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A review by whatlizisreadingnow
Cradles of the Reich by Jennifer Coburn
3.0
Overall: Cradles of the Reich follows three women into a Lebensborn home called Heim Hochland in Nazi Germany. Like the author, I hadn’t heard much about the Lebensborn program other than a reference to it in the Netflix series “The Man in the High Castle” and an occasional allusion to it in non-fiction. The program housed unwed pregnant women whose racial profile the Nazis deemed “desirable,” placing their children with party officials after birth. Other young women also lived at the homes as “mothers-in-training,” and many claimed after the war that they were used as sexual partners by Nazi officers. The reader meets Hilde and Gundi, two young women raised under Nazi ideology who arrive as expectant mothers under very different circumstances. Irma, the third main character, is a middle-aged woman with nursing experience trying to escape the fallout of a disappointing love affair when the director of the home recruits her.
Likes: Coburn did a ton of research, and it shows the details, such as the two baths a day dictated by the Nazi program for infants and the uniforms embroidered with the SS logo worn by the young women ostensibly being "trained” as future mothers. Coburn shines detailing how life for women in Nazi Germany, even so-called Aryan women, was constrained.
Dislikes: I did not connect with the characters as much as I would have liked. In my opinion, Hilde, Irma, and Gundi remained very one-dimensional. Coburn states in her author’s note that she wanted avatars of a German resistor, a German who embraced Nazi ideology, and someone in between; the characters’ stories seemed stuck in these archetypes. I didn’t feel that two of the three characters had learned or grown much over the course of the book. The ending, which involves a “deus ex machina” style turn in the plot, also seemed a bit too fairytale for me, especially for a book about the Third Reich.
FYI: sexual assault, racism, anti-Semitism, Nazi ideology, misogyny, violence.
Likes: Coburn did a ton of research, and it shows the details, such as the two baths a day dictated by the Nazi program for infants and the uniforms embroidered with the SS logo worn by the young women ostensibly being "trained” as future mothers. Coburn shines detailing how life for women in Nazi Germany, even so-called Aryan women, was constrained.
Dislikes: I did not connect with the characters as much as I would have liked. In my opinion, Hilde, Irma, and Gundi remained very one-dimensional. Coburn states in her author’s note that she wanted avatars of a German resistor, a German who embraced Nazi ideology, and someone in between; the characters’ stories seemed stuck in these archetypes. I didn’t feel that two of the three characters had learned or grown much over the course of the book. The ending, which involves a “deus ex machina” style turn in the plot, also seemed a bit too fairytale for me, especially for a book about the Third Reich.
FYI: sexual assault, racism, anti-Semitism, Nazi ideology, misogyny, violence.