Disclaimer:

I do not own the Rat Patrol or any of its characters. This fiction is written purely for entertainment purposes without the intention of earning any money.

This work is written under the assumption that the age of the characters at the beginning of the story = time of the final series episode is equivalent to the age of the character's actor at that time of production of the series which makes Dietrich the youngest compared to the Rat Patrol members.

I also want to declare that even though I am a German native speaker, I am not Nazi or hold any affinity for their ideology. I want to continue the series' spirit of keeping the speech between German native speakers mostly in German and include the explanation of the content as part of the inner monologue or reflection of the characters rather than provide a literal translation.

To be honest, I had never heard about the series until February 2023 and came across it by mere chance. However, it has incited my interest to deal with my own family's history in WW2 and I have collected and reflected on bits and pieces of memories from various sources. Now, I try to give all these people a place in this tale at some point, from the junior officer recruited right out of school against his will and sent to the Eastern front to the SS officer in service of the police criminal investigation department, from the defector who fled from Stalingrad after seeing his brother die to our kind neighbor who took care of us as kids and had survived the KZ in Mauthausen, always insisting on not wishing to be bound to her tormentors by hatred. As a central European, I also have my friends' tales ranging from the young Hungarian experiencing the death of hundreds of wounded in the burnt down field hospital to the French resistance fighter standing up against the Germans in Normandy, from the Scottish soldiers staying in Germany after the war to the Italian partisans resisting Mussolini. All these people are dead now, but their memories and tales remain.