The Nazi Officer's Wife by Edith Hahn Beer

The Nazi Officer's Wife Reviews

• 
  Angela M

  I have read a good number of books about the holocaust and most of them were novels I keep reading them because they are gut wrenching and they keep reminding me that it's important for us to acknowledge and remember what happened in those concentration and death camps Reading a memoir like this one only reminds me all the how horrific this history was and that this happened to real peopleThis book is not about the concentration or death camps but it is about the courage and determination of one woman who survived the holocaust as yes a Nazi Officer's wife Because she didn't go to the camps did not mean that Edith didn't experience horrific conditions go hungry or did not suffer physically or mentally She did She was sent from Vienna when the Nazis took over to work as a slave laborer on a farm then at a box factory With bleeding hands little food and despicable living conditions and only the hope of packages and letters from home she manages to surviveThen right in the middle of the Nazis she is defiant brave smart and afraid as she finds ways to make them believe that she is one of them I also loved knowing about the people who helped her It restores my faith in humanity to know of these people who risked their lives to save another human being who happened to be Jewish It is so well written that it almost doesn't feel like a memoir which can sometimes feel just like a reiteration of events and dates This is the story of an amazing woman whose strength and resilience saved her life as well as her daughter’s I love that her daughter convinced her to tell her story otherwise we would not have known about this remarkable woman I am glad that we can remember her We said Heil Hitler In my soul's fastness I prayed Let the beast Hitler be destroyed Let The Americans and the RAF bomb the Nazis to dust Let the German Army freeze at Stalingrad Let me not be forgotten here Let Someone remember who I really am
• 
  Chrissie

  NO SPOILERSThis is a four star book Recently another GR friend rated this with three stars and to be honest I was flabbergasted HOW CAN YOU NOT BE MOVED BY THIS BOOK? zinged through my head? I will try and explain without giving spoilers First of all if you are the kind of person like me that highly values straight talk and talk that does not shy away from ANY subject sex love cruelty motherhood lying corruption guilt and survival then this is a book for you Edith will say Now remember this to jolt you She will say Now maybe you are uestioning how I could and then she explains so clearly and so succinctly that what before seemed strange is know dazzingly obvious The fantastic prose hits you from the first page Then as you get to know EdithGrete you are drawn into her moral dilemas the choices she made When I picked up this book honestly I had a completely different view of Edith I was a bit disgusted at the thought of a Jewish woman who survived the holocaust by marrying a Nazi officer I thought she was self centered Well she isn't Not at all She is a wonderful kind person who suffered terribly during the war Terribly She never lost her integrity Never You get completely the wrong idea of Edith by reading that title The title IS perfect but you have to read the book to understand This book is about people and how we all react differently when shit hits the fan You come to empathize with Chrstl Elisabeth Pepi Werner Doctor Maria Nierderall Klothilde and I shouldn't stop here bc the list goes on and on Not all of these people acted admirably but what they did you come to understand That is why I used the word empathy This book focuses on how people behave and why they behave as they do not delivered as a lecture but simply by throwing a spotlight on them This is a book about the holocaust but don't think it is devoid of humor I promise you people are just so unbelievably funny What they come up with is utterly amaing and absurdly funny and wonderful Another very interesting issue is what Edith did with her education as a lawyer judge How it meandered AFTER the war To tell you would be a spoiler but it is a very interesting point How other Jews and Germans have reacted to Edith after the war is also revealing I could go on and on Instead read the book Through page 153 Most people do not have the courage to be kind Most often kindness doesn't demand courage but sometimes it does; and then who is strong enough brave enough to jeopardize their own security for another human being? Such people are to be found on BOTH sides of any conflict In this case some were Nazis others were gentiles and others Jews Finally someone a complete stranger a Nazi reaches out and helps Edith with explicit exact instructions devoid of emotion He turned away The interview was over I had never listened so hard to anything in my life Every word was printed on my mindHe did not wish me luck He did not ask for money He did not say good bye I never saw him againHe saved my lifeWith these words you see how this author expresses herself in telling her storyThrough page 147 I like this book very much Look at Edith's chin on the front cover Look at her eyes Her chin shows her relentless will to get through this mess Her eves hold something back Her strength is visible but it is at the same time cautious She is back in Vienna and alone In all senses She doesn't know where she can sleep or where she will get her next meal People who were close to her are gone And those who remain like her boyfriend? Well read her tale I have noted many sections that I should uote but it is terribly difficult to pick just one They show that she is a person like all the rest of us simply trying to get through this mess at the same time retaining an ounce of integrity This book shows how many different people behave when put in a tight spot Or should I say when stamped on? Each behaves differently some better than others but the focus is on each idividual behavior Unpretentious writing from start to finish You can relate to her thoughts and experiencesThrough page 23 I love this absolutely love this book Why? Well it is all in the ability of the author to write anchanting prose Very simple very down to earth and with humor The following lines are from page 9have you heard that the Russians are cannibals? Have you heard that they eat their young?Yes sirAnd do you believe that?I took a chance Some people do sir But I think if the russians ate their babies there would not be so many Russians as there apparently areHe Laughed He had warm humorous and a gentle manner He even reminded me a little of my grandfatherThis is a memoir about a Jewish woman who survived WW2 How? By being the wife of a Nazi officerBefore starting I Will return to reading about Armenia but first this since Maude and I want to read a book together 0 So many have siad this must be read And I always love memoirs
• 
  Rebecca McNutt

