The Nazi Officer's Wife

by Edith H. Beer

That was how I eventually came to work in the maternity ward—a wonderful spot for me, as distant as possible from the war and its losses.

  At that time it was customary for a woman to stay in the hospital for nine days after giving birth. The babies were kept in a special room and brought to the mothers for feeding. Usually maternity patients were farmers’ wives with big families. Their older children would come to visit, bringing dolls and little wooden horses as though the infant were already a toddler and their playmate. How bizarre it was to see these plain, hardy folk wrapping their new-borns in the finest pure silk baby clothes sent home by the occupiers of Paris!

  We had no incubator, so when infants were born prematurely we fed them with an eye dropper. I cuddled the babies, changed them, and helped them to the mother’s breast. If the mother had no milk, I prepared tiny little bottles. A few times, people asked me to come to church and stand as godmother. I always said yes, but then I would make some last-minute excuse and not go. If I went to church, it would be obvious to everyone that I had never been at a Christian service in my life.

  I loved this work. I felt that my mother walked with me through the maternity ward, steadying my hand. I spoke softly to the children, with her soft voice. At a time when every footstep in the hall, every knock on the door, created panic, it brought me some peace of mind.

  There were moments of crisis, of course. One woman developed a thrombosis after giving birth, and her leg had to be amputated. Another woman arrived at the hospital beaten and lacerated. Her child did not live ten minutes. She already had three other young children, barely two years apart. They waited for her outside, dumped there by the father. When she was recovering, she spoke to me of his brutality, his rages. When he came to get her, she didn’t want to leave with him. Her bruised eyes were glazed with terror. But we had no way to keep her.

  What most impressed me was the fact that when women were given anesthesia for the pain of childbirth, they would babble, saying all kinds of things that could have gotten them into serious trouble.

  One girl virtually admitted that her baby was not her husband’s but the child of a Polish slave laborer. She kept calling, “Jan! Jan, my darling!”

  I put my hand over her mouth, leaned close to her ear, and whispered, “Shhh.”

  A farm woman who had just given birth to twins admitted that she and her husband had been hoarding cheese and illegally slaughtering pigs. Another woman blurted out deliriously that she had heard her oldest son’s voice on Moscow Radio, which had begun broadcasting personal messages from captured German soldiers. This was by far the most serious political offense anyone spoke about. I could imagine her joy at knowing that her son had survived the Russian slaughter. How fortunate for her that I was the only one who heard her admit to it.

  IN MAY 1943 one of the doctors in the hospital noticed that I seemed thin and exhausted and called me in for an examination. He diagnosed malnutrition and recommended a few days in bed and some concentrated eating.

  Werner and I used the unexpected vacation time to take a trip to Vienna, for I had told him about Frau Doktor, Jultschi, Christl, and Pepi, and he was very keen to get to know them. I introduced him with a combination of pride—Look, I have found a friend, a protector; he says he loves me—and trepidation—but he is quite eccentric; he has a dangerous temper; on the other hand, maybe he can help in some way.

  Werner stayed in the Hotel Wandl on Petersplatz. I did not dare register at any hotel, so I stayed with my cousin. I took Werner to the Wienerwald to enjoy the panorama of the Danube. I took him climbing in the hills above the city.

  This is where I came as a girl, I did not say. On these trails I sang “La Bandiera Rossa,” in the days when a citizen could sing a socialist song like that aloud, in freedom.

  A sudden storm cracked in the sky overhead—lightning and thunder. I was scared, but not Werner; he enjoyed a good storm. We found shelter in a lean-to by the trail and he held me in his arms and comforted me while the wind howled outside. When we returned to Vienna the next day, Christl was ready to leave town, Jultschi was frantic, and Frau Doktor was pacing in her office like a lioness, grim with worry. They all thought we had been caught, you see. They thought we were in the hands of the Gestapo.

  Before we left, Christl showed us a large bolt of silk she had bought. It was hard for her to acquire stock for her shop, and she was thinking she might cut the silk into squares for souvenir scarves. But how should she decorate them?

