The Nazi Officer's Wife
Read The Nazi Officer's Wife Online
Authors: Edith H. Beer
The Nazi Officer’s Wife
How One Jewish Woman Survived the Holocaust
Edith Hahn Beer with Susan Dworkin
In loving memory of my mother, Klothilde Hahn
Contents
The Small Voice from Then
The Hahns of Vienna
Pepi Rosenfeld’s Good Little Girl
The Trap Set by Love
The Asparagus Plantation at Osterburg
The Slave Girls of Aschersleben
Transformation in Vienna
The White Knight of Munich
A Quiet Life on Immelmannstrasse
A Respectable Aryan Household
The Fall of Brandenburg
Surfacing
I Heard the Fiend Goebbels, Laughing
Pepi’s Last Package
T
HE STORY THAT
follows here was purposely buried for a long time. Like many people who survived a great calamity in which so many others lost their lives, 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. It was my daughter, Angela, who urged me to tell the story, to leave a written record, to let the world know.
In 1997, I decided to sell at auction my archive of wartime letters, pictures, and documents. The archive was bought at Sotheby’s in London by two longtime friends and dedicated philanthropists of history—Drew Lewis and Dalck Feith. Their intention was to donate it to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and there it resides today. I am enormously grateful to them for their generosity and concern. The papers in that archive have helped to trigger many memories. I am grateful to my collaborator, Susan Dworkin, for her sympathy and understanding in helping me to express them.
Many thanks to Nina Sasportas of Cologne, whose detailed research has enabled us to augment my recollections, and to Elizabeth LeVangia Uppenbrink of New York, who translated all the documents and letters into accessible and idiomatic English. Many thanks as well to Nicholas Kolarz; to Robert Levine; to Suzanne Braun Levine; to our editor, Colin Dickerman, and his associate, Karen Murphy; and to our publisher, Rob Weisbach—all treasured critics and comrades who have contributed gifts of spirit, energy, and wisdom.
Finally, this book owes everything to Angela Schlüter, my daughter, for it was the loving spirit of her inquiry, her need to know, her search for the strange, miraculous past, that inspired me to tell the story at last.
—E
DITH
H
AHN
B
EER
N
ETANYA
, I
SRAEL
The Small Voice from Then
A
FTER A WHILE
, there were no more onions. My coworkers among the Red Cross nurses at the Städtische Krankenhaus in Brandenburg said it was because the Führer needed the onions to make poison gas with which to conquer our enemies. But I think by then—it was May 1943—many citizens of the Third Reich would have gladly forgone the pleasure of gassing the enemy if they could only taste an onion.
At that time, I was working in the ward for the foreign workers and prisoners of war. I would make tea for all the patients and wheel it around on a little trolley, trying to smile and give them a cheery “
Guten Tag
.”
One day when I brought the teacups back to the kitchen to wash, I interrupted one of the senior nurses slicing an onion. She was the wife of an officer and came from Hamburg. I believe her
name was Hilde. She told me the onion was for her own lunch. Her eyes searched my face to see if I knew that she was lying.
I made my gaze vacant and smiled my silly little fool’s smile and went about washing up the teacups as though I had absolutely no idea that this nurse had bought her onion on the black market especially to serve to a critically injured Russian prisoner, to give him a taste he longed for in his last days. Either thing—buying the onion or befriending the Russian—could have sent her to prison.
Like most Germans who defied Hitler’s laws, the nurse from Hamburg was a rare exception. More typically, the staff of our hospital stole the food meant for the foreign patients and took it home to their families or ate it themselves. You must understand, these nurses were not well-educated women from progressive homes for whom caring for the sick was a sacred calling. They were very often young farm girls from East Prussia, fated for lifelong backbreaking labor in the fields and barns, and nursing was one of the few acceptable ways by which they could escape. They had been raised in the Nazi era on Nazi propaganda. They truly believed that, as Nordic “Aryans,” they were members of a superior race. They felt that these Russians, Frenchmen, Dutchmen, Belgians, and Poles who came into our clinic had been placed on earth to labor for them. To steal a plate of soup from such low creatures seemed not a sin but a perfectly legitimate activity.
I think we must have had more than ten thousand foreign prisoners in Brandenburg, working in the Opel automobile factory, the Arado airplane factory, and other factories. Most of those whom we saw in the hospital had been injured in industrial accidents. While building the economy of the Reich, they would mangle their hands in metal presses, burn themselves in flaming forges, splash themselves with corrosive chemicals. They were a slave population, conquered and helpless; transported away from
their parents, wives, and children; longing for home. I did not dare to look into their faces for fear of seeing myself—my own terror, my own loneliness.
In our cottage hospital, each service was housed in a separate building. We on the nursing staff ate in one building, did laundry in another, attended to orthopedic cases in another and infectious diseases in yet another. The foreign prisoners were rigorously separated from German patients, no matter what was wrong with them. We heard that one time, a whole building was allocated to foreigners suffering from typhus, a disease that comes from contaminated water. How they had contracted such a disease in our beautiful historic city—which had inspired immortal concertos, where the water was clean and the food was carefully rationed and inspected by our government—was impossible for simple girls like us to comprehend. Many of my coworkers assumed that the foreigners had brought it on themselves, because of their filthy personal habits. These nurses managed not to admit to themselves that the disease came from the unspeakable conditions under which the slave laborers were forced to live.
