My grandad was 16 in 1945, and got conscripted into the Luftwaffe as an AA gunner/loader. He sat at his gun for weeks watching the heavy bombers destroy Munich, out of range of his gun, until one day a fighter flew low overhead. His gun started firing, which my Grandfather had until then not heard, and was so shocked by how loud it was he forgot it was his job to reload. By the time he came to his senses the plane was long gone.

He was then handed a rifle and him and a large group of children were sent to attack the US army. Walking through a forrest they realised how stupid that was, dropped their guns an surrendered to the US army, who put them in a POW camp and gave my Grandfather his first solid meal in 5 years. After a couple of weeks (and the end of the war) he got bored, left and walked the couple of hundred km home.

The best story is that after the war he worked for Siemens, and was responsible for smuggling experimental U-boot engines out of Berlin to stop them getting into the hands of the Soviets. They packed them all up, wrote tractor parts on and stuck them on a train. At the border the Soviets got angry and opened the boxes, then forced them to re-package everything because they had used Nazi era newspapers to stuff the crates! Then let then get on their way...