1945. Gertrude was a young woman, practically a girl, who was torn from her civilian life and pressed into serving her fatherland in its great struggle. The war was inescapable now, as the devastation of nearly daily Allied air raids on her home city wrought havoc. Whole families were erased, in the flash of tons of explosives raining from above. One would simply stop seeing an acquaintance and know, like that, what had happened to them. She was afraid, as everyone else was surely afraid, but she was comforted slightly in that her appointed duty was to be directly involved in the defense of her home from those dreaded iron beasts which killed so many. She was assigned the duty of Flakhelfer, an assistant to the 88mm flak gun crews which lined the hilltop, blasting puffs of explosive shrapnel, often in vain, at the American and British bombers overhead. She did not feel at all like a soldier, but she looked the part in her feldgrau uniform and steel helmet weighing heavily on her head, ruining any effort she put into her hair such that she quickly stopped bothering with it. She was even armed, with a pistol, though mortified at the thought of actually needing it. She had mulled the cowardly, morbid, prospect of taking her own life instead of fighting the enemy, but hopefully it would not come to that. And hope, of the final victory promised for these long years was all she could hold out.

There was one bright spot in her patriotic labors, she got to work alongside Helga. Helga was a tall blonde, the spitting image of Dr. Goebbels ideal Aryan woman as her uniform smartly hugged her curvaceous body. Perhaps it was merely her age, the same as Gertrude, that had her here, sighting Flak-Kanone instead of in a Lebensborn retreat, rearing children, if such an idyllic life was still possible amid the ruins of the nation. Gertrude was grateful for the mere sight of her, as were the men she shared her gun crew duty with, obviously infatuated with her beauty. But Gertrude,