num_pages: 351
description: The harrowing account of a Nazi family in World War II. Karl Borch is a senior SS officer, who is promoted to commandant of Pullhausen concentration camp. Karl’s brief as an eugenics physician, is to create an Aryan master race by eradicating genetic defects from society and physically enhancing humans through experimentation and surgical procedure, while maintaining a holiday camp atmosphere for Nazi party propaganda. This eugenics directive has come straight from Heinrich Himmler himself.As the war progresses, his son and daughter learn more about the atrocities taking place in the Jewish ghettoes and concentration camps of Poland and Germany. Magda, Karl’s daughter, takes her own stand, making dreadful sacrifices. When the war is finally over and the camps are liberated, Karl and his fellow SS officers including Greta Binz’ the evil female camp guard, learn what it is like to be the persecuted hunted ones.The story opens with two teenage girls from very different families, recruited as eager ambitious conscripts into the Hitler Youth. In the first chapter, it is 1930. Greta Binz is from abusive, God-fearing parents, who despise Hitler’s ideology. Greta, taking exception to their criticism of the Fuhrer, and their scoffing at her pride for being awarded the “Medal of Purity” - given to racially pure members of the girls Hitler Youth, shows her brutality by faking an accident and burning her parents to death. Eight years later, 14-year-old Magda Borch, on the other hand, is caring and sensitive, from a well-to-do SS family. Whilst Karl’s wife, Frieda, goes along with it all under sufferance, and in secret has Jew friends. Magda’s 11-year-old brother, Martin, is also a keen Hitler Youth conscript. At school, Magda is also being presented with the “Medal of Purity”, for providing the purest Aryan family tree during lessons in class. “The Medal of Purity” shows how decent German families can slip into a way of life that feels good at the cost of slave labour, and how ordinary people can get caught up in the frenzy of National Socialism, no matter the cost, as the Borch family find out.
language: English
title: The Medal of Purity
publisher: BookPublishingWorld