NAZI OFFICER’S WIFE, THE

Were THE NAZI OFFICER'S WIFE offered as fiction it would be judged too unbelievable. Yet it happened, to Edith Hahn, daughter of an assimilated Jewish family in 1930s Austria. After her father's death, Edith chose to remain with her mother in Vienna during the early years of Hitler's rise to power and the madness of the Final Solution. Separated from her parent by a slave-labor assignment, Edith just missed being deported with other Jews to Poland, and went underground in the Axis nation. Through the unusual mercy of a few fascist functionaries, Edith received false ID papers, and, on a strange intuition, she moved to Munich, in the guise of Greta, a Teutonic beauty whose looks could even fool a bureaucratic who claimed he could discern Aryan purity on sight. As German victories in North Africa and France continued, Edith/Greta was courted by businessman Werner Vetter, a true believer in the Fatherland (and, like the Fuhrer, a frustrated painter). Astoundingly, even after she confesses her secret, Werner marries her. Many Holocaust-survival sagas concern ingenious hiding places or inhuman deprivation. The camouflage fate thrust upon Edith Hahn is something else indeed, as the potential of spending the war in the comfortable position of an upper-class hausfrau shields the Jewish refugee from the unspeakable horrors of the extermination camps. But there is still a psychic price to be paid, in terms of guilt, loss of identity, and an enigmatic husband who could betray his wife to the Gestapo at any time especially when he wears the uniform of a Third Reich army officer.