Retreating from the Russian front after the failure to take Moscow in 1944, German soldier Ernst Graeber is granted a three-week furlough. He returns to his home village for the first time since he left two years before and is shocked to learn that his parents are among the thousands left dead or missing by the Allied bombing raids. Then he falls for the beautiful Elizabeth Kruse, and the two attempt to begin a romance amidst the devastation and despair...

German doctor escapes the Nazis and is reduced to practicing criminal medicine.

An escape story and a love story told by one refugee to another, in a Portuguese interlude in the World War II flight of refugees from Europe. The narrator is a German who returned to see his wife and bring her out of Germany, but tragedy strikes the two.

A group of young World War I German recruits pass from idealism to disillusionment with war.