The Nazi Officer's Wife Read online

  Years later, I became friendly with one of his other wives. She said Werner told her that my father had committed suicide by jumping from a window with a typewriter tied around his neck. Why would Werner tell such a story? Perhaps just to entertain her, perhaps just to entertain himself, to make life a bit more thrilling. I sometimes think that was what sparked his interest in me too: the thrill of a lie. After all, an obedient, docile, willing, loving, cooking, cleaning, mending Jewish mistress was not something every German had around the house in the winter of 1942-43.

  Werner and I never talked about the Jews or what might be happening to my mother in the east. To speak of it could only have been dangerous for me, because either he might have felt guilty, as a German; or he might have felt frightened, as someone who was running a risk by harboring a fugitive.

  He knew that I was a well-educated woman, but that certainly was not something I reminded him about. He didn’t like people who had any claim to superiority over him. So I carefully limited my opinions to practical matters. For example, when Werner was divorcing Elisabeth, I told him that in the custody battle for little Bärbl, he should ask for six weeks’ visitation.

  “If she comes to us for just a short time, you won’t be able to have any influence on her,” I said. “But if she comes for six weeks, then it will be a real vacation with Father and she will get to know you and love you.”

  Werner requested this from the court. When his divorce was granted—in January 1943—and he received six weeks’ visitation rights, he was so happy that he waltzed me around the apartment, singing (very quietly), “Isn’t it just dandy to have a lawyer in the house?”

  Every month, he sent out money to buy the car that had been invented especially for the Nazis, to be the dream vehicle of the common man—the Volkswagen. I had no faith in it. I figured it was just something else that the government was doing to get money from the people.

  “You will never get that car,” I said, as I pressed his shirts.

  “I’ve already paid for several months.”

  “I promise you, dearest, you will never get it.”

  He looked at me thoughtfully for a moment. Some instinct must have told him that what I said was true, because he soon stopped paying and thereby became one of the few Germans not to be robbed in this unique manner.

  Sexually, Werner was a powerful man. He insisted that we prepare for bed together. He never stayed up after me. I never stayed up after him. Another woman whom stress and tension had rendered sleepless the night before, who had worked all day as a nurse’s aide in a municipal hospital, who had cleaned the house and made the dinner, might have said, “No, not tonight. I’m tired.” But not I. I knew I was living with a tiger. I wanted the tiger to be sated and happy, with a full belly, ironed shirts, no arguments.

  Does that seem like an impossibility? Can a woman be satisfying in bed when she is pretending to be somebody else, when everything she loved has disappeared and she is living in perpetual terror of discovery and death? The answer is, quite truthfully, yes. Sex is one of the few things you can do in life that makes you forget all the things you cannot do.

  And besides—you must understand this—I cared for Werner, more and more each day.

  His first wife, Elisabeth, haunted me. She didn’t even live in Brandenburg anymore; she had moved with Bärbl to Bitterfeld northwest of Halle in central Germany—but sometimes I felt that she was sitting at our table, sleeping on our pillow.

  “She came by when you were at work,” Frau Ziegler told me. “She was asking about you. Who is this Viennese girl, what’s her story? I told her, Elisabeth, Grete is a very nice person; you ought to be happy that Bärbl is going to have such a nice stepmother.”

  I could see from the malicious twinkle in her eye how much Elisabeth’s old neighbor had enjoyed increasing her discomfort about me. If she had only had any idea how much she was increasing my discomfort about Elisabeth!

  Elisabeth asked another neighbor if there was any chance that Werner still loved her and might want her again. What was I going to do about this? I wanted to stay with Werner, but I dreaded the idea of marriage—the background checks, the papers, and the questions. On the other hand, I lived in fear that if I didn’t marry Werner soon, his former wife might take him away.

  If it seems that I was haunted by Elisabeth, then you should have seen Werner. There we were in the kitchen one night, the picture of domestic peace. I was darning the holes in Werner’s socks. He was reading a novel he had borrowed from the Arado library. Suddenly his book fell to the floor. He stood up straight. He began to speak.

  “You are responsible for all of our problems with money,” he said angrily. “You have no sense about how to spend or how to save. You buy clothes, you wear them once, and then you throw them away. It’s because you are lazy, too lazy to do the laundry, to iron, to behave like a real woman should.”

  I didn’t know what to think. Was he speaking to me? I was the only person in the room, but the person he was speaking to was nothing like the person I was.

  “Werner, what’s the matter?” I asked in my small voice. He did not even hear me. He began to stride up and down the kitchen, rubbing his chest as though trying not to have a heart attack, dragging his fingers through his neat hair.

  “I work like a horse. I lie and invent stories at Arado so that you will have all the things you want. I buy you presents, I buy presents for little Bärbl, and still you are not satisfied, still you say this friend of yours has this, and that friend of yours has that! You want more and more and more!”

  I realized that he was talking to Elisabeth, that somehow or other his mind had taken him into the middle of a conversation he had once had with her, probably right here in this room.

  “Werner, please, you were divorced from Elisabeth. You are a wonderful provider. Look at me; I am Grete. We are living together here in peace and happiness. I am mending your socks. Please. Stop yelling.”

