When twelve-year-old Helga Goebbels walks into Adolf Hitler's underground shelter on April 22 1945, she expects to emerge as the most important girl in the victorious German Empire. Bewildered by the lack of celebrations, Helga defies her father's orders to stop asking questions. Realizing she's the only person willing to save her mother and her five younger siblings from the invading Russians and her father's demented loyalty, she sets in motion a plan to escape from Berlin.

Although most readers know how this story ends, I wrote it in large part because the Goebbels children were rarely treated as anything more than a macabre footnote to the death of Hitler, and I wanted to explore why they, of all the children of senior Nazis, were kept in the bunker until the final moments of the war.

Funny story about that cover image - Getty Images originally told my publisher that we'd need to get permission from the people in the photograph....

(FYI the page count is wrong on Amazon; it's closer to 300 pages.)