  Werner smiled. He had an idea. “I will imprint each scarf with a scene of Vienna,” he said. “Saint Stephen’s on the corner of this one. The Opera on the corner of that one. This one in blue, that one in gold.”

  “But where will you get the colors?” Christl asked.

  “Leave it to me,” he answered.

  I understood that a few more jars of paint would soon disappear from the shelves of the Arado warehouse.

  I hated to leave my friends again, but I knew that now I had crossed some line; I had become Werner’s woman in their eyes as well as my own. They evaluated his strength and said to themselves, “Edith will be safe with this man”—just as I said to myself, “Hansi is safe with the British.” I was no longer a desperate victim in their eyes, starving, homeless. Now, by virtue of my protector, with his imaginative gifts, his skill as a craftsman, and his access to materials, I was actually in a position to help them.

  I HAD REACHED a new plateau of well-being. But not for one moment could I let down my guard. The price I was paying for my ascent was simultaneously to sink so deep into my disguise that I ran the risk of losing myself completely. With Vienna loosening its hold on me, I felt more and more unconnected to anything I had once called “real.” I began to fear that soon I might look in the mirror and see someone I myself could not recognize. “Who knows who I am anymore?” I asked myself. “Who knows me?”

  There I was in the maternity ward, with all the tiny babies, bathing and feeding them, cuddling them, soothing them when they cried. I watched the delight of their mothers when we brought them to be fed.

  I thought: “I am almost thirty years old. Not so young. I know firsthand the hideous feeling of losing my menstrual period and living without hope of having a child. Now I am fertile again, but maybe I won’t be for long. Maybe they’ll catch me and starve me again. Who knows? Who knows how long this war will last and what the future will bring? Maybe now is my only chance. I have a strong and virile lover, who has the wit and the will to tell fantastic lies, who is not afraid. Maybe he can give me a baby. If I have a baby, I will not be alone. Someone will be mine.”

  I began to talk to Werner about having a child. He did not want one, not with me. You see, he had absorbed much of the Nazi race propaganda, and he believed that Jewish blood would somehow dominate in any child of ours. He didn’t want that. I had to find a way to overcome his reluctance.

  I waited for Werner to come home at night. I stood at the stove and listened for his footsteps on the short flight of stairs outside. I knew he often peeked through the keyhole, just because it pleased him so much to see me standing at the stove cooking his dinner. Frau Doktor’s words came back to me. “They all want a woman waiting in a comfortable room, with a good meal ready, and a warm bed.” I could feel him watching me. My scalp tingled. He came in the door. I pretended to be so engrossed in cooking that I did not notice him entering, and he came up behind me and lifted me away from the stove, with my stirring spoon still in my hand.

  After dinner, I suggested that we play chess. I played badly and he always won. And because it was chess, he always knew ahead of time that he was going to win, understanding, as I pretended not to, when I had made a wrong move. I loved watching Werner’s body relax and his face light up when he realized that he would win. The transparency of his happiness I found adorable. Chess always did the trick—it was the perfect mating game.

  I pondered each move. I dangled the rook between my forefinger and my thumb. I rolled the king thoughtfully between my palms. I
put it down in the wrong place. Werner captured it easily. My queen was completely exposed.

  I looked at him and smiled and shrugged helplessly. “Well, it looks as though you have triumphed again,” I said. “Congratulations.” I leaned across the table and kissed him.

  Werner caught me in his arms and picked me up and carried me to bed. Rushing, he reached into the drawer where he kept the condoms.

  “No,” I whispered. “Not tonight.”

  “I don’t want you getting pregnant,” he said.

  “I don’t care if I get pregnant,” I whispered. “I want to get pregnant.”

  “No,” he said.

  “Please,” I said.

  “No,” he said.

  “Dearest …”

  “Stop, Grete …”

  “Shhh.”

  It was the first time I had ever dared argue with Werner Vetter. But it was worth it. By September 1943, I knew I was going to have a baby.