  It annoys me hearing millennials whine about how they need faster internet and all the latest cell phones before anyone bites my head off I'm of the millennial generation myself so I'm not trying to be prejudiced People of my generation take everything they have not just their material items but also their rights and freedoms for granted This book tells the story of a woman whose freedom was taken from her living a life in constant fear having to hide her very ethnicity just to protect herself her husband an SS officer and her daughter chilling stuff very disturbing realities are documented here and yet there's a light at the end of the tunnel for this brave woman Definitely an excellent book worth reading
• 
  Tim

  What makes this memoir of an Austrian Jewish woman relentlessly moving is the attention to detail the sharp incisive nature of Hahn’s observations These elouently described details bring the narrative vividly to life The title is slightly misleading and hints perhaps at a cinematic melodrama which does this book a disservice Her husband was a painter blind in one eye and thus spent most of the war working as a kind of foreman in a paint factory Only when the Nazis were on the verge of defeat and desperate was he conscripted and made an officer He is essentially a good man not at all synonymous with the term Nazi Officer She does a brilliant job of portraying the constant terrors of being trapped in a world where you are being hunted Most poignantly of all she gets us to understand that everyone almost always has the choice of being kind or unkind no matter what the circumstances True to show kindness often takes courage but Hahn shows us that courage is no less a part of our humanity than charity It’s essentially an incredibly gripping and moving story of kindness and unkindness And as Hahn points out –“It was the individuals who made their own rules in many situations No one forced them to act in an unkind manner The opportunity to act decently towards us was always available to them Only the tiniest number of them ever used it” Wholeheartedly recommended
• 
  Michel Clasquin-Johnson

  This is an incredible true story That doesn't give it a free pass as a book To put it plainly it is badly written In fact it is not written at all the spoken interview was committed directly to publishing I knew a girl Her name was so and so She had red hair I liked her brother a lot The red haired girl is then never mentioned again while the brother only pops up again and is finally named fifty pages later We all talk like this But this is not how written text works The book should have been edited by a professional Like many autobiographies this one makes assumptions about what the interesting bits are and runs out of steam at the end I would have liked to know a lot about Fred Beer Edith's postwar husband and the fifty years between WWII and the writing of this book Does Fred really rate just three sentences? Can half a lifetime reflecting on the aftermath of wartime experience or trying to forget it be captured in a short epilogue? All that is not to say you should not read this book You should if only to get a first person account of what it was like to be inside Germany in WWII That world is increasingly becoming a foreign country to us and the genocides since then suggest that we have learnt nothing
• 
  abby

  Edith Hahn was one of the few Jews hiding in plain sight in the Reich during the Second World War Jews who evaded deportation were known as U boats Those who could pass for Aryan in looks and had the right connections could take their chances living on falsified papers That's how Edith Hahn 29 year old Austrian law student became Grete Denner meek 21 year old nurse's aid living in Munich Every day she lived in fear of capture She couldn't use food ration or clothing coupons because it would tip off the authorities She took a job at the Red Cross specifically because they did less background checks and fed their nurses on siteWhen Edith now Grete caught the eye of Nazi officer Werner Vetter it seemed like a stroke of bad luck that could expose her But it wound up being what saved her So besotted by her Werner didn't turn her into the Gestapo but rather married her Edith fell into the roll of the submissive dutiful hausefrau expected of German women That made Werner happy and making him happy kept her alive But there was also true love between them I think that was one of the genuine surprises of the book that Edith could fall in love with a man who viewed her blood as racially inferior But Edith would be uick to point out that no one person was all good or all bad Sometimes it was the most brutal SS man who saved your life and the sweetest old lady who betrayed you for a few coinsI found Edith's story really compelling I found some of her decisions hard to understand but then again I've never been in her shoes One thing I really appreciated was the uniue insight into the German collective psyche during the war After V Day you couldn't find a single Nazi in all of the country everyone was against the regime and always had been But during the war many Germans would candidly speak to each other about things they would later deny ever saying or even thinking Posing as a fellow upstanding Aryan Edith was a first hand witness to thisThe one problem with this book is that it isn't organized as well as it could be People are mentioned forgotten and then mentioned again much later with no reminder for the reader who they are The author also does not utilize dates nearly enough Overall though pretty good memoir from a woman with a uniue life story
• 
  Jean

