Synopsis:
Three women, a nation seduced by a madman, and the Nazi breeding program to create a so-called master race.
At Heim Hochland, a Nazi Lebensborn Society home in Bavaria, three women’s fates become irrevocably intertwined.
Gundi is a twenty-year-old pregnant university student from Berlin. Deemed a perfect Aryan beauty, she’s secretly a member of a resistance group, the Edelweiss Pirates. And if the identity of her unborn child’s father becomes known, there will be tragic consequences.
At just eighteen years of age, Hilde is a true believer in the cause and is thrilled to carry a married Nazi official’s child.
Irma is a 44-year-old nurse whose service during World War I left her traumatized. She is desperate to build a new life for herself after personal devastation and takes up her friend’s offer to return to nursing in a completely different setting and capacity.
All three have everything to lose.
Cradles of the Reich, based on untold historical events, takes readers inside one of the Lebensborn Society maternity homes that actually existed in several countries during World War II where thousands of “racially fit” babies were bred and forcibly taken from their mothers to be raised as part of Hitler’s new, racially pure Germany.
Through her fiction characters, author Jennifer Coburn illustrates that the connections women forge during the darkest periods in history can carry them through, even driving them to heroism they didn’t know they had within them.
Review:
Jennifer Coburn has published six contemporary women’s novels, as well as a mother-daughter travel memoir, We’ll Always Have Paris. She has contributed her writing to five literary anthologies, including A Paris All Your Own. Cradles of the Reich is her first foray into historical fiction.
She says the story was inspired by The Man in the High Castle. While watching the excellent miniseries adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s novel. When a female character mentioned that she was “bred through the Lebensborn Society, where Schutzstaffel (SS) officers impregnated ‘racially valuable’ young women,” Coburn recalls assuming that was a fictional aspect of the story. “If the Germans had really created a breeding program, wouldn’t everyone know about it?” she thought.
She soon discovered that the Lebensborn Society (meaning “Spring of Life”) was all too real. In 1935, the Nazis established a program to breed two million racially pure children meeting Aryan standards for physical characteristics. In 1939, Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler, the architect of the scheme, began awarding German women who raised four or more healthy children a Mutterkreuz medal. Soldiers were ordered to kidnap infants and toddlers in occupied countries and regions who were considered sufficiently Aryan-looking and bring them back to Germany where they were adopted by German families. (Many of the children were taken from Poland, in particular.) “Often, the children were orphans, their parents killed by the very Nazi soldiers who snatched them,” Coburn notes. Approximately two hundred thousand such children were placed with families to be “Germanized.” Older children who refused to comply were sent to concentration camps where they were executed.
The program involved young women who were sent to the homes after becoming pregnant. After their children were born, they were forcibly removed from their mothers and given to German families to raise, provided they met established physical criteria and were healthy. Those who did not were given a lethal injection. But other young women went to live in Lebensborn homes for the express purpose of being impregnated by the SS officers who were invited to parties and permitted to choose the young woman with whom they desired to spend the evening. The Lebensborn homes were, in fact, functioning brothels. Coburn found that aspect of history fascinating and wanted to understand why young women would consent to such an arrangement with the knowledge that, according to the form they were required to sign, they were bearing children who would literally belong to the Reich. Coburn wondered how they had “become so indoctrinated that they viewed having a child for Hitler as their patriotic duty?”
The story opens in April 1939. Gundi Schiller, a twenty-year-old university student, and her widowed mother, Elsbeth, have gone to see their regular physician but find that he has summoned SS-Oberfuhrer Gregory Ebner (an actual historical figure who was the physician overseeing the Lebensborn homes) to participate in the consultation. Gundi’s heart drops when he confirms that she is in fact pregnant. In another time and place, Gundi would be overjoyed to carry the child of Leo Solomon, the young Jewish man she loves. But it is an increasingly treacherous time in Germany. Gundi and Leo are both members of the Edelweiss Pirates, a real resistance group, and Hildi has been able to use her Aryan beauty to clandestinely further their efforts. She knows the consequences if their activities are discovered. She is also cognizant of the law prohibiting relationships with Jews and what would likely happen to her, their child, and Leo – who has gone missing – if the Nazis learn Leo is the father. Anna Rath was a real German who was paraded through Nuremburg, after having her head shaved, for merely intending to marry a Jew. Gundi can only imagine how much worse the penalty would be for bearing the child of a Jew.
Gundi is humiliated and appalled when Ebner’s examination grows increasingly violative and includes racial screening methods such as assessing the color of her skin and eyes, and using calipers to measure her skull, the distance between her eyes, etc. Ebner delightedly declares that she is the first women to ever achieve a perfect score, and she will be sent to the real Heim Hochland, “a very special maternity home for German girls, where you will receive top-notch medical care.” Gundi quickly learns that declining an invitation from a Nazi officer is not an option. To protect both Leo and her mother, who has spent the last decade working as a file clerk at the Reich Chancellery and whose allegiance is unclear to Gundi, she names her homosexual friend, Erich, as the baby’s father. By doing so, she is extending protection to him, as well.
Coburn says she found the character of Hilde Kramer the most difficult to craft. “I wanted to examine a young woman’s path to becoming a true believer without making excuses for her heinous acts.” But in order to do so, she had to “embody” a young woman who would have considered Coburn and her Jewish family “untermenschen” (subhumans). The fictional Hilde is based on Hildegard Trutz, a “Hitler Girl” who happily became pregnant by a German officer and enjoyed her stay at a Lebensborn home before voluntarily relinquishing her child to a German adoptive family. She later recalled her time as part of the Lebensborn Society “the best in her life.”
