Nadja Auermann was born on March 19, 1971, to a banker couple in West Berlin, Germany. Though interested in architecture and furniture design, she left school at 18 and began waiting tables. "I wasn't sure what I wanted to do," she once confessed in an interview. "I was bright, but I decided to take a year off to think about things and work as a waitress or something. But then I was sitting in a café and a woman came up and asked me to model. This time I thought, why not? I called her a few weeks later."

In 1990 Nadja moved to Paris to pursue modeling and signed with Karins Modeling Agency. After a year with little work, she left Karins and signed with Elite. Within months she was starring in Benetton ads and booking jobs with photographers like Paolo Roversi and Ellen von Unwerth, who featured Nadja exclusively in a Vogue spread entitled "She's an Enigma." As Nadja's visibility increased, she began changing her look. She caused a booking frenzy when she went platinum in 1993, and the following year she chopped her locks for an edgier do. By then she was an established cover girl, appearing in classic Gianni Versace ads alongside fellow supermodels Cindy Crawford, Christy Turlington, Claudia Schiffer, and Kristen McMenamy. Nadja's status was further cemented when she landed both Harper's Bazaar and Vogue's cover for the September 1994 issues—a rare feat for a model of any caliber.

The "blonde angel" also lent her face to projects outside of modeling. She rocked out with super Linda Evangelista in George Michael's "Too Funky" video, and has starred in a number of German films. Nadja is also a world record holder, having won the Guinness title of Model with the Longest Legs (an astounding 44") in 1997 and 1999.

Nadja continues to model on and off, but mostly enjoys being a mother to daughter Cosima son Nicholas and vacationing in the German Baltic spa haven of Heiligendamm. She walked as a sexy nurse in the Richard Prince-inspired Louis Vuitton Spring 2008 collection, and in September 2009 was featured in a Harper's Bazaar spread shot by the legendary Peter Lindbergh, who once called the German beauty his muse.