I knew well a little Jewish woman whose life was spared by a frightened Heinrich Himmler and the saving of her led to the death of Adolf Hitler. So begins the true account of an improbable April 1945 rescue from a Nazi death camp.
On April 21 a German Jewish businessman returned from the safety of neutral Sweden to the nation of his birth. He secretly met with Heinrich Himmler and arranged the release of a group of Jewish women (one of whom was my mother) from Ravensbruck. In exchange, Himmler’s offer of a cease-fire on the Western front was delivered to the Allied leaders. The news of Himmler’s attempt at a separate peace would be a principal cause of Hitler’s April 30th suicide.
The book also documents the events allowing my mother to survive both the line to the gas chamber in Auschwitz and the allied bombings of Berlin where she toiled in slave labor. Interposed is how the Holocaust affected the remainder of her life as well as much of mine.
