UC Santa Barbara > History Department > Prof. Marcuse > Courses > Hist 133d Homepage > Hist 133b+d Book Essays Index page > Student essay
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"The Greatest Lie Ever Told " Book Essay on:
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Kevin Markor for Prof. Marcuse's lecture course |
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About Kevin Markor I’m a senior majoring in history. My focus is on World War II. Ever since I was a kid I have been fascinated by history, especially World War II era history. That is the main reason why I took this class. I believe the Holocaust was in integral part of World War II, and specifically the history of Germany. I chose the Nazi Officer’s Wife, because I couldn’t believe the title when I saw it. The whole idea of a Jewish woman marrying a Nazi seemed really fascinating to me, I was interested in learning about the relationship between the two and how they were able to coexist with one another. Abstract (back to top) Edith Hahn Beer’s memoir The Nazi Officer’s Wife: How One Jewish Woman Survived the Holocaust is a tale of survival in a society that has set out to destroy her race. Edith Hahn was your average teenage girl living in Vienna, when Hitler came to power and spread his racist doctrine of beliefs throughout much of Europe. Like many memoirs of the Holocaust, her story is one of survival. However her story is unique because that she survived most of the Holocaust while assuming the identity of a Christian Aryan woman. Her gets even more complicated when she marries an officer of the Wehrmacht, who knows she is Jewish. In an effort to create a seemingly “proper Aryan Household” she even becomes pregnant,. Her story deals with the psychological and emotional effects of living your life as a lie, and living in constant fear of being found out. Random luck and the kindness of strangers who had no obligation to help her, are the keys to her survival. |
Essay (back to top) Imagine being forced to the live the life of someone else. Imagine losing your sense of identity. Imagine being forced into a society that has made its discontent for your former self known by the systematic murdering of millions. Imagine living every day of your life in fear that your true identity will be found out, and the life you are trying to lead, will be found out to be a lie, and might lead to your own demise. Imagine marrying a man who shared the same beliefs as the people who set out to kill you. Edith Hahn Beer did just this, and lived to tell her story. Through well placed connections and luck, Edith Hahn survived through the Holocaust posing as Aryan woman, named Grete Denner. Throughout her ordeal she kept a journal, which eventually turned into The Nazi Officers Wife: How One Jewish Women Survived the Holocaust. Her very well written memoir details the her life as a teen in Vienna, before the Anschluss through World War II, and the years after. Ultimately Edith Hahn was saved “because of random luck and the interventions of a few decent people” (299). Like many survival stories of the Holocaust, her survival was based on luck, and the efforts of people who had no obligation to help her Edith Hahn starts her story in 1930. She came from a reasonably well-to-do family, at least well off enough for them to have the ability to send Edith to a university to study law, and eventually become a judge. Edith says that living in an anti-Semitic country her father had high expectations of her saying that “my father’s insistence that we Jews must be better was based on our country’s firm belief that we were not as good” (23). Austria has historically been a Catholic dominated nation, so it was no wonder that discontent for Jews would exist even before the rise of the Nazi Party. Growing up in Vienna, Edith had no real interest in politics, she was a typical teenager concerned about fitting in. She wanted to fit in so much so she became involved in a socialist youth group, saying that “When Mimi and I joined the high school socialist club, it was not for the sake of ideology but to get ourselves a new social center…where we could learn socialist songs and meet some new boys from other schools”(34). By the time of Edith’s final year of schooling in the university Hitler had annexed Austria, during Anschluss in 1938. It was during this time when Edith had first hand experience of the Nazi Party’s persecution of the Jews. “The persecution of the Jews spread into every corner of our lives. We couldn’t go to movies. We couldn’t walk on certain streets” (57). In April of 1938 Edith went to the university to pick up her final exam papers and to schedule a date for her doctoral exam. Instead she was given her transcripts and told that she would not be allowed to return to school. This was the first time that the Nazi restrictions on Jews had an impact on Edith’s life. Edith was given plenty of opportunities to leave Austria before things got worse. However, leaving her home behind was too hard, and she believed that Hitler and his Nazis would soon be defeated by the Allies, but this would not happen, at least for the time being. The population of Jews in Vienna was roughly 185,000, and about 100,000 had managed to get