The Nazi Officer's Wife

Edith Hahn Beer, Susan Dworkin

• Publisher: William Morrow
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780062190048
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Holocaust History
• Index: History

#1 New York Times Bestseller

Edith Hahn was an outspoken young woman in Vienna when the Gestapo forced her into a ghetto and then into a slave labor camp. When she returned home months later, she knew she would become a hunted woman and went underground. With the help of a Christian friend, she emerged in Munich as Grete Denner. There she met Werner Vetter, a Nazi Party member who fell in love with her. Despite Edith's protests and even her eventual confession that she was Jewish, he married her and kept her identity a secret.

In wrenching detail, Edith recalls a life of constant, almost paralyzing fear. She tells how German officials casually questioned the lineage of her parents; how during childbirth she refused all painkillers, afraid that in an altered state of mind she might reveal something of her past; and how, after her husband was captured by the Soviets, she was bombed out of her house and had to hide while drunken Russian soldiers raped women on the street.

Despite the risk it posed to her life, Edith created a remarkable record of survival. She saved every document, as well as photographs she took inside labor camps. Now part of the permanent collection at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., these hundreds of documents, several of which are included in this volume, form the fabric of a gripping new chapter in the history of the Holocaust—complex, troubling, and ultimately triumphant.

ELEVEN

The Fall of Brandenburg

I LIVED IN hope. I did not think of my sisters except, sometimes, to comfort myself with the idea that they were safe in Palestine. I did not think of Mina or any of my other friends from the labor camp. I tried desperately not to think of Mama. Because, you see, if I thought about them, I would have lost my mind. I would not have been able to bear my disguise another minute. So I did everything in my power to protect myself from the depressing power of Rabbi Hertz’s suggestion that I was only a “remnant” and to delude myself that I was leading a “normal” life.

“Normal.” That’s what I said to everyone in later years. I lived as a housewife, a mother. We had a “normal” life. My God.

The milkman delivered our ration of milk. The Nazi paper—Der Völkische Beobachter—was delivered every day by a boy on a bicycle. I tried to go shopping where one did not have to greet the storekeeper with the Nazi salute. We lived on our rations. Frau Doktor sent us some extra things: nonperishables like rice, noodles, lentils, and peas. Frau Gerl sometimes sent me ration cards for bread. I sent as many of my milk rations as I could to Jultschi for her Otti, and I saved all of my coffee rations for Tante Paula, who loved her cup of coffee more than anything. We had cabbage and potatoes; we had bread, sugar, salt, and occasionally a little meat—and this was enough for me to feed our family.

The farmers outside the city made fortunes from bartering, because people would bring their most valuable furnishings to trade for some carrots, maybe a slab of bacon, or some fresh cheese. People joked that the farmers now owned so many Persian rugs that they put them in the cowsheds. I heard that there were used clothing exchanges, but I feared they would require me to show my nonexistent clothing card, so I never went. I just sewed all the time.

I was friendly enough with Karla, the singing lady upstairs. She and her husband, an older man, had long wanted to adopt a child, but for some reason, even with all the orphans in the country, they couldn’t find one. One day, they came home with a brand-new infant. I knew they had received her almost directly from the mother’s arms, and I could imagine from what sort of liaison she had originated. But what did it matter? She was a lucky child to have these nice people for parents. I often gave Karla baby clothes that Angela had outgrown. Karla, in turn, saved everything for my neighbor across the hall, Frau Ziegler, who already had a toddler and was now pregnant again since her husband’s last leave from the front.

The only person who ever came over to talk was Hilde Schlegel. She would sit in the kitchen and tell me how she longed for Heinz’s forthcoming furlough. We talked about the weather, rations, the difficulties of washing, how lucky I was that a friend in Vienna had sent me some washing powder. (Actually, the powder belonged to Anna Hofer; Pepi had stolen it from under her sink.) Hilde often went on and on about her mother-in-law. That gave me an idea.

“Let’s invite your mother for a visit,” I said to Werner.

