When Steve Watkins described the German terror tactic, “Night and Fog,” I snapped to attention.

Steve is a retired professor at the University of Mary Washington, the author of 12 books and a longtime friend. I sat beside his wife, Janet Watkins, for many years in the newsroom at the Free Lance-Star.

Steve and I recently appeared on “Behind the Page,” a Zoom panel of local writers sponsored by the Central Rappahannock Regional Library. Steve talked about his latest book, Stolen by Night, which will be published by Scholastic Press in November. The book is a fictional account of teenagers in the resistance movement in Paris during the German occupation in World War II.

The Germans invaded France and occupied Paris in 1940. Throughout their stay, they met with resistance from the French people, including many teenagers. At first, when the Nazis captured resistance fighters, they treated them according to the traditional rules of war. The community and the families of the victims usually knew what had happened to them.

Apparently, this was too cumbersome and too lenient for Adolph Hitler, who ordered something more efficient and ferocious. In 1941, he issued a secret order to begin the “Night and Fog” program. It stated that captured resistance fighters were to be shipped east to be tortured and placed in labor camps. The Nazis also made sure to erase all record of the victims.

“You don’t know where they are or what happened to them,” Steve said.

As Steve talked about this, my mind raced to Elvira Corder, one of the characters in my new book. Was Elvira the victim of an early version of “Night and Fog”?

Elvira was a young white woman living in Fauquier County, Va., in 1880. She became pregnant and ran away to Maryland with Arthur Jordan, her Black lover. Her father and his friends pursued and kidnapped the couple. They returned to Fauquier with Jordan and eventually lynched him.

As for Elvira, they stashed her in a Maryland hotel, saying that the family would return for her later. But they never did. She disappeared.

Hitler described “Night and Fog” as an efficient and enduring form of intimidation. It seems an apt way to describe what happened to Elvira.

She disappeared, and was presumably killed, because she resisted her father and the white, male authority he represented. She was “transformed into mist,” as the Germans would later describe it, never to be seen or heard from again.