The German Midwife

by Mandy Robotham

The USA Today Best Seller.

An enthralling new tale of courage, betrayal and survival in the hardest of circumstances that readers of The Tattooist of Auschwitz, The Secret Orphan and My Name is Eva will love.

Germany, 1944. A prisoner in the camps, Anke Hoff is doing what she can to keep her pregnant campmates and their newborns alive.

But when Anke’s work is noticed, she is chosen for a task more dangerous than she could ever have imagined. Eva Braun is pregnant with the Führer’s child, and Anke is assigned as her midwife.

Before long, Anke is faced with an impossible choice. Does she serve the Reich she loathes and keep the baby alive? Or does she sacrifice an innocent child for the good of a broken world?

*Published in the UK as A Woman of War*

Mandy Robotham’s highly awaited next book, The Secret Messenger, is out now.

• ISBN13: 9780008339319
• Publish Date: 14 December 2018 (first published 7 December 2018)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Imprint: AVON, a division of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
• Format: eBook (EPUB)
• Pages: 352
• Language: English
• URL: http://harpercollins.co.uk

Reviews

[readingwithwrin]

2.5 stars

Thank you to Netgalley and the Publisher for a free e-arc in exchange for my honest review.

Before starting this book I think people should remember that this is just an imagining of something that could have happened. We have no idea if this did happen, but we know that a child was never made public if it did.

Anke is a midwife but is also a political prisoner in Nazi Germany. She tries to keep her status as a midwife hidden for a time but it is eventually found out in the camp she is in and then is put to work delivering babies and taking care of the expecting mothers. Her experience and high regard eventually lead her to being brought to Braun in order to safely and efficiently deliver her baby. This is where most of the book takes place and we get to see life at the top of the mountain where Hitler lived sometimes.

We do get to see flashbacks of what got her to be into this position she is in now and those were what I most enjoyed as the book went on.

Overall I did like this book. I was immediately drawn into Anke's world and the inner turmoil she felt about having to take care of and then deliver Brauns child is one that I felt as well. Anke is a character who always tries to do what's best for the mother and baby and sticks to her morals in this story for the most part. I could have done with one thing happening but I also wasn't surprised when it did. But that one thing having happened also made me not give this book a higher rating. I did like some of the side characters especially Christa (I think that's how you spell her name) and how they worked together so well.

[wcs53]

This was a great read - one that was hard to put down. It was a fictional 'what-if' story, with quite a few ethical questions thrown in. It tells the story of Anke, a German midwife who has been forced to work in a concentration camp, due to her sympathies towards the Jewish people, among other things. She is summoned by the Nazis to be midwife to Eva Braun, Hitler's mistress. The story weaves its way through the latter part of WWII and poses a number of questions, especially moral and ethical ones faced by a number of the story's characters.

This is a great debut novel that I enjoyed more than I thought it would and has a lot to offer to readers with a variety of tastes.