Produced & Directed by Liz Garbus
Produced by Rory Kennedy
Produced by Laurent Zilber and Christina Zilber
Written & Co-Produced by Jack Youngelson
Edited by Eric Seuel Davies
Photographed by Daniel B. Gold
Music by Sheldon Mirowitz
Head of Production: Julie Gaither
Narrated by Susan Sarandon and Julia Ormond
A Moxie Firecracker/Trillion Entertainment Production
Aired on A&E Network Sunday, June 29, 2003, 8–10 PM ET/PT
"A bewitching and harrowing tale.... The documentary lays out a narrative that has the engrossing folds and twists of a novel fraught with danger.... The Nazi Officer's Wife is packed with revelations and withheld information that comes to life; it is like an old movie castle full of false fireplaces and trap doors."
Elvis Mitchell, The New York Times
"The Nazi Officer's Wife" looks at the extraordinary and unforgettable life of Holocaust survivor Edith Hahn Beer. Born in Vienna in 1914, Edith Hahn was an outspoken young woman studying law in Vienna when the Gestapo forced Edith and her mother into the Jewish ghetto. Soon Edith was deported to a labor camp, and though she convinced Nazi officials to spare her mother, when she returned home she discovered that her mother had been deported. Knowing she would become a hunted woman, Edith tore the yellow star from her clothing and went underground, scavenging for food and searching each night for a safe place to sleep. Her boyfriend, Pepi, proved too terrified to help her, but a Christian friend was not. With the Christian woman's identity papers in hand, Edith fled to Munich.
Edith was now what became known as a "U-boat"-- a fugitive hiding in plain sight in Nazi Germany. She got a job at the Red Cross and lived in a boarding house outside Munich. There she met Werner Vetter, a Nazi party member who fell in love with her. And despite her protests and even her eventual confession that she was Jewish, he married her and kept her identity secret. The two of them - the Nazi and his Jewish wife - lived out the war together, even bearing a child. Angela Vetter, their daughter is the only Jewish girl known to be born in a Nazi hospital.
Edith Hahn and her daughter survived the war, while potential exposure lurked at every corner. But Edith Hahn is not simply a hero - she is a complicated woman who kept her story of survival secret for nearly half a century, deceiving even her children. The film explores issues of faith, family and identity in this complex portrait of a woman who had to bury her true self in order to survive.