Note: This post is inspired by a Polish gentleman who sent me “colorized” photos of members of the Pauly branch of my extended family using an image I included in Post 45.
Given the emotionally taxing subject matter of some of my family history posts, occasionally I like to intersperse stories that are more whimsical or lighthearted in nature. The current post is one such example. It was inspired by a Mr. Marek Bieńkowski from Włocławek, Poland. This gentleman is not subscribed to my Blog, nor, to the best of my knowledge, are we in any way related. Taking a photo inserted in Post 45 showing multiple members of the Pauly branch of my family, Mr. Bieńkowski “colorized” images of 19 of the 31 people in this picture. I estimate the picture was taken in the early 1890’s in Posen, Prussia [Poznan, Poland], and, to date, I’ve been able to identify 23 of the 31 subjects using an incomplete caption on the back of the photo and comparing the individual images to others where the people are identified by name. The original photo with the heads of the figures circled and numbered is included here (Figure 1), and the table below summarizes the vital data of the known people.
** Numbers in the left-hand column correspond with the numbered, circled heads in Figure 1. Names in red refer to people whose images have been colorized.
Mr. Bieńkowski seemingly used the automated feature of an image-editing program to smooth and sharpen the individual photos. All subjects have blue eyes but given that only 8 to 10 percent of the world’s population have eyes this color, clearly this is unrealistic. Some of the colorized images are remarkably real and look like their originals, others are eerie since the proportions are imprecise and imbue the subjects with a wax-museum quality.
As mentioned, based on the estimated age of the younger subjects and their known dates of birth, I gauge the original picture was taken in the early 1890’s. While color photography is almost as old as black-and-white, the process did not become widely available until much later, certainly after the Lippmann color process was unveiled in 1891. The only color photo I have of any of the subjects is of my great-aunt Charlotte Mockrauer née Bruck when she turned 100 in 1965 and her eyes appear to be brown. (Figure 21) Additionally, I have color paintings of two of the 31 subjects in the original photograph, specifically, Julie Neisser née Sabersky (Figure 22) and Wilhelm Pauly (Figure 23). In these paintings, Julie Sabersky clearly has brown eyes, and a much older Wilhelm Pauly has blue eyes.
Regular readers know how I like making connections between seemingly unrelated things. In the previous post, Post 86, Suse Vogel née Neisser’s 1947 letter describing the last days of her father and aunt’s lives in October 1942 in Berlin was sent to her first cousin, Liselotte Dieckmann née Neisser in St. Louis. (Figure 24) Liselotte was an extremely accomplished woman and a Professor of German at St. Louis University. She wrote a short biography in English of her life, which I obtained a copy of from Nicki Stieda, Suse’s Vogel’s granddaughter. On the opening page, Liselotte discussed her grandmother without naming her. Being familiar with the Neisser family tree, I quickly ascertained she was discussing Julie Neisser née Sabersky, who is seated alongside one of her sons, Ernst Neisser, in Figure 1. Liselotte’s description of her grandmother, quoted below, comports with my preconceived notion of the strong matriarch I imagine she was:
“My Father Max Neisser, born in 1869, professor of bacteriology at the University of Frankfurt, came from Silesia which was then a Prussian province and is now part of Poland. By the time I was born in 1902, his mother [editor’s note: Julie Neisser née Sabersky], widowed for many years, lived with her brother [editor’s note: Heinrich Sabersky] whom she had well-tamed in Berlin where we visited her often. She was a fine lady, with beautiful blue eyes, who sat straight as a ruler at the edge of her chair. She was a woman of great vitality—no doubt, almost to her end in 1926, the ruling member of her family. My cousins and I owe to her a sense of family closeness rarely found among cousins. Her sons and one daughter had eight children together, with whom I am still in close touch, insofar as they are still alive.”
Julie’s regal bearing caught my attention well before I knew who she was. Interestingly, Julie’s brother, Heinrich Sabersky, mentioned in the paragraph above who is also in the group picture, similarly caught my attention because of his warm demeanor. Among my third cousin Agnes Stieda née Vogel’s personal photographs is a different one with Julie and Heinrich Sabersky seated amidst a group of ten people; this photo includes three Pauly sisters, Margarethe, Helene and Edith, all three of whom are in the larger group picture that is the subject of this post, two of whose photos are also colorized. (Figures 25-26)
To my mind, the major take away of receiving the unsolicited colorized images of people from 130 years ago is that it personalizes them and makes them seem less abstract. This comports with one of the goals of my Blog to make my ancestors come to life in a tangible way, while conceding it may not be entirely realistic.
“I am terribly afraid, but nevertheless I will go with them. Possibly God actually needs me now for the first time in my life.”—an elderly Jewish lady on the eve of her deportation to a concentration camp
(The above was said to Martin Niemöller (1892-1984), a German theologian and Lutheran Pastor, one of the founders of the Confessing Church, which opposed the Nazification of German Protestant churches. For his opposition to the Nazis’ state control of the churches, Niemöller was imprisoned in Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps from 1938 to 1945. He is best known for his opposition to the Nazi regime during the late 1930s and for his widely quoted poem “First they came …” The poem has many different versions, one of which begins “First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Communist,” and concludes, “Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”)
Note: In this post I discuss first-hand wartime accounts written by my distant cousin Susanne “Suse” Vogel née Neisser (Figure 1), mother of my third cousin Agnes Stieda née Vogel, that I unveiled in earlier chronicles. I detail how I was able to get these German narratives transcribed and translated, and further elaborate on some of Suse’s tragic narrative.
Following publication of Post 64 on Dr. Hans Martin Erasmus Vogel (1897-1973) (Figure 2), my third cousin Agnes Stieda née Vogel’s father, my friend Ms. Madeleine Isenberg, affiliated with the Jewish Genealogical Society of Los Angeles, forwarded the post to Ms. Julie Drinnenberg from Hofgeismar, Germany. Julie is the educational director of the Jewish department at the museum there which, as it so happens, is 45 minutes away from Kassel, Germany, where Dr. Vogel was the director of the art museum from 1946 to 1961. Prior to reading my article, Julie was unaware of Dr. Vogel’s importance to the Kasseler Museumlandschaft and conceded in an email that his contributions to the museum have not been appropriately acknowledged and promised to research this.
This was the beginning of a very lively and productive email exchange. At the time Julie first contacted me in October 2019, my wife and I had just returned from a cruise to Alaska that originated in Vancouver, Canada, where we had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Vogel’s daughter and granddaughter, Agnes (Figure 3) and Nicki Stieda. (Figure 4) Agnes’s personal papers and family photographs are in Nicki’s possession, who organized and graciously allowed me to peruse and take pictures of all of them. Among Agnes’s family documents is her mother, Suse Vogel née Neisser’s diary (Figure 5), which I would later learn was written roughly between the start of 1944 and April 20, 1945. The handwriting is crabbed in German, and for this reason I only photographed the first few pages of what amounts to perhaps 35 full-length sheets of paper, never anticipating I could get it transcribed and translated.
Prior to connecting with Julie Drinnenberg, and ever meeting Agnes and Nicki Stieda, I had stumbled upon a 34-page letter archived in the “John Henry Richter Collection” at the Leo Baeck Institute written by Agnes’s mother. This letter was written as a tribute to her father, Dr. Ernst Neisser, who committed suicide in 1942 after being told by the Nazis to report to an “old age transport,” a euphemism for being deported to a concentration camp, tantamount to being murdered. The letter, typed in German on the 28th of March 1947 (Figures 6a-b), was sent from Kassel, Germany to Suse Vogel’s first cousin in St. Louis, Missouri, Liselotte “Lilo” Dieckmann née Neisser. (Figure 7)
Fast forward. After establishing contact with Julie Drinnenberg, I mentioned Suse Vogel’s 1947 letter, telling her she might be interested in it to obtain more background on Dr. Vogel’s family. It was at this moment that Julie offered to translate the letter into English for me, an offer I immediately and unabashedly accepted. Below, I will quote some of the more poignant passages from this letter, so readers can get a sense of what a dreadful and horrific time people of Jewish background experienced during WWII.
As an afterthought, after Julie had translated Suse Vogel’s letter, I mentioned I had photographed the first few pages of her diary and sent her the images. Julie passed them along to one of her colleagues, Gabriele Hafermaas, who astonishingly reported she could decipher much of the crabbed handwriting. Julie again offered to help, by having her workmate transcribe Suse’s journal. I forwarded this proposal to Agnes and Nicki, who accepted it and soon sent Julie a PDF of the entire memoir. Gabriele provided a remarkable transcription. Inevitably, some words and sentences in the diary are illegible. Often, when specific people were mentioned, Suse used nicknames or letter abbreviations in the event her diary fell into the wrong hands; thus, not all people are identified by name. Using an online application, entitled “DeepL,” I translated the text; this sometimes resulted in awkward sentences that were nonetheless generally comprehendible. I highlight some passages below having taken some liberties in rewording phrases to capture what I think Suse may have been trying to say, while fully conceding I may be off the mark.
While Suse Vogel’s 1947 letter to her first cousin postdates her 1944-1945 diary, chronologically, it deals with events that took place in September-October 1942, so I begin with the more recent document.
COMMENTS ON SECTION BELOW: Suse Vogel’s parents were Dr. Ernst Neisser (1863-1942) and Margarethe Neisser née Pauly (1876-1941). (Figure 8) Margarethe was institutionalized in a sanatorium for the last few years of her life and committed suicide there in 1941. Prior to her father’s suicide in 1942, Suse Vogel was attempting to obtain exit visas for her father and aunt, ergo the reference to Sweden.