  He smashed his fist down on the kitchen table. The forks and knives flew up. The dishes rattled.

  “I will not take this anymore,” he yelled. “I am the master in my house, and I expect to be obeyed! Nothing new will be bought here until The Victory! You will have to live with the clothing you have! And anything that is bought for Bärbl I will buy myself!”

  He fell back into his chair, panting and exhausted. I waited for him to return to himself. It took some time. I thought: Edith, you are living with a lunatic. But then again, who else but a lunatic would live with you?

  WERNER’S PRIZED POSSESSION was his radio, a fine piece of equipment. On the dial, he had inserted a little piece of brown paper. As long as that little piece of brown paper stayed in place, you could hear nothing but the German news.

  The radio was our chief source of entertainment, our terror, and our solace. The “Army Report” was available to everybody. This was what Werner and I had heard when we were dating in Munich. The radio brought us our favorite music request show, romantic songs from Zarah Leander, short concerts by the Berlin Philharmonic on Sunday nights, and Goebbels declaiming his weekly editorial from Das Reich, the Nazi “newsmagazine” (if one can imagine such a thing). If you dared listen to the foreign news, and you were caught, you could be sent to a concentration camp—and thousands were.

  During the first days of February 1943, the radio told us about the defeat of the German Army at Stalingrad. Even this terrible news was presented in a theatrical, almost beautiful way by order of the brilliant Goebbels.

  We heard muffled drums—the second movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.

  “The Battle of Stalingrad has ended,” said the announcer. “True to its oath to fight to the last breath, the Sixth Army under the exemplary leadership of Field Marshall Paulus has been overcome by the superiority of the enemy and by the unfavorable circumstances confronting our forces.”

  Hitler declared that there would be four days of national mourning during which all places of entertainment would be closed.
<
br />   So closely controlled and manipulated was the news that even this disaster could somehow be made to stimulate renewal of the Germans’ fighting resolve. On February 18, the radio brought us Goebbels’s “total war” speech at the Sportspalast, in which he called on Germans to make greater and greater sacrifices, to believe with greater and greater fervor in ultimate victory, to give themselves body and soul to the Führer, to adopt the motto “Now, people, rise, and storm and break loose!” Meanwhile the thousands in the stadium were screaming wildly: Führer befiehl, wir folgen! “Führer, command us and we shall follow!” With such hysteria, with such total control of the news, it was entirely possible not to feel how severe the defeat at Stalingrad had been, not to put it together with the news of Rommel’s defeat at El Alamein and the Allied landings in North Africa, not to understand that the war had turned against Germany and that this was the beginning of the end, but to still believe that Hitler would soon conquer England and the world.

  To live in ignorance, all you had to do was listen only to the Nazi news.

  It was evening. Werner was working late, and I was alone. I sat looking at that piece of brown paper holding the radio dial firmly and permanently at the politically correct place.

  “What if I were to move?” suggested the little piece of paper.

  “You can’t move,” I answered.

  “I could slip from my spot.”

  “Not all alone without help.”

  “You could help me move …”

  “No! Impossible! Anybody who does that will go to Dachau or Buchenwald or Orianenburg or God only knows where. A Red Cross nurse who helped you move from your spot on the dial could end up in Ravensbrück.”

  “So, if you’re so afraid,” said the little piece of brown paper, “leave me where I am and continue to live in darkness.”

  I turned my back on the radio, thinking to myself that I was going mad like my husband, arguing with chimeras. I got down on my hands and knees and scrubbed the kitchen floor. But the little piece of paper called to me.

  “Hello, there! Hausfrau! You know what’s on the other end of this dial? The BBC.”

  “Shh!”

  “And Radio Moscow.”

  “Quiet.”

  “And the Voice of America.”

  “Shut up!”

  “All in German, of course.”

  The man upstairs had started hammering on a bookcase he was building, as he did most nights after work. His wife—I think her name may have been Karla—was singing as she ironed their clothes.

  “Have you ever considered these lines by Goethe?” said the little piece of paper.

  Cowardly thoughts, anxious hesitation,

  Womanish timidity, timorous complaints

  Won’t keep misery away from you

  And will not set you free.

  So, challenged by my own motto, I at last snatched the brown piece of paper off the radio dial and threw it away. Under cover of the racket upstairs, for the very first time, I tuned in the BBC.

  Werner came home from work, tired and hungry. I gave him his dinner. I held him tightly in my arms. And right before we went to sleep, I said to him, “Listen …” Very, very quietly, using pillows and eiderdowns to muffle the sound, I turned on the BBC news. We were told that of 285,000 German soldiers at the battle of Stalingrad, only 49,000 had been evacuated. More than 140,000 had been slaughtered, and 91,000 had been taken prisoner. The prisoners were starving, freezing, frostbitten, being marched away in the subzero cold. Although we could not know it then, only about 6,000 of these men would ever return to Germany.

  Tears rolled down Werner’s face.

  From that time on, I listened to the foreign radio three or four times a day, and Werner listened too. Radio Moscow we did not believe. (Its broadcasts always began with “Tod der Deutschen Okkupanten!”—“Death to the German invaders!”) The BBC we thought sometimes exaggerated. The Voice of America did not come in very clearly. Beromünster of Switzerland we tended to find most objective.

