My mum, the Ausch

that she decided to search for her mother. She had assumed Traudi had left the family for a man, and was ready to forgive her. She wrote to six women with the same name and, in 1971, found Traudi in Vienna.

“When she opened the door it was very emotional – she looked so much like me,” says Helga. “We hugged at first. I was so happy. But after 10 minutes she told me with pride and without repentance that she had worked at Auschwitz.”

A phrase she repeated haunts Helga: “‘But the Nazi regime was beautiful’.”

Traudi asked her daughter to try on her Auschwitz uniform and even gave her a handful of gold jewellery, which Helga soon realised would have come from people at the camp.

“I opened my fingers and the jewellery fell to the ground,” she says. “I said to her: ‘How could you? How could you take children to the gas chamber?’.”

Helga asked if she felt guilty taking Jewish babies from their mothers to be killed. “They would have grown up to be Jewish adults,” Traudi told her.

Traudi also felt no remorse for leaving her as a four-year-old in war-torn Berlin.

Traudi’s duties at the camp had included herding women and children to the gas chambers and restraining the victims of the camp doctors’ notorious medical experiments.

She was jailed as a war criminal for about two years after the war but her commitment to the regime had not wavered.

“She told me, ‘Once the Fuhrer died I felt nothing’,” Helga says. “Life no longer meaning. She had based her life Hitler and Nazi ideology and whe ended she felt erased.”

Helga’s reunion with Traudi lasted 45 minutes. Helga says: “I had grown thinking of her, imagining a kind wom sweet. Instead I found a war crimin

Helga tried to forget her. Th decades passed, her husband die cancer and her son grew up.

But then she received a letter sa her mother was in a nursing home might die any day. Helga hoped she repented. “After all that time, I thou surely she’d have realised she mistaken, that the ideology was evi

This second meeting is the focu the new film, which tells how she retu to confront Traudi along with her gra daughter, played by Lucy Boynton.

In real life, when Helga returned to

Traudi and, below, female SS guards at Auschwitz camp

Helga and, right, with her brother