“My father who would never give up in his life, whose whole character was insistence and steadfastness, who loathed any kind of running away, who perceived life anyhow as good as he was good himself – he did not throw it away, although he was consumed by the longing for my mother. But the old doctor who of course assessed his fast progressing heart disease, knew that should he be ripped out of tender and loving care, he would not survive in the hangmen’s hands. He saw clearly that it would not only be an agonizing and awkward death for himself but would be also for me a poisoned memory forever if I had been forced to let him die in the hands of those murderers. Indeed, I accepted it, as I was under no illusion. Also, I had far too much respect for his decision. Still, deep inside, I did not accept anything at all, did not think seriously of such a terrible option. I believed in Sweden, his rescue, and his recovery there. Discussions about suicide—what a horrible word for the forced act in desperate misery—had been the daily fare in those times.”
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COMMENTS ON SECTION BELOW: “Aunt Lise” was Dr. Ernst Neisser’s cousin, although to date I have been unable to determine how many degrees of separation existed between them. At the time of their suicide, they resided together. Dr. Ernst Neisser had multiple nicknames, including “Ernstle.”
“In a confidential talk Aunt Lise had advised me of her resolution. ‘I am going with Ernstle,’ she told me in a determined and conclusive tone. And, almost off-handedly, she had added, ‘I should like to be buried in German soil. Berlin is my home.’ And once Aunt Lise who always had disliked heroics told me unexpectedly: ‘Whatever will happen, you can always say to yourself one thing, that you did everything possible that a human being can do for another, remember that!’ At that moment I was almost embarrassed by those exaggerated words—but how much I was comforted by these loving words later, when second thoughts and misgivings, which never abandons survivors, tortured me.”
COMMENTS ON SECTION BELOW: Dr. Ernst Neisser and his cousin Luise “Lise” Neisser lived together at Eichenallee 25 in the Charlottenburg District of Berlin. (Figure 9) Suse and her husband Hans Vogel lived in the Berlin suburb of Potsdam. Two other nicknames for Dr. Ernst Neisser were “Väterchen,” affectionate term for father, and “Bärchen,” or “little bear.” The “honorable privy councilor” referred to below was a principled lawyer, Mr. Karl von Lewinsky (1872-1951), who worked tirelessly on behalf of his Jewish clients to help them obtain exit visas to leave Germany before and during WWII. As followers can read, Ernst and Lise Neisser were ordered to report for deportation at 8 a.m. on the 1st of October 1942, and both likely attempted suicide in the early morning hours on that day. “Mundi” is Ernst Neisser’s granddaughter (Figure 10) and Suse Vogel’s daughter, Agnes Stieda née Vogel, my 93-year old third cousin.
Suse alludes to what can only be referred to as “mob or herd mentality,” when otherwise “rational” Germans spotted Jews on the street during Nazi rallies and heaped abuse or worse on them.
“I told myself, I would go home [the 30th of September 1942] and only the following day go to Eichenallee. The unrest surely was an understandable reaction of my nerves. But I heard this voice – not any voice, but ‘that’ voice, the mysterious companion of my life. I heard it very rarely, but if I heard it, it was distinct, irresistible—’I had to obey!’ I jumped off the tram and went to Eichenallee.
Despite the inner instruction I was in a good mood, full of hope, like I hadn’t been for a long time. Now everything had to go well. The honorable privy councilor surely was the sign from heaven that everything would go well. My beloved Väterchen would be happy, too. Oh, I was looking forward to finding him working at his writing table, to seeing his meaningful dark eyes shining towards me. The usual thoughts of worries touched me only hazily. . . I walked through the cellar entrance, passed the flat of the friendly caretaker-family, and went upstairs to the flat. No need to ring the bell, the good deaf aunt never heard it anyway. Strange, she was not in the kitchen—though it was time for the evening meal. And, there was no light in the living room—though it was already dusk.
I knocked at the door and entered. In the room was silence, the two old ones were sitting next to the window, their silver-white heads leaned towards each other. My heart grew frozen—something had happened. ‘What happened?’ I whispered. Only then did they notice me. Quickly my father came towards me, serious, changed and without the tenderness that had connected us our entire lives. ‘You, my child, where are you coming from at this time? I have no use for you now!’ he said firmly, with the authority that he surely had used with other people often enough but never with me. I didn’t answer but only said startled: ‘Aunt Lise, what’s the matter?’ Silently she pointed to the table. There was laying the order of deportation. I don’t know what was written on it, I never read it. Only the words were burnt into my mind. . . transport to Terezín tomorrow October 1st, 1942. Tomorrow at 8 o’clock in the morning, not in three weeks or eight days, or at least three days, like it used to be with other people. No, tomorrow morning at 8 o’clock. This could only be a mistake. It had never happened before, only perhaps as revenge—I was thinking ‘it must, it had to be a mistake!’ It was the only moment that I remember when I implored my father not to act immediately. Indeed, I knew why he was so serious, so determined. We did not talk much, ‘Please. Please, wait! For your sake, yes!’
I hastened away. The phone box was empty. It was like in a nightmare, only much worse. I said to myself, ‘Lord help me that I get the connection to Potsdam, hope that Hans is at home, hope that he hears the ringing.’ He answered, terrified—we had always anticipated something bad happening. We had a conversation most taciturn: ‘You have to come immediately!’ ‘Something bad?’ he asked. ‘Yes!’ ‘I am coming!’ ‘But please eat something first!’ ‘Yes!’ Reading these words, you might think, ‘How can someone think of eating in a situation like this?’ I thought like this in former times, but by now I know. You can think of eating even in the hour of death, you can think about drinking, a warm blanket, a piece of bread during a bitter farewell.
By now I know that simple people were way ahead in this regard and in many other respects. They are connected to the simple truths of life in a deep and confident way, without those superficial feelings, the over-refined sensibilities, the cluttered idealisms that the sophisticated citizen dwells on for a long time. All this, the daily bread, a shroud, money to pay with, a roof above one’s head and a warm room. . .if it is also blessed with love, it is enough.
After my call to Potsdam I wanted to call the director of the sanatorium where my mother had been for many years and died. My father, too, had been living there, where we believed him to be secure and safe. And now the number—I could’t remember the telephone number! I had used it a thousand times, believed it to be etched in my mind – and now I’d forgotten it! The phone box was in darkness—I have no matches, and time was racing, racing—I had to get hold of the professor on the phone—’help heavenly host!’ And on its own my hand dialed the right number. ‘Herr Professor, it is life-endangering! Do you think, you could help once again?’ He understood at once. Paused. In a suppressed voice he said, ‘Please come immediately, I am waiting here for you!’
I returned to my father. ‘Poor beloved Bärchen—please wait!’ He was nodding: ‘But child—tomorrow morning at 8:00—there’s not much time—look, what’s the use of it?!’
At the sanatorium, there was the professor and his employee. It was the same one who went to bat for us exactly one year and a day before. It was when they even wanted to tear my mother out of the coffin for testing to see if a suicide ‘was in doubt.’ The professor and his employee—they also had been angels in the valley of the shadow of death. When at that time my mother should have been buried without a pastor in an unknown grave, they offered us their morgue cellar where we were able to celebrate a small catacomb obsequy with some friends. Of course, this was absolutely forbidden. The staff was believed to be reliable, but of course, you never knew. What if someone had denounced us? But nobody did so. People toddled into the cellar and wanted to have a look at my mother. She had been in a psychiatric sanatorium where there was so much anguish and awfulness. A beautiful dead like a Gothic image of saints. They all stood in front of her in silence and whispered to each other, shook our hands shyly. If there had been need for proof of immortality, looking at this beautiful, consummate face it became clear: such a conversion after three years of an awful soul-wrecking illness and bitter end—God was creating something new where we saw only death and destruction.
The professor and Ms. Sch. were talking to me, but I only heard their voices from afar. I thought to myself, ‘Does it make any sense to take my father back to the sanatorium? The henchmen will come tomorrow at 8:00—they will not find my father—then what? And what will become of Aunt Lise?’ Also, in former times she did not go outside with us: ‘It’s impossible, I look too Jewish’—and we kept silent or said in a dry manner, ‘you are right.’ The consequences for looking Jewish were the usual hysteric inferno, typically when many people congregated officially. Privately, the same people were helpful and attentive, be it on the street or in a shop. The ‘fission of the souls’ was incredible and scary. But that also belonged to the dreadful humiliation, the vulgar unworthy grotesque dissimulating. Only the superior and dignified smile of the Jewish-looking ones, their smiles of subtle irony, comforted the less Jewish-looking ones or even the Aryan-looking ones for their shameful and pitiful misery.
Everybody in our house and in the neighborhood knew where the trail would lead; everybody knew the nearby sanatorium as well as our address in Potsdam. Therefore, a flight to there or to us made no sense. And, it made no sense and could not be, to rob my father’s time—his only freedom—to dissipate it by powerless rescue attempts for the hundredth time.
