Manipulation and cunning propaganda were Hitler’s most powerful weapons, dwarfing even the spear-headed blitzkrieg and the strategic rocket propelled V-2.

Germans worshiped the man that promised them a utopian society, lives filled with good health, education, and wealth; all this was a lie perpetrated and orchestrated to inflict self-sacrifice for a regime with the goal to dominate the world for a thousand years and to annihilate a human race. Kristel and Kommander Georg became the epitomes of the Hitler Youth program, yet they did not fall into the trap of the misleading nature of the Führer’s indoctrination.

This is a story that stretches characters beyond rebound, snapping them in half and out of existence: by intimidation, rape, torture, murder, and war.... That is almost all characters. It took a remarkable, free spirited, and independently minded grandmother, a woman of unbounding wit and sultry good looks, to teach an abandoned granddaughter how to survive in this world of horror; a job she took upon herself and one that she did extremely well, for to do so covertly required a keen mind that conversed with the most powerful men in Nazi Germany.

As Kristel’s shoulder was touched by the Führer deep within his bunker at the Reich Chancellery – she began to sweat beads of fear. She became comforted only by the sound of her grandmother’s voice, which reminded Kristel to fake her compliance in order to survive; this she does and for years after the war her haunting past memories continued to terrorize her. Her strength to endure one catastrophic event after another during the Second World War grew. Towards the end of her journey, Kristel feels an urgency to finally share her story, thinking how wrong she was to have struggled within the dimension of Nazism. She battled alone, at least so she thought.

This is a story of remarkable courage that was shown by thousands of young German mothers from a dark time in our world’s history, including mine.