“What?”

“She’s never seen the baby.”

“She won’t care about the baby.”

“That’s impossible. Who could not be charmed by our little sweetheart?”

The elder Frau Vetter stayed with us for a week. She had a flat blank wrinkled face and wore her hair in a gray bun at the back of her head. She hardly ever spoke to me. She wore a starched white apron. She was so neat and tidy that she didn’t even want to touch Angela for fear of being soiled by a dirty diaper or a bit of drool. She drank beer all day, quietly, and fell asleep snoring, her apron still unsullied. She reminded me of Aschersleben in the snow—white and clean on the outside, but inside, ice cold and unloving. One day, I came home with Angela and she was gone. She had brought nothing. She took nothing. Werner had been absolutely right about his mother.

I cuddled my pretty baby and whispered: “Don’t you worry, little one. It doesn’t matter that Grandma didn’t say good-bye. Soon the war will be over; we have only to wait and be rescued by the victorious Soviet army. And when the ghettos of Poland are opened, your other Grandma will come out and you will see, she will sing to you and cradle you and kiss your eyes.”

AS PEPI HAD said, the Nazis grew more dangerous as the war turned against them. The propaganda machine tried to foster hope in the population with talk of “secret weapons.” But these weapons never quite seemed to materialize. The Gestapo didn’t trust the people to be loyal to the Führer in times of trouble. They hunted for deserters, who were shot if discovered. They ransacked the huts of foreign workers, looking for signs of sabotage. They despised the lonely married women, many of them widows by now, who took up with foreign workers. By 1944, almost a quarter of the court cases concerned illicit liaisons between German women and foreigners, and every day three or four workers were executed for crimes like petty thievery and adultery.

Sudden razzias would occur, poof, like that, for no reason, putting ordinary citizens on edge and filling my days with tension. Once I remember, I was at a pharmacy with Angela when two SS men walked in and demanded to see the papers of the proprietress. She handed them over without a word. The SS men scrutinized the stamps, the official signatures. I hung back among the medicines, planning my strategy, as I always did: If they ask for my papers. I’ll give them. If they think there is something wrong with my papers, I’ll act dumb and sweet. If they imprison me, I’ll tell them I stole the papers, all by myself, me alone—no one helped me, my husband had no idea …

Satisfied, the SS men gave the papers back to the proprietress and left the store. One of them stopped to smile and cluck sweetly at my baby in her carriage.

Werner now worked a seven-day week, twelve hours a day. His Dutch employees declared themselves too religious to work on Sundays. Although it seemed odd that foreign laborers should have a shorter work week than Germans, Werner defended them to the company, and they got their way in the end. You see, every able-bodied German was fighting, making the loss of skilled labor so critical that these foreign prisoners had now become too valuable to offend. Werner made a concerted personal effort to treat them decently. An appreciative Frenchman sent us a beautiful box, intricately carved and inlaid with tiny pieces of wood and metal. I understood that he had probably kept his soul alive by concentrating on making this object of beauty. I had been there myself.

The supply lines were being bombed. Production slowed. Werner had to travel to companies like Daimler-Benz, Siemens, Argus, Telefunken, Osram, AEG, and others to acquire materials for Arado. Inside the factory, constant propaganda exhorted the workers to greater and greater efforts. Large photos of Arado employees who had died at the front hung on the walls, a stark reminder that no matter how long and hard you labored at home, it was better than dying in Russia. Incidents of sabotage increased. We later heard that French workers at Arado colluded with German communists to build a secret radio and send messages to the Allies.

In addition to his endless work week, Werner also had to put in time for civil defense because we were now living under almost constant bombardment.

If Werner was home, and the air raid sirens sounded, we would put Angela in the laundry basket and each of us would take a handle and carry her down to the shelter together—just as Mina and I had carried potatoes in Osterburg. But if I was by myself, I tried to take Angela down there as little as possible. There was no air, no light, and all the mothers and children were packed in together—it seemed to me like a recipe for disease because one infected child could sicken the entire group. A little boy in our building (Petra was his name, I think) did contract whooping cough in just that way, and died in his mother’s arms.

