A prisoner in the camps, Anke Hoff is doing what she can to keep her pregnant campmates and their newborns alive.
But when Anke’s work is noticed, she is chosen for a task more dangerous than she could ever have imagined. Eva Braun is pregnant with the Führer’s child, and Anke is assigned as her midwife.
Before long, Anke is faced with an impossible choice. Does she serve the Reich she loathes and keep the baby alive? Or does she sacrifice an innocent child for the good of a broken world?
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The German Midwife is a fictional story set in WWII Germany. It is author Mandy Robotham’s debut novel and is full of mystery, romance and intrigue.
This book brought up some conflicting emotions for me. There are so many interesting stories of real people to be told during this time and it is likely the most studied period in history. When I first picked up the book, I assumed it was based on a true story and it is not. That’s on me for not learning more about it beforehand. So it is purely a work of fiction and in addition, it heavily features the actual historical person Eva Braun, mistress to Hitler, in a mostly positive light.
I was inspired by The German Midwife to do some research on Braun and discovered that historians know very little about her. She was heavily insulated and protected by the Reich and as a result, not much is known about her, even today. I certainly found no evidence in my cursory research that she was pregnant at any point in her life, or that she was the kind-hearted, whimsical, easily misled girl that Robotham characterized her as in The German Midwife.
Robotham is a real-life midwife in addition to author, and as such, all aspects of the midwifery care that Anke provides in the story is extremely accurate as to how prenatal and childbirth were handled in the 1940s.
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