The Nazi Officer's Wife

by Edith H. Beer

  The Nazi Officer’s Wife

  How One Jewish Woman Survived the Holocaust

  Edith Hahn Beer with Susan Dworkin

  Dedication

  In loving memory of my mother, Klothilde Hahn

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Preface

  One

  The Small Voice from Then

  Two

  The Hahns of Vienna

  Three

  Pepi Rosenfeld’s Good Little Girl

  Four

  The Trap Set by Love

  Five

  The Asparagus Plantation at Osterburg

  Six

  The Slave Girls of Aschersleben

  Seven

  Transformation in Vienna

  Eight

  The White Knight of Munich

  Nine

  A Quiet Life on Immelmannstrasse

  Ten

  A Respectable Aryan Household

  Eleven

  The Fall of Brandenburg

  Twelve

  Surfacing

  Thirteen

  I Heard the Fiend Goebbels, Laughing

  Fourteen

  Pepi’s Last Package

  Photographic Insert

  About the Authors

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Preface

  THE STORY THAT follows here was purposely buried for a long time. Like many people who survived a great calamity in which so many others lost their lives, I did not discuss my life as a “U-boat,” a fugitive from the Gestapo living under a false identity beneath the surface of society in Nazi Germany, but preferred to forget as much as possible and not to burden younger generations with sad memories. It was my daughter, Angela, who urged me to tell the story, to leave a written record, to let the world know.

  In 1997, I decided to sell at auction my archive of wartime letters, pictures, and documents. The archive was bought at Sotheby’s in London by two longtime friends and dedicated philanthropists of history—Drew Lewis and Dalck Feith. Their intention was to donate it to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and there it resides today. I am enormously grateful to them for their generosity and concern. The papers in that archive have helped to trigger many memories. I am grateful to my collaborator, Susan Dworkin, for her sympathy and understanding in helping me to express them.

  Many thanks to Nina Sasportas of Cologne, whose detailed research has enabled us to augment my recollections, and to Elizabeth LeVangia Uppenbrink of New York, who translated all the documents and letters into accessible and idiomatic English. Many thanks as well to Nicholas Kolarz; to Robert Levine; to Suzanne Braun Levine; to our editor, Colin Dickerman, and his associate, Karen Murphy; and to our publisher, Rob Weisbach—all treasured critics and comrades who have contributed gifts of spirit, energy, and wisdom.

  Finally, this book owes everything to Angela Schlüter, my daughter, for it was the loving spirit of her inquiry, her need to know, her search for the strange, miraculous past, that inspired me to tell the story at last.

  —EDITH HAHN BEER

  NETANYA, ISRAEL

  ONE

  The Small Voice from Then

  AFTER A WHILE, there were no more onions. My coworkers among the Red Cross nurses at the Städtische Krankenhaus in Brandenburg said it was because the Führer needed the onions to make poison gas with which to conquer our enemies. But I think by then—it was May 1943—many citizens of the Third Reich would have gladly forgone the pleasure of gassing the enemy if they could only taste an onion.

  At that time, I was working in the ward for the foreign workers and prisoners of war. I would make tea for all the patients and wheel it around on a little trolley, trying to smile and give them a cheery “Guten Tag.”

  One day when I brought the teacups back to the kitchen to wash, I interrupted one of the senior nurses slicing an onion. She was the wife of an officer and came from Hamburg. I believe her name was Hilde. She told me the onion was for her own lunch. Her eyes searched my face to see if I knew that she was lying.

  I made my gaze vacant and smiled my silly little fool’s smile and went about washing up the teacups as though I had absolutely no idea that this nurse had bought her onion on the black market especially to serve to a critically injured Russian prisoner, to give him a taste he longed for in his last days. Either thing—buying the onion or befriending the Russian—could have sent her to prison.

  Like most Germans who defied Hitler’s laws, the nurse from Hamburg was a rare exception. More typically, the staff of our hospital stole the food meant for the foreign patients and took it home to their families or ate it themselves. You must understand, these nurses were not well-educated women from progressive homes for whom caring for the sick was a sacred calling. They were very often young farm girls from East Prussia, fated for lifelong backbreaking labor in the fields and barns, and nursing was one of the few acceptable ways by which they could escape. They had been raised in the Nazi era on Nazi propaganda. They truly believed that, as Nordic “Aryans,” they were members of a superior race. They felt that these Russians, Frenchmen, Dutchmen, Belgians, and Poles who came into our clinic had been placed on earth to labor for them. To steal a plate of soup from such low creatures seemed not a sin but a perfectly legitimate activity.

  I think we must have had more than ten thousand foreign prisoners in Brandenburg, working in the Opel automobile factory, the Arado airplane factory, and other factories. Most of those whom we saw in the hospital had been injured in industrial accidents. While building the economy of the Reich, they would mangle their hands in metal presses, burn themselves in flaming forges, splash themselves with corrosive chemicals. They were a slave population, conquered and helpless; transported away from their parents, wives, and children; longing for home. I did not dare to look into their faces for fear of seeing myself—my own terror, my own loneliness.

