The Nazi Officer's Wife Read online

“Tell me about your mother.”

  She is in Poland, where your vile Führer has sent her.

  “Tell me about your sisters.”

  They are in Palestine, fighting with the British to destroy your army, may God help them.

  “Your uncles, your aunts, your cousins, your old boyfriends.”

  Gone. Maybe dead. So deep in hiding from your Nazi plague that they might as well be dead.

  “I love you. I must have you.”

  No, no, leave me alone. Go away. I have too many people to protect. Christl. Frau Doktor. Pepi. You.

  “You!” I cried. “I cannot be involved with you!”

  Rassenschande, the scandal of racial mixing—a crime.

  “Why not? My God, Grete, are you promised to someone else? Did you steal my heart and not tell me? How can this be?”

  He looked hurt, destroyed by the idea that I might not want him. I recognized his pain because I had felt it myself. I threw my arms around him and whispered violently into his ear:

  “I cannot marry you because I am Jewish! My papers are false! My picture is in the files of the Gestapo in Vienna!”

  Werner stopped in his tracks. He held me away from him at arm’s length. I dangled in his hands. His face turned hard. His eyes narrowed. His mouth tightened.

  “Why, you little liar,” he said. “You had me completely fooled.”

  He looked as grim and determined as one of the SS men in Krause’s painting.

  Idiot, I thought. You have signed your own death warrant. I waited for the sword of Breker’s god-man to fall. I imagined my blood spreading on the marble floor, the horrific pounding on Christl’s door.

  “So, now we are even,” Werner said. “I lied to you about being divorced, and you lied to me about being an Aryan. Let’s call it square and get married.” He cradled me in his arms and kissed me.

  I think I must have become a bit hysterical then.

  “You are a madman! We cannot be together. They will discover us.”

  “How? Are you going to tell someone else besides me about your true identity?”

  “Stop joking, Werner; this is serious. Maybe you don’t understand somehow, but they could imprison you for being with me. They will kill me and my friends and send you to one of their terrible camps. Why aren’t you afraid? You must be afraid!”

  He laughed. I was imagining him at the end of a Nazi rope, like the Frenchman who had taken up with a Jewish girl from the Arbeitslager, and he was laughing and carrying me into a room full of golden landscapes.

  To this day I cannot understand what made Werner Vetter so brave when his countrymen were so craven.

  “I’m really twenty-eight, not twenty-one,” I said.

  “Good. That’s a relief because at twenty-one you might be too young to get married.”

  He stopped in an alcove next to a bust of Hitler.

  “Do you cook everything as well as that cake you sent me for my birthday?”

  I swear it was the spirit of my mama, appearing like an angel whenever I needed domestic advice, who must have told me to say yes.

  Of course this was a bald-faced lie. To understand Werner Vetter, remember that it was perfectly possible for me to tell him that I was Jewish in Germany at the height of Nazi power, but it was essential for me to lie about being a good cook.

  “Go back to Brandenburg,” I whispered. “Forget about this whole thing. I will not hold you to any promise.”

  He went back to Brandenburg, but he did not think it over. He had made up his mind, you see, and when Werner did that, there was no stopping him.

  You ask me whether I thought he would denounce me, whether the Gestapo would come knocking on Frau Gerl’s door. I did not think that. I trusted Werner. For the life of me I do not know why. Maybe it was because I really had no choice.

  He sent me several telegrams saying that he had arranged for me to come and stay with the wife of a friend of his. Her name was Hilde Schlegel. She had an extra room and would take me in until his divorce was final.

  I was afraid to receive any more of these ardent telegrams, afraid that they might bring me to the attention of the SS. I was afraid that my Red Cross assignment, when it came, would send me out to the territories in Poland, where I would need a national identity card which I could not possibly get. I was afraid that if I stayed in Frau Gerl’s house, the Gestapo would begin to wonder who I was. After all, she had an anti-Nazi record. I thought that if I went with Werner, I would be better hidden: a little Hausfrau in a kitchen living with a member of the Nazi Party who worked for the company that made the planes which were dropping the bombs on London. A man with clearances. A trusted man who would never be challenged. Of course to be this man’s wife was a better disguise than being single.