  TEN

  A Respectable Aryan Household

  ALTHOUGH I WANTED to have a baby, that didn’t mean I wanted to get married. The idea of another stern Nazi bureaucrat scrutinizing my fake papers in order to qualify me for a marriage license made me sick with fear. And what could the notion of illegitimacy mean to me in my situation? I thought that by the time the ninth month passed, the Nazis would have lost the war and I would take my illegitimate baby and maybe marry its father or, if we didn’t want that, maybe marry somebody else.

  But Werner Vetter was a real citizen of the Reich. He had a reputation to uphold, and he absolutely refused to father an illegitimate child. “Besides, Tante Paula insists that if I am not good to you, she will never speak to me again,” he said lightly. “So I must make an honest woman of you.”

  There was no fighting him. We had to get married.

  I walked down the main street in Brandenburg, nodding hello to acquaintances, oblivious of the sparkling weather. At some grim administrative office, I met a man who was to me the keeper of the gates of hell, a humorless, gray-faced registrar. From my papers I gather that his name may have been Heineburg. He hung like a dark spider among his files, lists, and boxes of index cards and potentially deadly records, waiting, I daresay hoping, for some enemy of the state like me to come walking into his lair. Next to him was a stone bust of Hitler. Behind him was the Nazi flag.

  “Your father’s parents are Aryan, I see. Your mother’s father, I see, has a birth certificate, a baptismal certificate. Now. (Looking at the papers.) Now. Now what about your mother’s mother?”

  “Mother came from White Russia,” I offered. “Father brought her back from there after the First World War. He served with the Kaiser’s engineers.”

  “Yes, yes, yes, I see all that. But. (Looking again.) But. But what about your mother’s mother? Where are her racial papers?”

  “We have been unable to receive copies of them because of the battles and the interruption in communication.”

  “But this means we cannot know who she really was.”

  “She was my grandmother.”

  “But she may have been a Jewess. Which means that you yourself may be a Jewess.”

  I gasped in simulated horror and squinted at him as though I thought he had gone mad. He tapped his teeth with his fingernail and looked at me calmly through thick glasses that were speckled with dust. He had tiny eyes. My heart made a noise like a kettle-drum in my chest. I did not breathe.

  “Well. (Looking at me.) Well. Well, it is obvious just from looking at you that you could not possibly be anything but a pure-blooded Aryan,” he said.

  Suddenly, with a loud grunt, he smashed his rubber stamp down on the forms. “Deutschblütig”—“German-blooded”—said my papers at last. He gave me the marriage license, and I breathed again.

  The same man married me and Werner, at the same desk with the same bust of the Führer and the same flag, on October 16, 1943. Try to imagine what a romantic event it was, with this registrar presiding. I think the ceremony took all of three minutes.

  Hilde Schlegel, who was now six months pregnant herself, and her husband, Heinz, home from the front on leave, served as the witnesses. I wore a dress that my mother had made for me, to summon her presence in spirit, as though that might protect me in this potentially fatal charade. But I was a wreck. I was scared to death that I would forget to sign all my names—Christina Maria Margarethe Denner—and that somehow the pen would just write by itself, “Edith Hahn, Edith Hahn, that’s who I am, you bastards, I hate you, I pray that an American bomb falls right on this office and turns your statue and your flags and all your evil fascist records into dust.”

  We were supposed to receive a copy of Mein Kampf—Hitler’s gift to all newly married couples—but just that week the supply in Brandenburg had run out.

  We were entitled to extra ration cards because of our marriage: 150 grams (about 3 ounces) of meat; 50 grams of real butter, 40 grams of oil, 200 grams of bread, 50 grams of cereal, 100 grams of sugar, 25 grams of coffee substitute, and one egg per wedding guest. I had been afraid to go and pick up this treasure. “Here I am pregnant,” I complained to Hilde. “Werner demands that the house should be so spotless that you could eat off the bathroom floor. When do I have time to go to the ration office and pick up my extra cards?” Thankfully, Hilda agreed to go and pick up the marriage rations for me.