  We shared our new discovery with Tante Paula during one of her visits. She wrote and thanked us for showing her the “beautiful pictures.”

  One day when I went across the hall to bring some flour to Frau Ziegler, I heard a familiar sound from Karla’s flat. It was just one tone, but I recognized it as one of the call notes of the BBC. Instantly I understood that our noisy upstairs neighbors had fooled us and everybody else with their hammering and singing. They were listening to the forbidden radio stations, just as we were.

  Outside of our house, Werner appeared to be a party stalwart, unshakable in his faith in Hitler. I know this because I met people he worked with at Arado, who spoke to me as though they expected me to share the opinions they thought Werner held.

  “I agree with Werner, Fräulein Denner,” said one of our neighbors. “Churchill is a drunkard and an upper-class English snob, and he has no rapport with his people. They don’t adore him the way we love our Führer. They will abandon him sooner or later and England will be ours.”

  “As Werner always says, the Führer knows best,” said another—this about a man who was living with a Jewish fugitive and listening every night to the foreign news.

  WORKING AT THE Städtische Krankenhaus solved one problem for me: I no longer had to go every month to have my ration card booklet stamped.

  You see, ordinary Reich citizens like Werner received their ration cards from a delivery man. Not me. I had to go to the food ration office in person—a terrifying trip, because I had no legal registration card, no identification that said who I was and where I lived. That card, which enabled a person to acquire all the other cards needed for food and clothing, was sitting in a file in Vienna and belonged to Christl Denner.

  When you changed your address, your card went into a sort of transit file. When you arrived at your new address, your card followed you. My last registration had taken place at Aschersleben. When I returned to Vienna, I should have registered there, but of course I had not. So now I lived in fear of conducting some transaction that would force the Germans to look for my card and say, “Well, but Fräulein, where is your card? And who is this other Fräulein Christina Maria Margarethe Denner in Vienna?”

  I had to avoid such an encounter at all costs—it would have meant disaster for me and for Christl. So I continued to eat from cards issued against Christl’s registration for a six-month holiday. Her ration card book was almost completely filled, and I was very afraid they would tell me that I could no longer use it, that I must actually live in the place where the holiday was being spent. I was terribly afraid of that. For days before I had to go to the food office, I would lie sleepless with anxiety. I rehearsed my lies over and over. At the desk in the office, waiting for the bureaucrat’s stamp, I would tremble and pray, “One more time, dear God. Please let them overlook the overfilled ration card booklet one more time.” I never shared my fears with Werner because then he might be afraid as well.

  Imagine, then, what a relief it was, as of February 1943, to be registered in the Red Cross Gemeinschafts-verpflegung, the group catering service at the hospital. I no longer had to make the terrible trip to the food ration office, because I didn’t have to get that card stamped.

  I worked a twelve-hour shift and received 30 reichsmarks per month. This was more pocket money than pay, but of course it was monumental compared with the starvation wages at the Arbeitslager. All the nurses ate the midday meal at a long table. The head nurse sat at the top; the others, arranged by rank, sat along the sides. I was at the very bottom of the table. At first, the head nurse would say a prayer before we ate, but by the spring of 1943 the prayer was outlawed.

  On my uniform I had a Red Cross brooch, and in the center of the cross was a swastika. I was supposed to wear it over my heart but I couldn’t bear to, so I didn’t. Every once in a while one of the senior nurses would notice and reprimand me.

  I would make my face humble, stupid. I mumbled that I had forgotten, hoping that after a while
they would assume I was a fool and had just lost the pin. This was my response to many “Aryan” matters—appear slightly foolish and they will leave you alone.

  For example, when I was working with foreign patients, I always tried to speak French to the French.

  “Tell them,” said one of my colleagues with a laugh, “all French are pigs.”

  “Oh, I am so very sorry,” I said, “but I don’t know the word for pigs.”

  And then there was the issue of party membership.

  “Fräulein Denner, you have been told more than once that we expect all our aides to belong to the Frauenschaften, the women’s auxiliary of the party. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Go tomorrow afternoon and join.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “That will be all.”

  I saluted. We were always supposed to salute a superior, coming and going, as though the German Red Cross were the German Army.

  “Uh, where is it I am supposed to go, ma’am?”

  My superior would sigh with great patience and tell me, yet again, where I should go. And yet again, I would “forget” to go.

  One day as I stood at the window of the ward, facing the gardens, two grizzled men in rags suddenly dashed out of the bushes and scurried toward the back door. They disappeared for a moment, then reappeared, trying to hide chunks of bread and cheese beneath their shirts. My superior—the nurse from Hamburg who had saved an onion for a dying Russian patient—came into the ward to change some bandages. I said nothing. She said nothing. I knew she was feeding these men. She knew I knew. Not a word was spoken about it. When her parents’ home was bombed in air attacks on Hamburg in July 1943, she had to leave. I was sorry to see her go, and with reason, because another nurse took her place as my superior, and almost immediately denounced me as a young silly girl who was much too nice to the foreigners and demanded my transfer to another service.