Helga Schneider was four when her mother suddenly abandoned her family in Berlin in 1941. When she next saw her mother, thirty years later, she learned the shocking reason why.

Helga's mother had joined the Nazi SS and had become a guard in the concentration camps, including Auschwitz, where she was in charge of a "correction" unit and responsible for untold acts of torture.

Nearly thirty more years would pass before their second and

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A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. For eight weeks in 1945, as Berlin fell to the Russian army, a young woman kept a daily record of life in her apartment building and among its residents. "With bald honesty and brutal lyricism" (Elle), the anonymous author depicts her fellow Berliners in all their humanity, as well as their cravenness, corrupted first by hunger and then by the Russians. "Spare and unpredictable, minutely observed and utterly...

"Drawing on a wealth of first-hand testimony, the German War is the first foray for many decades into how the German people experienced the Second World War. Told from the perspective of those who lived through it-- soldiers, school-teachers and housewives; Nazis, Christians and Jews-- its masterful historical narrative sheds fresh and disturbing light on the beliefs, hopes, and fears of people who embarked on, continued, and fought to the end, a...