"In 1998, Helga Schneider, then in her sixties, was summoned from Italy to the nursing home in Vienna where her ninety-year-old mother was then living. The last time they had seen each other was twenty-seven years earlier, when her mother had asked Schneider to try on her treasured SS uniform, and tried to give her several items of jewellery, the loot of holocaust victims, which Schneider refused. It was the first time they had met since 1941 (when Schneider was four and her brother was nineteen months old), when her mother abandoned her family in order to pursue her career as an SS officer." "Before reluctantly visiting her on this occasion, Schneider looked at her mother's file at the Simon Wiesenthal Centre and discovered that her past was even more horrific than she had previously imagined: in Ravensbruck, a concentration camp for women, her mother had collaborated on 'medical' experiments on prisoners, and trained to be an extermination camp guard, a career path permitted only to the most hardened. Never at any stage had her mother recanted or expressed even the slightest remorse about her past; yet Schneider still hoped that she would show some sort of redeeming quality that would finally enable her daughter to accept her - on some level - as a mother." "Helga Schneider's frank account of her last meeting with her mother is both sad and powerful. She describes without sentimentality or self-pity her own difficult upbringing and the raising of her own child against the background of her painful confrontation with the reality of her background. Powerfully evoking the misery of Nazi and immediate post-war Berlin, her book provides a terrifying insight into the psyche of an otherwise unremarkable woman whose life was given a seemingly unshakable sense of purpose and fulfilment by the most evil and repellant aspects of the Third Reich."--BOOK JACKET.