"We heard Birkmeier shouting and Knoppig calling. It must have been three in the morning. We opened the three soldered metal containers in the boat and inside found brandy, ship's biscuit, schokakola, bandages, several flare pistols and ammunition. I inserted the first flare and fired it. A garish light illuminated the surface of the water, and before it slowly went out we saw the two yellow life vests of Knoppig and Birkmeier bobbing on the waves. We couldn't tell how far away they were, but Peewee and I began paddling with the two oars in the dinghy. I fired another flare. This time it was green, then red, then a whistling shell, then another white, and so on. We paddled like crazy, the waves lifting us up and down. Wind came up, dawn began, and we fixed the sail. The wind threatened to crush us – we paddled on, how long I can no longer say. Then my oar slipped away from me. There was 20 cm of water in the dinghy. The sides of the dinghy felt spongy. Air had escaped. Peewee broke out the bellows and pumped air through the valve. The water in the boat was ice-cold, outside it was warm. Breuer's face was snow-white, I poked him and he grunted and began coughing up water. I had feared that I was sitting next to a corpse. We ate Schoka and drank brandy. Jakob didn't want any. That was understandable, given how much water he had swallowed.

'Birkmeier, Rudi, do you still hear Birkmeier?' The Leutnant always addressed his Gefreiter radio operator using 'Rudi' and the familiar 'Du'.

In fact Hans Birkmeier from Ansbach was silent forever. Numbness relieved him of all his pain and let him go under.

We kept paddling, which was pointless as we couldn't see anything. The two yellow life vests had disappeared. Peewee insisted that he could still hear Knoppig calling.

It might have been about four when the crack of a German Parabellum 08/15 9 mm reached us. It was the last we heard from our observer Walter Knoppig, the Berliner. We all felt left alone and frozen in the endless solitude of the water around us and the breath of the mystical touched us. We were going to have to understand and accept the inevitability of our fate. Walter hadn't deserved this kind of death. Why had he made up such nonsense? In his own head for good measure? He with his nerve and his calmness!"