The Nazi Officer's Wife

by Edith H. Beer

  She gave me the original papers—her baptismal certificate, her vacation ration stamp book. Then she and Elsa went to visit their father at Osnabrück. I was supposed to leave Vienna immediately, but I didn’t know where to go. I didn’t know Germany—I had been only to little towns like Aschersleben and Osterburg. I was so frightened that I could not summon even one simple idea.

  I went to the cinema to think.

  In the newsreel they showed some pictures of Goebbels opening the “Great German Art Exhibition of 1942” in Munich, at a new, low-slung, ugly building that Hitler thought was beautiful; it was called Das Haus der Deutschen Kunst, “The House of German Art.” Loud military music played as the works of art flickered by. There was a terrifying picture of the war on the Russian front, with German soldiers crawling across the great steppes into the flames and chaos of battle. There was a bust of Hitler by Pagels—that style of sculpture so well liked by the Nazis, in which all soft, human expression is distorted by a mien of ferocity and cruel determination. There was Ernst Krause’s group portrait of the members of the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler, holders of the Knights Cross and the Iron Cross. The most detested men in Europe had been made as handsome as movie actors and were set before us in glory as though they were indomitable heroes of a righteous cause. I saw The Judge, one of Arno Breker’s ghastly relief sculptures. This one depicted a grim-faced Germanic avenger about to draw his sword.

  But also … but also, you see, there were two white marble statues: Mutter mit Kind by Josef Thorak, a mother nursing her baby; and Die Woge—“The Wave”—by Fritz Klimsch, a woman lying outstretched, leaning on one arm, one knee bent, her hand on her knee.

  I looked at the statue, and something happened to me. How shall I explain this to you? It was a kind of epiphany. The Wave washed over me. I heard the statue speak to me. “Komm, Edith, komm zu mir.” I heard the voice of The Wave calling like my mother’s voice, and in it I heard love, security, kindness, blessing. It was a fantasy, of course; but it happened, I swear to you—it happened to me in my time of greatest fear and confusion, when I was about to un-become myself. This white marble statue spoke to me about peace and freedom and the promise of life. I felt that in the next minute she would leave the screen, her marble skin would warm and become flesh, and she would embrace me and tell me that I would be safe.

  “I have decided to go to Munich,” I said to Frau Doktor.

  I was never in my life more confident of any decision.

  I BOUGHT THE Munich newspaper, Münchner Nachrichten. In the “Rooms for Rent” section, a women in the little suburban town of Deisenhofen offered a room in exchange for sewing and mending. I thought: This is perfect for me. It is a sign that Munich is the right choice.

  Frau Doktor sold my mother’s Persian lamb coat and gave me the money. I left the jewelry with her, not as payment—neither of us would ever have considered such a thing—but for safekeeping. I hugged her close to me, blessing her with all my heart.

  I went to my cousin Jultschi’s house and picked up my suitcase with the six dresses Mama had made for me, and the shoes and underwear, the little nightgowns she had left. I kissed my poor cousin, feeling as sorry for her as she felt for me, and I kissed our darling little boy.

  I went to Pepi’s house. Anna was there, happy to see me dressed for departure. She talked about how a niece of hers had just this morning gone to travel in the Reich on vacation with the “Strength through Joy” program, how she had packed her up with cakes and sausages. I was sitting there quietly waiting for Pepi, and she didn’t even offer me a sandwich for the journey.

  Finally he came. He had brought me a present. It was a book of poems by Goethe which he himself had bound—rather clumsily—in a dusty blue paper cover. Deep inside the binding were my true identity papers, the ones that said I was Edith Hahn, a Jewess and a resident of Vienna. With this were my last exam papers, and my grade transcripts from the university.

  “Someday maybe you will need these,” he whispered. “To show someone what a brilliant law student you were in your previous life.”

  He walked me to the train station and put me on the night train for Munich. He did not kiss me good-bye. The time for kisses was over.