  In our cottage hospital, each service was housed in a separate building. We on the nursing staff ate in one building, did laundry in another, attended to orthopedic cases in another and infectious diseases in yet another. The foreign prisoners were rigorously separated from German patients, no matter what was wrong with them. We heard that one time, a whole building was allocated to foreigners suffering from typhus, a disease that comes from contaminated water. How they had contracted such a disease in our beautiful historic city—which had inspired immortal concertos, where the water was clean and the food was carefully rationed and inspected by our government—was impossible for simple girls like us to comprehend. Many of my coworkers assumed that the foreigners had brought it on themselves, because of their filthy personal habits. These nurses managed not to admit to themselves that the disease came from the unspeakable conditions under which the slave laborers were forced to live.

  You must understand that I was not really a nurse but rather a nurse’s aide, trained only for menial tasks. I fed the patients who could not feed themselves and dusted the night tables. I washed the bedpans. My first day on the job, I washed twenty-seven bedpans—in the sink, as though they were dinner dishes. I washed the rubber gloves. These were not to be discarded like the thin white gloves you see today. Ours were heavy, durable, reusable. I had to powder their insides. Sometimes I prepared a black salve and applied it to a bandage and made compresses to relieve the pain of rheumatism. And that was about it. I could not do anything more medical than that.

  Once I was asked to assist at a blood transfusion. They were siphoning blood from one patient into a bowl, then suctioning the blood from the bowl and into the veins of another patient. I was supposed to stir the blood, to keep it from coagulating. I became nauseated and ran from the room
. They said to themselves: “Well, Grete is just a silly little Viennese youngster with almost no education, the next thing to a cleaning woman—how much can be expected from her? Let her feed the foreigners who have chopped off their fingers in the machines.”

  I prayed that no one would die on my watch. Heaven must have heard me, because the prisoners waited for my shift to be over, and then they died.

  I tried to be nice to them; I tried to speak French to the Frenchman to assuage their homesickness. Perhaps I smiled too brightly, because one August morning my head nurse told me that I had been observed to be too friendly with the foreigners, so I was being transferred to the maternity service.

  You see, there were informers everywhere. That was why the nurse who was preparing the forbidden onion for her Russian patient had been so frightened of me, even me, Margarethe, called “Grete” for short. An uneducated twenty-year-old nurse’s aide from Austria. Even I could conceivably be working for the Gestapo or the SS.

  IN THE EARLY fall of 1943, shortly after my transfer to the maternity service, an important industrialist arrived in an ambulance, which had brought him all the way from Berlin. This man had suffered a stroke. He needed peace and quiet and uninterrupted therapy. The Allies had been bombing Berlin since January, so it seemed to his family and friends that he would recover more speedily in Brandenburg, where no bombs were falling and the hospital staff was not beset with emergencies and he could count on more personal attention. Perhaps because I was the youngest and least skilled, and not badly needed elsewhere, I was taken away from the babies and assigned to care for him.

  It was not very pleasant work. He had become partly paralyzed, and he had to be led to the bathroom, hand-fed every morsel, bathed and turned constantly; and his flaccid, powerless body had to be massaged.

  I did not say much about my new patient to Werner, my fiancé, because I believed it might trigger his ambition, and that he would begin to press for the advantages we could gain from my close association with such an important personage. Werner was always on the lookout for advantages. Experience had taught him that advancement in the Reich occurred not because of talent and ability but because of connections: friends in high places, powerful relatives. Werner himself was a painter, imaginative and quite talented. Before the Nazi regime, his gifts had brought him nothing but joblessness and homelessness; he had slept in the forest under the rain. But then better times came. He joined the Nazi Party and become a supervisor of the paint department at the Arado Aircraft factory, in charge of many foreign workers. Soon he would be an officer in the Wehrmacht and my devoted husband. But he didn’t relax—not yet, not Werner. He was always looking for something extra, an angle, a way to climb upward to a spot where he would finally receive the rewards he felt he deserved. A restless and impulsive man, he dreamed of success. If I told him everything about my important patient, he might dream too much. So I told him just enough, no more.

  When my patient received flowers from Albert Speer, the Minister for Armaments and War Production, himself, I understood why the other nurses had been so eager to give me this job. It was risky to take care of high-ranking party members. A dropped bedpan, a spilled glass of water, could get you into serious trouble. What if I turned this patient too quickly, washed him too roughly, fed him soup that was too hot, too cold, too salty? And—oh, my God—what if he had another stroke? What if he died while I was the one taking care of him?

  Quaking at the thought of so many possibilities for doing something wrong, I tried with all my strength to get every single thing just right. So of course the industrialist thought I was wonderful.

  “You are an excellent worker, Nurse Margarethe,” he said as I was bathing him. “You must have considerable experience for one so young.”