  I found this to be a fascinating book I could hardly put it down I found the fact that a highly educated woman successfully played an uneducated woman How difficult it much have been not to accidently just say something or use words above her station in life She lived day to day with the fear of being caught and sent to a concentration camp Edith only had one examination to take to receive her J D degree in law with extra training as a judge She arrived to take the last examination and was refused admittance and removed from the university because she was a Jew from that moment on her life was in a downward turmoil She was sent off to a labor camp for Jews doing hard physical labor in the fields Before this she had never worked physically in her life On a trip back to Vienna she took the star off her coat slipped away as she left the train and passed as an Aryan She got papers from a catholic friend and moved to Munich where she worked as a nurse’s aide at a Red Cross Hospital The only job she could get that did not check her papers against the National Registry was the Red Cross She did not want to get her friend in trouble so she had to stay out of sight She married Werner Vetter a Nazi Party member She had a daughter which made her a popular woman with the Nazis Werner was captured on the Eastern Front by the Russians and sent to SiberiaThe book is well written and the description of daily life under the Nazis was interesting All of Edith’s paper are at the Holocaust Memorial in Washington D C She resides in Israel It was her daughter that pushed her to tell her story The book is 330 pages long I read this as an e book on my Kindle app for my iPad
• 
  Lorna

  The Nazi Officer's Wife How One Jewish Woman Survived the Holocaust was a most important memoir as told by Holocaust survivor Edith Hahn Beer She purposely buried her story for many years not wanting to relive the past nor to burden younger generations with her sad memories However her daughter Angela urged her to tell her story In 1997 she sold her archive of wartime letters pictures and documents to Sotheby's where it was bought by two philanthropists who donated it all to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC The Hahn family lived in Vienna where Edith was well educated and almost out of law school when she was forced by the occupying forces into a ghetto and on to a labor camp where she became separated from her mother What follows is a tragic but compelling story as we see how Edith is forced underground eventually able to forge a new identity and live in Germany It is a gripping frightening and tragic tale while at the same time giving us all hope in the resilience of the human spirit That's all it takes you see a moment of kindness Someone who is sweet and understanding who seems to be sent there like an angel on the road to get you through the nightmareI simply retreated down down down trying to live in imitation of the German writer Erich Kastner whom I always admired and who responded to the Nazi years with what was called 'internal emigration' The soul withdrew to a rational silence The body remained there in the madnessMy 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 of the world could be savedWhat you see is a mask of calm and civility Inside always forever I am still weeping
• 
  Janet

  Found on the history clearance cart at our local HPB The Nazi Officer’s Wife was a surprise weaving itself into the heart of my WW2 studies Author Edith Hahn Beer’s personal story of survival remained untold for almost 50 years until encouragement from her daughter born in a Nazi Germany hospital inspired her to share the memories she’d long lived in silence with “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” Edith grew up in a moderately well off secular Jewish family in Vienna Austria Her father died before the Nazi invasion leaving Edith’s beautiful mother to support 3 daughters via her dressmaking talent A beautiful young woman herself Edith studied law at the University of Vienna and fancied herself in love with a young socialist who was himself saved from the Holocaust by his Catholic mother Until the Nazi’s absorbed Austria a dream of socialist utopia was the political movement of the youth of Edith’s day allowing Hitler to capitalize with his vision of National Socialism Most intriguing and fascinating about Edith’s history is the way in which she reveals to us day to day Nazi Germany from the perspective of citizen and Jew simultaneously Her's is a tale of courage of stamina of forbearance and fortitude of the adaptability of the human spirit in order to survive Edith projects a human face into my reading of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich Her experiences are the cry of the clarion calling us to be ever vigilant in promoting liberty throughout the world and defending America’s freedoms here at home Edith died just last year March 2009 but her legacy lives on at the United States Holocaust Museum
• 
  Eva Leger

  This felt like a conversation with the author between only the two of us I loved it I loved how easy it read in that way Stories as personal as this are some of my favorites and this is right near the top The photos the author included are astounding some of the words can even be made out The reader can actually see although I couldn't read it the letter her husband had smuggled to her from a Siberian prisoner when he was a POW I think the biggest thing for me was how clear she made what her life was like Most Holocaust readers know what life was like in the camps even what life was like hidden in fields forests barns someone's hidden room But this may have been my first memoir about a person hiding out in the open I loved one part when after the war she went back to get her papers changed and she met the same man who had given her papers saying she was deutschblutig German blooded He was highly offended about the fact that she had lied to him There is testament after testament to the honor with which this woman livedlives She became a judge after the war which is where she had been headed before the war and before the Nazi's put a stop to it She was offered no pushed to judge Nazi cases and she refused How does one do that? I'd have accepted and punished them with everything I had I can't imagine being so honest so duty bound that I would refuse I have an immense respect for this womanEdith's daughter was born during the war and the way her husband acted on his return was hideous Apparently the Jewish blood was stronger and overruled the German blood This makes no sense to me because weren't the Germans superior? Wouldn't that made this the other way around? Not to fit their crazy schemes He had wanted a son I wonder if it would have been the same? Would the sons Jewish blood had overridden the German? What a pity some people have these thoughts and feelings I can't count all of the times when I felt such sympathy for the author and as I kept reading realized she didn't need it She has to be one of the strongest women to have ever lived She lived a remarkable life and we all owe her and her daughter a debt of gratitude that she's written it down for us to learn