out of Vienna, but Edith was not one of them. The remaining Jews were forced to register at gun point. When it was Edith’s time to register she was picked up by the Gestapo, and told she was “needed for agricultural work in the Reich” (76), which turned out to be six weeks of work on an asparagus plantation in Osterburg, Germany. While working in the camp, Edith and the rest of the workers were told that they would be working 2 months as opposed to the 6 weeks previously promised. While working the women were told “it was the role of certain races to work for certain other races” (83). Like many Jews in the work camps they were told that their families would be safe while they were working for the Reich. The work was back breaking, so much so that Edith lost her menstrual periods. This might seem as somewhat of a convenience given the situation that Edith was in, but to her it was much more, her sense of womanhood had gone away, she was now just a slave to the Reich. This was the first stage of Edith Hahn’s loss of identity When Edith’s two months were completed she was supposed to go back to Vienna, but this did not happen. Although they were hated by the Nazis, they were ultimately needed by the Reich, this time to work in a box factory in Ascherslaben. Like the Jews in the ghettos of the Nazi occupied parts of Europe, Edith and the rest of the Jewish workers were forced to wear a yellow Star of David on their clothing. The factory was not a labor camp, in the sense that the workers, even the Jews, were paid for their work,
At the box factory the workers were given absurd quotas that they had to meet, make tens of thousands of boxes or force being removed from the factory. Every Jew knew that if they were separated from the factory they would be put into ghettos. Edith developed strategies to meet the quotas, making 5 boxes at a time as opposed to 4, which frequently caused the machinery to break down resulting in docked pay, but since Edith had nothing to spend money on, this was an acceptable sacrifice. By October of 1941 the Jews were well aware of the abysmal conditions of the ghettos, and so the factories gave relative security. So Edith’s fingers bled and yet she continued to work, because outside the camp life was much worse. Because Edith was working for the Reich she was allowed certain privileges. One in particular was the right to travel. She and 5 other Jewish women were permitted to travel under the stipulation that they wore the yellow star on their clothes. They traveled by train to Vienna and decided they would simply go onto the train with the yellow star and leave with out it. Edith explains being able to fit in with the rest of the Aryan soceity rather easy; the only visible sign that she and her friends were Jews was now gone. She writes “At the station, my dear friends melted into the Austrians the way flesh melts into dust” (134). Once in Vienna, Edith had no intention of going back to the camp. She was helped by an Aryan woman, referred to as Frau Doktor, who gave her papers necessary to exist among the Aryans. She wandered the streets of Vienna, in constant worry of the Gestapo stopping her, she frequently stayed with her Aryan friend but this always posed great risk to her and the people who took her in. To continue living a free Jewish woman, she would need a whole new Aryan identity. Through her friend Christl Denner, Edith was able to get papers to prove that she was indeed an Aryan; this was not a difficult task. All Christl had to do was go the police and say that she lost her papers and she would be issued another copy so she could give Edith the original. Edith was now Christina Maria Margarethe Denner (she is known as Grete Denner through the remainder of the book): “I murdered the personality I was born with and transformed myself from a butterfly back into a caterpillar” (157). It is during this time that that Edith got a job as a Red Cross nurse in Munich, posing as Aryan. The situation in Munich during 1942 was a vast improvement from the conditions of the rest of Nazi occupied Europe, because of the belief that Germany was actually winning the war, as Edith argues. “People on vacation thronged to national sites like the beer hall where Hitler made his Putsch against the Bavarian authorities in November 1923” (163). While working at the Red Cross Edith was given the job of caring for wounded German soldiers from the front, but this was just a little part of her job. The most important aspect of her job was to spread propaganda to the wounded soldiers and reinforce the notion of German invincibility. In one particular instance she was told to tell the soldiers that the Rhineland had not been bombed, when in actuality it has been all but destroyed by Allied bombing. Grete Denner 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” (164). It is Edith’s ability to make herself unnoticed that makes her even more noticeable to one man in particular, Werner Vetter. Werner was a registered member of the Nazi Party, and a painter who worked at the Arado airplane factory. They both shared an interest in art and after a few “dates” he abruptly proposed to her, even after Edith’s confession of being Jewish. Edith in fact really did love Werner, and a