Title: Stolen genes, stolen children
Description: "In Pre-WW-II Germany two female nursing students meet at a Berlin university.  Alena grew up wild and promiscuous in Berlin.  Karin is the proper child of Swedish-Norwegian diplomats.  Opposites attract and they quickly become fast friends, remaining so throughout nursing training. Employed in a Berlin hospital after graduating, Alena takes a lover, Lorentz, an engineering student and future Luftwaffe pilot.  Hitler invades Austria in 1938 and Alena is eager to become pregnant and contribute a newborn child to Hitler's new Lebensborn Program and further the Aryan race.  Lorentz is skeptical, but with urging, eventually relents. A nurse in Trondheim in 1940 when Norway is invaded, working with Norway's Resistance, Karin captures the heart of Svente, an injured Resistance fighter.  Once he's healed, they set out through Norway's mountain forest for a remote hideout.  But their campfire is spotted by a passing Nazi aircraft and paratroopers are dropped in the darkness. Alena is pregnant with their second child.  Confronted by Lorentz, adamant  they keep this child, Alena finally relents.  When their daughter is three, returning unexpectedly on his first furlough, longing for marital bliss, Lorentz finds his daughter has disappeared and Alena is living with another man. Fast forward to 1965... Living in Norway with her husband, Karin is reading the Sunday papers when an article catches her eye: fourteen Nazi-era nurses are on trial for cooperation with the Nazi Euthanasia Program, accused of killing thousands of disabled adults and children, through the administering of drug overdoses, starvation and gassing.  It's 1965; how can this be, she wonders?  One on the fourteen accused nurses resembles a nickname her old friend Alena used when secretly meeting boyfriends.  With help from an old UNRRA coworker Karin rushes to Berlin, eventually remaining to help defend her old friend. During visiting hours, a horrific tale of Alena's Nazi years unfolds and carries Karin back to her own time in the Norwegian Resistance, reviving happy memories of poignant romance and sadness in the dangerous and remote Norwegian forest"--Publisher's description.
Subjects: Nurses, Fiction, Female friendship, World War, 1939-1945, Man-woman relationships, Euthanasia, Eugenics
Places: Germany, Norway