  There was no razzia, no search of passengers’ papers by the police, on the train. This was good luck—no razzia on the train from the Arbeitslager, when I could have been arrested for not wearing the star; none on the train to Hainburg, when I could have been arrested just for being on a train; and none on the train to Munich, when I was first carrying papers that said I was Christina Maria Margarethe Denner, twenty years old, an Aryan Christian. I rode all night in a compartment with other people, pulled my coat over me, and slumped down so that, whoever I was now, I should not be noticed.

  During that long terrible ride to Munich, I finally swallowed the bitter pill of my lover’s rejection and poisoned myself with it. I murdered the personality I was born with and transformed myself from a butterfly back into a caterpillar. That night I learned to seek the shadows, to prefer silence.

  In the morning, I stood in the station and looked around at the Germans. They seemed just fine—healthy, pink, well-fed. Swastika armbands and Hitler’s picture were everywhere. Red and black and white banners fluttered from the walls and the roofs, and martial music was playing. There were so many pretty, laughing women; so many confident, decorated soldiers. You could buy every sort of flower and wine, and wonderful things to eat. A holiday place, this Munich, with high spirits and happy people.

  I thought: Now I am like Dante. I walk through hell, but I am not burning.

  EIGHT

  The White Knight of Munich

  IN FACT, I had journeyed not into hell but to a corner of heaven, to the little town of Deisenhofen outside of Munich and the cheerful home of Herr and Frau Gerl. When she opened her front door and saw me, she gasped. I understood what must have alarmed her. She saw a tiny, thin, exhausted girl, with haunted eyes and a timorous voice, too nervous to say her own name properly.

  “Margare … the … D … D … Denner. But everybody calls um … um … me Grete.”

  “Do you know what I think?” she said. “I think you must go right to bed and I’ll bring you coffee and cake. Now do as I say, there you go.”

  Every time I go to bed at night in my apartment in Netanya, it is a little bit like going to bed at Frau Gerl’s house that first morning after the train ride to Munich. Safe at last—safe enough to shut your eyes and sleep.

  Frau Gerl was a humorous, imaginative woman, a nurse by profession. Her husband worked for the courts, I believe. She had met him the way she met me—through a newspaper advertisement. They had a little boy, about four years old. As Protestants in a Catholic town, they lived in some isolation from their neighbors. That suited me fine.

  Instead of paying rent, I sewed for Frau Gerl three days a week. I made skirts out of her husband’s old robes, remodeled his shirts to fit her, made little outfits for her son, mended the sheets. I told her that my mother had died and my father had married a young woman, only a few years older than I was, and that this new wife hated me and made my life in Vienna a misery, so I had fled and applied for employment with the Red Cross. She believed me. She called me her Dennerlein. Her only rule was that she didn’t want any boys coming to visit. I was happy to comply.

  “Before the war,” she told me, “I worked for a Jewish lawyer, taking care of his mother. But then the government said I could not work for them anymore. The old lady cried to see me go. And then the lawyer was arrested. And then I was arrested too.”

  We were sitting in her sunny kitchen. I was sewing. She was mashing potatoes.

  “They accused me of having an affair with my employer. ‘Where does he keep his gold?’ they asked. How should I know, I said, do I look like a miner? ‘You were a servant! You must have seen!’ I was a nurse. I said, I saw bedpans.”

  She laughed. But by now the potatoes were liquefied.

  “They brought my employer to
see me in prison,” Frau Gerl continued. “Ah, that poor man, he had been so abused by them. And you know what he did, Grete? He fell down on his knees before me and begged my forgiveness that my association with his family should have landed me in this terrible place.”

  “What happened to him?” I dared to ask.

  “Gone,” she said. “Disappeared. The whole family.”

  Sitting in Frau Gerl’s kitchen those first few weeks in Deisenhofen, I heard stories I could not believe.

  “The SS men are often quite attractive—racially they are just perfect, you know—but everybody is afraid of them, so nobody wants to be their friend and they are very lonely.”

  I sighed regretfully—ah, the poor SS!

  “So the government has taken pity on them and persuaded the girls from the Hitler Youth to sleep with them and have racially perfect babies who are raised in government nurseries like pine trees.”

  I burst out laughing.

  “Oh, this cannot be, this must be somebody’s propaganda …”

  “It’s called Lebensborn,” she said, rolling out her dough with authority. “When you go to Munich, you will see the office.”

