I just want you to come home, Mom.

This is a story that begins with a dying wish.

One thing I would like you to do.

My mother's last request that my sister and I

finish writing the memoir she'd started

about her German childhood

when her city burned

and her father designed a secret super weapon

for Adolf Hitler.

My grandfather, a man named Robert Lesser, headed the Nazi project to build the world's

first cruise missile, which terrorized millions, ripped his family apart,

and left a legacy that dogged my mother like a curse.

I think mom often felt like she suffered, you know, that's what she deserved.

Because her dad was a Nazi scientist and see what happened to the family.

My mom always seemed to be haunted by a question that was shrouded in time.

Who bombed a remote farmhouse at the end of the war and killed her mother?

And why? She had some secrets. Mom had some secrets.

She did. All we have to go on is the dusty family legend that the attack was British revenge

for my grandfather's flying bomb. You know, my experience, even with secret projects, nothing stays secret

forever.

The Odyssey to finish the twisted story our mom ran out of time to tell takes us deep inside our own ancestry,

to the dark intersection where family history and world history collide.

...