  Heinz Schlegel suggested that we all go out to a restaurant to spend the extra ration cards and have a little celebration. It was especially pleasant because my famous patient, who had recovered enough to return to Berlin, had asked his sons to send me some Moselle wine on the occasion of my marriage, a rare treat for ordinary citizens of the Reich in wartime.

  You will ask how I felt about spending so much time with people who supported the Hitler regime. I will tell you that, since I had absolutely no choice in the matter, I no longer dared to think about it. To be in Germany at that time, pretending to be an Aryan, meant that you automatically socialized with Nazis. To me, they were all Nazis, whether they belonged to the party or not. For me to have made distinctions at that time—to say Hilde was a “good” Nazi and the registrar was a “bad” Nazi—would have been silly and dangerous, because the good ones could turn you in as easily and capriciously as the bad ones could save your life.

  My new husband was the most complicated of all. An opportunist one moment, a true believer the next. On our wedding night, when I was washing the dishes, Werner walked up behind me and put his hands on my small belly. “This is going to be a boy,” he said with absolute confidence. “We will name him Klaus.” He wrapped me in his arms. He had often said that he felt that the Jewish race was stronger, that Jewish blood always dominated. He had learned this idea from the Nazis, and he still believed it. He would always say that he felt himself to be only the “trigger element” in my pregnancy, “das auslösende Element”—those were his words. But it didn’t seem to bother him as long as he could have what he desired most—a son.

  Why my new husband didn’t believe that German blood was stronger, that the child would always be an Aryan by virtue of his father’s participation, I will never understand. When an idea is idiotic to begin with, its applications never make any sense.

  THE DOCTOR EXAMINED me and shook his head. He had found something that I myself had completely forgotten. As a child, I had endured a bout of diphtheria, and it had left me with a heart murmur. The Viennese doctor had told me at that time to take great care with pregnancy. But the tumultuous events of the ensuing years had made such considerations insignificant.

  “You’ve taken a big chance here, Grete,” said the German doctor. “You have a weak heart. The murmur is very strong. You should never have become pregnant. But now that you are, I am going to write you a prescription for digitalis and recommend that you quit your job and stay home until the baby is born.”

  Wonderful news? Well, not exactly, because now I had a new crisis with my rations. I had been receiving rations suitable for a Red Cross employee eat
ing with the group at the hospital. Now that I was going to be out of work and at home for six months, how would I eat? I needed a new ration book. But I could not receive one without a national registration card, an index card issued for each Reich citizen by the Office of Economics, the Wirtschaftsamt. And how was I going to get one of those without coming to the attention of the Gestapo?

  “Please, dear God,” I prayed, “get me through this. I will soon have a child to protect. Help us pass this test.”

  For the first time, I decided against looking nondescript, made myself as presentable and attractive as possible, and walked to the central registry. This time I encountered a woman, fat, neat, perfumed. She kept a little potted plant on her spotless desk, I gave her the Red Cross document, which showed that I had been let off from work and should now receive ration cards at home because I would no longer be eating at the hospital.

  She began looking for my index card. There was no sign of it in the main file. She checked four times. I stared at her fingers picking through the little cards on which all the citizens of the Reich were neatly stored.

  She glanced at me.

  “It’s not here.”

  I smiled. “Well, it must be somewhere.”

  She searched for a hint of reproach in my face or my voice, but I made sure she found none. I did not want her to feel guilty. I did not want her to feel defensive. I wanted her to feel safe.

  She grinned at me suddenly and tapped her forehead with her palm to show me she had just had a wonderful idea; with renewed enthusiasm, she looked in a series of files for the cards of people who had moved from other cities, which were not yet transferred into the main file. Surely my card must be in there. She looked. She looked again. She looked again.

  “It’s not here.”

  A film of sweat glistened near her ears and on her upper lip. She was terrified. I concentrated every ounce of my emotional strength on concealing the fact that I was terrified too.