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THE NAZI OFFICER’S WIFE

A recent article in the New York Times titled "Too Much of a Bad Thing" suggested that the growing number of Holocaust documentaries may be reaching a saturation point and that perhaps fictional film might be appropriate for some topics rather than the standard devices of generic archival footage and talking heads. Evidence to support that position comes from Liz Garbus’s fascinating but staid The Nazi Officer’s Wife. Edith Hahn was a bright and free-spirited young Jewish woman in Vienna when the Nazi anschluss ended all that in 1938. Rather than take the one-way trip east demanded by the new masters, she arranged with a gentile friend and a pair of ranking Nazis to change her identity. As an Aryan named Greta, she fled to Munich, married a handsome Nazi, had a daughter, and survived.

Garbus gets the facts across efficiently with the talking-heads/archival-footage format, including interviews with the now octogenarian Edith and her still conflicted daughter. Susan Sarandon’s trite voiceover narrative, meanwhile, pales before Julia Ormond’s readings from Hahn’s far more eloquent autobiography. Maybe the truth needs to be told by a filmmaker like Agnieszka Holland, who dramatized a similar true story in the harrowing Europa Europa (1990), or Roman Polanski, who raised the bar with The Pianist. (96 minutes)

BY PETER KEOUGH

Issue Date: June 27 - July 3, 3003
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