After I read the great stories in this thread I decided to share the wartime experience of my family. I hope some of you find it interesting to hear some German stories.

My grandfather from my mothers side was a WW1 veteran and after surviving Verdun he was pretty much fed up with war and joined the Social Democratic Party. When the Nazis seized power he was arrested several times but wasn't harmed very much because he was no leading member and his brother was in the NSDAP. When the war broke out he wasn't sen t to the front because he was relatively old and he was an engineer and therefore a war-important worker.During the war he worked in the Zitadelle Spandau in Berlin which was a military research facility at that time, where mainly combat gas was developed. When the Eastern Front crumbled he headed to East Prussia to get his family out and fortunately managed to get them on a train to Berlin. When the battle for the city started he simply didn't go to work anymore and hid till the fighting was over. There is a nice story where during the fighting he persuaded some Hitlerboys to lay down their weapons and go home. But we actually don't know if they really stopped fighting or if they rejoined the battle later. He was very bitter for the rest of his life and also was antimilitaristic and pacifistic.He passed away 1981 from a stroke.
The career of his brother turned out to be very different. As mentioned earlier he was in the NSDAP and later joined the SS. He was in the adminstrative personnel and spent a lot of the war in the extermination camp of Majdanek. After the camp was given up he spent the rest of the war in Würzburg. He wasn't captured and after the war he managed to escape punishment. As far as I know he never spoke of his SS time and his children even don't know that he was there. The two brothers never ever spoke a word to each other after the war. My great uncle died 1996.
My grandfather from my fathers side was also not at the front because after an accident he was almost deaf on one ear and therefore served in an Anti-Aircraft unit in Dortmund. His unit surrendered in the Ruhr Pocket without a fight. He was a POW for a short time but returned quite early because his father was a farmer and he was needed for the harvest. He died in 2005.
One of his brothers was a in Army group North and fell during the Siege of Leningrad.
His second brother was in Army group center and was finally captured at Seelow. He was also POW for a short time but was released for the same reason as his brother. He died in 2002.
My fathers family lives in the village near the Möhnetalsperre which was one of the dams which were blown up . Luckily their house was on the hill and not in the valley so nobody from my family drowned.

Grüße
Philipp