In The Shadow Of Silence

In the Shadow of Silence is the candid account of an ordinary young woman’s extraordinary journey through the collapse of the Third Reich, arrest and internment as a political prisoner of the British Army of the Rhine.

Through a series of poignant vignettes, the author describes what it was like to grow up in Nazi Germany, to witness Hitler Youth, anti-Semitism, Kristallnacht, carpet-bombing and mandatory labor service. Like millions of other Germans, her everyday life was directed and controlled by the absolute power of the National Socialist state. As the air war wore on, survival became the only imperative.

Gertrud Mackprang Baer was a 19-year-old medical student at the University of Marburg, Germany, when, in 1944, the ongoing war forced the closure of all universities. To avoid compulsory labor ina munitions factory, she naively accepted a position with the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), one of Hitler’s shadowy and most dangerous SS-organizations.

Although the Third Reich and the power of the SS-state stood on the fervent support of some 80 million Germans and Austrians, Gertrud Mackprang Baer became deeply troubled by their instant and collective tendency to deny any involvement in the Hitler era. With the mass deception permeating every facet of the social and political culture of the new German state, In the Shadow of Silence bears true witness to an exceptional era, by one who was there.