Filmmaker Liz Garbus (The Farm: Angola, USA) documents the extraordinary story of Edith Hahn in The Nazi Officer’s Wife. Using old newsreel footage, personal photos, and interviews with Hahn, her daughter Angela, and various acquaintances, with narration by Susan Sarandon and Julia Ormond (who reads excerpts from Hahn’s autobiography), the film explores how Hahn, a Jewish woman living in Vienna during the Nazi takeover of Austria, survived.

The film begins the tale with Hahn’s childhood, including her education, the death of her father, and her college romance with a half-Jewish intellectual. As the Nazis grew in power, and Hahn’s sisters fled for Palestine, he insisted that they would be safe in Vienna. Soon, Hahn, a law student, found herself in a slave labor camp. By the time she returned to Vienna, her mother had been sent to a concentration camp in Poland.

Certain to be deported herself, Hahn chose instead to remove the yellow star from her clothing and go into hiding. Finding help from the unlikeliest of sources (including two prominent members of the Nazi party,) Hahn took on a new identity as a young Aryan woman, and left Vienna, traveling to Munich, in the heart of the Third Reich, where she got a job working as a nurse’s aide for the Red Cross.

There, visiting a museum, she met a bright and well-spoken Nazi, Werner Vetter, who approached her. Soon, against Hahn’s better judgment, the two had started a romance, which eventually led to an unlikely marriage and a child. (Barnes & Noble)

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Edith Han was an outspoken young woman studying law in Vienna when the Gestapo forced Edith and her mother into a Jewish ghetto. Edith was taken away to a labor camp, and when she returned home months later, she found her mother had been deported. Knowing she would become a hunted woman, Edith 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. Using the woman’s identity papers, Edith fled to Munich. There she met Werner Vetter, a Nazi Party member who fell in love with her. Despite her protests and even her eventual confession that she was Jewish, he married her and kept her identity a secret.

The most melodramatic Hollywood screenwriter could not concoct a tale as full of dramatic reversals, conflicted characters, and astounding coincidences as the story of Edith Hahn, an Austrian Jew who eluded Nazi oppression by going underground as an Aryan woman in the heart of Germany. When a Nazi factory manager named Vetter proposes to her after they’ve only known each other a few weeks, she confesses her true identity - and he marries her anyway.

Her “U-boat” existence becomes an even more complicated masquerade when Vetter is drafted into the Nazi army and becomes an officer. The Nazi Officer’s Wife lays out the story with clarity and compassion, with all its contradictions and glimpses of human goodness, in the face of monstrous evil, intact. The details of Hahn’s life are simply amazing. Interviews with Hahn, her daughter, and other survivors give full dimension to the events. (Amazon)