AN OVERLOOKED ERA
Jane Thynne fascinated by role of women in Nazi Germany
Woman in the Shadows Jane Thynne Doubleday Canada
The island is called Schwanenwerder and you’ll find it in Berlin’s Havel River. By all accounts, it’s a charming place — save for the fact that it’s haunted by Nazi ghosts.
They were there for British novelist Jane Thynne when she explored it, revisiting a grim era when Jewish property owners were forced from their homes to make way for a rising Nazi leadership craving a desirable residential address. And she came away with a key plot thread for Woman in the Shadows, her latest thriller to chronicle the adventures of a female British spy operating undercover in Hitler’s Germany.
“This beautiful little peninsula was like a gated community and had probably 30 houses on it, with just this one little road going around,” Thynne says. And it was once home to such infamous Nazis as Rudolf Hess, Albert Speer and Joseph Goebbels.
Thynne had been especially anxious to see the Goebbels summer house, given that Hitler’s propaganda minister and his family are recurring characters in her fiction. But then, she unexpectedly came face to face with a “handsome white building” and realized with a shiver this was the place that had once housed the first Reich “bride” school.
“They really existed, the bride schools,” Thynne emphasizes, and there’s incredulity in her voice as she talks about these creepy institutions that were the brainchild of Heinrich Himmler, architect of the dreaded SS.
“They were rooted in Himmler’s belief that his SS men needed a very special kind of woman. So girls who wanted to marry into the SS had to go to a six-week orientation course at a bride school.
“They were taught all sorts of things — for example, how to tell fairy tales with the correct National Socialist spin.”
When she stumbled onto that house, the novelist within Thynne took charge.
“Seeing it, just a few doors down from the Goebbels’ house, I knew immediately it had to be the scene of a murder,” she says.
Woman in the Shadows delves into the forgotten history of these schools while also unleashing a tantalizing mystery about the fate of a former cabaret dancer being groomed to become a Nazi wife. When she is found murdered on the school grounds, the authorities move to hush-up the crime.
The book’s heroine, Clara Vine, has known the victim for years, and when she learns of the woman’s death and the coverup, Clara sets out to find the truth.
Clara is a rising actress, Anglo-German in background. She’s also a spy. The Clara Vine thrillers reflect Thynne’s fascination with what she describes as “the untold half of history” — the role of women in world events.
“I think women have been overlooked in that whole story of Nazism and the Third Reich,” she says. “This is a really encapsulated era — 12 years in which an oppressive misogynist, murderous regime existed.”
Magda Goebbels, for example, was one character who intrigued Thynne. “All I knew about Magda at the start was that she had murdered her six children in the bunker at the end of World War II. And then I learned this astonishing thing — that she once had an Orthodox Jewish fiancee, was planning to marry him and wore a star of David.” Instead, Magda married Joseph Goebbels.
And because this was a world she wanted to examine, Thynne needed a character who could function as a go-between.
“I wanted someone who could peer behind the scenes. And it was quite plausible that a character like Clara, who is after all Anglo-German and speaks the language, should be able to move in the upper echelons. She’s an actress, and actresses were given a special status in Nazi Germany.”
A previous Clara Vine novel, The Scent of Secrets, has her embarking on a dangerous mission to befriend Hitler’s mistress, Eva Braun. Another, The Pursuit of Pearls, sees Clara insinuating herself into the world of Nazi wives. Woman in the Shadows takes place in 1937, and once again, real-life characters mingle with the fictional ones — including Unity Mitford, the flakiest of Britain’s eccentric Mitford sisters, and the Naziloving Duke and Duchess of Windsor who were in Germany as part of their honeymoon.
Thynne notes that Unity Mitford adored Hitler. “Hitler met Unity hundreds of time over lunch and tea. She completely worshipped him. She would give the Nazi salute to shopkeepers and would travel on trains with her pet sheep sitting beside her.”
The novel also touches tantalizingly on the Duke of Windsor’s notorious private meeting with Hitler — a session that carved out a plan where the former King Edward Vlll would return to England as president of a new republic.
This scheme, Thynne says bluntly, constitutes a “huge skeleton in the cupboard of the British Royal Family.”