Traumatised and nearly starved in the aftermath of WWII, former SS soldier Hans Post was brought back to life by two women. Producer William Verity discovers Hans' transformation and the love of his Jewish wife, Gina Behrens.

Hans Post is an old man. He is also a former SS soldier, twice decorated with the Iron Cross. He celebrated his 90th birthday in January and although he is still passionate and political, there are often times when his mind lets him down.

I love him dearly, I say that first. He's a remarkable man so I can forgive him for his foibles now. Gina Behrens

He will start sentences that fade away before they reach their end. There's a searching look in his eyes as if he is on the verge of a breakthrough, but it's followed by a shrug. The memory is gone.

'I am going to die when I want to die, make no mistake about that,' he says.

'I have come to the conclusion that a bullet in the head is too much trouble for the ones that are not dying. But I will find a way. When I want to go, I'll go. Don't worry about it.'

Gina Behrens, his wife, is old too, but not so old that the cruelties of age have begun to affect her. She is a Jew— 'People just hate Jews, I don't know why'—who grew up in London before migrating to Australia.

Gina has been married to Hans for 36 years—'All in all they've been the best years of my life'—and she can barely bring herself to contemplate a life on her own, without him.

'I love him dearly, I say that first. He's a remarkable man so I can forgive him for his foibles now,' she says.

'I don't want to think about it. I don't want to talk to him about it either. I say, "Don't go until I've gone." That's what I really want to say to Hans.'

I started this story intending to document the short time Hans spent at war. Those few years of armed combat that so often come to define a soldier's life.

Hans has an extraordinary story, and an important one.

His father lost a leg at the start of World War I but was Kaisertreu—a true, patriotic Prussian who raised his only son in military style. The young Hans could imagine nothing more noble than defending the Fatherland.

He became a valuable soldier and was proud to be picked for an elite SS unit at the end of the war, aged just 17.

He was awarded the Iron Cross for hiding in a manhole with his Panzerfaust shoulder-held grenade launcher and blasting a Soviet tank and its crew to smithereens.

However, his patriotic fervour waned when he witnessed the aftermath of the bombing of Dresden in March 1945.

'The stench. It really threw me back. Indescribable. I have goosebumps now.'

At that moment, he promised himself that if he survived the war, he would dedicate his life to peace.

As a marker of that promise, he took his Soldbuch—the document confirming his family details, his SS career, his medals, his religion—and hid it in the sole of his shoe.

Discovery could mean death, but Hans believed he needed documentary proof if he was to bear witness to the horrors of war.

He still has that precious slip of cardboard, its ancient wrinkles pressed flat between the sole of his shoe and his foot, a photo of him as a young man in his military uniform.

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Sympathy was in short supply for SS soldiers at the end of the war and Hans weeps as he relates witnessing a truckload of young men just like him gunned down by Czech partisans in a forest clearing.

Captured by the Americans, he was starved, then sent to a camp in France where their guards would fire indiscriminately into the camp at night. Piles of 50 or 60 bodies would fester by the gate.

'I have seen that much death, it is not funny,' he says.

He survived and was nursed back to health by Lydi—a girl from an old Communist family. They arrived in Australia in 1959, where Hans found a job at the Port Kembla steelworks.

After Lydi died suddenly in 1975, Gina Behrens—a peacenik friend from the Vietnam Moratorium days—took care of Hans. Eventually, this became a love affair that would last more than 30 years.

Although war formed the man that Hans became, it did not define him. It is not at the core of the story of his life.

Love—a love of humanity in general, and of women in particular—is the key to his story.

Because both Gina and Hans are acutely aware that their days together are numbered, they are all the more precious for that.

'I know he's old and I know he's forgetful, and I know he's absent-minded,' Gina says.

'But when I see him, I really feel a leap in my heart.'