CRADLES OF THE REICH
by Jennifer Coburn
The author’s first historical novel explores the perils of motherhood in prewar Nazi Germany.
In 1939, three women live at Heim Hochland, a home for “racially pure” unmarried mothers in a secret breeding program to create Aryan babies for Hitler. Gundi Schiller and Hilde Kramer are pregnant, and Irma Binz is a nurse. Basing her novel on a real Nazi program, Coburn skillfully intertwines the stories of distinctly different personalities: Gundi secretly distributes anti-Nazi flyers; Hilde is a true Hitler Girl; Irma just wants to do her job and stay out of trouble. Secrets abound: Gundi had sex with a Jew; Hilde wants to be an actress; Irma treats injured resistance fighters. Gundi carries the most weight in this carefully researched story, and she is the most sympathetic. A leering doctor rhapsodizes to her, “You, my dear, are perfection. I have been waiting for a girl with your features since we started the program four years ago.” And the man everyone presumes to be the father, her friend Erich Meyer, looks “as if he'd been plucked straight off a Nazi propaganda poster.” But she has actually only had sex with Leo Solomon, and if the baby shows evidence of being a Mischling, a mix of Jew and Aryan, it will be euthanized and Gundi could be arrested. Hilde, who looks like she could pull a plow and has a figure that “look[s] like a can of evaporated milk,” seems aimless and shallow. The 18-year-old miscarries the baby of her married Obergruppenführer lover but hopes to get pregnant by him again when he returns to Heim Hochland. She certainly isn’t making the “productive contributions to Germany” that her mother and SS officer father want. She feebly attempts to impress Propaganda Minister Goebbels when he pays a visit, pitching a movie idea: All is good until a Jew comes to town. It’s an old idea, he says dismissively. On one level, this compelling story is about women and babies; on another, it portends a dark future of concentration camps and war.
A deep well of discussion topics for book-club readers.