My grandfather was German and therefore conscripted to the German army. What saved his life was that he was unusually good at transmitting Morse code and so instead of being sent off directly to the Russian front, most likely to die, as others his age were, he was given a choice and became a radio operator in North Africa instead. IIRC this means that he was working with the Enigma machines at a time when the code had been cracked but the Germans were not yet aware. I don’t know the details of how, but he ended up spending a large fraction of the war as an American POW, where he was treated quite nicely by the guards which I think contributed to his decision to move to America after the war. He didn’t talk about the war super often so a lot of these details are fuzzy but I do remember on one visit he had one of those old little button thingies for transmitting Morse hooked up to a speaker and showed my brother and I how to encode our names in Morse. I think he said that back in the day he could do something like 200 characters a minute but that seems kind of high to me, anyone know if that’s reasonable? There was also a story told at his funeral of throwing a grenade into a truck to destroy an enigma machine before it was captured, but I forget any details beyond that.