It was the day of the Anschluss. Five hundred kilometers south, Hitler had personally driven to his birthplace, the little border town of Braunau am Inn in Austria, to announce the country’s “return to the Reich.” The radio was filled with tales of cheering crowds, waving flags, and throwing flowers, of people dancing in the streets. Frühlinghausen officials, eager to capture a little gaiety for the town, organized an impromptu celebration—a rally to be led by their own mayor and a local band. Who wouldn’t want to celebrate the union of two populations of German speakers? This was a great theme for Hitler, and therefore for Frühlinghausen, which was thoroughly in support of the man and his party: the quest to unify all ethnic Germans across the continent under one flag.

Benita Gruber was nineteen years old and dressed in her finest Bund Deutscher Mädel uniform, a dark blue wool skirt and white blouse she’d saved her own money to buy—no longer the makeshift blue-and-white ensemble she’d worn for the first years of her membership, but the real thing, printed with the BDM monogram. She had braided her thick hair in two artful plaits and knew that she looked beautiful and healthy, the very picture of the celebrated Jungfrau, or German maiden. It was young women like her who had inspired Hitler’s vision of the master race. She was meant to become round with child, again and again, to populate the motherland with Aryan babies who would grow to be happy, healthy Germans, capable of hard work and loyal to their homeland. At least this was the idea propagated by Fräulein Brebel, the dour leader of Benita’s BDM group, who had no children herself.

And so, after coffee, Benita arrived at the town square along with her troop of wide-eyed Mädels. The mayor of Frühlinghausen was a rising star in the local Nazi Party and was considered quite a catch. On that afternoon, at least among the girls of the BDM, there was a sense of Cinderella-at-the-ball anticipation as they took their places before the podium.

For all his promise, though, the mayor was neither handsome nor charismatic. His face was blubbery and wide, and as he spoke, rivulets of sweat dripped down his cheeks and hiccupped over his moles. But he was full of conviction.

“Today we usher in a new and important era . . .” He used an approximation of Hitler’s own staccato, his words half lost in the wind, half swallowed by the stone walls of the seven-hundred-year-old church behind him. “Today we embark on the road to a once again powerful and united Germandom . . .”

Benita was bored. She had no doubt she could attract this trundlehead’s attention. But what was the point? The very idea of standing beside him, let alone kissing him, was unpleasant. She imagined he smelled like sweat and mildewed wool and, beneath this, the pigsty. Like so many of the town’s young men, he lived with his family on the farm they had operated with minimal success for the last however many hundreds of years. During the harvest season, he would be out in the fields alongside everyone else, pitching hay and sweating like a pig.