  A GOOD MOOD animated the city of Munich in August 1942, making it throb and dance, because the Germans were winning the war. People on vacation thronged to national sites like the beer hall where Hitler had made his Putsch against the Bavarian authorities in November 1923, and the House of German Art, home of my “magic statue.”

  I walked through the bustling streets, shrinking into my clothes but wildly curious. There were exhibits, operas, band concerts. I saw SS men from the Baltic countries. They didn’t speak a word of German, but they still wore that uniform. What would happen to the Jews of Vilna, the city my father had called the Jerusalem of Europe, with such people in power? I saw Russian prisoners of war doing heavy construction work, guarded by a German with a rifle, their clothes marked with a red circle.

  I saw a middle-aged Jew with a yellow star on his coat, scrubbing the streets. My heart twisted in my chest. If only I could touch him, speak to him. I walked past him without even daring to turn my head. And then I found myself staring at the offices of the Lebensborn program, just as Frau Gerl had said.

  Along with my proven gift for going unnoticed, which I had discovered in Vienna in the days after the Dollfuss assassination, I was now wrapped in a further disguise called Grete. She was quiet, shy, very young, and inexperienced, with no ambitions, no opinions, no plans. She did not seek to meet people but was always ready to be polite and helpful.

  This girl would sometimes attract the notice of young German soldiers on leave in Munich, lonely, with no one to talk to, and they would strike up a conversation and suggest a stop at a café.

  Remembering how Christl dealt with the Gestapo, I would accept. To be honest, I desired primarily that someone should buy me a meal. I was living on the money that Frau Doktor had saved for me from the sale of Mama’s fur coat, and it was running out fast. Every sandwich and every piece of cake helped.

  Usually these boys wanted to talk about themselves. They would like me because I was such a good listener. Of course, I told them nothing about myself. That turned out to be surprisingly easy. People didn’t want to know too much in those days. They had their own thoughts and secrets and troubles. It was wartime, after all. If a young soldier wanted to see me again, I would agree, make the date, and then not keep it. He never came looking for me, because he had no idea where to look.

  Just about that time, the Red Cross summoned me for an interview. It was in the large, expensive home of an upper-crust woman. She wore a maroon velvet dress. Her terrace overlooked the River Isar. She had Hitler’s picture hanging in her parlor and a diamond swastika on a gold chain hanging around her neck. She asked me about my background.

  With precision, I rattled off every detail I had memorized from the papers that Pepi had secured about Christl’s grandparents. My grandfather on my father’s side was born in such and such a city, studied in this school, worked at that job. My grandfather on my mother’s side died of such and such an illness, attended this church, founded that company. The only gap in my knowledge concerned my—Christl’s—mother’s parents. Although Aryan papers had been found for the maternal grandfather, they could not be found just yet for the maternal grandmother. Still, since my—Christl’s—mother was dead and her father had been an officer in the German Army, the Red Cross woman let it slide.

  “You show admirable knowledge of your forebears, Grete. An impressive display. Most of our applicants are not so well informed.”

  My stomach tightened. “Fool! You knew too much!” I thought. “You’ll give yourself away by knowing too much! Watch that!”

  She said I would receive my assignment in a few weeks.

  Gradually I learned to wear my disguise with greater comfort. I moved like a speck of dust on a bubble—invisible, yet vulnerable to destruction at any moment.

  I went to the opera, La Bohème. I believe that Trude Eipperle was singing the role of Mimì. A soldier asked if he could say that I was his bride because military couples didn’t have to wait in line for tickets. Of course, I agreed. We received our tickets right away. Then he took me to a crowded restaurant. I guess he must have been a high-ranking fellow, because when a waitress passed by with two plates full of food meant for other people, he took them right out of her hands and put them down at our table, and nobody protested.

