Werner Holt, a young Wehrmacht soldier stationed on the eastern border of Germany in the last days of World War II, is awaiting the attack of the Red Army with his friend and commander Gilbert Wolzow. Holt recalls the last two years of his life: his meeting with Wolzow, their conscription, his experience as an assistant in an anti-aircraft battery. He remembers how he began to lose faith in the war's aims, after witnessing the brutal crushing of the Slovak National Uprising and having a sexual encounter with an SS officer's wife, which left him disgusted. After that, he realized that his father's claims about millions of people being murdered in the concentration camps were true.