I thought to myself, ‘Why not call the Jewish community again one last time? All the orders of the Gestapo were going through it. Possibly my young friend [Hanni] would know what to do?’ The professor agreed—just this was a courageous act. Hanni herself was on the phone. ‘Hanni, what can be done?!’ I understood how she was feeling. ‘What is it?’—I kept silent as an answer. She said, ‘When?’ ‘Tomorrow morning at 8 o’clock.’ ‘What is he about to do?’ ‘Go.’—She paused, then in a stifled whisper said, ‘I can do nothing more. Please let him!’ ‘Hanni. . .’ Loudly and coldly and nearly threateningly a voice repeated: ‘I beg you, let him. It will be better for him!’ Then, a pleading helpless voice whispered my name, ‘Please let him—it will be better—do you understand?!’ And the receiver was put down. This had been my last hope.
I came to myself when the professor called me. There was no time to lose. It was the time to have my wits about me. ‘I’ll take you along in my car. Has your father everything he needs?’ ‘Not enough for both of them.’ ‘I’ll take everything with me. May I come with you?’ A short silent ride. I don’t remember anything about it. But I remember the professor taking my hands firmly in his good warm hands—a doctor’s hands—like those of Bärchen.
My father came up to meet us, earnest and somehow disconnected from reality, but calm and friendly, as always. The room was full of people. My husband pale and perturbed, my beloved heart. I didn’t dare touch him—I didn’t want to lose my composure then. Hildegard v. W. was present, the young doctor, she had been in my father’s home as a child. She had wished to visit my father. She was crying in silence. Another friend from the house was there. Accidentally? No, not accidentally. She too had felt anxious for him. She was Otto Hahn’s wife, the world-famous nuclear scientist. She and her husband always had belonged to the ‘good angels’—fearless, faithful, loving. Aunt Lise was scurrying about, whipping away her tears furtively. She smiled, prepared some food, packed things up for us, ‘You have to save these things, you may need them!’ We were not able to deter her from it.
I drew Hans aside. ‘I am going to the Gestapo now. I am aware that everything could be bungled—even for us—you know it!’ He didn’t need a second to think about it, ‘That’s nothing to think about at a moment like this!’ Suddenly Bärchen was standing by our side, ‘What are you going to do? How can you do such a thing to me at the end of my life—to ruin yourselves? Susel, Susel I forbid it!’ Beloved Bärchen. He never in my whole life had forbidden me something in such a severe tone. And I obeyed. And for years I blamed myself for having done so, that I did not go trusting in God’s help. I know, I know it would have been madness—yet still it was and remains against my conscience and against God’s commandment!
Bärchen said almost gaily, ‘Dear children, we don’t want to mope about. I am happy that so many dear friends are here just now. Let’s drink a good bottle of wine as a farewell.’ A ‘harmless’ drop [i.e., an ordinary wine] was standing in the corner ‘illegally’ [i.e., during the Nazi era, Jews were prohibited from buying alcohol, which was moot since they were not issued ration cards for purchases of liquor]. We all drank. We were all in a state of lethargy and paralysis, but my father was stronger than us. He thanked the professor for bringing along the poison. ‘This was a friendly turn, dear colleague. You are taking a huge risk for me.’ We were talking in our normal voices; the women were smiling with tear-stained eyes. I, too, was smiling, holding Bärchen’s hand all the time. ‘I have had a good life, I heard him say. Only my husband was silent and deathly pale. He reached for my free hand. ‘Do not move, do not loose lose self-control!’ ‘I had it good—undeservedly,’ my father says, ‘at first my mother cared for me, then I had my Gretel and, in the end, my faithful children and you, dear Lise. Come and sit with us!’ But she didn’t want to, she was writing a couple of letters. She gave this and that to me, contemplating everything, though tears were running down her face relentlessly. Oh, don’t believe that such a voluntary dying was easy! Perhaps, for someone who does not love anything in this world anymore. Maybe for my mother’s darkened heart, especially as she did it under the delusion of sheltering my father from the Nazis, because she believed he would follow her at once. Such a dying is possibly—I don’t know—easy. But for someone, though being old and sick, who was full of life and love, it remained hard to die voluntarily—without the Grim Reaper present.
Whoever has stood next to a deathbed knows that death really ‘enters the room.’ I saw how my young brother sank towards him from one second to the other. But here death was not among us—nothing in this room, in our being together had been touched by him! Yes, my father was right. It was against nature. And woe to anyone who brings to his fellow men such terrible hardship to be forced to die! But in my father’s heart there was nothing like woe or bitterness, hate or malediction. Later when we three were alone and the friends were gone, Aunt Lise was writing next door, he answered to my cry: ‘I don’t believe it! It is impossible! It is really unbelievable’—and for a moment the fire of youth flashed in his eyes. And immediately he added, ‘You must see it like this. I kind of succumb to the enemy.’ And when I was going to lose my composure, he said tenderly but firmly, ‘Susel, don’t begrudge me going to my Gretel—I want so much to do so, I am so sick, sicker than you may know.’ From then on, his will was stronger than my pain. It was like him holding us all with his strong will. Once we even joked and laughed all three of us. Then my father talked about Mundi full of love and care, ‘Take your time with her. She is developing slowly but safely.’ We could not overload her small heart with the manner of his death. Not before she was old enough to understand and accept his motivations would she know about it.
Then, he said I should not worry about his funeral. As nice as my mother’s funeral was last year it wouldn’t be possible this time. He pleaded with me not to worry about his funeral. My husband later freed me from my promise. Bärchen himself would have allowed me to find my peace by looking at his wonderful and glorified expression.
We sensed that we had to go now. There were no more words, no tears—a short farewell from Aunt Lise—she smiled, stroked my hair, I kissed her hand, and we departed the residence. And at the front door in darkness only one embrace, a kiss on his hand. And I went away, left him. . . I never will forgive myself for it! Though it was him who compelled us to do so, his will was above ours that night, but not God’s will, I felt it. That must be said. God left me alone. And perhaps I did not call out loudly enough for Christ who had performed so many miracles within my life.”
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COMMENTS ON SECTION BELOW: Ernst Neisser and Lise Neisser poisoned themselves, likely in the early morning hours of October 1, 1942. Lise Neisser died immediately, but Ernst Neisser lingered for several days. He was taken to the Jewish Hospital in the Wedding District of Berlin where he succumbed on October 4, 1942. Suse Vogel’s worry was that he would be resuscitated.
“. . .when Hans and I came to the Jewish hospital to hear how my father was doing, my only prayer was, ‘Dear God don’t let him come back to life again.’ But the young and tender nurse did not give me a terrified look when I said objectively that hopefully no attempt at resuscitation would be made, and hopefully there was no danger of a return to consciousness. In response, she comforted us by saying ‘he would sleep towards death.’ She spoke briefly and soberly like me, but her eyes told me something entirely different. This is what I experienced many times. . .a dry harshness of conversation without any obligation in the tone, but a glance in the eyes and a pressing of the hand, this had a deeper meaning. And, from this sign I drew comfort. After Hans had looked in on my father where he lay with other sleeping persons, we had to leave quickly. At that time, each night old and sick people who had gotten the order for deportation took their own lives. The number of them was frighteningly high.”
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COMMENTS ON SECTION BELOW: “Kafkaesque” is suggestive of Franz Kafka, or his writings, and is defined as “having a nightmarishly complex, bizarre, or illogical quality.” In reading Suse Vogel’s description of meeting the Nazi inspector at her father’s apartment in Eichenallee following his suicide, the unreal characterization of events reminded me of Kafka’s writings. I’ll let the readers draw their own conclusions, but the narrow-minded, vulturous and rapacious nature of the Nazi overlords boggles the mind.
“Now I had to go to the detective squad. For my husband it was awful to await again without being able to help and stand by me. We separated in a Café. There everything was business as usual. It was not advisable to catch somebody’s attention by perturbed behavior or whispering. We even did not even shake hands. ‘Farewell! I will pick you up here.’ The short way to the police station seemed endless. I felt petrified from complete exhaustion. At the same time, I felt that anxious wakefulness and cold determination that had helped me time and again. An officer received my report. ‘Oh. I see, it’s because of the Jew in the Eichenallee?’ he said leisurely. I did not answer. He looked at me and suddenly nodded to me. ‘A good sign.’ Then he came nearer and said in a low voice: ‘Just go to the Eichenallee, Madame, the inspector will be there too,’ and again he nodded to me encouragingly and alarmingly all at once—oh, I understood. I nodded back in silence and disappeared as shadowy as I had come. Thank God, no interrogation before a Nazi-commissar. They sent an inspector to the Eichenallee, possibly well-intentioned, ‘perhaps everything would go well.’
I waited in front of the sealed door of my father’s apartment until the inspector came. A small blond man, middle-aged, a vacuous face, sharp and wary light blue eyes. A pinched hard ass, not quite likeable. I stepped towards him without offering my hand (Jews were not allowed to shake hands). And I came to the point immediately, ‘Mr. Inspector, I am so grateful that you came here. You know how hard the situation is for me.’ He looked at me wonderingly. A shadow of condolence flashed over his unreadable face. ‘The concierge shall come.’ He questioned her in my presence. She behaved gorgeously, told him without timidity how much she had loved and admired the ‘Herr Professor’ (I was thinking, ‘How could she say, “Herr Professor!” That was strictly forbidden!’) and how she had loved ‘Fräulein Lise.’
The inspector unlocked the door. I entered the room that I had left last night—not 24 hours ago. No time for feelings, he was observing me sharply. A broken off morphine syringe was on the table. ‘Why was it broken off?’ My heart was tensing up. Very quickly he turned to me, ‘With what did your father poison himself?’ My answer came calmly, ‘I don’t know.’ ‘When were you here last?’ ‘The day before yesterday in the evening.’ ‘There it was the lie!’ And now I anticipated he would ask me who else had been here and I would have to mention Hans. I looked at him and he looked at me. I was sure he did not believe me, but he wanted to help me. Therefore, he was no Nazi, I was skilled at that! He was only a ‘dog in service’ (expression for somebody who only pretended to be a Nazi).