  “Oh, no, sir,” I said in my smallest voice. “I have only just come from school. I do only what they taught me.”

  “And you have never taken care of a stroke patient before …”

  “No, sir.”

  “Amazing.”

  Every day he recovered a little more motion and his voice became less slurred. He must have been encouraged by his own recovery, for his spirits were high.

  “Tell me, Nurse Margarethe,” he said as I was massaging his feet, “what do people here in Brandenburg think about the war?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, sir.”

  “But you must have heard something…. I am interested in public opinion. What do people think about the meat ration?”

  “It is quite satisfactory.”

  “What do they think about the news from Italy?”

  Should I admit that I knew about the Allied landings? Did I dare? Did I dare not? “We all believe that the British will be defeated in the end, sir.”

  “Do you know anyone whose boyfriend is fighting on the Eastern front? What do the men write in their letters home?”

  “Oh, the men don’t write about the fighting, sir, because they don’t like to worry us, and also they fear that they might give away some important detail and the enemy might capture the mail and read it and their comrades might be endangered.”

  “Have you heard that the Russians are cannibals? Have you heard that they eat their young?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And do you believe that?”

  I took a chance. “Some people do, sir. But I think that if the Russians ate their babies, there would not be so many Russians as there apparently are.”

  He laughed. He had warm, humorous eyes and a gentle manner. He even reminded me a little of my grandfather, whom I had cared for years before when he suffered a stroke … so long ago, in another life. I began to relax with the important industrialist and let down my guard a little.

  “What could the Führer do to make his people happy, Nurse? What do you think?”

  “My fiancé says that the Führer loves Germany like a wife, and that is why he has no wife himself, and that he would do anything he could to make us happy. So if you could speak to him, sir, perhaps you could tell the Führer that we would be very very happy if he would send us some onions.”

  This amused him very much. “You are good medicine for me, Margarethe. You are plainspoken and kindhearted, the true soul of German womanhood. Tell me, is your fiancé fighting at the front?”

  “Not yet, sir. He has special skills, so he is working to prepare aircraft for the Luftwaffe.”

  “Ah, very good, very good,” he said. “My sons are also fine young men; they are doing very well these days.” He showed me a picture of his tall handsome sons in their uniforms. They had risen high in the Nazi Party and become important men. He was very proud of them.

  “It’s easy to be a cardinal,” I said, “when your cousin is the pope.”

  He stopped bragging and took a long, hard look at me. “I see you are not such a simple girl,” he said. “I see you are a very clever woman. Where were you educated?”

  My stomach tightened. My throat went dry.

  “That is something my grandma always said,” I said, turning him over to wash his back. “An old saying in our family.”

  “When I return to Berlin, I would like you to come with me as my private nurse. I shall speak to your superiors.”

  “Oh, I would love that, sir, but my fiancé and I are planning to be married soon, and so you see, I could not leave Brandenburg—it would not be possible! But thank you, sir! Thank you! I am honored! Most honored!”

  My shift ended. I bade him good night and walked, trembling and unsteady, out of his room. I was wet with perspiration. I told the coworker who arrived to replace me that this was because exercising my patient’s heavy limbs was such hard work. But in truth it was because I had almost revealed my disguise. The smallest indication of sophisticated wit—a literary reference or historical knowledge no ordinary Austrian girl could hope to have—was, for me, like a circumcision, a complete giveaway.

  As I walked home to the Arado apartment complex on the east end of town where Werner and I lived, I admonis
hed myself for the millionth time to be more careful and hide every sign of intellect, to keep my gaze vacant, my mouth shut.

  IN OCTOBER 1943, the other members of the Red Cross nursing contingent gave me a great honor. The municipality of Brandenburg was planning a rally, and each group of workers had to send a representative. For one reason or another, none of the senior nurses could attend; I suspect that they didn’t feel like celebrating because they had heard how badly Germany’s forces were faring in Russia, North Africa, and Italy (although how they would have heard that I cannot imagine, since German radio did not fully report it and everybody knew that to listen to Radio Moscow, the BBC, the Voice of America, or Beromünster of Switzerland was a criminal act akin to treason). I was selected to represent our workers’ group at the rally.

  Werner was very proud of me. I can imagine him bragging to his colleagues at Arado, “No wonder they chose my Grete! She’s a true patriot of the Fatherland!” He had a good sense of humor, my Werner, a real flair for life’s little ironies.

  I dressed carefully for the big day. I wore my Red Cross nurse’s uniform. My plain brown hair I combed in a simple natural style, no barrettes, curls, or pomade. I wore no makeup and no jewelry except a thin little gold ring with the tiniest diamond chip, a gift from my father on my sixteenth birthday. I was a small girl, not much more than five feet, and I had a lovely figure in those days. However, I kept it covered with baggy white stockings and a shapeless pinafore. It was not a time when a person like me wanted to look especially attractive in public. Nice, yes; neat, yes. But most important, plain. Nothing to draw attention.