An Analysis of Edith Hahn Beer's, The Nazi Officer's Wife

Edith Hahn Beer, born in 1914, wrote The Nazi Officer's Wife, a memoir about her life and struggles for survival during the rein of Adolf Hitler. Edith goes chronologically through her life and tells the truths about the constant fear she lived in. Throughout her entire ordeal, perhaps her biggest fear was that her identity would be revealed and lost at the same time. Yet despite the risk it posed to her life, Edith Hahn created a remarkable collective record of survival: She saved every set of real and falsified papers, letters she received from her lost love, Pepi, and photographs she managed to take inside labor camps.
Edith Hahn returned to her home of Vienna, Austria, after fourteen months in Nazi labor camps to find her mother had been deported. Her father passed many years earlier and her two sisters fled for Palestine in hopes of escaping Nazi takeover of their homeland. Edith was left with no one or no place to turn to and as a result, she was forced to change her identity in order to survive. She obtained identity paper from a good Austrian friend, Christl. Edith was now Christina Maria Margarethe Denner, but she would go by Grete Denner. Every aspect of Edith's life would revolve around securing her identity, essentially surviving. For example, her first move was to Munich, Germany, where she began to work at the Red Cross as a nurse. Edith chose this particular place because she would receive food rations there, where as everyone else received them from the Rations Office, which required a national identity card; Grete did not have one. Even though no one could tell that Grete was actually Edith Hahn, she still feared for the worst. It was a new struggle daily and she longed for the life she once knew.
Edith dreamed of good things and participated in deep political discussions. When Edith was twenty-four and an aspiring law student with only one exam left to finish her schooling and her future looked very bright. Edith fell in love with a