It looked desolate in my father’s room. The henchmen had rioted here—not a stone was left unturned. The bed was rumpled, the books were pulled out, the desk’s content spread all over the ground. Thank God they could not find any addresses of friends and acquaintances, nothing that would have incriminated others. We had destroyed everything. In a strained voice the inspector said, ‘Where is your father’s identity card? We were not able to find it. The relevant department was upset. He must have an identity card. Otherwise you will not get the corpse for burial. And there will be endless trouble for you and me. You must have it!’ ‘I don’t have it. I don’t know what my father has done with it.’ ‘Why have all the papers disappeared? I cannot understand. I do not understand your father! Unfortunately, I must deal with things like this every day. One at least leaves behind his papers in an orderly state. Nothing was to be found. He did not even have a watch with him—strange!!’
‘Aha, that was the reason for the rage of the relevant department.’ My father wanted so much that my husband got back his watch. It was Hans’ watch, a gift from his confirmation. Years ago, he had given it to my father because we did not want to leave his golden watch to the robbers—a gift from his grandfather. So, we hid it. None of us had thought of the covetousness and rapacity of the pursuers. But despite the threatening ‘strange!’ the inspector did not continue asking. I felt he didn’t want to know, didn’t want to be the hangman. Yet still he had protocols to follow. ‘You seem to be rather harassed by the occurrences,’ he grunted and looked at me meaningfully. And I seized the rescuing hint. And he wrote on his paper confused, impossible, stupid answers of a flustered wife. ‘How smart of him!’ I was aware of the Nazi’s obstinacy—if they ever got something official, a document, they were often content with it.
The concierge, a silent shadow and witness, was looking at me stunned, so well was I ‘playing’ my role. Oh, if she only knew what this was all about! He did not even ask for my address. The watch and the identity card that was all he was harping on about. ‘Could you at least procure the identity card?’ ‘No, I am sure I don’t know.’ I never confessed that my father gave it to us. That would have been the greatest foolishness! My father had hoped that the card, this ‘piece of evidence,’ could be useful. That perhaps this could save his small residual assets for Mundi. This meant a lot to him.
Before me I saw several photographs showing my parents, my late brother, pictures of our voyages. My father’s favorite books were still there. ‘Oh, if I only could take some with me.’ I begged the inspector. He refused. I tried once again. He clasped his hands together. ‘Please don’t!’ he said harshly, ‘I cannot allow it, do you understand! People ask me daily to do this. I am not allowed!’ And he looked at me angrily. Then suddenly he became rude, snapped at the concierge and me, finally laughed and sent the concierge away, snapped at me once again and said, ‘You will accompany me!’ My heart sank. ‘Was it all comedy?’ But as soon as we were alone, he took his bicycle, and shouted loudly, ‘As soon as your father is dead, you will report!’ And simultaneously his left hand reached for mine, pressing it firmly as he muttered, ‘Don’t worry. We’ll get you father under the soil even without his identity card.’ And, with that he departed, leaving me feeling released.
I thought, ‘Oh, it had come to that! Anxiety and every day’s horrors had become so commonplace that stupid and falsely contrived situations got weight and importance. On the other side hand, wasn’t this like reality, when this narrow-minded clerk who combined Prussian blind obedience with his personal honor, who had at least freedom of choice, chose lies and foolishness rather than word-for-word-accuracy?’ He himself knew better than me what would have happened if he had had examined everything exactly and if he had found the identity card and the watch. Only the connivance of a ‘forbidden’ suicide would have been to blame. There would have been interrogations about the origin of the poison, our statements would have been scrutinized for deviations from each other, possibly under the Nazis’ infamous interrogation methods. Once again, the ‘moral inferiority of the Jews and their comrades’ would have been affirmed. It would have resulted in deportation to a labor camp in Poland as a natural consequence. Moreover, friends and enemies would have shaken their heads about our incomprehensible stupidity and our lack of consideration, and that’s what the inspector knew definitively, and I knew it as well. Now you possibly understand why I met the grey face of my husband with a beaming smile. You understand that we went home by tram arm-in-arm and became human beings for a short while.”
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SECTIONS FROM SUSE VOGEL’S 1944-1945 DIARY
Suse Vogel’s diary includes numerous literary and religious references. I quote a few of these along with short passages from Suse’s diary to round out what I related above or in earlier posts.
COMMENTS ON SECTION BELOW: Suse Vogel had multiple nicknames for her relatives. She alternately referred to her husband, Dr. Hans Vogel, as “Hase” (=rabbit), Fiddie, Eukuku, Schieperle, Kuchenmännchen (= “cake mate”), Hanschen. Among their daughter Agnes’s surviving papers are numerous pencil drawings Hans did. He typically depicted himself as a rabbit, Suse as a dachshund, and Agnes as a bunny. (Figure 11)
“On Christmas I got a pencil drawing from Fiddie showing his little castle room in Seitenberg; in the background sits ‘Hase.’ Hanschen, smoking his pipe. The expression of his somewhat sublime, clever bunny face is collected, serious and as ‘bright’ as I had hoped ever to see again after those infernal years.”
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COMMENTS ON SECTION BELOW: Suse Vogel had multiple nicknames for her father, Dr. Ernst Neisser, including Bär, Bärchen and Igilchen (=hedgehog). Among her father’s personal items she had salvaged was his armchair, which retained his contour, enveloped her when she sat in it, and gave her a sense of comfort and well-being.
4th January 1944
“In Igelchen’s armchair I believed I felt it like a gentle closeness.”
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COMMENT ON SECTION BELOW: In multiple passages in her diary, Suse recalls visits with her father and aunt in Berlin before they were summoned for deportation and opted to commit suicide together.
12th January 1944.
“Often, I am attacked by images of the past when Hans and I lived in Potsdam, outside Berlin—up early around 6am, breakfast heated, tidied up, dinner pre-cooked, everything prepared, nothing forgotten—11am already! Getting out of the Westend, rushing up the stairs, is the 54 and 154 coming straight (train numbers)? Of course not straight. Waited. Rushed up Kastanienallee, Branitzer Platz, around the corner from Eichenallee—is everything still standing? Is there nobody in front of the door—can I still find everything? Waited outside the door for hours, no one hears–then finally Aunt Lise’s touching but exhausting welcoming speech past the door; there he sits at his desk, so small and wilted, old, angry, with signs of pain, but the black eyes shine towards me, oh, what I would give to see his old hedgehog face shining like that again!—‘Hush, my soul, it’s over.’- And the walks, small and grey by my side—and always fear—and always fear—but that sat only in the innermost depths of his heart and in his eternally watchful gaze—but only loving and benevolent eyes looked from father to daughter and back, and we smiled so clearly at the resemblance, and we had so much to tell each other—never did we run out of material to tell one another.”
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COMMENT ON SECTION BELOW: As previously mentioned, “Mundi” was an affectionate name for Suse and Hans Vogel’s daughter, Agnes Stieda née Vogel. In 1944, when Suse humorously remarked the following, Agnes was 17 years old and already had strong opinions about what type of a husband she wanted.
“Mundi says she’d rather marry a pussy, ‘I want the upper hand with my husband!’”
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COMMENTS ON SECTION BELOW: In her writings, Suse made frequent exaltations to God, alternating between feeling He had answered her prayers and forsaken her. Clearly, while Suse and both her parents were of Jewish descent, in the past, their ancestors had converted to Protestantism; nonetheless, in the eyes of the Nazis, they were Jewish. In the later stages of the WWII, Hans Vogel was hounded by the Gestapo for his “mixed marriage” status to a Jew.
Regarding the Prince’s palace in Seitenberg [today: Stronie Śląskie, Poland], for a time castles were deemed “off-limits” to bombing by the Allies.
6th January 1944
“Fiddie writes [he received] news from Berlin that the castle is now secured as a place to stay! Thank God.”
31st August 1944
“Tomorrow begins the 6th year of the war. ‘Keeper, is the night almost over?’”
30th November 1944
“‘My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken us!’. . . at the moment I don’t even have a longing to die—just fear and pain and fear and need and fear, fear, fear—and God is silent!”
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COMMENTS ON SECTION BELOW: “Schieperle,” as mentioned above, was another affectionate name Suse had for her husband. Suse, Hans and Agnes lived in a small town in Silesia called Baitzen, which was just outside of Kamenz [today: Kamieniec, Poland]. Hans worked for Friedrich Heinrich Prinz von Preußen at his estate in Seitenberg [today: Stronie Śląskie, Poland]. While Kamenz and Seitenberg are only 22 miles or 35km apart (Figures 13a-b), Hans had his own room at the castle where he lived during the work week.
Hans Vogel had been seriously injured during WWI, making him unfit for service during WWII. The term in German for badly wounded is “schwer verwundet.” His status as a seriously injured veteran of WWI afforded his Jewish wife Suse and his “mischling“ daughter Agnes a measure of protection, at least until the later stages of the war, when the Nazi noose began to tighten around any people of Jewish descent. For Suse and Agnes, it never came down to a decision to take their own lives as it had with Suse’s parents and Aunt. While Agnes was no longer permitted to attend school within a year of her grandfather’s death, ironically, she was for a time a member of the “Bund Deutscher Mädel (B.D.M.),” the female section of the Hitler Youth.