  When I wrote to Pepi saying that I had become engaged to Werner, he became irate. How could I do such a thing? How could I even consider marrying a non-Jew? “Think of what your father would say!” he protested. “Think of how much I love you!”

  Well, I had learned the hard way just how much he loved me. Had Pepi arranged for me to sleep securely for even one night in Vienna? His mother, with all her connections—had she even made me a cup of tea while I was hiding? Do you know that when Pepi heard what Frau Doktor had said about him—that he belonged to me because I had slept with him—he refused even to speak to her? This wonderful woman, who had helped me so much, who could have helped him too—he never even thanked her for what she had done; he never even went to meet her. He could have run away with me before the war. We could have been in England long ago; we could have been in Israel building a Jewish country; we could have been out of this nightmare. But no! Pepi couldn’t leave because of his blasted bloody racist mother! That was how much he loved me!

  And here was this white knight in Munich, who came to me fearless and adoring, and he offered me not just safety but love. Of course I accepted. I accepted and I thanked God for my good fortune.

  Frau Gerl and her husband went into the woods and stole a little Christmas tree for me. It was illegal to cut down trees at this time, but they wanted to send me away with a present. On December 13, 1942, I came to Werner Vetter in Brandenburg with that tree strapped to my bag.

  NINE

  A Quiet Life on Immelmannstrasse

  I BEGAN TO live a lie as an everyday ordinary Hausfrau. It was as good a lie as any that a woman could live in Nazi Germany, because the regime celebrated female domesticity and made itself extremely generous to housewives.

  My manner was quiet. My habit was to listen. I behaved in a friendly way toward everyone; I became close to no one. With all my strength, I tried to convince myself that I was really and truly Grete Denner. I forced myself to forget everything dear to me, all my experience of life, my education; to become a bland, prosaic, polite person who never ever said or did anything to arouse attention. The result was that on the outside I seemed like a calm, silent sea and inside I was stormy—tense, turbulent, stressed, sleepless, worrying constantly because I must always appear to be worried about nothing.

  Werner lived in company housing, in one of more than three thousand apartments built for employees of the Arado Aircraft Company in an embankment of identical straight-faced buildings on the east end of town. Our flat was on Immelmannstrasse, which is now called Gartz Street. They took the rent right out of Werner’s salary before he brought it home.

  Arado Aircraft made war planes, among them the world’s first jet bomber. During the war, it was the biggest armaments industry in Brandenburg district, which included not only the city of Brandenburg but Potsdam and Berlin. The company’s directors, Felix Wagonfür and Walter Blume, were rich and famous. Blume became the head of military economy for the Reich, and Albert Speer made him a professor.

  By 1940, Arado had 8,000 workers; by 1944 it had 9,500. Almost thirty-five percent were foreign-born. You may ask why the Nazis would allow so many foreigners to work in a high-security company. I tell you, I really believe it was because Hitler insisted
that Aryan women must be protected breeding machines whose major task was to stay home and have babies.

  We heard that the Americans and the British encouraged mothers to work in the war industries, that they provided child care and paid high wages to a highly motivated, patriotic workforce. But the Führer rejected this idea. German women received extra rations, even medals of honor, for breeding profusely. So places like Arado depended mainly on boys who were too young, men who were too old, girls who knew they would be better off pregnant, and workers from conquered countries, a group not especially motivated to break production records for the Luftwaffe.

  Arado’s foreign workers lived at eight labor camps. The Dutch, especially the aircraft designers, lived quite decently. So did the French, whom the Germans had come to admire for their skill and diligence. And so did the Italians, who were supposed to be our allies. Some alliance! The Germans generally thought the Italians were cowardly and ill-mannered, and the Italians thought the Germans were bombastic and uncultured. Also, the Italians hated German food. A neighbor of mine once told me, with horror, that she had seen an Italian worker at a restaurant spit out his sausage with a disgusted “Yuch!” (“Right onto the floor!” she exclaimed) and then storm out, shouting that only the barbarian Huns could possibly consume such offal.

