The Unusual Saga of an Iowa Farmer Who Saved His Own Life as a Waffen SS Conscript on Hitler’s Eastern Front
Fidel, a young ethnic German from Eastern Europe, finds himself caught up in the violence of World War II when involuntarily relegated to Hitler’s cause by his government. When stuffed into a Waffen SS uniform and dropped into a hopeless situation on the Eastern Front, Fidel chooses to save himself with a controversial action—one that carries surprising consequences.
Like its previously published companion volume (The Secret She Carried), which relayed the traumatic experiences of the author’s mother and people close to her in an ethnic German Sudetenland village during the apocalyptic World War II era, By Accident of Geography relates the parallel and equally compelling story of the author’s father, Fidel Eipert, and those dear to him in his ethnic German village in the Banat portion of Romania.
Fidel had farming in his blood as a youth. Understandably, he wanted nothing to do with soldiering after growing up fatherless because World War I field conditions ruined his father’s health and led to his early death. Nevertheless, Fidel couldn’t avoid mobilization by the inept Romanian Army, conscription into the infantry uniform of Hitler’s infamous Waffen SS shortly thereafter, then deployment to an undermanned Eastern Front line just prior to a massive Russian assault.
The residents of the Iowa community that Fidel called home during his last five decades knew nothing of this losing-side war service. His background was not something he tried to conceal, but no one ever asked him about it. In the throes of America’s postwar patriotic fervor, the public had little interest in the enemy side of things.
Had it been otherwise, the people around him would have learned something of how his identity in a region once part of the German-speaking Austrian Empire stuck him on the Eastern Front and how a controversial action saved him from dying pointlessly for Hitler like the vast majority of his division’s eleven thousand soldiers. In the telling, his community would have also heard how, paradoxically, a seemingly perilous late-war reassignment to an aggressive commando unit led by Hitler’s favorite military fixer, the notorious Otto Skorzeny, saved him a second time. And put him on the path to becoming an American farmer by leaving him in a place where he could successfully surmount the postwar challenges of broken and Cold War-conflicted Germany. Fidel has long since passed on, but since he never had the chance to tell his eventful tale, the author resolved that the pages of a book would tell it for him. And for the sake of completeness, that telling must also include the surrounding history and the experiences of the soldiers and civilians around Fidel who shared in the treacherous combat, deadly Soviet slave labor, or relentless postwar communist persecution.