In the passage below, Suse is voicing her consternation at the fact that her husband was shanghaied into shoveling snow for Kamenz.
18th September 1944
“My Schieperle is gone! They took him for snow shoveling—oh, it’s like a bad dream—oh, he will come back—he can’t shovel at all! And in the Seitenberg employment office they had promised him that he would work in an office. But Kamenz took him.”
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COMMENT ON SECTION BELOW: Suse Vogel made frequent mention of her debilitating menstrual periods, referring to them by the initials “EW”; interestingly, this stands for “das Ewig-Weibliche,” the concept of the “eternal feminine” from Goethe’s “Faust.” For Goethe, “women” symbolized pure contemplation, in contrast to masculine action, parallel to the eastern Daoist descriptions of Yin and Yang.
“But I am also particularly disparaged by EW.”
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COMMENT ON SECTION BELOW: “Wafi” is a reference to Suse Vogel’s mother, Margarethe Neisser née Pauly, who was confined to a sanatorium for the last several years of her life and eventually committed suicide there in 1941, a year before Ernst and Luise Neisser took their lives. At moments, Suse Vogel felt she too was slipping away like her mother had.
“I think I’m already mentally ill like Wafi!”
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COMMENTS ON SECTION BELOW: Suse and Agnes Vogel left Silesia as the Russians were approaching and made their way to Potsdam, bordering Berlin, arriving there around the 11th of April 1945. In February, possibly earlier, Hans Vogel, while handicapped from an injury he sustained during WWI, was nonetheless conscripted to a military unit and assigned responsibility for taking the unit’s mail to the train. When he noticed one train was headed to Berlin, he jumped aboard and went AWOL, making his way to Potsdam, where he miraculously reunited with Suse and Agnes. The family barely survived a massive bombing of Berlin in the waning days of the war in an underground bunker.
20th April 1945, written in a basement in Potsdam under the terrible thunder of gunfire
“. . .the eve of the battle, after the horrible attack on Berlin two days after our arrival here[Potsdam]. I cannot write much, only that we decided to go to him very quickly on the 11th of April. Everything worked out. After a 26-hour drive, we managed to arrive behind the Front. The longed-for, longed-for reunion was given to us! So wonderfully sweet, so wonderfully lovely, but amid rising hell and fear. . .”
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In conclusion, while I fail to do justice and adequately capture the depth and nuance of Suse Vogel’s words, I hope I have conveyed at least a small part of her wrenching story and the constant misgivings and survivors’ guilt she felt for not having saved her father from the Nazis.
Note: In this post I relate the story of how in the process of helping a reader whose grandmother died in 1940 in Ratibor, the birthplace of my father, I improbably discovered information on some of my own ancestors.
Ratibor [today: Racibórz, Poland] (Figure 1), the town in the Prussian province of Upper Silesia where my father, Dr. Otto Bruck, was born in 1907 was one of the largest municipalities in the region. Periodically, readers who are descended from former inhabitants of Ratibor will contact me through my Blog asking for information I have or may have come across related to their ancestors. Often, their relatives are entirely unknown to me but seeing what, if anything, I can uncover about them becomes an extension of my own forensic genealogical endeavors. And, the pleasure I derive in helping others is sometimes magnified when I learn something about my own ancestors in the process. The inspiration for the current post stems from precisely such a situation.
One reader, Dan Ward, recently contacted me after perusing Post 13 and Post 13, Postscript, and learning the “Muzeum w Raciborzu” in Racibórz had given me an Excel spreadsheet with the names of the Jews that had once been interred in the former Jewish Cemetery in Ratibor, requesting a copy of this database. This cemetery was demolished in the 1960’s during Poland’s Communist era to further expunge evidence of German residency in the area. Fortunately, before the stout headstones were torn down and sold off locally, a Polish gentleman whom I wrote about in Post 13, Postscript, Mr. Kazimierz Świetliński (Figure 2), had the foresight to photograph all the gravestones; these images served as the basis for the creation of the Excel database, with the Racibórz Museum staff gleaning as much vital information as possible from the high-quality snapshots. Despite the sharp and fine details on the photos, not all the data is discernible. More on this below.
Dan Ward contacted me seeking information on the tombstone and burial location of his grandmother, Rosa Wartenberger née Perl, who according to records he found was buried on the 29th of March 1940 in the Jüdischer Friedhof Ratibor, Jewish Cemetery in Ratibor, in Plot 153; she died or committed suicide before she was scheduled to be deported to a concentration camp. As a quick aside, the “Ward” surname is clearly the Anglicized version of the “Wartenberger” family name. Dan sent me screen shots with the source of this information, Jewish Gen. As readers can see, Rosa Wartenberger’s name was misspelled as “Risa Wortenberger,” although the transcriber obviously had trouble deciphering the script. (Figure 3)
Armed with the information Dan sent me, I immediately began my own research. The first thing I checked was the Excel spreadsheet with the names of Jews formerly buried in the Jewish Cemetery in Ratibor, and Rosa Wartenberg is not listed. Dan would later tell me his grandmother’s maiden name was “Perl,” and I found four individuals with this surname once interred in the Jewish graveyard, but being unfamiliar with Dan’s family tree, I am not sure how they might have been related to her.
Next, I checked address books and phone directories for Ratibor. I have previously told readers about a database on ancestry.com, entitled “Germany and Surrounding Areas, Address Books, 1815-1974 (Adressbücher aus Deutschland und Umgebung, 1815-1974),” with address books for Germany, Poland, and other neighboring countries. In the only address book in this database for Ratibor for the year 1938, I found a single “Wartenberger.” It was for a man named “Kurt Wartenberger,” identified as a “gastwirt,” innkeeper, shown living at “Breite Straße 54.” (Figure 4)
I asked my friend Mr. Paul Newerla from Racibórz, a retired lawyer whom regular readers have often heard me mention, who now researches and writes about the history of Silesia, whether the surname “Wartenberger” is familiar to him. It is not, but in a 1926 Ratibor Address Book not included among the “Germany and Surrounding Areas” directories, he too found “Kurt Wartenberger” listed, identified then as a “destillateur,” distiller, living at “Brunken 54.” (Figure 5) Other than finding Kurt Wartenberger’s name in the 1926 Ratibor directory, Paul could add nothing more.
I found it odd the address number “54” was identical in 1926 and 1938 but that the street names were different. Paul Newerla explained that “Brunken” was a connecting street to what is referred to as the Altendorf district, that’s to say, a little “outside” of Ratibor along the main road towards Oppeln [today: Opole, Poland] and Leobschutz [today: Głubczyce, Poland]. I located this street, respectively, on plan maps of Ratibor from 1927-28 (Figure 6) and 1933 (Figure 7), although a plan map from 1914 names it “Große-Vorstadt.” (Figure 8) In tiny print on all three plan maps, readers can see the number “54,” confirming it was the same corner lot with different street names over time.
I passed along what Paul and I had found to Dan Ward. He confirmed that Kurt had owned a tavern and that family papers in his possession place Kurt’s business at “Große-Vorstadt 54,” papers which must clearly pre-date 1927-28, by which time the street was known as “Brunken.” By 1938, the street had been renamed yet again because it was then called “Breite Straße.” According to Dan, Kurt Wartenberger was murdered in the Shoah in Buchenwald, and, indeed, Yad Vashem lists him as a victim of the Holocaust. (Figure 9)
Next, I retraced Dan Ward’s steps to track down the source of the information on his grandmother, misspelled as mentioned above as “Risa Wortenberger.” The data, as I previously also said, originates from JewishGen, and relocating it was straight-forward. Here, however, is where things took an interesting turn. The source documentation for the data in JewishGen comes from elsewhere, namely, from the Church of Latter-Day Saints’ (LDS) “Family History Library International Film 1184447, Item 2” (Figure 10), which is one of three microfilm rolls with data on the former Jewish inhabitants of Ratibor. While I had last examined this microfilm many years ago, when it was still necessary to order films from the LDS Church in Salt Lake City and have hard copies sent to a local Family History Library for viewing, I clearly remembered this roll as having limited or, at least, confusing information. Now that the Ratibor records are accessible online through familysearch.org, I decided to reexamine film 1184447.
For anyone interested in seeking similar information from familysearch.org for towns they are researching, they can replicate these steps:
1) Go to familysearch.org (you can create a free account);
2) Under the “Search” button, scroll down to “Catalog,” click enter, and go to the following page;
3) Next, type in “Raciborz” under “Place,” or whatever town you are seeking records for (i.e., different spellings yield different results, so for towns that are now located in different countries than they once were, you may need to try alternate spellings);
4) Scroll down to “Poland, Opole, Racibórz (Racibórz),” then hit “Search”;
5) Select “Poland, Opole, Racibórz (Racibórz) – Jewish records (1),” hit enter;
6) Next select “Matrikel, 1814-1940”;
7) On the next screen select “1184447, Item 2” (select the camera icon all the way to the right; if there is a key above a camera icon, the microfilm is unavailable online).
There are 342 pages on Microfilm 1184447 but only pages 220 through 338, referred to as “Item 2,” specifically deal with Ratibor. The film contains “Friedhofsurkunden 1888-1940” for Ratibor, which Peter Hanke, my German friend who helps me with translations and making sense of German records, tells me is more aptly referred to as “Friedhofsdokumente,” or cemetery documents. The cemetery administration would use these files to see which tombs were unused; which ones could be reused after 25 or 30 years if descendants stopped paying to keep their ancestors interred; which tombs were reserved in perpetuity for so-called “family graves”; or simply to help visitors locate specific graves. These files often contain useful information for genealogists, as I illustrate below.
