At the height of the extermination process in Auschwitz-Birkenau, 23 young female prisoners were saved from the gas chambers to design, sew and cut beautiful clothes for the Nazis. The SS guards and officers’ wives patronized a fashion workshop established by Hedwig Höss, the Commandant’s wife, within the infamous concentration camp complex. In this workshop – known as the Upper Tailoring Studio—high-quality garments taken from the suitcases of murdered deportees were fitted for their new owners. Original outfits were also commissioned, some to be worn at the numerous social functions run for the SS at the camp, others by Nazi women of the highest level in Berlin society. This skilled work was carried out by prisoners – all women or teenage girls, many of them Jewish—who wielded needles to survive the gas chambers. The Dressmakers of Auschwitz will reveal and follow the fates of these extraordinarily brave women, some of whom had a far greater involvement in resistance within Auschwitz than was previously known, with far-reaching implications for Allied strategies towards the camp. While weaving together these women’s experiences, novelist and historian Lucy Adlington will explores the greed, cruelty and hypocrisy of the Third Reich.