 Complete the following phrase:  Gast was born in Remscheid during the Second World War and slightly more than three months before most of the town was destroyed in a fire storm caused by aerial bombing. Her father, who died while she was still very young, was a driving instructor. The youngest of three siblings, she grew up in a conservative Catholic household in what became, in May 1949, the German Federal Republic West Germany. Intelligent and diligent in her studies, she became politically engaged and evidently inherited her parents political conservatism, joining the a hrefAssociation20of20Christian20Democratic20StudentsAssociation of Christian Democratic i.e. conservative Students Ring Christlich-Demokratischer Studenten  RCDSa and the mainstream centre-right CDU party. Like many people in western and central Europe, she was, according to her own later testimony, opposed to the 