Non­fic­tion

Left to the Mer­cy of a Rude Stream: The Bar­gain That Broke Adolf Hitler and Saved My Mother

  • From the Publisher
March 29, 2018

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.

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