The Nazi Officer's Wife

“A beautiful story of survival, an inspiring tale of overcoming fear.” —Washington Jewish Week

The Gestapo forced Edith Hahn into a ghetto and then into a slave labor camp. When she returned home to Vienna months later, she’d become a hunted woman and went underground. With the help of a Christian friend, she emerged in Munich as Grete Denner. There she met Werner Vetter, a Nazi Party member who fell in love with her. Despite Edith’s protests and her eventual confession that she was Jewish, he married her and kept her identity a secret.

In wrenching detail, Edith recalls a life of constant fear. She tells how German officials questioned the lineage of her parents; how during childbirth she refused all painkillers, afraid that in an altered state of mind she might reveal something of her past; and how, after her husband was captured by the Soviets, she was bombed out of her house and was forced to hide while Russian soldiers raped women in the street.

Despite the risks to her life, Edith created a remarkable record of survival. She saved every document and the photographs she took inside labor camps. Now part of the permanent collection at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., these hundreds of documents form the fabric of a new chapter in the history of the Holocaust—complex, troubling, and ultimately triumphant.

“A remarkable story.” —Jerusalem Post