Let me digress for a moment. Given the disparate sources of ancestral information I have accessed over the years, including in this current post, I am often reminded of the American television game show “Concentration” that aired from 1958 until 1991. Basically, the game was based on the children’s memory game of the same name. Players had to match cards which represented prizes they could win. As matching pairs of cards were gradually removed from the board, it would slowly reveal a rebus puzzle that contestants had to solve to win a match. The similarity I see with genealogical research is not so much solving the rebus, but matching pairs of cards. Often years pass before a “genealogical card” I newly discover can be “matched” to one or more I found earlier in my investigations. The challenge, particularly as I get older, is retrieving the earlier “card” from my memory. Such is the case with connections to Microfilm 1184447, Item 2.
I downloaded, saved, and studied all 119 pages from this film, and made several interesting discoveries and connections. Of immediate interest, I found Rosa Wartenberger’s name in an index (Figure 11); as readers can discern from what I have circled in Figure 11, the number “46” appears to the right of Rosa’s name; this refers to the page number in the “Friedhofsdokumente,” on which Rosa’s name and interment date appear. Initially, I found only one page 46, not realizing there was a left page-right page pair.
Let me briefly explain. When the LDS Church originally photographed vital records for Ratibor and other places, they typically started by photographing the left-side pages from the front to the back of the register, then in reverse order from the back to the front photographed the right-side pages; thus, the left page-right page pairs, either identically numbered or consecutively numbered, from any register will not be found on consecutive microfilm images. Thus, while Rosa’s name does not appear on the left-hand page 46, it is found on the right-hand page 46; for reader’s ease, I have “grafted” the two pages in one (Figure 12), and translated, using a different grafted left-right pair of pages, the headers for each column. (Figure 13)
As readers can see, by “Grabnummer,” grave number, 153, the date of Rosa’s interment is shown, the 29th of March 1940, which matches the information in JewishGen. The column titled “Belegt” translates to “occupied,” and signifies when a person was interred, rather than when they died.
Once a researcher understands the organizational “structure” of microfilms with cemetery documents, they are easy though tedious to use. On one left-right pair of pages, I was able to find both sets of great-grandparents on my father’s side. (Figure 14) Oddly, the names of Fedor Bruck (Figure 15) and his wife, Friederike Bruck née Mockrauer (Figure 16), are not found in the Excel spreadsheet at the Muzeum w Raciborzu, meaning no photo of their headstone was taken. However, Hermann Berliner (Figure 17) and Olga Berliner née Braun’s names do appear in the Excel spreadsheet indicating a picture of their gravestone exists. (Figure 18)
I know from a family tree in the Pinkus Family Collection at the Leo Baeck Institute that my great-grandmother Friederike Bruck née Mockrauer died in Berlin on the 29th of February 1924 (Figure 19), though she was not buried there. From Microfilm 1184447, I learned she was instead interred on the 11th of May 1924 in Ratibor, almost 10 weeks later, presumably alongside her husband. Jews are typically interred within two to three days after they die, so a 10-week delay is very unusual. (Figure 20)
On Microfilm 1184447, I also found a single page mentioning one of my father’s older brothers who died in infancy, Walter Bruck. (Figure 21) His name is found on a page entitled “Kleiner Kinderfriedhof,” small children’s cemetery. This is further proof of his existence. A brief explanation. After I began immersing myself in family history and creating a family tree years ago, I started to wonder why there was a nine-year age difference between my father’s oldest brother, Fedor Bruck, born in 1895, and my father’s older sister, Susanne Bruck, born in 1904, in an era where families were large. I eventually learned in 2014 when I visited the “Archiwum Państwowe w Katowicach Oddział w Raciborzu” (“State Archives in Katowice Branch in Raciborz”) that another sibling had been born in 1900 (Figure 22) who died in infancy the next year (Figure 23), named Walter Bruck. I was able to retrieve both his birth and death certificates among the civil records archived at the Archiwum Państwowe. Thus, the discovery of Walter Bruck’s name on Microfilm 1184447 was confirmation he was once buried in the Jüdischer Friedhof Ratibor.
Among the photos that Mr. Kazimierz Świetliński took at the former Jewish Cemetery in Ratibor before it was demolished is one showing the “Kindergräber,” children’s graves. (Figure 24) As readers can see, the children’s names on some of the headstones can be made out, though most are indecipherable. Interestingly, there is a separate index on Microfilm 1184447, entitled “Großer kinderfriedhof,” big children’s cemetery (Figure 25), with the names of older children buried in the Jewish Cemetery. Infants may have been interred in graves identified only by number, as I discovered in the Weißensee Jewish Cemetery in Berlin.
As a tedious exercise for another day, which I started while researching and writing this post, is cross-checking the names on Microfilm 1184447 with those on the Excel spreadsheet. Some names on Microfilm 1184447 are not in the Excel database, while others are found in both. Preliminarily, I was able to amend death dates or years in the Excel directory, which, as previously mentioned, was compiled from photos, some of which are indistinct.
In closing, I would say one final thing. Based on the Excel index I obtained years ago, I mistakenly concluded then that none of my Bruck relatives had ever been interred in the Jewish Cemetery in Ratibor, even though I knew some died there when the cemetery was still in use. However, with the benefit of the information I recently acquired from the Jewish records on Microfilm 1184447, I am certain that at least three relatives with the Bruck surname were once buried there. And, this discovery was spurred by helping a reader learn about one of his relatives, a case of helping yourself by aiding others, a most satisfying outcome!
Note: In this post, I discuss a German Baron my uncle Dr. Fedor Bruck befriended in a displaced persons camp in West Berlin while awaiting passage to America in 1947, a gentleman with whom my uncle had much in common and who went on to parlay a small investment in the stock market into more than $500,000 by the time he died. I also review the circumstances that led my uncle to immigrate to the United States after spending 30 months in hiding in Berlin eluding the Nazis, then being permitted to take over Hitler’s dentist’s office following WWII.
My uncle Dr. Fedor Bruck has been the subject of multiple earlier posts which are among my most popular chronicles. I encourage interested readers to peruse these earlier written accounts to familiarize themselves with the broad outlines of my uncle’s life. For the purposes of this post, however, let me provide a brief review.
My uncle owned his own dental practice in Liegnitz, Germany [today: Legnica, Poland] (Figure 1), in the Prussian province of Silesia, until April 1936, when he was forced to shutter his business by the Nazis. He relocated to Berlin, where he was able to resume work for a time, initially working for himself (Figures 2a-b), then later working under the auspices of a non-Jewish dentist. In October 1942, my uncle was ordered by the Nazi authorities to report to an age transport; realizing this meant deportation to a concentration camp and eventual death, he went into hiding. With the help of non-Jewish relatives and acquaintances, “silent heroes,” my uncle survived underground for 30 months until the fall of Berlin in early May 1945. It is estimated that fewer than 5,000 Jews survived concealment in Germany during WWII.
When my uncle had his own dental practice in Liegnitz, one of his dental assistants was Käthe Heusermann née Reiss (Figure 3), a woman of some later recognition; after my uncle Fedor was forced to close his business, she too relocated to Berlin and wound up obtaining a similar position as dental assistant for Adolf Hitler’s American-trained dentist, Dr. Hugo Blaschke (Figure 4), an early member of the National Socialist party. As Dr. Blaschke’s assistant, Käthe Heusermann was always in attendance when der Führer had very distinctive yet outdated dental work performed on him at a special private office Dr. Blaschke was assigned in the Reich Chancellery; Dr. Blaschke’s private business office was located at Kurfürstendamm 213 in the district of Charlottenburg, the boulevard considered the Champs-Élysées of Berlin; this building still stands today. (Figure 5)
As I explained to readers in Post 31, there is very clear evidence that because of their previous relationship and friendship Käthe Heusermann sheltered and hid my uncle for brief periods during his 30 months underground during WWII; she also gave him special rations and extra food vouchers she received as a member of the Führer’s extended staff, at great personal danger. Thus, throughout my uncle’s time in hiding during the war, he was periodically in touch with Käthe. This becomes relevant after the Russians occupied Berlin, and, by my uncle’s own account, he made his way to her apartment at Pariserstrasse 39-40 (Figures 6a-b):
“On April 26, 1945, Steglitz, in the southwestern part of the city [Berlin], was occupied by the Russians. Behind the advancing troops, I arrived, on May 4th, in the apartment of my former assistant Käthe Heusermann. This apartment was situated at Pariserstrasse 39-40 near Kurfürstendamm. A friendship of twenty years tied my person and the family of Käthe Heusermann. Käthe was alone in the bomb-damaged apartment and was very upset and confused. She had only returned to her apartment the day before, May 3rd, having spent the time before that in the Air Shelter in the Reich Chancellery.“
Käthe Heusermann related the events to my uncle of what had occurred at the Reich Chancellery as the Allies encircled Berlin in the waning days of the war, and how Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun had committed suicide (see Post 31 for the complete account in my uncle’s words). Following the fall of Berlin, Käthe Heusermann advised my uncle to obtain permission from the pertinent authorities to take over Dr. Blaschke’s dental practice. His dental office was intact, and Dr. Blaschke had already fled to Obersalzburg, so was unlikely to return. As a person persecuted by the Nazis, my uncle had a right to make this claim. The authorities did in fact grant my uncle permission to take over Dr. Blaschke’s apartment and practice at Kurfürstendamm 213 in Charlottenburg; as discussed in Post 17, post-WWII Address Directories from 1946 (Figure 7), 1947, and 1948 locate my uncle at this address. My uncle’s knowledge of the events surrounding Hitler’s fate stem primarily from his friendship with Käthe Heusermann, but also from his occupancy of Dr. Blaschke’s dental office following WWII.
