The Nazi Officer's Wife (19 page)

“Go back,” she said. “I don’t want you here anymore.”

I had expected to stay with her for three days. After only two, I returned to Deisenhofen, miserable and rejected. And there in Frau Gerl’s front hall was a telegram from Werner, saying that he was arriving in Munich in the morning and simply had to see me. It’s amazing to consider these turns of fate. If I had stayed three days in Vienna, I would not have returned in time to receive that telegram. But by chance I did—by chance.

Early the next morning, I went to Munich to meet Werner. In the train station, I took my hat off, fearing that he would not recognize me in my winter clothes. But he spotted me instantly. He shouted a greeting, scooped me up in his arms, showered me with kisses, and sat me down for breakfast in the café at the House of German Art.

“I decided on my way to work yesterday that I had to have you,” he said, kneading my hand.

“What?”

“That’s right. It has to be. You must be my wife.”

“What?”

“So I took time off from work by telling the boss at Arado that my mother’s house in the Rhineland was bombed and I had to go and make sure she was all right.”

“Werner! You can go to prison for that! False excuses! Absenteeism!”

“But they believed me. Look at this face.” He grinned. “This is a face you
must
believe. So, when will you marry me?”

“We’re in the middle of a war! People shouldn’t get married in wartime.”

“I am madly in love with you! You do not leave my thoughts
for one minute. I sit in the bathtub, I think of you, and the water begins to boil.”

“Oh, Werner, stop that …”

“I want to meet your father. I will go to Vienna to meet him. He will think I am wonderful, you’ll see.”

My mind was racing. I had thought to spend a day with a charming man, bandaging my wounded ego. I had never dreamed of this! What was I going to do? Werner was ready to jump on the train to Vienna and ask my father for my hand in marriage. Where was I going to get a father?

“Now, please, slow down. This is not rational; we have known each other only a few days.”

“For me, this is enough. I am a man of action.”

“But why didn’t you write to me? Why did you endanger yourself by lying to the company?”

He leaned back in his chair, sighed, and hung his head. “Because I felt guilty. Because I told you a lie about being a bachelor. I’m married and in the middle of a divorce, that’s the truth, and my little niece Bärbl that I spoke of—well, she is really my daughter Bärbl. So I thought that since I had not been honest with you at first, now I must see you in person face-to-face to tell you the truth. I love you, Grete. You are my inspiration. Come and live with me in Brandenburg, and as soon as the divorce comes through, we can get married.”

My coffee sloshed onto the table because my trembling hand could not control the cup. I was terrified. He wanted me to meet his brother Robert and his sister-in-law Gertrude and the famous Tante Paula; he wanted to introduce me to his friends; it was endless.

We went into the museum. He pressed me and pressed me as we walked past those huge Nazi paintings and friezes, by Helmut
Schaarschmidt and Hermann Eisenmenger and Conrad Hommel, portraits of Hitler and Göring, skies full of fire and eagles, grimfaced soldiers with steel helmets, Arno Breker’s stone god-men with their Parthenon stances, waving their mighty swords. Werner didn’t even look at them. He was holding my hand and talking into my ear, telling me what a nice flat he had and what a good job he had and how happy he would make me. “Think of the bathtub! Think of the sofa! Think of the Volkswagen I am buying for us both!”

It went on and on for hours.

“The world is too unsettled,” I protested. “What if you are sent to the front and killed in battle?”

Werner laughed heartily. “They’ll never send me to the front! I’m half blind!”

“What if the Red Cross hospital is bombed and I am killed?”

“What if they send you to another hospital and some soldier sees you and falls in love with you as I have done, and I lose you? It would be unbearable! I would not be able to go on living!”

“Oh Werner, stop that….”

“Tell me about your father.”

He was a dedicated Jew, and if he knew I was even walking through a museum with the likes of you he would kill me and then have another heart attack himself and die again
.

“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.

N
INE

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.