White Rose, Black Forest by Eoin Dempsey is a very readable story, but not a polished literary novel. Others obeyed because the penalties for not obeying were very steep, often even life-threatening. However many German women became very good Nazi citizens and supported the regime in every way. Women, unless single, did not work outside the home. Women were house frau’s and child bearers and kept an eye on their neighbors and reported their behavior when it seemed suspect.
Much is revealed about the role of women under Nazi rule which was defined by Hitler. She eventually turned against Hitler and the Nazis, but her old beau, Daniel Berkel, became an agent of the Gestapo, became a loyal Nazi, and with promotions and power became quite a menacing figure. What I did find relevant and worthy of attention were Franka’s interactions with her neighbors dished out in flashbacks to her years as a young girl when she joined the Hitler Youth movement, and with her earliest friends and her first boyfriend who shared these experiences with her. Although the snow is a great device to buy her parachutist, John Lynch aka Werner Graf, time to heal. Some of the author’s explanations for what Franka does require a bit too much suspension of disbelief. This is where the story goes a bit off the rails. Her suicide is interrupted when she stumbles on a Luftwaffe officer attached to a parachute and unconscious, with two broken legs, who despite his extensive training speaks to her in English. It is the middle of winter and winter snows are deep on the ground, the cabin in a remote location, the roads closed due to the snow. She is planning to shoot herself out in the Black Forest with her father’s gun.
She is devastated by the things that have happened to her family and the rumors of the terrible things happening to the Poles and the Jews.
Now with all her family dead Franka lives alone in the family’s cabin in the Black Forest. After serving time in prison she is now considered an outcast.
Franka Gerber, our young lady, a nurse in Munich, actually helped write that flyer and distribute it but was assumed to have been naively led astray by her boyfriend Hans. In White Rose, Black Forest we meet a young German woman who was imprisoned for a short time because she had a boyfriend in the White Rose Society, the German resistance group which published underground news sheets called “The White Rose”. We can imagine that there were Germans living in Nazi Germany who did not buy into Hitler’s racism, his use of fear and instant retribution, the way he used his paranoia about what people said and did in privacy to justify invading everyone’s privacy, and setting neighbors to spy on neighbors. White Rose, Black Forest by Eoin Dempsey starts with a real resistance movement inside Germany, the White Rose Society, and builds a novel around it.
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