KOENIGSWINTER, Germany – Paul Golz was a 19-year-old German private when he was captured by the Americans in a Normandy field, three days after the D-Day invasion.

Golz says it was a stroke of luck that changed the trajectory of his life.

Being a prisoner of war in America for two years beat being a soldier in Germany, where Golz had avoided the hellish eastern front and refused to join the Waffen-SS, which after World War II was deemed a criminal organization for its atrocities.

As a POW in America, Golz tasted his first Coca-Cola, met comedian Red Skelton, watched Mickey Mouse at the cinema and heard jazz music for the first time. Along the way, he learned English, a skill that led him to a long career with the German foreign service.

The invasion ultimately changed his life for the better, Golz said. “Otherwise I was a poor farmer’s boy. I have seen another life. I’ve always had a good guardian angel all of my life.”

Golz returned to Normandy for the first time since the war in 2014 and hopes to go back for the 75th anniversary of the invasion that turned the tide of WWII and helped the Allies win.

Now 94 with white hair and piercing blue eyes, Golz lately has been asked to tell his war story more often. War veterans are dying off quickly and Golz is an eyewitness to the historic battle from the other side of the shores of Normandy.

Golz almost didn’t make it to Normandy in June 1944. An ammunition runner in the German Wehrmacht, Golz’s unit was sent to Russia to fight in January 1944. But Golz got very sick, sidelining until the end of March.

“Everyone was dead,” Golz said, of the 50 soldiers in his company sent to fight in Russia. “My guardian angel had given me diphtheria and scarlet fever.”

On April 4, 1944, Golz’s 19th birthday, he was sent to Baumholder and assigned to a machine gun team with the 91st Air Infantry Division.

From there, they walked more than 500 miles to help defend the French harbor of Saint-Nazaire. When the Allies never came there, Golz’s team was ordered to Normandy. At Cherbourg’s heights, Golz helped place “Rommel asparagus” logs driven into the ground and connected with barbed wire to snare Allied gliders and paratroopers.

The Americans have landed

On the morning of the invasion, Golz was near Carentan, where at about 6 a.m., he went to a local farmer for milk.

“He knew me,” Golz said of the French farmer. “Every morning I went to him to get milk.”

But the farmer said, “’Hey, listen, get out, get out! The Americans have landed already with tanks,’” Golz said. “He heard it on the radio.”

Golz’s team was sent to the fight, toward Sainte-Mere-Eglise, the first village in Normandy liberated by the Allies.

Along the way, Golz remembers “looking for chocolate or something to eat. We were hungry and thirsty.”

They saw gliders and parachutes strewn in the meadows, remnants of the airborne assault on Normandy that had begun the night before the invasion.

While passing through hedges, he encountered his first American, a paratrooper waving his rifle with a white sock over it in surrender. “He was trembling with fear,” Golz said.

“I won’t do you any harm,” Golz said calmly, in German.

The paratrooper offered him water from his canteen, but Golz remained wary of what might be inside. “First, I had him drink it,” he said.