  All the “Eastern” foreign workers—Poles, Serbs, Russians, and others—lived in squalor, under guard, in fear.

  Thankfully, it was mostly the French and Dutch who worked under Werner’s supervision in the Arado paint department. He made sure that there was enough paint and that the insignia on the aircraft were applied correctly, and he earned quite a good salary. His apartment was by far the nicest in our building.

  Each of the workers’ buildings had four stories, with three apartments on each floor. Our flat was on the first floor, facing the street. The big vacant lot across the way, scheduled to become a park, as yet contained nothing but a row of trash bins. We had a bedroom, a big combination kitchen and living room, a smaller room, and a bathroom—with a bath! Actually, it was a gas heating unit with a large kettle on top. You could heat water in the kettle and then empty it into the tub for a bath. We alone, among the tenants, possessed this luxury.

  Our stove came already prepared for war. It was electric; but if the electricity were to be cut off, coal bricks could fuel it.

  Werner took great care not to tempt the neighbors to gossip. He did not bring me to live in his flat until his divorce was final, in January 1943. Before that time, I stayed with his friend’s wife, Hilde Schlegel, a warmhearted girl with bouncing curls, who lived a few houses away. Hilde’s husband, Heinz, also a painter, had been sent to the Eastern front. She longed for a child and had recently undergone an operation to help her conceive. Since the Nazis were generous to the wives of soldiers, she had plenty to live on and did not have to work.

  “When Heinz went to the army, they gave me enough money to go see him,” Hilde said. “He had been wounded, but only slightly, and he was in a military hospital in Metz. Ach, what a wonderful time that was, Grete—a real honeymoon, my first vacation ever. Because, as you must know, it wasn’t always like this. Let me tell you, we had some hard times back when I was a kid. For twelve years Papa had no steady job. We lived on charity mostly. Then, when our dear Führer came to power, things got much better. Just about all the young people we knew joined the Hitler Youth. When I was fifteen I went to a Nazi Party banquet, and they served rolls with butter. It was the first time I ever tasted butter.” Is that the reason? I wondered. Is that why they averted their eyes, made themselves blind? For the butter? “I feel that everything we have we owe to our dear Führer, may he live forever.”

  She clinked her teacup against mine.

  Hilde became my closest “friend” in Brandenburg, if you can say that about a woman who has no real idea who you are. She walked me down Wilhelmstrasse toward the town, to show me the stores where I could do my marketing. And she told me all about Werner’s first wife, Elisabeth.

  “Huge! Taller than Werner! Gorgeous. But temperamental! Ach, what shouting, what fighting! Ask Frau Ziegler in the flat across the hall from Werner if I’m not telling the truth. They had terrible battles. He hit her! And she hit him back! No wonder he finally went and found himself a proper sweet little girl like you.”

  Elisabeth had taken most of the furniture when she moved out, but we were left with quite enough to get along. Werner lugged all his tools and paints and brushes into the “little room,” transforming it into his workshop. We kept a single bed in there, in case anyone came to visit. Against the interior wall, he put together a work table; and then, on little hooks, he hung all of his tools, neatly organized by size and function. To make me feel welcome, he decided to decorate the colorless apartment by painting all around the living room a mural on the wooden section of the wall.

  Every night, he would come home from work, change his clothes, and eat the evening meal, which I prepared; then, he would go to work on that mural. He used a technique called Schleiflack. I seem to remember that it required several steps of sanding, varnishing, painting, and finishing—a messy, dusty, slow job. He stole paint from the Arado warehouse, bright colors which usually sparkled on the wings of the planes bombing England. Night after night, Werner scraped and sanded, sketched an outline, put down a base coat, let it dry, sanded again, painted again. I sat in a chair near the doorway and watched him, remembering the craftsmen I had seen in Vienna, climbing like acrobats on their scaffolding, painting the facades of the boutiques and the hotels. I was so impressed with him, so filled with admiration, that I needed no other entertainment than to watch him at work. His face was smudged and shining with sweat and the intensity of his pleasure in the project. The gold hair on his strong forearms bristled with plaster dust.

