In the summer of 1944 Eva Braun invited her younger cousin Gertraud to keep her company at Berchtesgaden, the Fuhrer's mountain retreat. Defying her anti-Nazi father, Gertraud went, and stayed until Eva left to share Hitler's fate in his Berlin bunker. Not until her seventies did she ever speak of this strange time in her life.
Based on Gertraud's memories, this novel recalls the carefree yet sinister idyll of that summer. Young Gertraud is dazzled by her glamourous other cousin and falls for a young SS officer. But after encountering an escaped thirteen-year-old Ukranian slave labourer and clandestinely listening to BBC radio reports, she starts awakening to the reality of atrocity and war.
