Edith Hahn Beer

Edith Hahn Beer, born in 1914, wrote The Nazi Officer's Wife, a memoir about her life and struggles for survival during the rein of Adolf Hitler. Edith goes chronologically through her life and tells the truths about the constant fear she lived in. Throughout her entire ordeal, perhaps her biggest fear was that her identity would be revealed and lost at the same time. Yet despite the risk it posed to her life, Edith Hahn created a remarkable collective record of survival: She saved every set of real and falsified papers, letters she received from her lost love, Pepi, and photographs she managed to take inside labor camps.

Edith Hahn returned to her home of Vienna, Austria, after fourteen months in Nazi labor camps to find her mother had been deported. Her father passed many years earlier and her two sisters fled for Palestine in hopes of escaping Nazi takeover of their homeland. Edith was left with no one or no place to turn to and as a result, she was forced to change her identity in order to survive. She obtained identity paper from a good Austrian friend, Christl. Edith was now Christina Maria Margarethe Denner, but she would go by Grete Denner. Every aspect of Edith's life would revolve around securing her identity, essentially surviving. For example, her first move was to Munich, Germany, where she began to work at the Red Cross as a nurse. Edith chose this particular place because she would receive food rations there, where as everyone else received them from the Rations Office, which required a national identity card; Grete did not have one. Even though no one could tell that Grete was actually Edith Hahn, she still feared for the worst. It was a new struggle daily and she longed for the life she once knew.

Edith dreamed of good things and participated in deep political discussions. When Edith was twenty-four and an aspiring law student with only one exam left to finish her schooling and her future looked very bright. Edith fell in love with a young and intelligent Pepi Rosenfeld. However, it would soon dim when Hitler and the Nazis took over Austria. When the Nazis came to power all hope was lost for Edith. Five years of school and the law career she had dreamed of was denied her because she was a Jew and no longer welcome. After her two younger sisters Hansi and Mimi had become Zionist, Edith and her mother had to become registered and made to wear a Jewish cross on their clothes at all times. Edith was sent to two labor camps where she stayed and worked. Afraid and scared that someone would reveal her true Jewish identity Edith, now known as Grete Denner, guarded her every move carefully, to keep her new identity hidden.

Grete posed as the perfect German woman and worked as a nurse at the Red Cross in Munich. When Grete fell in love with a member of the Nazi party, Werner Vetter, she never really became herself but got better at becoming Grete. Grete loved Werner and cherished her time with him, but when he asked her to marry him, she was very unsure. Edith knew that she had to tell him her secret before she could ever accept his proposal. Edith trusted Werner and wanted him to know the truth about who she was because if she had ever been discovered he would have thought that she betrayed him. She got up the nerve and softly whispered in his ear that she was Jewish. Edith was a U-boat, a lone Jew surrounded in Nazi Germany pretending to be an Aryan and loyal to the Fatherland. He surprisingly said that he would protect her. Even when they lived together they never spoke of Edith's past and they both pretended to believe that she was Grete Denner and not Edith Hahn. Edith longed for a child because she was afraid that she would soon be to old, but Werner did not want to be the father of a Jewish baby. Edith soon coaxed him into becoming a father.

Edith still longed for her family and knew that it was likely that she would never see them again. She wanted to go to Vienna to see some friendly faces because she was afraid that she was losing herself. Edith loved Werner and loved their life together, as much as possible for the time, but she felt herself slipping away. For example, while working at the Red Cross she remembered women coming in to have children and being put under anesthesia and letting things slip out without any knowledge of it. Edith endured the pain of natural childbirth to protect her self and gave birth to a healthy baby girl named Angela. Edith would struggle for the rest of