Edith Hahn Beer was born in 1914 in Vienna, Austria, to Leopold and Klothilde Hahn, as the second of three girls. She showed an early interest in law and politics, which was encouraged by a local rabbi who advised her father to send her to university. However, her studies were cut short when Austria was annexed by Germany in 1938, and she was forced to abandon her degree due to her Jewish heritage.
Edith's sisters escaped to Palestine, but she and her mother were forced to move into a ghetto in Vienna. After a few months, the Germans ordered the Jews to report to a specific location, and Edith and her mother were deported to the Nazi headquarters in Vienna. Edith used her skills to get her mother out of going to a labor camp, claiming that her sisters were still in line and could work faster and better.
Edith was then sent to a farm in Osterburg, Germany, where she worked for nearly a year and a half. She made friends at the farm and continued to write to her mother and boyfriend, Joseph (Pepi) Rosenfield, who was still living in Vienna. After a year and a half, Edith was sent to a factory to make boxes, where she spent several months before learning that her mother was being sent to Poland.
Edith tried to get back to Vienna to go with her mother, but arrived two weeks after she left. She then went into hiding, using the identity of a woman named Christina Maria Margarethe Denner. She lived with a couple outside of Munich, working as a seamstress and at the Red Cross, where she used her law background to help refugees.
Edith met Werner Vetter, a painter for the Luftwaffe, and they married after she became pregnant. However, Werner was drafted into the German army and became a Nazi officer. After the war, Edith became a judge in Munich, using her law degree to help rebuild the city's legal system.
After Werner left her, Edith moved to England with her sister and brother-in-law, where she remarried to Fred Beer, a Holocaust survivor. She later moved to Israel and wrote a book about her experiences, titled "A Nazi Officer's Wife."
