Laminar,
A few months ago my son and I ran into exactly the same issue (crumbling insulation with fully exposed wiring on one of the headlights) on his '02 VW Jetta that was originally sold on of the NE states.
The VW dealer was not even able to find the part number of this section of the harness, so we visit one of the imported car section of one of the large junk yards in the LA area and found a few cars with the harness section we needed in great shape, if I remember correctly we walked out of there with the connectors, harness and few odd extra parts for a grand total of $5.50 or so, and we spent way more on gas and lunch than the spares...
We swap them up with the damaged harness and everything was back in working order right away.
Woody may have the harness section you need
