Edith Hahn Beer

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Edith Hahn Beer (born January 24, 1914 in Vienna , † March 17, 2009 in London ) was an Austrian lawyer . As a Jew , she survived the Holocaust by assuming a different identity and marrying a party member of the NSDAP .

biography

Youth and education

Edith Hahn was born as the eldest of three daughters of Klotilde and Leopold Hahn. Her parents owned and operated a restaurant. Although a higher education was by no means common for girls in Hahn's youth, one of Hahn's teachers managed to convince her father to send the girl to high school. She passed the Matura and enrolled at the University of Vienna in 1933 as a law student . Her father suddenly died in June 1936, and his widow now worked as a tailor to support the family. During Edith Hahn's studies, the so-called connection to the National Socialist German Reich took place . As a Jew, Edith Hahn was no longer allowed to finish her studies in April 1938, she was not allowed to take the third state examination and was therefore unable to apply for her doctorate.

Edith's sister Johanna, called Hansi, seven years younger, emigrated to Palestine on November 9, 1938 . Her sister Maria, called Mimi, a year younger, married Milo Grenzbauer, a fellow student of Edith, in December 1938. The couple managed to enter Palestine illegally in February 1939.

Second World War

In 1939 Edith Hahn and her mother were interned in the "Wiener Ghetto". The two women were separated from each other in 1941 when Edith Hahn was forced to work in an asparagus growing area near Osterburg and later in the Bestehorn cardboard factory in Aschersleben . Two weeks before Edith Hahn had the opportunity to return to Vienna in 1942, her mother was deported to Poland. Provided with the papers of her Christian friend Christl Denner , Edith Hahn went to Munich and worked there as a seamstress. She lived under the code name Grete Denner (Margarete was one of Christl Denner's first names).

In Munich she met the NSDAP member Werner Vetter, who asked for her hand. During this time, she did voluntary service with the German Red Cross . The couple moved to Brandenburg an der Havel together and married in order to legitimize their daughter Angelika, whose birth was imminent in 1944. Werner Vetter himself was deported to a Siberian labor camp after the war.

Next life

After the Second World War , Edith Hahn showed her Jewish identity card, which had been hidden for a long time, in order to recover her real identity. She was able to effectively counter the threat of a Brandenburg registrar to report her for falsifying documents. The Soviet Military Administration in Germany (SMAD), which had a great need for trained and unencumbered lawyers, made Edith Hahn a judge at the Brandenburg district court on the Havel. Edith Hahn campaigned for the Soviets to release her husband from Soviet custody. Nevertheless, the marriage ended in divorce shortly after Vetter's release in 1947. Werner Vetter died in 2002.

While she was a judge, Edith Hahn was put under pressure by the new rulers to act as an informant for the KGB . An open rejection of this suggestion would have put them in great danger. For this reason Edith Hahn decided to flee with her daughter to London, where her sisters were already living after they had fled to Israel when the war broke out .

Hahn worked as a housemaid and designer of lace-ups. She married Fred Beer, a Jewish jeweler, in 1957 and remained his wife until his death. After his death she moved to Netanya in Israel. In the last years of her life, however, she returned to London and lived in a London retirement home.

In the 1980s Edith Hahn wrote to Simon Wiesenthal and described Christa Beran's rescue act. He informed the Israeli memorial Yad Vashem , which Christa Beran honored as Righteous Among the Nations on June 4, 1985 .

In December 1997, Edith Hahn had her extensive collection of 250 personal papers, photos and documents auctioned at Sotheby’s in London for $ 144,000 because she needed money for an operation. The acquirers Andrew L. Lewis and Dalck Feith, a Jewish emigrant from Poland, donated the papers to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as the Edith Hahn Collection .

She was only now writing down her experiences and published her book two years later. In the foreword she wrote:

Like many people, I never talked about my time as a "submarine" , as a fugitive who was hiding under a false name in the underground of Nazi German society from the Gestapo, rather I preferred to talk about as much as possible To forget everything and not burden future generations with sad memories. It was my daughter Angela who urged me to tell my story, write a written report, and thus let the world know.

On July 11, 2007 Edith Hahn Beer took part in the inauguration of the General Public Prosecutor's Office of the State of Brandenburg in the building of the former district court, where she unveiled a memorial plaque for herself in the entrance area. On January 14, 2010, a plaque was unveiled in the building by Attorney General Erardo Cristoforo Rautenberg and the Brandenburg Justice Minister Volkmar Schöneburg documenting the obituaries of her death. Since July 8, 2013, it has also been mentioned on a stele in front of the building, which deals with its history.

reception

  • Liz Garbus made the 2003 documentary The Nazi Officers Wife and cast the two actresses Susan Sarandon and Julia Ormond with the speaking roles.
  • Obituaries on the life of Edith Hahn Beer have been published in the Times and The Jewish Chronicle , among others .
  • On October 28, 2010, a stumbling block for Edith Hahn Beer was laid in front of the building of the former Bestehorn cardboard factory (now an education center) .

Publications

  • Edith Hahn-Beer, Susan Dworkin: The Nazi Officer's Wife: How One Jewish Woman Survived the Holocaust. Rob Weisbach Books, William Morrow, New York 1999, ISBN 0-688-16689-X ,
    • German: I went through the fire and did not burn - an extraordinary life and love story . Translated from the English by Otto Bayer. Scherz-Verlag, Bern / Munich / Vienna 2000, ISBN 3-502-18287-6 .
    • French: La Femme de l'officier Nazi , Paris 2000
    • Dutch: De joodse bruid , The House of Books 2001, ISBN 9789044311693
    • Italian: La moglie dell 'Ufficiale Nazista , Garzanti Libri 2003, ISBN 881167593-6
    • Turkish: Nazi Subayının Karısı , Beyaz Baykuş 2017, ISBN 9786053113355
  • Edith Hahn-Beer, I want to live !: Letters and documents from a Viennese Jewish woman - labor camp and submarine in Nazi Germany, paperback - January 1, 1996 , Ugarit-Verlag, Münster 1996, ISBN 978-3-927120-39- 6 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Inauguration of the new service building. on the website of the General Public Prosecutor of the State of Brandenburg.
  2. ↑ Marko Litzenberg: Stolpersteine ​​remembering Jewish victims ( Memento from February 22, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) , einblick.de, October 29, 2010. Retrieved January 28, 2014.
personal data
SURNAME Hahn Beer, Edith
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian lawyer and Holocaust survivor
DATE OF BIRTH January 24, 1914
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH March 17, 2009
Place of death London