Indeed, Hilde is a largely despicable character. At eighteen years of age, her parents are pressuring her to find a husband. She wants desperately to be an actress but is aware that she is not considered beautiful by German standards. She has a figure “like a can of evaporated milk.” The middle child, she feels she falls short when her parents compare her to her successful older brother and deceased younger sister, who was a classic beauty. But Hilde is ambitious, if not very bright and incredibly naïve. Opportunity presents itself when her father, an SS officer who needs to build goodwill with his superiors, invites Obergruppenfuhrer Werner Ziegler, Himmler’s right-hand man, to dinner. In her Bund Deutscher Madel – the girls’ division of the Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth) – uniform, Hilde dominates the dinner conversation, including claiming to have participated in Kristallnacht, and manages to impress Ziegler enough to secure a secretarial position in the Frauenschaft, the National Socialist Women’s League. She is convinced she is on her way to greatness and fixated on Ziegler. She becomes intent on seducing him, but in her fantasy, she will have his baby and they will raise the child together. Her scheme succeeds in part. When Hilde does, in fact, become pregnant, she happily goes to Heim Hochland where she is convinced that if the other girls and staff knew the identity of her baby’s father, they would envy and revere her, and she would receive special privileges. She is haughty and lazy, frantic to see her plans come to fruition, and will do anything necessary to achieve her goals.
Finally, Irma Binz is a forty-four-year-old former nurse who served in battlefield hospitals during World War I and was left traumatized by her experiences. Since then, she has remained adamant about her nursing career being behind her. But her personal life implodes and the future she planned is no longer a possibility, so she accepts an offer from a fellow nurse, Marianne, to serve at Heim Hochland. For Irma, it represents not just a chance to start over. It is also an opportunity to use her skills again, but under happier circumstances, helping usher babies into the world rather than, in far too many instances, watch wounded soldiers depart from it. Coburn describes Irma as being like many other Germans who “decided to keep their heads down, focus on their lives, and assume that reports of persecution of Jews and other minorities were exaggerations from the Lugenpresse, the so-called lying press.”
The three women meet at Heim Hochland in a fascinating, but frequently horrifying tale. Gundi is terrified about the approaching day when she will deliver her precious baby, praying fervently that the child will bear no resemblance to Leo. She feels guilty about her desire to bear a child who shares her perfect Aryan features because she truly loves Leo and his family who welcomed her warmly into their midst, never judging Leo for loving a gentile woman. She learns that their circumstances have become quite dire, even though she has no idea of the extent of the atrocities taking place and worries that they will never be reunited so that Leo can know his child.
Hilde does not endear herself to the other girls or the staff, considering herself superior to them because she is carrying Ziegler’s child, and believes she will be able to convince him to leave his wife once the baby arrives. When her plans go awry, she deviously and ruthlessly plots an alternative way to remain at Heim Hochland. It requires deception and Hilde has no qualms about callously using anyone and anything to get what she wants. Will her conceit ultimately be her undoing?
And each day at Heim Hochland reveals to Irma just how maniacal and heartless the Nazi regime is. She is dismayed when she arrives and discovers that Marianne lied to her about the “apprentice mothers” residing there who are, rather, prostitutes, essentially. They accept gifts of jewelry and other items from the German soldiers and sneak into town to party on nights when there are no soldiers to entertain at the home. Marianne reveals herself to be a true believer in the program, which further causes Irma to consider her feelings about the work they are doing. She cares about the pregnant girls she cares for, especially Gundi, and is kind to them, unlike some of the other nurses. But her conscience prohibits her from embracing the Reich’s ideals, unaware that she will soon be given the chance to tangibly demonstrate just where her allegiance lies and what she genuinely believes in.
Cradles of the Reich is a gripping, well-paced story comprised of alternating narratives detailing the three main characters’ perspectives. Coburn intersperses scenes revealing how Gundi became involved in the resistance and her sweet, but dangerous romance with Leo. Likewise, Irma’s history and how she came to make one mistake she now regrets is described. Those interludes are deftly timed to hold readers’ interest and provide context to the events currently unfolding. Gundi and Irma are both likable and sympathetic, each caught up in situations they could not have envisioned in part because of their choices and behavior, but also because of the forces at work in Germany over which they have no control, but are intent upon not falling victim to. Hilde is thoroughly unlikable, yet pitiable because she is a product of her upbringing and the environment in which she was raised. She is fueled by deep-seated insecurities and feelings of inadequacy that drive her obsessive need for attention and validation. Understanding those aspects of her personality, however, does not render her sympathetic or excuse her narcissism and unrestrained desire for power and status. Readers will likely be satisfied with the manner in which Coburn wraps up her story. Coburn surrounds the three characters with an intriguing cast of supporting players, some of whom are instrumental in the surprising plot developments that Coburn cleverly injects into the story.
Historical fiction fans in particular will find themselves engrossed in Coburn’s illuminating and suspenseful tale. Coburn says she loves historical fiction because it provides a way to learn about history “through the more intimate lens of personal relationships” and that is precisely what Cradles of the Reich accomplishes. The Lebensborn program, although a lesser-known part of the Reich’s horrific legacy, was carried out in approximately thirty locations where approximately twenty thousand children were born. The details remain sketchy because when it became clear that they were losing the war, the Nazis burned the records. Accounts of what actually transpired are contradictory, but it is beyond doubt that the Nazis established a concerted effort to propagate a generation of German citizens they considered superior to all others while simultaneously murdering millions of innocent individuals who did not conform to their definition of worthiness to live.
Cradles of the Reich would be an ideal book club selection because of the themes it examines, including the many ways throughout history in which women and children have been targeted and victimized. Coburn hopes readers will think about and discuss the “social environments that allow women’s bodies to be politicized and commoditized.”
Also by Jennifer Coburn:
