The Sunflower House (2024) is the debut historical fiction novel by Adriana Allegri. The story uses a frame narrative set in 2006, where a woman named Katrine discovers a wooden box containing Nazi memorabilia that belonged to her German mother, Allina. This discovery prompts Allina to reveal her long-held secrets, transporting the reader to 1930s Germany. After a devastating loss, Allina is forced to work as a nurse in Hochland Home, the first maternity facility in the Nazis’ notorious Lebensborn program, a state-sponsored eugenics initiative designed to breed racially pure children for the Reich. The novel explores themes including The Fragmentation of Identity Through Generational Secrets, The Psychological Cost of Silence as a Survival Mechanism, and The Perversion of Motherhood for Ideological Ends.

Author Adriana Allegri is a first-generation American whose parents lived in Europe during World War II, and she grew up hearing stories about their experiences. She was inspired to write The Sunflower House after learning about the little-known Lebensborn program through her research. The novel sheds light on this dark chapter of history, where women deemed racially suitable were encouraged to bear children for their country, who were then adopted by approved Nazi families.

This guide refers to the 2024 St. Martin’s Press First Edition.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of graphic violence, illness and death, mental illness, rape, sexual violence and harassment, child abuse, child death, ableism, racism, and religious discrimination.

Plot Summary

Set during World War II and framed by scenes in present-day New Jersey, the novel opens in 2006 when Katrine, a woman in her sixties, rushes to the hospital after her 86-year-old mother, Allina, falls from a step stool. While cleaning up afterward, Katrine discovers a hidden compartment beneath the bedroom floorboards containing an oak box marked with a swastika. Inside are old photographs, letters, a gold locket, and images of babies. A headshot of a handsome man triggers buried childhood memories. Allina catches Katrine with the box and agrees to explain everything.

Allina Strauss’s story begins in 1938 in Badensburg, a small German village where she lives with her aunt and uncle, Claudia and Dieter Strauss, who raised her after her parents died. During a picnic, her friend Fritz, now a member of the Hitler Youth Patrol, launches into a vicious antisemitic rant against a Jewish family who recently vanished. Allina confronts him, but her boyfriend Albert warns her that arguing is dangerous. Albert leaves soon after for Berlin, and Allina’s world contracts further when Uncle Dieter is diagnosed with terminal cancer.

On a lucid day near the end of his life, Uncle Dieter reveals long-guarded secrets. Allina’s birth mother, Irene Schenck, was Jewish, making Allina a Mischling: a person of mixed Jewish and non-Jewish heritage who faced severe persecution under Nazi racial laws. She has lived under forged papers her entire life that conceal her Jewish heritage. Uncle Dieter gives his niece a set of forged identity documents in the name of Allina Gottlieb, insisting she must use them if she is forced to flee. He reveals that Albert is not a bank clerk but a resistance operative smuggling Polish Jews out of Germany. Uncle Dieter himself led the village’s resistance network. He dies before they can speak again.

Two days after the funeral, SS soldiers under Gruppenführer Reinhardt Gud attack Badensburg in retribution for a resistance operative traced back to the village. Aunt Claudia is shot dead. Allina hides in the forest but is found, beaten, and nearly raped. She wakes naked atop a pile of her neighbors’ corpses. Gud spares her, remarking she resembles his granddaughter. While permitted to pack, Allina sews her father’s letters into her coat lining and assumes the identity of Allina Gottlieb. Gud rapes her during the drive to Hochland Home, the first Lebensborn facility. Lebensborn was a network of maternity homes established by SS leader Heinrich Himmler to breed “racially pure” “Aryan” children for the Reich.

Allina arrives traumatized and barely conscious. Gud informs the staff to take care of her as she may be carrying his child. Head nurse Marguerite Ziegler settles her in, and Rilla Weber, a 15-year-old expectant mother, sits with Allina as she falls asleep and holds her hand during her nightmares.

When her period confirms she is not pregnant with Gud’s child, Allina is flooded with relief. Schwester Ziegler offers Allina a position as a nursery nurse, explaining that unmarried “Aryan” women give birth at the facility. Approved Nazi families then adopt the children.

