‘On Either Side’ is essentially a love story set during World War 2 between a young German SS Officer, Karl Wulf, and an English nurse Brenda King. The couple meet late in the book when Karl is wounded at the Battle for Caen and brought to a British Field Hospital. Before this Karl is awarded the Knight’s Cross for bravery demonstrated on the Eastern Front fighting the Russians and is assigned by Heinrich Himmler to the Sobibor death camp in a benign role to recuperate for a few weeks before being sent back to active service. Here he discovers the true purpose of the camp and is appalled by the mass murder of Jews. Along with another SS soldier he plans a successful escape of a small group of prisoners. However he is suspected of collusion with the escape and so sent back to Berlin. But Himmler admires the qualities of Karl, his bravery and conscientiousness, and so saves him from punishment and adopts him briefly as a confidante before being reunited with Klaus Wagner and being sent to Limoges in Vichy France to take over command of an SS field base at Masset Farm in Oradour-sur-Glane. With the onset of the D Day invasion Karl's orders are changed while still at Limoges and he and Klaus are due be sent to Paris, under the supervision of General Dunckern, to root out Jews hiding in the city for deportation to the death camps. Of course neither he nor Klaus would entertain such orders and so, before the pair leave for Paris, he arranges an escape route, with the help of a local priest, for Jews from Paris to a temporary safe-house at Oradour then on to Spain. In Paris he meets Coco Chanel and she helps him to arrange safe passage for a few Jews from the city to Oradour before Karl and Klaus decide to head for the Normandy coast and fight the allied invasion. Klaus is killed en route to Normandy and Karl ends up as a POW in England where Brenda visits him when on leave from the field hospital which travels deeper into Europe following the retreating German forces.