  Frau Gerl decided to buy me a dress. She had a few extra points on her Kleiderkarte—the ration card for textiles and clothing—and since I said I had used up my points (in fact, I didn’t dare buy any clothing, because Johann Plattner had warned me not to), she gave her points to me. She took me to a shop that sold the traditional dirndl, a style popular then, because it recalled the Nordic tradition celebrated by the Nazi regime. I remember the dress exactly. It was red, and it came with a white blouse and a matching jacket. Frau Gerl stood behind me. I could see her in the mirror. How delighted she was at the fit, the cut, the style! I suddenly remembered my mother grinning in the same way, remembered the tape measure around her neck and her silver thimble and her shining eyes.

  “Grete? Are you all right?”

  I nodded, recovering quickly.

  The store owner must have been caught up in Frau Gerl’s enthusiasm because she sold that dress to us for fewer coupons than she might have.

  I wore that dress when the Gerls took me to a beer garden that featured the Weiss Ferdl Cabaret. The place was packed with Germans high on their Blitzkrieg, out for an evening with their loved ones, feeling prosperous, enjoying their new apartments and their new businesses, so cheaply acquired—from where, they did not stop to wonder.

  “The Nazis are such good-hearted, generous people!” exclaimed the comedian. “I hear they have stopped bathing themselves and have given over the use of their bathtubs to their geese, so that the geese will be nice and clean and fat when they are slaughtered for Christmas dinner!”

  That comedian soon disappeared.

  AUGUST 28, 1942. A Friday, steaming hot. I remember the date because it was Goethe’s birthday. At the Maximilianaeum, a famous art gallery in Munich, I sat down before a lush, gold-toned landscape, probably one of those paintings by Schmid-Fichteberg or Herman Urban that the Nazis loved because they made Germany look like the Elysian fields. I tried to see what they saw, to think of their land in those bold heroic yellows and oranges and wipe away my memory of the exhausted girls crawling in the mud behind the emaciated Frenchman.

  A tall man sat down next to me. He had thin, silky blond hair, bright blue eyes, and a thin hard mouth—an Aryan through and through. He wore civilian clothes and, in his lapel, a swastika pin, the sign of a Nazi Party member. His hands were strong and clean, a craftsman’s hands. He looked down at me and smiled.

  “This landscape we have here before us is a perfect example of the Bavarian Heimat style,” he said. “But I am sure you already know that.”

  “No, I di
dn’t.”

  “Well, in this style, the painter celebrates the Fatherland. The farmers are always healthy and strong, the fields and the cows are always very full and fat, and the weather is always beautiful.” He glanced at my hands, looking for a wedding ring, and found none. “Just as you are, Fräulein …?”

  I did not answer. I inched away from him on the bench, to show that I had no interest in him. He was not in the least deterred.

  “I work in Brandenburg-Havel,” he said. “We have all sorts of farmers thereabouts, but none quite so handsome and robust as those in the picture. Do you think perhaps someone is having a fantasy?”

  I suppose I allowed him a little smile at that.

  “You know, our Führer loves the arts. He buys two or three hundred paintings every year. If you can get a picture selected for exhibition in the House of German Art, your reputation is made. It also helps if your uncle is on the board of Krupp or your mother has tea with Frau Goebbels.”

  “Are you a painter?”

  “Yes.”

  “Really! That is your profession?”

  “My profession is to supervise the paint department at Arado Aircraft. My training, and my desire, is to be a painter. Did you hear that the Führer gave Sepp Hilz his own money out of his own pocket to build a studio? And Gerhardinger became a professor because the Führer ordered it. From an ordinary painter to a university professor, overnight.”

  “No, I didn’t know any of this.”

  “Shall we walk through the gallery?”

  “All right.” He was so much bigger than I was that I found it hard to keep up with him. He talked and talked.

  “Personally, I like the classics. The Führer prefers nineteenth-century Austro-Bavarian painters like Spitzweg. And Grützner. Me, I am a big fan of Angelika Kauffmann.”

  “Uh … who?”

  “She was an eighteenth-century genius, and good-looking too, at least according to her self-portrait. Klopstock got her interested in German history, and she painted scenes from Hermann’s victories.” His face was animated. His eyes sparkled. “There’s one Kaufmann picture of Hermann returning to the Teutoburg Forest…. The pretty wife who has been home waiting while he was off fighting the Romans comes out to meet him, and the local girls are dancing. I love that picture.”