My greatest fear was of being caught inside, crushed inside the house or buried inside the shelter. My plan for a bombing was to run out into the open. Of course this seems idiotic now; but in wartime, people develop superstitious ideas of how they would and would not like to die. So when the bombers roared overhead, I would stay aboveground. I would put Angela in her basket on the floor, making little “walls” around her out of furniture and pillows. I would sit with my back to the window, so that the flying glass would hit me and not enter the flat and hit her. I kept a blanket ready in case I had to grab her and run.

In summer, the bombers came over from eight o’clock in the evening until midnight. The Americans flew in formation, so low that you could see their insignia. I organized my housework with the thought that, since the bombing would begin at eight, I must cook dinner and the next day’s breakfast and make sure the laundry was done and nothing was hanging outside after seven o’clock.

Every once in a while, the Americans surprised me. One day I had taken my usual walk with Angela in her pram, down the Wilhelmstrasse, away from the center of town. We had stopped to sit on the grass under a tree so I could give her a bottle. (You must understand that after three months I had no more milk in my breasts, an effect of the hunger I had endured in Osterburg and Aschersleben. Werner brought special milk from the pharmacy.) My baby lay on a blanket, laughing and cooing, wriggling with happiness as I nuzzled her little belly. And meanwhile the bombs smashed into the city over the horizon, the sky flashed with orange and black waves of death, the antiaircraft cannons roared. The earth beneath her shook and trembled—and Angela kicked her legs and laughed.

She kept me sane. She made me smile in the presence of death. She was my miracle. As long as I had her, I felt that any miracle could happen, that all the world could be saved.

I had always been able to catch a glimpse of Edith in the mirror. Now what I had feared when I became a U-boat began to happen. I did not recognize myself. I knew I was a German woman with a baby, but where was this lovely child’s grandma? Where were her aunts? Why wasn’t a great, warm, loving family swarming around her crib, bringing her presents, commenting on her extraordinary feats? I ached with longing for my mother. She would know who I was. She would recognize Grandmother Hahn’s fingers or Aunt Marianne’s nose in my baby.

“What’s the matter?” Werner asked.

“Longing,” I said. “I have this longing….”

“Don’t say another word. Put some things in a bag. I’ll be back at noon, and we’ll be on our way to Vienna.”

I did not say: It isn’t Vienna that I miss, it’s my mother who is lost out there somewhere in the empire your Führer has torn from the world’s heart.

Werner rode his bike to Arado and told them, again, that his mother’s home in the Rhineland had been bombed and he had to go help her, and they believed him again. (With this kind of competence at the top, it is no wonder that the French workers and the German communists had so much success with their secret radio.)

What a strange trip that was! While exhausted Wehrmacht soldiers stood in the crowded train corridor, the nurse attendants fussed over Angela, I was helped to a seat, and I rode with my husband in a compartment like a queen. Having a baby in Germany had become, next to dying at the front, the highest form of service to the state. I think that by then the Nazis no longer wanted babies because they felt it was their racial destiny to repopulate a “new Europe.” I think they wanted babies to repopulate Germany itself because the country had lost so many people in the war.

We rang the bell at Jultschi’s house. She took one look at me with my Nazi husband and my German baby and she said, “You are insane!”

Maybe I was a little insane by then just from being invisible.

Only Frau Doktor gave me the reaction I longed for. “This child is named Maria. For you,” I told her. Her strong face melted. She cooed to Angela, cuddled her; she bounced her and changed her and crawled on the floor next to her—everything that I knew my mother would have done.

Frau Doktor went out of town for a few days, and I stayed in her flat on the Partenstrasse. Werner stayed in a hotel.

Pepi took a walk with me down the streets of our youth. The baby was sleeping. Pepi was pale. The dark circles around his eyes told the story of th...