In his new 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 "The Autobiography of Frau Adolf Hitler."
About the Author: Author and journalist Frank Sanello has written about film and world history, cultural anthropology, politics, and substance abuse. His 30+ books are available on Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com, and in bookstores. They are also in the library collections of Harvard, Yale and Temple Universities. Sanello's most prominent work is "The Opium Wars: The Addiction of One Empire and the Corruption of Another," about the two 19th century conflicts over the British importation of opium into China which was devastating Chinese society. The book was also published in China, a rare honor because the Chinese typically reject Western historians as biased. Other historical works include "The Knights Templars: God's Warriors, the Devil's Bankers"; "Invisible People: History's Homosexuals Unhidden," and "Victims and Victimizers: Gays and Lesbians in Nazi Germany." Sanello cowrote "Saving America: Solutions For a Nation in Crisis," with Adel N. Shenouda, M.D., professor emeritus of nephrology at the University of Tennessee. "The Addict Next Door: The Epidemic of Prescription Painkiller Abuse and Other Contemporary Plagues," coauthored with Jayson A. Hymes, M.D. assistant professor of anesthesiology and pain management at the University of Southern California's Keck School of Medicine. will be published in early 2013. Sanello's solo effort about substance abuse, "Tweakers: How Crystal Meth Is Ravaging Gay America," was made into a feature-length documentary. "The Autobiography of Frau Adolf Hitler" is the author's first novel. An investigative journalist for the past 35 years, Sanello has written articles for the Washington Post, the New York Times Syndicate, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle, USA Today, Redbook, People, US Weekly, and Penthouse. Cosmo and other magazines have excerpted his books. Sanello was formerly a film reviewer for the Los Angeles Daily News and a business reporter for UPI. The author graduated cum laude with a bachelor's degree in English literature from the University of Chicago and earned a master's degree from UCLA's film school. He also holds a purple belt in Tae Kwon Do and has volunteered as a kickboxing instructor at AIDS Project Los Angeles where he taught self-defense classes for HIV/AIDS patients who had been AIDS- or fag-bashed. A former instructor of English at the University of Phoenix, Sanello lives in Los Angeles and can be contacted at FSanello@AOL.com.