According to my uncle’s account, following his tenancy of Dr. Blaschke’s dental premises, he was visited on a few occasions by Russian counter-intelligence agents:
“. . .On Wednesday, May 9th, 1945, I met a Russian Lieutenant Colonel in the building, as well as woman in uniform and a gentleman in mufti, as they inquired from the Superintendent as to the whereabouts of Blaschke. As I learned later, they were the deputy military governor of Berlin, a female agent of the Russian secret police, and a certain Doctor Arnaudow, who had been assistant at the Berlin Charité with “Geheimrat Sauerbruch” [“Geheimrat Sauerbruch” is a successful and respected physician]. The latter was a Bulgarian and had brought the Russians who were looking for Hitler’s dentist . . .; furthermore, he acted as interpreter, although the agent of the Russian Secret Police, who called herself “Lola,” spoke a little German.”
As I eventually learned, “Lola,” was a 26-year-old Jewish woman named Yelena Rzhevskaya (Figure 8), born Elena Moiseyevna Kagan in Belarus in 1919, who was travelling with the Soviet vanguard when they entered the center of Berlin on April 29, 1945. She was a military interpreter for SMERSH, the Soviet counter-intelligence agency. Like my uncle, she was a witness to events and findings about Hitler’s fate, corroborating much of what my uncle knew and later reported. As the Soviet forces advanced through Berlin, Rzhevskaya’s unit was tasked with finding people who could provide information on Hitler’s whereabouts. It is only in 2018 that an English version of Yelena Rzhevskaya’s memoir, “Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter: From the Battle for Moscow to Hitler’s Bunker,” was published and that mention of her role in helping identify Hitler’s teeth was made.
Thus, in 1945, what led “Lola,” Yelena Rzhevskaya, to visit my uncle Fedor at Dr. Blaschke’s former dental offices was her search for information about Hitler’s fate. While questioning my uncle, Elena and the Russian authorities would learn about and eventually interrogate Käthe Heusermann and Fritz Echtmann, Blaschke’s dental technician, about their respective roles during Hitler’s dental procedures and their knowledge of his whereabouts; Käthe identified Hitler’s dental bridge for the Russians confirming his death, a fact the Soviets kept hidden for many years. Käthe and Fritz’s familiarity with Hitler’s fate would eventually result in both being abducted by the Russians and imprisoned in Russia until around 1955, a few years after Stalin died in March 1953. It served Stalin’s expansionist goals to have the world believe that Hitler had survived WWII and was an existential danger to the world, thus the need to remove from the scene anyone who could refute his narrative. It is precisely for this same reason that my uncle was in danger of being spirited away by the Russians, namely, because of his indirect knowledge of Hitler’s fate.
My uncle was alerted by the American post-war occupation forces who now controlled Charlottenburg, the Berlin district where Dr. Blaschke had once had his dental practice and where my uncle now lived and worked, that he was in danger of being snatched by the Russian intelligence services. Realizing they would eventually track him down wherever he hid and having already received a visa for the United States, my uncle abandoned his profession. Like my father, he would never again practice dentistry. Thus, began the next phase in my uncle’s life.
The precise date on which my uncle left Berlin is unknown to me. However, he wrote an affidavit in November 1966 in the matter of a probate hearing on behalf of the estate of Wolfram E. von Pannwitz, a German Baron he met in June 1947 in West Berlin, providing a general timeframe for when he departed Germany. My uncle and Mr. von Pannwitz befriended one another that month in a displaced persons camp where they had been assembled awaiting passage to the United States. Both left for America on the 8th of July 1947 aboard the “Marine Marlin” from Bremen, Germany, and arrived in New York City on the 17th of July 1947 (Figures 9-10a-b); the two would remain friends until von Pannwitz died in New York City in 1966. (Figure 11)
Wolfram E. von Pannwitz was born on the 7th of July 1889 in Botzanowitz, Prussia [today: Bodzanowice, Poland], approximately 84 miles northeast of Leobschutz, Prussia [today:Głubczyce, Poland], where my uncle was born in 1895. Beyond both having been born in Upper Silesia, my uncle and von Pannwitz shared other things in common; they were close in age, only six years separated them; both were from the upper class; both were veterans of WW; both were victims of the Nazis; and both were anti-fascist.
Von Pannwitz was a Lutheran member of the Prussian nobility, who had been a captain in the German Army during WWI. In the early 1930’s, von Pannwitz operated a large garage business and dealt in fuel in Berlin. Not wishing to join the Nazi party, he went to Paris to live between 1937 and 1939. He was forced to return to Berlin, having been declared an “enemy alien” by the French, although he was able to use family influence to return to Paris. Once returned, he became involved with the movement that attempted to assassinate Hitler on July 20, 1944, an ultimately unsuccessful effort that forced him to go into hiding.
Wolfram von Pannwitz had a younger sister, “Else Petrea, Magda, Ernestine, Ottilie, Leonie, Gertrud,” born on the 19th of February 1893, also in Botzanowitz, Prussia. (Figure 12) He married Clara Virginia Rohde on the 18th of October 1920 in Berlin, a short-lived marriage that ended on the 28th of February 1922 and produced no children. (Figures 13a-b) He remarried Frida Mueller in 1931, who died of cancer in 1934, another childless marriage.
Let me briefly digress. During this Covid-19 pandemic we are currently living through that requires most of us to self-quarantine, I have spent countless hours listening to webinars on an investment service to which I am subscribed. In this context, an interesting fact about Mr. von Pannwitz caught my attention. Investing largely in aircraft stocks, he parlayed $15,000 he saved in 1948 and 1949 into $500,000 by the time he died in 1966. I find this interesting on multiple levels. He was heavily invested in the stock market long before this was commonplace, and seemingly followed a path to building his wealth by buying and holding stocks, a strategy the investment service I follow also subscribes to. He was also invested in a segment of the market, airlines, which have largely fallen out of favor, for obvious reasons, during the current pandemic.
Wolfram von Pannwitz died on the 28th of January 1966 in St. Vincent’s Hospital. At the time he lived modestly in a $23-a-week 9-by 12-foot room in the Hotel Seville on Madison Avenue (Figure 14), known today as the “James New York-NoMad.” His death made the news (Figure 15), including the New York Times, because he left his $500,000 estate equally to Cardinal Spellman of St. Patrick’s Cathedral and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, “HIAS.” While Mr. Pannwitz was not Jewish, his bestowal to HIAS was his way of showing gratitude to his Jewish friends for their professional and personal help during his life. His bequest to the St. Patrick’s Cathedral was, in his own words, to thank them for the “. . .strength and power [they gave him] to accomplish the hard struggle for this life.”
Interestingly, Mr. von Pannwitz typed his will, dated the 4th of September 1958, on a conventional printed form. In the will, he stated “all my relatives, near or remote, shall be excluded from my inheritance, there being special reasons for this direction.” While none of the contemporary newspaper accounts discuss these “special reasons,” I know from my uncle’s November 1966 affidavit that upon Mr. von Pannwitz’s mother’s death, Gertrud von Pannwitz née Scholz in 1957, he was cheated out of his inheritance by his younger sister.
Based on surviving correspondence in my possession, sadly, Cardinal Spellman and the Catholic Church reached an out-of-court settlement with Wolfram’s sister, Elsa Petrea Reymann née von Pannwitz, after she contested the will. In the back-and-forth correspondence between my uncle Fedor and one of Mr. von Pannwitz’s friends in California, both expressed outrage that she managed to obtain any part of her brother’s estate.
This would likely have been particularly galling to Mr. von Pannwitz given that he was estranged from his sister and because of his family’s connections to the Nazi regime. A certain Helmuth von Pannwitz (14th October 1898-16th January 1947) (Figure 16), also born in Botzwanowitz, Prussia and likely one of Wolfram’s cousins, was a German general; he fought in both world wars. In WWII, he was in command of a battle group assigned to cover the southern flank in the battle of Stalingrad, where he wiped out a Soviet cavalry brigade, a Soviet cavalry division, and an enemy infantry division. Later, Helmuth von Pannwitz established a Cossack volunteer force, the 1st Cossack Division, which fought against freedom fighters in the Ukraine and Belorussia, before eventually fighting partisans commanded by Tito in Yugoslavia. During punitive operations in Serbia and Croatia, the Cossack regiments under Pannwitz’s command committed several atrocities against the civilian population, including mass rapes and routine summary executions. In 1947, the same year that Wolfram immigrated to America, Helmuth was executed by the Russians for these war crimes.
REFERENCE
Rzhevskaya, Yelena. “Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter: From the Battle for Moscow to Hitler’s Bunker.” 2018. Greenhill Books. London.
Note: In this post, I walk readers through the steps they can follow for using the United Kingdom’s “General Register Office” database to locate some of their ancestors who may have immigrated to the UK either during the Nazi era or before. I provide as a case example people from my own Jewish family I was able to track down, and vital documents I was able to obtain for some of them.
