Tragic story of German worker's epic attempts to save his Jewish fiancee from the Nazis becomes European best-seller

The extraordinary love story of a young man who faced off against the power of the Nazi state to try to save his Jewish fiancee from the gas chambers has become a best seller in German-speaking Europe.

'Love in the Time of Racial Madness' is an epic account of the doomed relationship between Heinrich Heinen and his sweetheart Edith Sara Meyer.

He was a gentile, she a 'full Jew' under the perverse Nuremberg Racial Laws. It meant not only was it illegal for them to marry, but as the war progressed, she was marked for deportation and extermination.

WARNING: Spoiler alert in this story

Best-seller: Edith Sara Meyer (left) is the subject of a new book (right)



What made their story so remarkable was the lengths Heinen went to in order to free her from the grip of her tormentors.

He broke her out of the Jewish ghetto in Riga, Latvia, after she was shipped there in 1941. Using his wiles and cunning, munitions worker Heinen slipped past the S.S. and smuggled her out of the disease ridden ghetto and back to Germany on false papers.



They then attempted to flee into Switzerland from Austria but were captured by Nazi border guards and imprisoned.

Heinen managed to escape from his cell at Feldkirch prison two months later and made it into another part of the jail where female prisoners were held.



Extraordinary: The love story of a young man who faced off against the power of the Nazi state to try to save his Jewish fiancee from the gas chambers of Auschwitz has become a best seller

He searched frantically for her but in vain; another female prisoner told him she had been shipped to Auschwitz just three hours earlier.

He made it to the outside and tried to find shelter in the village of Hohenems. He was denounced by a Nazi resident and shot by the S.S. and the lover he was never to see again was murdered at Auschwitz within hours of arrival.

Sweethearts since 1938, their story is now told by a retired judge, Alfons Duer from Feldkirch, who sat during his career in the same courthouse where the duo appeared after their failed escape to Switzerland.

Herr Duer has researched the book for several years.

He said: 'Some of these events played out in my court and I sat in his cell, number 52 in the jail next to the court, and I thought what a tragic, human and ultimately inspiring love story this was.

'They died because the state said their love was illegal.'

They were not the only ones in her family to die. While on the run to Austria the pair stayed at the home of her pregnant cousin Helen Krebs.

Denounced by Nazi neighbours, she was shipped off to Auschwitz and gassed despite the pleas of her protestant husband to spare her.