The Wolf Children Of The Eastern Front

If this doesn’t move you, I suggest you check your pulse.' –John Kay, frontman of Steppenwolf (born in East Prussia in 1944) Told by the children who survived, these stories could well be the last eyewitness report of the aftermath of the Second World War. As the land where they once lived was integrated into the Eastern Bloc, their accounts remained hushed until after the Iron Curtain fell. Now, in The Wolf Children of the Eastern Front, they break their silence. During the bitter winter months of 1944-45, hundreds of thousands of Germans fled East Prussia from an advancing Red Army. With sometimes only minutes’ notice, families escaped in horse-drawn carriages, or they simply ran on foot. In desperation, mothers threw babies onto handcarts, pushing ahead through snowstorms and freezing temperatures. Exhausted, horses broke down, left to die in roadside ditches. Pounding artillery filled the air. In the ensuing chaos, 20,000 children lost their families – to the mayhem, to starvation, epidemics or gunfire. Even the youngest suddenly found themselves alone in the world, needing to forage for food and find shelter. They hid in bullet-riddled barns and wandered from house to house, begging for help. While many died, there are the few that managed to survive. Their experiences are unimaginable: toes frozen off, endless hunger, rape, physical abuse. Those considered lucky were eventually taken in, even lovingly cared for, primarily by Lithuanian farmers, but nearly to the last of them, they grew into adulthood illiterate and poverty-stricken. Yet a surprising truth lives within nearly every one of these victims – an overwhelming sense of hope and forgiveness. They are the Wolf Children.

'If this doesn’t move you, I suggest you check your pulse.' –John Kay, frontman of Steppenwolf (born in East Prussia in 1944) Told by the children who survived, these stories could well be the last eyewitness report of the aftermath of the Second World War. As the land where they once lived was integrated into the Eastern Bloc, their accounts remained hushed until after the Iron Curtain fell. Now, in The Wolf Children of the Eastern Front, they break their silence. During the bitter winter months of 1944-45, hundreds of thousands of Germans fled East Prussia from an advancing Red Army. With sometimes only minutes’ notice, families escaped in horse-drawn carriages, or they simply ran on foot. In desperation, mothers threw babies onto handcarts, pushing ahead through snowstorms and freezing temperatures. Exhausted, horses broke down, left to die in roadside ditches. Pounding artillery filled the air. In the ensuing chaos, 20,000 children lost their families – to the mayhem, to starvation, epidemics or gunfire. Even the youngest suddenly found themselves alone in the world, needing to forage for food and find shelter. They hid in bullet-riddled barns and wandered from house to house, begging for help. While many died, there are the few that managed to survive. Their experiences are unimaginable: toes frozen off, endless hunger, rape, physical abuse. Those considered lucky were eventually taken in, even lovingly cared for, primarily by Lithuanian farmers, but nearly to the last of them, they grew into adulthood illiterate and poverty-stricken. Yet a surprising truth lives within nearly every one of these victims – an overwhelming sense of hope and forgiveness. They are the Wolf Children.

Book Two of the Inspector Frank Stave Investigations, a German detective trilogy set in post-WWII Hamburg. More than 150,000 copies sold. Hamburg, 1948 It is a year of extremes. After a bitterly cold winter of starvation, the bombed city groans under excruciating heat. And Chief Inspector Frank Stave is confronted with a new case. In the ruins of a shipyard, the corpse of a boy is found and Stave's hunt for the killer leads him into the world of "wolf children" - orphaned children who have fled from the Occupied Eastern Territories and are now united in gangs. When two more bodies are discovered Stave is under even increasing pressure as he struggles to keep his personal life together too . . . Praise for the Frank Stave Investigations 'Undoubtedly the most powerful work of crime fiction I have read this year' Independent 'Vivid and harrowing' Sunday Times 'Police procedural, romance, thriller The Murderer in Ruins has a bit of everything and it's one hell of a read.' Bücher Reader reviews for The Wolf Children 'This is writing at its best. A well crafted murder hunt set in haunting landscape of post war Hamburg. Cay Rademacher has again written a book that will stay in my memory for a long time' ***** 'Another atmospheric, well-researched novel from Rademacher. He has a remarkable ability to bring characters to life in the space of a paragraph' ***** 'A bit of a goldilocks book. Not too heavy, not too light, not too long, not too short. Just about right' ***** Translated from the German by Peter Millar

This is the story of the family of Rita Baltutt at the end of World War II in the part of Germany known as East Prussia. When the Soviets conquered East Prussia in 1945, like many other German children these four little girls were effectively orphaned when their parents were taken for forced labor into the Soviet Union. This is the story of their struggle for survival. Left to fend for themselves in a burned-out town, they faced starvation, dehydration, drunken Russian soldiers, and roving gangs of lawless boys.

A history of modern Germany told not through the lives of its leaders, but its lawbreakers. As Nelson Mandela said, “a nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones.” Shadowland tells the sometimes inspiring, often painful stories of Germany’s prisoners, and thereby shines new light on Germany itself. The story begins at the end of the Second World War, in a defeated country on the edge of collapse, in which orphaned and lost children are forced into homelessness, scavenging and stealing to stay alive, often laying the foundations of a so-called criminal career. While East Germany developed detention facilities for its secret police, West Germany passed prison reform laws, which erected, in the words of a prisoner, “little asbestos walls in Hell.” Shadowland is Germany as seen through the lives, experiences, triumphs, and tragedies of its lowest citizens.

It is July 1945, Hitler's Third Reich has fallen, and Berlin is in ruins. Living on the edge of survival in the cellar of an abandoned hospital, Otto and his ragtag gang of kids have banded together in the desperate, bombed-out city. The war may be over, but danger lurks in the shadows of the wreckage as Otto and his friends find themselves caught between invading armies, ruthless rival gangs and a strange Nazi war criminal who stalks them ... A climactic story of truth, friendship and survival against the odds, Wolf Children will thrill readers of Michael Morpurgo and John Boyne.

Germany 1945. A young girl finds herself alone in a vast forest, amid post-war turmoil. As the countryside is ravaged by the final clashes of retreating and advancing troops, Malin has one thought in mind: She must head east, to find her family. Winter is approaching and, as she begins the long trek, she encounters a group of Wolf Children, the orphans of Germany parents killed in the war. They have gone feral in the forest, scavenging for food and shelter in sub-zero conditions with barely enough clothes to protect them from the snow and ice. But who is Lubina, the strange young woman who accompanies a group of these children? Is she to be trusted? Many dangers, fears, loves and obsessions will both bind and divide them until journeys end. This is the second of Skadi Winters atmospheric and mysterious tales, set in the deep countryside of post-war Germany, amid a culture of ancient wisdom, the world of forest spirits, gods and superstitions.