The Nazi Officer's Wife

"The Nazi Officer's Wife" is a 2003 documentary about Edith Hahn Beer, a Jew who lived in Vienna when the Nazis took over in the '30s. Her sisters were sent to Palestine, her father died, and she was sent to a work camp. Her mother was sent to Minsk and died there, though it was some time before Edith learned what had happened to her.

After the work camp, Edith was to be sent to Auschwitz, but she removed her Jewish star and eventually was helped to escape by a non-Jewish friend who surrendered her own identity papers, after claiming to the government that hers had been lost in a boat trip on the Danube. The friend was later honored for this, as she risked her life in doing so.

Edith went to Munich and worked for the Red Cross, eventually meeting a Nazi who could not join the service because he was blind in one eye. They married and had a child.

This is an amazing story of the horrible fear of living under the Nazis, how the Jews were stripped of their rights, and how Edith had to take on an Aryan identity in order to survive, something she obviously felt very guilty about doing. It is a fascinating documentary. I read up on her later on and learned that her diaries and letters were sold by Sotheby's for $169,000 and later donated to a Holocaust museum. At the time, Edith had cataracts, was in her eighties and broke. It was her wish to donate the papers, but as always in her life, she had to be practical.

There are interviews with Edith, her daughter, and several school friends, as well as a lot of footage. Her letters and diaries are beautifully read by Julia Ormond, and Susan Sarandon provides narration.

I have to take issue with the reviewer who claimed there were "credibility issues." There are no credibility issues. She was hardly the only Jew who took an Aryan identity. It is also true that Nazis helped Jewish friends escape (though this didn't happen to Edith, but the reviewer on this site said that no Nazi would ever help a Jew - many did). Also, the fact that the person who gave her ID papers to Edith was honored is another testament to the truth of the story.

Additionally, her boyfriend, Pepi, whom she asked to burn her letters for his own safety, saved them instead and returned them in 1977, so there is excellent documentation since she was writing him from the labor camp. She also took photos during the whole period with a camera given to her by her father, and some of these photos were shown during the documentary. I doubt Sotheby's would have sold a bunch of fakes - the New York Times article I read said that all of Edith's papers were carefully studied.

If there was some denial of how she lived afterward so that she didn't share much with her daughter, this is understandable and probably part of her survivor guilt. It's not a sin to survive - the sin is that anyone was persecuted. People do what they have to - look at the pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman and what he did to survive.

This is a very compelling story and you can feel the fear rising as you watch it, it so entrenches you. Highly recommended.

I tried! I tried 10 minutes and it was boring as can be, so I skipped ahead a little more and it was still boring. Skipped again and it was just as boring. This thing is narrated in one tone, one I've become familiar with from watching crappy documentaries like this one, a tone that tries to tug at your heart strings, so that instead of listening to the actual narration, I kept interpreting what Sarandon was trying to say: "This is so sad. We're not even going to make an effort to make this interesting because Holocaust! Who cares what the content of my narration is, just be sad because Holocaust!"

The story itself seems interesting but I'll see if I can find a book about it rather than waste another hour and ten minutes of my life on this.

We had seen many promos on A&E throughout the last week or so about this documentary. I have seen quite a few documentaries about World War 2 and the holocaust, but this particular one, to me, was quite personal.

I am very happy that I never had to live through this ordeal and I could not even imagine what would be going through someone's brain to try and even fathom what was going on and how to survive.

This particular lady, Edith Haan, had some luck plus some opportunities to survive the war. Tragically, most of her family didn't.

She hid openly inside Germany under an assumed name, thanks to help which some of her friends gave to her, and eventually she married a Nazi Officer and remained married to him until after the war. The marriage produced one daughter (the only Jewish baby to be born during the war and survive, thanks to her mother).

I have met survivors of the holocaust and one of the first things that they tell me is the powerful guilt they feel because they survived, where others didn't. They have one MAJOR problem of discussing their ordeals because of how powerful and all consuming this tragedy was.

So this documentary shows the life, on a personal level, of Edith Haan, when she finally was able to talk about her life after the Germans invaded Austria in 1938.

I don't think that we, as civilized human beings, have the right to judge any of her decisions or actions. We all survive in our own way.

Let us hope and pray that this tragedy will never befall man ever again!!! Where man can live together with man peacefully and as the Bible says "beat their swords into plowshares".