An uncommonly distinguished memoir
I read a LOT of militaria and this is one of the most distinguished, broad-spectrum accounts which I have come across in decades. For starters, Knappe was clearly a very, very superior man, athletic, a polyglot, shrewd, and a highly competent combat commander. The memoir starts with his formative years in 1936 with the inescapable Nazi indoctrination and effectively ends with his release from five years in Soviet POW camps, after which he extracted his wife and children from East Germany and finally moved to America. In combat, fortune smiled on him almost to a ludicrous degree, because every time he was wounded, he was invalided out of a situation which he probably would not have survived.