The scene with Obersturmbannführer Krumey in Chapter 11 actually happened, although not in the Star camp, but in the adjacent Hungarian camp, where the first batch of 300 people were chosen to be sent to Switzerland. Obviously, everyone was desperate to get onto the first transport, since waiting for an elusive second transport might be in vain. 318 Jews travelled from Bergen-Belsen to Switzerland in August 1944, while the remaining 1,368 (including Ladislaus Löb and his father) arrived there in December 1944.
The female guard Susanne Hille is a real person. She worked in the KZ-Außenlager Tannenberg bei Unterlüß, which is why I sent Rachel to work there in the ammunition factory. In reality, this subcamp only functioned between August 1944 and April 1945, so I bent the timeline a few months to keep the story moving.
Susanne Hille is remembered by many survivors for her exceptional brutality. Before the British arrived, she escaped together with the other Tannenberg camp personnel and for many years it wasn’t clear what had happened to her. But it was later found out that she made it all the way across the Elbe river, where she died on May 7, 1945, one day before the capitulation of Germany. The exact circumstances of her death are unknown.
Starting in 1957 several compensation lawsuits against the Rheinmetall Berlin AG were instigated and apparently every woman who mentioned the orange hair and skin or the glass of milk, was immediately acknowledged as having worked for Rheinmetall and given compensation without further evidence.
The most infamous guard of Bergen-Belsen was Irma Grese, who was one of the very few women executed for her crimes by the Allies. I didn’t mention her in the book, because she only came to Bergen in March 1945, having been in Auschwitz and Ravensbrück before that.
You probably have recognized Bergen-Belsen’s most famous inmate Anne Frank and her sister Margot. They arrived at the end of 1944 on a transport from Auschwitz. The exact date when the two sisters died is unknown, it’s only clear that they became sick with typhus and perished in February 1945. According to a former inmate, “one day they simply weren’t there anymore”.
Hanneli Goslar is also a real person, who had been a classmate of Anne’s in Amsterdam. She managed to communicate several times with Anne across the fence, and she threw a package to her friend, which was stolen by another woman. Two days later she threw another one, which apparently was received, but that was the last time she and Anne had contact. Hanneli survived the war and later emigrated to Jerusalem, where she’s still living in 2020.
About the Author
Marion Kummerow was born and raised in Germany, before she set out to "discover the world" and lived in various countries. In 1999 she returned to Germany and settled down in Munich where she's now living with her family.
Her books are filled with raw emotions, fierce loyalty and perpetual resilience.
She loves to put her characters through the mangle, making them reach deep within to find the strength to face moral dilemma, make difficult decisions or fight for what is right. And she never forgets to include humor and undying love in her books, because ultimately love is what makes the world go round.
You can find all of her work here:
https://kummerow.info/
The Aftermath
Ellie Midwood
Contents
Synopsis
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Epilogue
Note to the Reader:
About the Author
Synopsis
“In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing. The worst thing you can do is nothing.” (T. Roosevelt)
Berlin, 1945
Tadeusz Baumann, a recently liberated Auschwitz inmate, joins forces with the American intelligence service to hunt down Otto Neumann, a high-ranking SS official, who has the blood of thousands of innocents on his hands. Their only hope of finding Neumann is that he might contact his daughter, Gerlinde, before disappearing forever.
However, Gerlinde, a former BDM girl, refuses not only to cooperate but even acknowledge that her father did anything wrong, writing off the OSS agents’ accusations against him as enemy propaganda. Tadeusz and Agent Morris must convince her that the elite Nazi upbringing she had is tainted by evil and horrors beyond her imagination and persuade Gerlinde to cooperate before their quarry makes his final escape.
Germany has been liberated but the battle for the hearts and minds of the people has just begun.
Prologue
The Seelow Heights, near Berlin. April 16, 1945
Night. The air thick with mist and tension, like a giant spring waiting to be released. Dark shapes of heavily camouflaged T-34 tanks and trucks with Katyusha rocket launchers mounted on their backs towered behind the infantry trenches. In the Oderbruch, first flowers began peeking, with uncertainty, through the hostile, gunpowder-poisoned ground just to be squashed by thousands of mud-caked boots and caterpillar tracks in the next hour or so. In that very next hour or so, thousands of soldiers would find their final resting place among them.
Pre-dawn mist enveloped the earth around the Seelow Heights. It seeped into trenches, clung to one’s clothes and penetrated them slowly but surely. Bad weather for the planned attack. Tadek wiggled his toes in his boots. The water that had collected in the bottom of the trench in the past few hours was already seeping into them. Shturmoviks that were to provide the support from the air would strafe them again instead of the Germans, due to the bad visibility. If the Germans didn’t do him in, the Russians would surely finish the job, Tadek concluded to himself with a fatalistic smirk and squeezed the barrel of his rifle tighter.
Not that he complained, if he were entirely honest. Unlike the former Gulag prisoners whom the Red Army began to acquire in the early spring to use as cannon fodder while storming their main objective – the
