The Autobiography of Frau Adolf Hitler

In his metafictional novel, Frank Sanello vividly recreates the Third Reich and World War II as seen through the eyes and daily diary of Hitler's imaginary wife, Countess Christina Bernadotte (1916-1948). The granddaughter of the king of Sweden, the countess is forced at the age of 16 to marry the 43-year-old Nazi dictator by her socially ambitious and abusive mother, an heiress to the Vanderbilt fortune. Her husband, strung out on morphine and cocaine, makes revolting sexual demands on his virginal wife involving coprophilia, a fetish that eroticizes feces. Lonely and isolated, Frau Hitler throws herself into a series of transient love affairs with the Third Reich’s handsome foreign minister, the corrupt Joachim von Ribbentrop, Cary Grant, and Ernst Röhm, leader of the SA (Storm Troopers). Because of her many romantic liaisons, she doesn’t know the identity of the father of her son, Folke, except that he’s not her husband’s. As the Holocaust claims more victims, Christina begins smuggling Jews out of Germany right under her drug-addled husband’s nose. During the war, she travels to Auschwitz to rescue Jewish friends and bribes the Gestapo to allow other Jews to flee Nazi Germany. With her uncle, Count Folke Bernadotte, she helps organize the White Buses operation, a dangerous mission that transports 30,000 Jews and POWs to safety in Sweden aboard Red Cross buses painted white to avoid bombing the Allies or the Luftwaffe. As First Lady of the Reich, she meets or corresponds with various historical figures such as Sigmund Freud, Pope Pius XII and MGM chief Louis B. Mayer. Toward the end of the war, as she tries to flee home to Sweden with her son and adopted daughter, her arch-nemesis, Hermann Göring, Hitler’s second in command and pedophile, forces her to choose one of her children to leave behind with him. The choice haunts the countess until tragedy intervenes during her work as UN mediator between warring Palestinian Jews and Arabs in 1948. These dramatic events are recorded in her daily diary, which her grandson finds hidden in a Holocaust memorial library and publishes as emphasized textThe Autobiography of Frau Adolf Hitler.