How a single family was affected by rampant ethnic nationalism of the twentieth century - how each used it and was used by it - and how the secrets were kept. A soldier goes missing two days before the Armistice ending World War I. A decorated pilot conceals a diamond deal gone bad. A trained pastry chef, prisoner of two wars and national policeman, is executed on Stalin’s order. An industrialist loses everything he has built, first in part to the Nazis, then totally to the Communists. A shopkeeper is arrested by the Gestapo and both he and his wife spend years in a forced labor camp. A civil servant changes his birth record and hires a genealogist to prove he is really German, only to die in the rubble of the Third Reich. These stories sound unrelated, but these men are actually brothers torn apart by war. Veterans of the defeated Imperial German Army, they returned to a changed homeland in a new world order. They had to re-establish their lives put on hold by the war. One of them immigrates to America to begin a new life. That man was the author's father. LOST ROOTS brings a deeply personal color to the context of oppression and immigration in the twentieth century.