TOW #20: The Nazi Officer's Wife (IRB #1)

     The era of World War II is a rather famous one full of rather disturbing executions and heart-wrenching tales of lost family members and disloyalty. Often times, the aspect of this era that is usually told is the one of the actual Holocaust victims, the ones enduring the excruciating pain caused by the supposed superior beings. A perspective explored through my IRB entitled "The Nazi Officer's Wife" touches on a Austrian-born and Jewish woman who changed her identity in order to save herself and the ones she loved. Throughout her memoir, Edith Hahn Beer uses humor to parallel the paralyzingly fearful events that she faced during the Third Reich. 

     The rather humorous aspects of the Third Reich (if someone may believe that they exist) deal with the citizens of Germany and the "terrible things" that they had to face during Hitler's reign. While millions of people were forced into labor camps or gassed to death, citizens of Germany faced a problem. After a while through the war, there were no more onions. Beer states that her coworkers among the Red Cross nurses said that it was because Hitler "needed the onions to make poison gas with which to conquer [their] enemies." According to Beer, it became so much a problem that people started to buy "their onions on the black market." Today, this is a laughable issue to people who can drive to their local grocery store and buy as many onions as they wish. 

     Although this is humorous, it does have quite a seriousness attached to it. Beer claimed that "many citizens of the Third Reich would have gladly forgone the pleasure of gassing the enemy if they could only taste an onion." This relates to an issue that was occurring that would eventually lead to the end of Hitler's reign. Even with a small issue such as the lack of onions, citizens were losing their loyalty to the Furher. By 1943, the whole idea of attacking the enemies seemed to die down, but only as long as someone weren't to say it out loud as they feared being sent to a labor camp.

     The audience of this book can naturally be anyone. I am enjoying the different perspective that it brings from this saddening era of despair.