Edith Hahn-Beer escaped probable extermination as a Jew in wartime Germany by assuming a false identity, marrying a German and living out the Second World War in the guise of a dutiful housewife.

She later became a judge in postwar Germany before fleeing to Britain in 1948 after coming under pressure from the KGB to become an informer. The story of her life is told in an account she wrote (with Susan Dworkin) The Nazi Officer’s Wife: How One Jewish Woman Survived the Holocaust (1999), which became a best-seller and was translated into a number of languages. A feature film is in pre-production.

Edith Hahn-Beer was born Edith Hahn in 1914 and grew up with her widowed mother in Vienna. She did well at school and, unusually for a young woman in 1930s’ Austria, she was encouraged to go to university. She qualified as a lawyer in Vienna but was prevented from sitting final exams for her doctorate when Germany enacted the Anschluß in 1938, and Austrian Jews, too, started to be persecuted.

The family was evicted from its home in 1939 and sent to the Jewish ghetto in Vienna. In 1941 she was forced to work in a labour camp in north Germany — first in an asparagus plantation and then in a paper factory. For 13 months she survived a regime of 80 hours’ work a week on starvation rations. Detailed letters to her boyfriend, Josef, describing conditions in the camp, have formed valuable source material now kept in the American Holocaust Museum in Washington.

In 1942 she was told she was being sent back to Vienna, probably a euphemism for deportation farther east and eventual extermination. Her mother had already disappeared never to be heard of again. Hahn escaped from the train at Vienna, removed the yellow star that identified her as a Jew, and with the help of Josef she went into hiding.

She was advised to find a friend who would pretend that she had been boating on a lake with her boyfriend when her handbag fell into the water and all her identification papers were lost. Her friend, Christine Maria Margarete Denner, agreed with the idea of going to the authorities with this story and for her bravery would later be commemorated at the Tree Garden of Righteous Gentiles at the Holocaust Memorial Centre outside Jerusalem.

Having obtained new papers in Denner’s name she left for Munich to start a new life because it was too risky to stay in the same city as the woman whose name she had adopted. She lived quietly in Munich working as a seamstress before joining the Red Cross as an aide to a nurse.

One day she met a young German man, Werner Vetter, in a gallery in Munich. Within weeks of their meeting he proposed to her. Hahn was afraid of accepting him for fear that her papers would be scrutinised and tried to talk him out of the idea, but he was persistent and Hahn eventually told him that she could not marry him because she was Jewish, thinking that she had signed her death warrant.

“It was a matter of honour,” she said. “I could pretend to be another woman, I could pretend to be German, I could lie to everyone else, but I had to tell him the truth.” Rather than turn her in, Vetter responded that he had not been truthful either. He was going through a divorce and had a child, so they were quits, he told her. They never discussed their past again and were married in 1943. She gave birth to a daughter in 1944.

They settled in Brandenburg and she lived as a dutiful wife to her exacting husband, doing nothing to draw attention to her true identity. She gave birth in pain, refusing to take painkillers for fear of what she might reveal under the influence of drugs.

“I stayed at home, had a child, did the cleaning and cooking and looked after my husband. I needed to keep him happy so I made sure I was everything he wanted. I had gone from being the most despised creature in the Reich, a Jew, to a revered citizen, a breeding Aryan Hausfrau.”

Vetter was blind in one eye, an afflication which spared him from active service for most of the war, and he worked as an overseer in an aircraft factory. As the Allied forces closed in on the Reich he was sent to the Eastern Front as an officer. After his capture by the Soviet Army he was sent to a prison camp in Siberia.

After the German surrender in 1945, Hahn obtained a court order to reclaim her Jewish identity using her original identity card, which she had kept hidden in the pages of a book.

With law professionals in short supply, her law training was officially recognised and she established herself as a family law judge in Brandenburg.

She campaigned tirelessly for her husband’s release but when he finally returned from Siberia in 1947 things did not work out between them. He was disconcerted to find his previously meek, dutiful wife transformed into an empowered and lively legal professional. He became reconciled with his first wife, and Hahn agreed to a divorce.

She fled to Britain in 1948 when the KGB tried to recruit her as a Stasi informer. She later said that as the Russians regarded themselves as having liberated the Jewish people she was expected to spy for them.

She joined her sister, who had lived in London since before the war. She worked as a housemaid because her legal qualifications were not valid in Britain. In 1957 she was married to a Jewish jewellery merchant, Fred Beer. Five years after his death in 1984 she moved to Netanya in Israel but eventually returned to UK after heart surgery to spend her final years with her daughter and then in a London care home in Golders Green.

Hahn-Beer donated her personal papers to the US Holocaust Museum in Washington; at 800 documents, it was one of the largest archives pertaining to a single person.

In 2003 a documentary film was made, narrated by Susan Sarandon with extracts from her autobiography read by Julia Ormond. It was broadcast in Britain on Channel 4.

Hahn-Beer did not achieve her ambition to attend the premiere of the feature film about her life, but it is hoped that filming will begin soon in Budapest.

Edith Hahn-Beer, lawyer and Holocaust survivor, was born on January 24, 1924. She died on March 17, 2009, aged 85