marriage to a member of the Nazi Party had its advantages, especially for someone like her. “I began to live a lie as an ordinary Hausfrau. It was as good a lie as any that a woman could live in Nazi Germany, because the regime celebrated female domesticity and made itself extremely generous to housewives”(187). This was the ideal situation for Edith to be in. No one would question the purity of a Nazi Party member’s wife, and eventually a Nazi officer’s wife. The time with Werner was in my opinion the hardest time for Edith. She was now the submissive wife who would do anything to please her husband. She was the typical Aryan wife saying that “he knew I was a well educated woman, but that certainly was not something I reminded him about…so I carefully limited my opinions to practical matters”(194). For Edith this time in her life had a tremendous effect on her mentally, being relegated to a position she’s not accustomed to. While in the factories and the camps she could share her discontent with fellow Jews, something Aryans would be unwilling to relate with. Werner was the most powerful man to Edith, at any moment he could report her to the authorities and this would almost certainly lead to her death. The last step to become completely Aryan was to have a child, and despite the fact the country was engulfed in war and Edith was still very much in danger of being found out, she became pregnant anyway. “In a matter of little more than a year, I had gone from being the most despised creature in Third Reich—to being one of its most valued citizens, a breeding Aryan housewife” (220). The idea of being a mother was very important to Edith. Not only did this make her status in the Reich higher, but she felt she was always meant to be a mother. Normally the convenience of modern medicine made it possible for woman to give birth relatively pain free by the use of pain killers and sedatives. For Edith the idea of being under the influence might lead to dangerous revelations. If she was found out to be Jewish, it would mean the end of her and Werner. “I could not take anything for the pain because if I did, I too might mention names Christl, Frau Doktor, or god forbid Jew…after that, for the only time during the war I really wanted to die” (226). Angelika Maria Vetter was born nevertheless. In 1944, it became evident that Germany was losing the war. They needed all able bodied men to fight the Allied invasion, this included Werner, to fight. He was made an officer in the Wehrmacht, because of his contributions to the party. He was shipped to the eastern front to fight the oncoming Soviet Army. Edith was relatively safe because of her husband’s status in the party. Unfortunately for Werner he was captured by the Red Army and sent to Siberia. Being alone in Munich gave Edith a lot of time to the listen to current event on the radio, as where before she had been busy serving Werner. It was during this time that Edith learned of the horrors of the camps like Auschwitz and Birkenau. “I lay on the floor unable to absorb the horror of what I had just been told. Who can imagine a living breathing, laughing mother as smoke and ashes” (252). Being assimilated into Aryan society made Edith become disconnected to what she was and her true identity. While the rest of Germany frowned at the idea of a defeat to Allied forces, Edith on the other hand welcomed it. She was now able to emerge from hiding, to surface so to speak. She was no longer a “U-Boat” hiding as Grete Vetter; she was now Edith Hahn, a Jew. Working for the communists in Germany, she became a judge and in an ironic twist, presided over several cases involving Nazi crimes. However, her main objective was to try to get Werner out of Siberia and by 1948, she accomplished this. Her hope was that Werner would accept her new found freedom and ultimately accept Edith Hahn for who she really was. She was no longer the subservient wife of a Nazi officer, and Werner couldn’t accept this, saying that “my wife Grete was obedient, she cooked! She cleaned! She ironed! She sewed! She treated me like a king! And I want her back!” (286). However, this was not really who Edith was, she was forced into a mold created by a society who hated who she really was. Werner was unable to accept this, and they subsequently divorced. The book ends with Edith and her daughter Angelika moving to the United States. Indeed, if it were not for the actions of a few decent people and random luck, Edith Hahn Beer would most likely not have survived. It was purely by chance that she was chosen to work in the labor camps and then in the factories, while others weren’t so fortunate, her mother for instance was killed in a Minsk ghetto in 1942. Like many of the stories told by Holocaust survivors, Edith’s story is one of survival. However her story is unique in the sense that she was able to become assimilated into a society that wanted nothing more than to see her and the rest of her race killed. |
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Any student tempted to use this paper for an assignment in another course or school should be aware of the serious consequences for plagiarism. Here is what I write in my syllabi:
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