Wednesday, September 13, 2017

The Nazi Officer's Wife: How One Jewish Woman Survived the Holocaust by Edith H. Beer



The Nazi Officer's Wife: How One Jewish Woman Survived the Holocaust by Edith H. Beer is the story of Beer’s rather remarkable survival during the Second World War.  She became a “U-boat,” a Jewish person hiding under false papers.  But she went much further than that: she married a member of the Nazi party, became a Nazi hausfrau, bore a daughter, as the rest of European Jews, including her family, were murdered.

There is a telling moment after the war where Edith searches for family in the camps.  When she reveals to former Jewish prisoners who she is, and how she survived, they call her terrible things, in essence equating her survival as on less of a parallel plane to those in the camps.

But this is a blunt and ugly way to view her story.  Beer survived both because of her tenacity, and because four Germans helped her at pivotal moments.  Without them, she probably would have been discovered. These Germans, her former employer, a man in a Nazi office (who had a connection with her employer) in charge of racial certification, a young friend, and her husband, saved her, at the risk of their own lives, for no other purpose than their great love for her.

If more Germans took such risks, more Jews like Edith Beers would have survived the war.


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