Devil's Shield — Leo Kessler

This is the second in the fictional series The Dogs of War, by Leo Kessler. In the grey September of 1944, colonel von Dodenburg's SS battle group Wotan became the Fuhrer's Fire Brigade, the crack unit of the German Wehrmacht, to be thrown into any battle as a last desperate measure to redress the balance. As the Allied armies closed in on Germany's holy city of Aachen, even the most optimistic said that Hitler's war was lost. Only Colonel von Dodenburg's black uniformed troopers, with their dreaded silver death's head badge, were convinced that they could still save the day.