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This country is at war with Germany.

We shall go on to the end.

I remember the sheets of flame which came up and almost blinded us from our guns.

Music under the sheets of flame, which came up and almost blinded us from our guns. In the final months of the Second World War, as the Third Reich collapsed in and itself,

boys were sent to the front to hold back the Red Army and among them was 14-year-old

Vili Langbine. He'd grown up under Nazism, saluting Hitler at school, joining the

young Volk at 10 and the Hitler youth soon after. By March 1945, he was fighting Soviet tanks

at close range on the Eastern Front. He was wounded, decorated and

survived the war, though many of the boys he fought alongside did not. Today I'm joined by his daughter,

Heidi Langbine Allen, to talk about her father's war and the long shadow it cast off his life.

Heidi is the author of Save the Last Bullet, a memoir of a boy soldier in Hitler's army.

Thanks for joining me, Heidi.

So your father, Wilhelm, Vili, was born in 1930.

What was his childhood like growing up in Witten in the 1930s before the war. Indeed, where is Witten?

Witten is in North Rhinelia. It's close to Dortmund. And in North Rheinwesphalia is in the

northwestern part of Germany, close to the Dutch border. And his early childhood was certainly very happy.

However, in the background, the political events were already unfolding, right?

...