In his own way and in his own time, World War II veteran Herb Schroeter will observe Veterans Day this Wednesday.

But he will observe it in the company of no other soldiers. He will attend no reunions of old battalion mates. There will be no calls from men he shared foxholes with.

For all he knows, none are left. And if they are still alive, they almost assuredly would not be nearby.

Schroeter fought for Germany.

He was Lt. Schroeter back then, a thrice-wounded, Iron Cross-wearing officer of the Wehrmacht who, for four years, fought on the Eastern Front and was captured by the Russians at the Battle of Stalingrad.

His earliest perspective of the war was formed through the eyes of a youngster born in Dresden in 1923, five years after Germany's humiliating defeat in World War I.

He remembers no food on the table, a father always out of work, people without smiles.

Then came Hitler.

"He took Germany out of the gutter," remembers Schroeter. "There was food again, people started to smile. I remember still when he said 'I don't want to see any Germans on a bicycle.' He introduced this new car for the people, it is still here today, the Volkswagen. We admired him, we followed our Fuhrer. He thought he was the leader of Europe. He said we needed elbow room. When the war started we were so happy; we would get more room."

A member of the Hitler Youth from age 14, Schroeter entered the army at age 18 in 1941. To that point, two years into the war, Germany hadn't lost a single battle and controlled all of mainland Europe.

Then the Fuhrer ordered the invasion of Russia.

"The beginning of the end," says Schroeter.

He should know. He led his troops into Stalingrad (now Volgograd) in southwestern Russia where for seven months the bloodiest battle in the history of warfare was waged. One and a quarter million men died, another 750,000 were injured. The winter was so cold, remembers Schroeter, "my finger froze on the rifle trigger — like a tongue on a refrigerator."

When Stalingrad held, Germany suffered its first substantial land defeat of the war, and Lt. Schroeter was among 300,000 Wehrmacht soldiers taken captive.

"I personally walked on dead German soldiers for miles," he recalls. "There was nowhere else to step. It was endless, endless."

Then it got worse. Schroeter was sent to Siberia, where he worked in a succession of prison camps, shoveling coal, building the railroad, with no name, no number, no identity, bitter cold, very little food.

"You want to escape? Go ahead," he remembers the prison camp commandant saying, motioning to the vast wasteland beyond.