Edith Hahn Beer

Edith Hahn Beer was born in 1914 in Vienna

Edith Hahn was born in Vienna in 1914, one of three daughters of Klothilde and Leopold Hahn, who ran a restaurant. A teacher convinced her father to send her to high school. She went on to study law at the University of Vienna.

After the Anschluss she had to leave the university because she was Jewish. In 1939 she and her mother were sent to the Vienna ghetto, and in 1941 she was sent to forced labor in Germany. Her mother was deported shortly before Hahn returned to Vienna in 1942.

Using the papers of a Christian friend, she moved to Munich and volunteered as a Red Cross nurse. There she met Werner Vetter, a Nazi party member who wanted to marry her even after she told him she was Jewish. They married and had a daughter, Angelika, in 1944.

After the war she reclaimed her identity and was made a judge at the Brandenburg district court. Under Soviet pressure to become an informant, she fled with her daughter to London, where she worked as a housemaid and corset designer.

In 1957 she married Fred Beer, who died in 1984. She then emigrated to Israel and lived in Netanya before returning to London, where she died in 2009.