In the nurseries, Allina is disturbed by the eerie silence of babies lying still with unfocused eyes, trained not to cry through systematic neglect. On a restricted third-floor ward, she discovers toddlers in deplorable condition: developmentally delayed and unable to walk or speak. A boy named Otto is the most responsive. Allina realizes the children’s disabilities result from neglect, not birth defects, but Schwester Ziegler refuses her request to work with them.

During a late-night shift, Allina breaks down crying and is overheard by Gruppenführer Karl von Strassberg, an SS officer who responds with unexpected gentleness. Over the following weeks, Karl uses his influence to take over Gud’s patronage of Allina, implying to Schwester Ziegler that he plans to impregnate her. He begins visiting daily. Karl tells Allina that Albert was the captured operative whose trail led Gud to Badensburg. Albert is dead.

Karl asks Allina to steal files from Hochland Home’s Central Filing office. She discovers that children’s records have been stripped to a single page bearing a coded notation indicating a transfer authorized by Himmler. The children are being sent to research facilities for experimentation. Karl persuades Himmler to approve an alternative: a 90-day experiment rehabilitating 10 of the neglected children through exercise and speech training. Allina is named program director and must choose which 10 to save, knowing the rest face experimentation.

As her relationship with Karl deepens, Allina reveals that her mother was Jewish. Karl promises to protect her and shares his own secret: His grandmother was a Russian Jew who fled the pogroms, making Karl a Mischling as well. Since 1936, Karl has been covertly smuggling Jewish families to safety, funded by his Aunt Adele in Switzerland. Karl takes Allina to a secret Shabbat service in a rabbi’s cellar, where she connects for the first time with her mother’s faith. Their physical relationship develops slowly as Allina battles severe trauma responses, and Karl remains patient.

The rehabilitation program launches with Rilla as Allina’s assistant. Rilla discovers that singing and dancing motivate the children. When Allina discovers she is pregnant, Karl takes Allina to his family home, Sonnenblumen Haus (the Sunflower House), and proposes. After initially framing the proposal as practical protection, he admits he has loved her since their first meeting. Allina accepts, and they marry in a brief civil ceremony.

At the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth, Karl arranges for Allina to meet Sir Nevile Henderson, the British ambassador, establishing a potential escape route out of Germany. Allina also comes face-to-face with Gud and stares him down, reclaiming her power. Karl confirms that diplomatic negotiations have collapsed and war is imminent.

By 1941, Karl is stationed in Prague overseeing the forced relocation of Jews while secretly smuggling children to England. During a visit home, he confesses he was ordered to execute a Jewish toddler at Theresienstadt, a concentration camp in occupied Czechoslovakia, and carried out the order. Consumed by guilt, he tells Allina that he and his friend Markus Klemperer plan to stop Hitler and asks her to flee to Switzerland with their daughter, Katrine, when he sends word. Meanwhile, Berta Schneider, a coldly ambitious resident of Hochland Home, warns Allina that she has been watching her and threatens to expose how she handed over files to Karl.

The signal arrives: a coded call claiming Karl’s aunt is ill. Alexander Schäfer, a member of Karl’s team, escorts Allina and Katrine to a train. In Switzerland, Karl’s Aunt Adele, a fierce elderly woman, has already placed dozens of smuggled Jewish children with local families. After a decoy boards a return train in Allina’s clothes, Allina and Katrine hide in Adele’s cellar. On the sixth day, a police officer delivers the news that Karl has been executed by firing squad for plotting to kill Hitler. Adele arranges for her driver to take Allina and Katrine through France and Spain to Lisbon, where they wait six weeks for passage to the US. Karl’s last gift awaits there: identity papers restoring her name to Allina Strauss.

In the framing narrative, Katrine struggles with the revelation that her father was an SS officer but comes to understand the impossible choices her parents faced. She recognizes her mother’s lifelong silence as the same pattern of protective secrecy that shaped every generation of their family. At Katrine’s urging, she and Allina begin attending Shabbat services, learn German, and read Karl’s love letters together.

Allina dies peacefully in 2009. In the Epilogue, Katrine visits her mother’s grave and places sunflowers at the headstone. She reflects that she has told her own daughters everything, so that secrets will no longer cast a shadow over their family.