You must understand that I was not really a nurse but rather a nurse’s aide, trained only for menial tasks. I fed the patients who could not feed themselves and dusted the night tables. I washed the bedpans. My first day on the job, I washed twenty-seven bedpans—in the sink, as though they were dinner dishes. I washed the rubber gloves. These were not to be discarded like the thin white gloves you see today. Ours were heavy, durable, reusable. I had to powder their insides. Sometimes I prepared a black salve and applied it to a bandage and made compresses to relieve the pain of rheumatism. And that was about it. I could not do anything more medical than that.
Once I was asked to assist at a blood transfusion. They were
siphoning blood from one patient into a bowl, then suctioning the blood from the bowl and into the veins of another patient. I was supposed to stir the blood, to keep it from coagulating. I became nauseated and ran from the room. They said to themselves: “Well, Grete is just a silly little Viennese youngster with almost no education, the next thing to a cleaning woman—how much can be expected from her? Let her feed the foreigners who have chopped off their fingers in the machines.”
I prayed that no one would die on my watch. Heaven must have heard me, because the prisoners waited for my shift to be over, and
then
they died.
I tried to be nice to them; I tried to speak French to the Frenchman to assuage their homesickness. Perhaps I smiled too brightly, because one August morning my head nurse told me that I had been observed to be too friendly with the foreigners, so I was being transferred to the maternity service.
You see, there were informers everywhere. That was why the nurse who was preparing the forbidden onion for her Russian patient had been so frightened of me, even me, Margarethe, called “Grete” for short. An uneducated twenty-year-old nurse’s aide from Austria. Even
I
could conceivably be working for the Gestapo or the SS.
I
N THE EARLY
fall of 1943, shortly after my transfer to the maternity service, an important industrialist arrived in an ambulance, which had brought him all the way from Berlin. This man had suffered a stroke. He needed peace and quiet and uninterrupted therapy. The Allies had been bombing Berlin since January, so it seemed to his family and friends that he would recover more speedily in Brandenburg, where no bombs were falling and the
hospital staff was not beset with emergencies and he could count on more personal attention. Perhaps because I was the youngest and least skilled, and not badly needed elsewhere, I was taken away from the babies and assigned to care for him.
It was not very pleasant work. He had become partly paralyzed, and he had to be led to the bathroom, hand-fed every morsel, bathed and turned constantly; and his flaccid, powerless body had to be massaged.
I did not say much about my new patient to Werner, my fiancé, because I believed it might trigger his ambition, and that he would begin to press for the advantages we could gain from my close association with such an important personage. Werner was always on the lookout for advantages. Experience had taught him that advancement in the Reich occurred not because of talent and ability but because of connections: friends in high places, powerful relatives. Werner himself was a painter, imaginative and quite talented. Before the Nazi regime, his gifts had brought him nothing but joblessness and homelessness; he had slept in the forest under the rain. But then better times came. He joined the Nazi Party and become a supervisor of the paint department at the Arado Aircraft factory, in charge of many foreign workers. Soon he would be an officer in the Wehrmacht and my devoted husband. But he didn’t relax—not yet, not Werner. He was always looking for something extra, an angle, a way to climb upward to a spot where he would finally receive the rewards he felt he deserved. A restless and impulsive man, he dreamed of success. If I told him everything about my important patient, he might dream too much. So I told him just enough, no more.
When my patient received flowers from Albert Speer, the Minister for Armaments and War Production, himself, I understood why the other nurses had been so eager to give me this job. It was
risky to take care of high-ranking party members. A dropped bedpan, a spilled glass of water, could get you into serious trouble. What if I turned this patient too quickly, washed him too roughly, fed him soup that was too hot, too cold, too salty? And—oh, my God—what if he had another stroke? What if he
died
while I was the one taking care of him?
Quaking at the thought of so many possibilities for doing something wrong, I tried with all my strength to get every single thing just right. So of course the industrialist thought I was wonderful.
“You are an excellent worker, Nurse Margarethe,” he said as I was bathing him. “You must have considerable experience for one so young.”
“Oh, no, sir,” I said in my smallest voice. “I have only just come from school. I do only what they taught me.”
“And you have never taken care of a stroke patient before …”
“No, sir.”
“Amazing.”
Every day he recovered a little more motion and his voice became less slurred. He must have been encouraged by his own recovery, for his spirits were high.
“Tell me, Nurse Margarethe,” he said as I was massaging his feet, “what do people here in Brandenburg think about the war?”
“Oh, I don’t know, sir.”
“But you must have heard something…. I am interested in public opinion. What do people think about the meat ration?”
“It is quite satisfactory.”
“What do they think about the news from Italy?”
Should I admit that I knew about the Allied landings? Did I dare? Did I dare
not
? “We all believe that the British will be defeated in the end, sir.”