The German Heiress, Anika Scott

The German Heiress, Anika Scott

This is the first novel by author and journalist Anika Scott, and is about post-war Germany. I have read books about the holocaust, and I have read books that happen during the war, but I feel we never hear alot about right after World War II. 

This is the story of a previously wealthy German woman, Clara, who helped her powerful father run his iron factory. During WWII ,it was taken over by Nazis, and her family had to decide whether to do what the Nazis wanted, or suffer the consequences; so they, on the surface, complied with the Nazis. However, Clara did her best to make things easier for the prisoners being used as laborers, even through life was brutal for them. However, after the war, she and her father were considered war criminals. Her father was put in a prison camp, but she escaped and took on a secret identity, and hid for a year. In that time she met a suitor, and decided to flee after he proposed and she discovered he was a doctor who experimented on children in the prison camps during the war. She didn't know it but she had been watched, and was now being chased by Allied agents, who wanted to bring her in for questioning. 

While running from the Allies, she uncovers some terrible secrets about her family and her best friend, and finds help, and a friend, in an ex-Nazi soldier.

This book explores post war Germany from the side of the Germans who survived it, and how they had to move forward in a world that, for them, had been completely devastated. 

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