  Soon a frieze of fruit and flowers appeared, encircling the kitchen, a network of twining vines, curling leaves, apples, carrots, radishes, onions, and cherries—a garland representing all the bounties of peacetime inside which we two would live, as in a charmed circle.

  When he had finished his mural, Werner crouched in the middle of the floor and swiveled slowly on his paint-spattered shoes. His bright blue eyes glittered with critical intensity as he looked for places where finishing touches were needed.

  “What do you think?” he asked.

  “I think it is beautiful,” I said. “And you are a great artist.”

  I sank down on the floor beside him and held him tight. I did not mind that some paint ended up on my clothes.

  In January, after the divorce came through, I moved into that flat, and when Werner closed the door behind us, I became a privileged middle-class German woman. I had a home, a safe place, a protector. I remembered the blessing of the rabbi who had sat by my bed and patted my hand and prayed in Hebrew for me in Badgastein. I felt very lucky.

  WE ENJOYED A very quiet, peaceful relationship, Werner and I. But you must understand that I was not a normal companion, like Elisabeth or Frau Doktor, full of demands and opinions. I was concerned only that everything should be as Werner liked it. I never deliberately reminded him that I was Jewish. I only wanted him to forget that, to put that fact away in the back of his mind, as I had put away Edith Hahn, and just let it gather dust there, barely remembered. I put all my energy and imagination into learning how to do the one thing I had lied about being able to do—cook. Frau Doktor sent me packages of lentils and a book of recipes: “Cook with love,” it said, and you can be sure that I did.

  Every morning I would get up at five, make us breakfast, and make Werner’s lunch, and he would go to work on his bike. I ate a potato in the morning so he would have enough bread for his lunchtime sandwich. I could see clearly that before my arrival he hadn’t been eating enough, that he could not really feed himself adequately. Early on he had awful headaches in the evening, hunger headaches; I had made their acquaintance myself, so I knew how he suffered, and I tried very hard to feed him well. Just in case I was held up at night at th
e Städtische Krankenhaus, the hospital where the Red Cross had placed me, I taught him to make Kartoffel-puffer, pancakes made of fried potatoes and anything else one could find. Werner Vetter gained two kilos after I moved in.

  Tante Paula Simon-Colani, a tiny, powerful woman whom I immediately adored, came often to visit from Berlin, to give herself some relief from the constant bombing there. She told me that Werner’s family had an inherited obsession with cleanliness.

  “Dust, my dear,” said Tante Paula. “Dust as though your life depended upon it.”

  Good advice, as it turned out. One day, Werner came home before I did and, just to satisfy the family passion, reached up and ran his forefinger along the top edge of the door to see if there was any dust up there. He was tall enough to do that. To clean off the top edge of the door, I had had to climb on a chair. But I had done it, thank God, because Tante Paula had warned me. So there was no dust.

  “I am extremely pleased with the way you are keeping the house,” he said that evening. “Even the upper edges of the doors are dusted. This is good, very good.”

  “Ah, well, but I have an advantage—Tante Paula warned me that you would be checking,” I laughed, sitting on his lap, wiggling my fingers through the buttons on his shirt and tickling his belly. I think he might have been just a little embarrassed. He never bothered me about cleaning again.

  Werner had a problem with authority, which was a very serious problem indeed when you consider that he was living in the most authoritarian society in the world at that time.

  I believe he handled his problem by lying. He was an inspired liar. My lies were small, believable. His were huge, colorful. If he didn’t want to get up for work one morning, he would say his brother’s house in Berlin had been blown up by the RAF, the children were in the street homeless, and he simply had to go and help them. And Arado would believe him.

  He loved lying to his superiors at Arado. His lies made him feel free—in fact, superior to his superiors—because he knew something they didn’t know, and he was taking the day off while they were working.