Waffen SS, and sent to the Eastern Front of World War II. There Fidel landed in a situation desperate enough to require a life-altering decision and a risky action. The latter’s consequences took him to the rapidly shrinking home front where paradoxically his key to surviving the remainder of the war and the postwar challenges of shattered and Cold War-conflicted Germany was attachment to a feared commando unit led by Hitler favorite Otto Skorzeny.

Surprisingly, this reassignment ultimately led to a new life in America. There, in his adopted Iowa community, his story was so radically different from that of the American veterans around him that no one ever heard it. Had someone asked, they’d have learned it was Fidel’s German upbringing in a region once part of the German-speaking Austrian Empire rather than ideology that condemned him to fight for Hitler in a cause that claimed the lives of nearly all of Fidel’s classmates. Or how Fidel escaped that fate because he’d made the momentous decision to not die for Hitler!