Synopsis

Nearly seventy years after her death, Anna Alrutz, who in life was a Braune Schwester, one of Hitler's specialized nurses, is nothing more than a ghost, a disembodied voice living and reliving fragments of her brief existence. The eldest child of a wealthy bourgeois family—her father a doctor, her mother elegant and cultured but in poor health—Anna enjoyed a happy childhood. Because of her mother and sister's chronic lung disease, the Alrutz family spent every summer in the same pleasant spa town, Bad Salzgitter. There, Anna met Helene, her lifelong friend, and Pastor Rudinski, her first impossible love. But Bad Salzgitter was also the place where her unusually strong character, obsessed with order and discipline, was formed. In 1927, after her sister's death, against her family's wishes, Anna left medical school to enroll in the new nursing school and became a Braune Schwester. Summoned back to Göttingen by her former professor, the gynecologist Hartmann, she becomes his personal assistant and carries out a very specific task with him, mandated by Hitler: sterilizing as many women as possible to "purify" the future Aryan race. Anna believes in order and the social well-being that comes with it, but when her friend Helene is admitted to the clinic, she opens her eyes and suddenly sees horror.