The Sunflower House
The pre-WWII Nazi German Lebensborn homes supported the birth of “racially pure” children by housing unmarried pregnant women and placing these babies of proper bloodlines in Aryan families. They also provided care for pregnant wives of deployed German soldiers. Many women stayed on to birth more children of Nazi leaders for the purposes of increasing the Aryan population.
In 1938, Allina’s German home town is the scene of a massacre, her only family is slaughtered, and she is raped by a Nazi officer. In the hopes that Allina is now pregnant, the officer drops her off at Hockland Home, a Lebensborn home, near Munich. Allina is relieved to discover she is not pregnant, so for now, she is put to work in the nurseries until available to attempt another pregnancy. She is dismayed by the extremely strict schedules of feeding, bathing, and sleeping, with all affection and interaction by caregivers forbidden. Shocking are the children confined to bed in complete silence. Without play, love, and affection, these children fail to develop physically or mentally. They become unadoptable and eventually disappear. When Allina meets the compassionate Gruppenführer Karl von Strassberg, they team up to discover the fate of these children and make plans to save them. A romantic relationship builds from there.
The novel is bookended by a present-day narrative as Allina tells her daughter, Katrine, her and Karl’s story, the father she never knew. Unnecessary present-day interjections interrupt the much more engaging Lebensborn storyline. This overused structure only serves to foreshadow the death or disappearance of Katrine’s father and allows us to learn of Allina’s end of life. Yet another little-known piece of Nazi history is revealed and the cruelty reigned over its own “valuable” Germans in this riveting novel. Read this for the shocking Lebensborn story.
