Del Cerro author Jennifer Coburn will give a free talk at the San Carlos Library (7265 Jackson Drive) on Friday, Feb. 24, 2 p.m.

Coburn is the author of Cradles of the Reich, which looks at a topic not often delved into when it comes to fiction: the Lebensborn project, a Nazi-breeding initiative to raise the birth rate of “racially pure” Aryan children.

Mission Times Courier recently caught up with Coburn, mother of a Patrick Henry High School graduate, to talk about her book and more.

MTC: What do you enjoy most about writing?

Coburn: I love how writing allows me to research topics I’m interested in. For Cradles of the Reich, I learned so much about the German zeitgeist in the Weimar Republic, but also mundane cultural details like how men put on their pants (button, snap or zip?), why Nazi women didn’t wear makeup, and what time of year a German family could prepare rabbit stew. (I consulted with a food historian for the latter. Who knew that was a job?)

Mostly, though, I love to connect with readers and share a story about a period I felt was important to explore. I want to tell a good story with characters people care about and are rooting for (or hating!), but I also want to contribute to the understanding of what the rise of fascism looks like.

MTC: What led you to write this specific book and what was the timeframe involved from beginning to end?

Coburn: Before Cradles of the Reich, I wrote a mother-daughter travel memoir. And before that, six romantic comedies, so moving to historical fiction about a Nazi breeding program was not the next natural career step for me. When I first heard about SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler’s Lebensborn Society, a plan to create two-million so-called racially pure babies for Germany, I had so many questions. I wanted to know where these breeding homes were, how the women were selected, and why in the world young women would volunteer to have sex with strangers to have a child for Hitler. I enjoy learning about history through well-researched novels so I looked for one that would answer my questions about Lebensborn program through the lens of female characters. I found that there were many non-fiction books, but no novels, so I decided to write the book I wanted to read with a book club.

I have always been fascinated and terrified by how Germany devolved into a cult of hatred, how one madman so effectively convinced millions of people that their neighbors and friends were the enemy. Like many Jewish people who grew up in the 1970s, I often heard my family mourn the losses of European relatives murdered in the Shoah. The fears they held about Hitler invading the United States were shock waves that reverberated through generations.

Cradles of the Reich takes place in 1939, at the Heim Hochland maternity home for unwed German women who would place their babies for adoption with “suitable” German families. The program also recruited young Aryan women to have relations with SS officers with the hope of the women becoming pregnant. And finally, in 1939, the Lebensborn program expanded to kidnapping, where Nazi soldiers identified blond-haired, blue-eyed infants and toddlers in countries that Germany occupied, and brought them back to Germany for a process they called Germanization, then matched them with adoptive parents. I write about history through the lens of women’s relationships, so the story is about three women who represented the choice young German gentile women had in 1939. There’s the resistor, the bystander, and the true believer. When they come together, they change the course of one another’s lives.

MTC: Given there are authors looking to get a first book written and published, what advice would you have for them?

Coburn: There’s an adage in Alcoholics Anonymous that advises, “Don’t compare your insides to other people’s outsides.” Adapted for the writing world, I’d say don’t compare your first draft to someone else’s published book. Read the acknowledgments in the back of most books and you’ll see that although there is typically one author’s name on the front, dozens of people are involved in the development of a book. Then go out there and find those people who you will eventually acknowledge in your book: your writers’ group, early readers, a developmental editor, friends that cheer you on.

MTC: What plans might you have in the works for another book down the road?

Coburn: I am currently working on another Holocaust-era historical novel set in the Theresienstadt ghetto in the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. The Nazis set up this “model camp” for propaganda purposes – to offer tours to the International Red Cross, and to use as the set of a film about how well the Jewish people were treated in the Reich. The film highlighted the rich cultural life with concerts and lectures, all of which actually did take place, but Theresienstadt was also a prison where Jewish people were used as slave laborers, died of disease and malnutrition, and were transported to Auschwitz and other death camps in Eastern Europe. In this book, I want to explore how propaganda is used to manipulate facts, and how we sometimes delude ourselves with propaganda that serves our own agenda. But like Cradles of the Reich, The Glimmer Factory (working title) is primarily about women’s friendships and how the bonds we forge can often lead us to heroism we never knew we were capable of.

For more information on this local writing talent, visit: jennifercoburn.com/.