Amid the Horror of Holocaust, a Nazi’s Love Saved Her Life

WASHINGTON —  A wartime romance: Beautiful Red Cross worker meets handsome tourist, who quickly becomes smitten. The world is exploding, and after his holiday he sends her a stream of letters and telegrams and ultimately returns to propose marriage. But here Edith Hahn’s story takes a strange twist.

It was Munich, 1942, and the young Jewish woman was living a secret, using identification papers given to her by a Christian friend. Her suitor, Werner Vetter, was a member of the Nazi Party. After resisting his increasingly urgent appeals, she decided to trust her instincts, even at the risk of her life, and tell him the truth. “He said at once, ‘It doesn’t matter,’ ” she remembers.

“He’s impulsive,” she adds, smiling at the memory. “I was young, and--such things happen.”

It was one of the odder turns in Hahn’s altogether improbable life, which is abundant with narrow escapes and unforeseen providence. The most dramatic chapters of that life are chronicled in the Edith Hahn Archive, a collection of letters, photographs and documents that was sold at auction recently and has now been donated to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. An Israeli, the 84-year-old Hahn came to Washington in May with her London-based daughter, Angela Schluter, to mark the occasion.

A tiny, sure-footed woman with a modest demeanor, Hahn speaks in a musical German accent. Seated demurely in a small office at the museum, her daughter offering trenchant counterpoint, she tells her story with a sense of wonder. The sudden attention is surprising, she says, but no more so than her own survival.

Hahn was born in 1914 and grew up in Vienna, the daughter of middle-class parents who ran a restaurant. In 1933 she began to study law but five years later was forced to abandon it after the Nazis took control of Austria and restricted Jews’ activities. Her father had died, and she and her mother were ordered into a ghetto, issued Jewish IDs and given the middle name Sara, which was assigned to all Jewish women. (Men took the name Israel.)

In 1941 Hahn was sent into forced labor in Germany, first picking asparagus and later working at a factory making cardboard cartons. She began a correspondence with Pepi, her boyfriend of nine years, who remained in Vienna. It is these letters--she often wrote more than once a day, and Pepi wasn’t one to throw things away--that form the nucleus of the Hahn archive.

When she speaks of the long-ago romance she giggles shyly and looks down. “To him I wrote only the truth,” she says. “It was more like a diary.”

Her mother sent urgent word that she was being shipped east, and Hahn got permission to make an emergency visit home. The idea was that the two would go together--she says no one knew for sure where Jews were being sent. Families were kept together “to make a pretense of resettling,” she adds. “Really, it was to kill everything of the family at once.

“But when I came, she was not anymore there. I was devastated--can you imagine?”

Her mother had been sent ahead, and the two never saw each other again. Hahn, ordered east herself, instead went underground. Pepi was no help; he lived with his Gentile mother, who considered Hahn’s presence a threat. But other friends pitched in with a meal here, a couple of nights’ lodging there.

“It was not a very nice way to live,” she says. “I was not regularly eating.”

Then a friend, Christine Denner, gave Hahn identification papers. For the duration of the war, Hahn, who quickly moved to Munich, was known as Gretel Denner.

Enter Vetter, who so far looks like the hero of the tale. But it’s not that simple: Though he did indeed love Hahn and protect her, he also deeply believed the Nazi theories about Jews. He still does.

“That’s not Nazism to him,” says Schluter, 53, a product of the marriage. “It’s gospel truth.” A few months ago, she adds, she received a 28-page letter from him trying to convince her, among other things, that Jewish blood is “stronger” than Aryan blood and taints it when the two are combined. “He’s a bit mad,” she concludes dismissively.

In a ceremony at the museum, Hahn said, “he was so much in love that I was sure he would not hand me over to the Gestapo, so I married him.” She lived with him in Brandenburg, near Berlin. She also lived with constant fear: “I was for three years a wanted person,” she says.

Though it appears she didn’t love her husband the way he loved her, she was fond of him. Schluter clarifies: “Pepi was the love of her life.” Her mother makes no protest.

Hahn tells her story in considerable detail and takes amusement in its ironies. Before getting married, all German couples had to prove they were Aryan, but she lacked Denner’s maternal documents. A municipal clerk peered hard at her and concluded, “It is obvious your mother couldn’t have been Jewish.” When, after the war, she went to the same clerk to register as her true self, he was outraged at the “felony” she had committed by posing as someone else.

“I said, ‘I don’t think you will find an authority who will indict me,’ ” she concludes, enjoying the moment.

Though reluctant at first, Vetter ultimately went along with Hahn’s wish to have a child. There is speculation that Schluter may have been the only Jewish baby born in a Nazi hospital.

Ultimately Vetter was drafted and sent to the eastern front. He wound up in a Soviet POW camp but was released in 1947. The marriage quickly broke up.

“He wanted to marry again his first wife,” she says. “He had five marriages.”

Schluter breaks in: “Seven, sweetheart.”

There was no thought of a reunion with Pepi, for Hahn had concluded he could never leave his mother. At her request, he returned her letters.

After the war, she worked as a lawyer and judge, living in the Soviet sector of Germany. After the secret police attempted to enlist her to spy on colleagues in 1948, she fled to London, where she had a sister.

“The only thing valuable I took to England was my daughter,” she says.

Instead of welcoming her, her sister’s husband feared she would be a financial drain.

“This man applied to the Home Office to have my mother deported to East Germany,” Schluter says, the anger still fresh.

“My sister said, ‘You’re breaking up my marriage,’ ” Hahn adds.

But she wasn’t going back. She took a succession of jobs--cleaning, cooking, designing corsets--and in 1957 married again, this time to Fred Beer, a Jew from Vienna. The union, she says, was happy and lasted 30 years. After his death, she moved to Israel.

“She was only 72 when he died, and she decides she needs an adventure,” Schluter reports with mock exasperation. “This is what I live with!”

It was the daughter’s idea that the archive might be of historical interest. She suggested taking it to Sotheby’s in London, where it was auctioned last December. Dalck Feith, a Holocaust survivor and former member of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, and former transportation secretary Drew Lewis purchased it for $140,000, more than four times the estimated price. They donated it to the museum.

The museum’s director of collections, David Marwell, welcomed the acquisition. “Her story is extremely unusual,” he says. “I would imagine it is unique.” Noting that “there’s an absolute closing window of opportunity here” as Holocaust survivors grow older, he says he hopes news of the archive will attract additional offerings.

The sale gives Hahn, who lives alone, a financial cushion and will pay for a pair of cataract operations.

Having brought her saga up to the present day, she giggles and says in summation, “I can’t believe it!” She’s entitled to be angry about the harm that was done to her, the years of terror. She insists she’s not. “How can I be angry when I have survived such a thing? It’s a miracle I have survived. I think of the people who helped me.”

There are people who retain the aura of children all their lives, and Edith Hahn is one of them. It has nothing to do with maturity or responsibility, both of which she appears always to have exhibited. But the optimism and merriment that she employs wherever possible are the kind that spring up at an early age or not at all.

It pleases her that long after all of the Holocaust survivors are gone, her story will be available to scholars. Lives, after all, are meant to be shared. She admits there was one point of reluctance, however.

She’s laughing so hard she can barely get it out. “The only thing that troubled me is my grandchildren will read my love letters,” she says. “You can understand--it’s not usual!”