The life of Ilse Koch, a concentration camp guard nicknamed "The Bitch of Buchenwald", was strikingly similar to that of Hanna Schmitz, the role played by Winslet in the Oscar-tipped film, according to Professor Bill Niven, an expert on modern German history and culture.
Bernhard Schlink, the author of the 1995 novel adapted for the film, has refused to disclose whether there was any real-life basis to Schmitz. Yet Prof Niven, of Nottingham Trent University, said that "no other known female camp guard comes close to matching up with Schmitz".
Like Schmitz, Koch came from a poor background. She married Karl Koch, a close friend of Adolf Hitler, in 1936, and accompanied him when he was made commandant of Buchenwald camp the following year.
As a supervisor of the camp's female guards, she whipped and beat prisoners. Witnesses said she forced prisoners to rape one another and was eventually disciplined by Nazi chiefs for her brutality.
At her trial it was said by a prisoner who had worked in the camp laboratories that she had selected prisoners with distinctive tattoos to be killed in order to produce lampshades for her husband.
As Schmitz does in the film, Koch killed herself after being sentenced to life in prison for her crimes perpetrated in a concentration camp.
Before her suicide, Koch had been reunited with her illegitimate son, who had only recently discovered his mother's identity and crimes. He wrote poems and sent them to her in prison.
In the film, Schmitz is effectively reunited with Michael Berg, a former lover who is shocked to see her in the dock when he attends a war crimes trial. After she is sentenced, he sends her taped books to listen to in prison.
Prof Niven said: "We are told that Ilse's son wrote poems to her in prison and that Michael and Hanna were united by reading."
He added: "What also struck me was that Ilse was accused of using a riding crop to strike prisoners and Hanna, in the book, strikes Michael with a belt.
"This gratuitous violence is also echoed in the fact that both Hanna and Ilse selected prisoners for execution, and that there was a suggested sexual element underlying this. Ilse was accused of having affairs with prisoners, while Hanna was suspected by her camp inmates of selecting female prisoners to have sex with."