The dispersion of my Jewish relatives following the 1933 Nazi takeover in Germany has led me to search for evidence of my ancestors and their descendants in multiple countries around the world, obviously, Germany and Poland, but also Italy, France, Czech Republic, Spain, Switzerland, Greece, United Kingdom, China (Shanghai), Australia, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Canada, and the United States. I have no doubt, as I expand my ancestral inquiries, this list will grow.
Much of what I will discuss below has generally been covered in Post 68 and the postscript to that installment. Still, I thought that for those readers who can trace some of their Jewish, as well as non-Jewish, ancestors to the United Kingdom, they may find some value in having the information consolidated in one post. Readers may find themselves in the same position I initially found myself where their ancestral searches begin and end with what they can locate on ancestry.com or MyHeritage. Often, however, this is merely the first step in obtaining copies of vital documents if you recognize these might be available from what you discover on these platforms.
In Post 68, I discussed Dr. Julius Bruck (1840-1902), my first cousin thrice removed from Breslau, Germany: [today: Wrocław, Poland], a dentist renowned for his influence on modern endoscopy. During my investigations into his family, I became interested in tracking down the descendants of the four children he had with his wife, Bertha Bruck née Vogelsdorf (1843-1917), particularly those of his youngest child, Dr. Walter Wolfgang Bruck (1872-1937). (Figure 1)
The remainder of this post will be focused primarily on explaining to readers how my involved search into Walter Wolfgang Bruck’s family unfolded. I began by searching for “Walter Bruck” in ancestry.com’s “Eastern Prussian Provinces, Germany [Poland], Selected Civil Vitals, 1874-1945 (Östliche preußische Provinzen, Polen, Personenstandsregister 1874-1945)” database. Here I located Walter Wolfgang Bruck’s death certificate indicating he had died on the 31st of March 1937 in Breslau, Germany [today: Wrocław, Poland]; his wife, Johanna Elisabeth Margarete Graebsch, is named on Walter’s death certificate. (Figure 2)
My membership to the Jewish Genealogical Society of Los Angeles (JGSLA) gives me access to the ancestral search platform MyHeritage, so in the context of writing Post 68 on Dr. Julius Bruck, I searched there for Johanna Bruck née Graebsch. I came across a “German Minority Census, 1939” form (Figure 3), which, oddly, is only found on MyHeritage, not on ancestry.com. This form indicated that “Johanna Bruck (born Graebsch)” was born on the 10th of April 1884 in Wrocław, Poland; resided there in May 1939; and lived with her daughter, Renate Bruck, who was 12 years of age at the time. Given that Johanna and Renate Bruck were still in Germany at a precarious time, I became curious what might have happened to them. Naturally, the first place I checked was Yad Vashem’s “Central Database of Shoah Victim’s Names”; while I was very relieved not to find their names there, initially I could find no evidence of what may have happened to them or where they may have wound up.
I then began to search family trees on ancestry.com for both Johanna and Renate Bruck, and, coincidentally, found them on Dr. Frank Thomas Koch’s tree (Figures 4a-b), one of my German fourth cousins who is more closely related to this branch of the Bruck family; it included not only Johanna and Renate’s names, but the name of another of Walter and Johanna Bruck’s daughters, Hermine Johanna Elisabeth Bruck, who died in infancy in 1924. Interestingly, my cousin’s tree indicated that Renate Bruck may have died in 1948. Curious as to the source of all this information, I contacted Thomas. He explained this comes from the Charlotte Cramer-Sachs Family Collection archived at the Leo Baeck Institute (LBI); I was easily able to track down the source of this data from the LBI’s website and confirmed that Renate Bruck’s death is indeed noted as 1948. (Figure 5) As readers will learn, this is an error.
Thomas explained that in 1939 the Nazi regime conducted a census of German citizens to segregate Aryan versus non-Aryan citizens; this census recorded names, dates of birth, places of birth, racial descent or extraction, and addresses. People were designated as 100% Aryan, 100% Jewish, or “mixed,” 50% Jewish. This census recorded Johanna Bruck née Graebsch as 100% Aryan and her daughter as 50% Jewish, thus subject to discrimination.
By 1944, people of “mixed” descent were forced to do hard labor. To avoid this, according to Thomas, there is evidence that Johanna and Renate Bruck relocated to Erfurt, Germany from Breslau by 1944 or earlier. Thomas told me there is further evidence that in 1948, a woman, possibly a neighbor, by the name of Ms. Edith Czeczatka, initiated a search with the German Red Cross, giving Johanna and Renate’s last known address in Erfurt, Dammweg 9 (Figure 6), trying to learn what happened to them. By then, Johanna and Renate no longer lived in Erfurt, and the German Red Cross could provide no further clues as to their fates. This is where things stood when I began to search for them.
Thomas provided one obscure clue that was ultimately instrumental in unraveling where Johanna and Renate wound up, namely, that they may have immigrated to England. I did a query for “Renate Bruck” on ancestry and came upon a marriage register listing for a “Renate S. G. Bruck” and a “Harry E. Graham” in Willesden, Middlesex, United Kingdom in October 1948. (Figures 7a-b) “Bruck” or “Brook” are not uncommon names in England, so I had no way to know whether this was the elusive Bruck relative I was searching for. As readers can confirm, this register only lists the names and years persons married with no other vital data.
Having never previously needed to access vital records from the United Kingdom, I turned to my friend Ms. Madeleine Isenberg who volunteers with JGSLA for assistance. Madeleine told me to check the United Kingdom’s “General Register Office (GRO)” database. Registering as a user is straight-forward. Go to their website and click on “Register as an Individual.” (Figure 8)
Once you are logged in, you have multiple options. (Figure 9) For Renate Bruck and Harry Graham, I was interested in ordering their marriage certificate so selected “Place an Order.” The following screen allowed me to select where the event was registered, thus for Renate and Harry, in “England or Wales” as a marriage in 1948 (Figure 10); I filled in the appropriate information, checked the “I know the GRO reference number” (i.e., readers will observe from the October 1948 register that I have circled the District, Volume, and Page number on which the original marriage record for Renate S. G. Bruck and Harry E. Graham can be found). Then, on the next screen, “Application for an England and Wales marriage registration record,” I entered this information and the names of the spouses. I filled in the “Service Options,” provided payment information and submitted my request. Certificates cost between 11- and 14-Pounds Sterling (i.e., ~$13.75 to 14.50), and typically arrive within three to four weeks.
The marriage certificate for Renate S.G. Bruck and Harry E. Graham corroborated what I suspected, namely, that Renate was indeed the daughter of Dr. Walter Bruck, identified as a Doctor and Professor of Dentistry. (Figure 11) The certificate provided a wealth of additional information and names I was able to follow up on. Renate’s full name was “Renate Stephanie Gertrude Bruck,” and her husband was “Henry Ernst Graham.” Henry’s father was Hermann Gradenwitz (1876-1940), showing Henry had anglicized his surname to “Graham.” Both Renate and her husband had previously been married, Renate to a man named Eugen Walter Mehne, and Harry to a woman named Ruth Philipsborn (1914-2003); Henry and his first wife Ruth, I later discovered, married in 1935 in London indicating Henry had already emigrated from Germany by this time. Renate and Henry were married in the presence of a Marie Luise Gradenwitz (1881-1955), whom I later confirmed was Henry’s mother, née Mugdan. Curiously, Hermann Gradenwitz is buried with a Leo Mugdan, possibly his brother-in-law, as readers may be able to detect from their headstone. (Figure 12)
From ancestry.com and MyHeritage, I learned more about Renate and her family. Renate’s first husband, Eugen Walter Mehne, is initially listed in a 1908 Breslau Address Book showing he was an instrumentenmacher, an instrument maker; he is listed in a Breslau Address Book as late as 1939, and by then is a geigenbauer, violin maker. I recently found a fleeting but unattributed reference on a family tree that Renate and this Eugen Mehne married in 1945, place unspecified.
I have been unable to learn when or where Eugen was born or died, although the fact that he was already in business in 1908, 18 years before Renate was even born, proves she married an older man. Similarly, her second husband, Harry Ernst Graham (aka Heinrich Gradenwitz), was significantly older when they married in 1948, he was 43 and she only 22. Harry, I discovered, was born on the 8th of November 1904 in Berlin, and died on the 7th of March 1959 in London.
Having confirmed that Renate Bruck was in fact the daughter of Dr. Walter Wolfgang Bruck, I next turned my attention to Renate’s mother. Assuming she had survived the war, I surmised she too may have immigrated to England. In MyHeritage, I found a “Johanna M.E. Bruck” living in Barnet, Hertfordshire, England, born around 1885, who died between January and March 1963, at the age of 78 (Figures 13a-b); I already knew that the Johanna Bruck was born on the 10th of April 1884, so the difference by one year I deemed insignificant. I checked the distance between Willesden, where Renate Bruck married in 1948, and Barnet, where this Johanna Bruck died, and found it was only 44 km apart, or 27 miles, so it was reasonable to assume these people might be related.
By this time, I was virtually positive that Johanna M. E. Bruck was Renate’s mother. I returned to the GRO database and searched for her among the death records for the first quarter of 1963. I found her listed and ordered her death certificate. It arrived a few weeks later and confirmed that Johanna was indeed the widow of Dr. Walter Wolfgang Bruck; she died of ovarian cancer that resulted in early cardiac failure. (Figure 14)
Next, I tried to figure out when Renate Bruck might have died. In ancestry.com, I uncovered evidence of yet a third individual she had wed, a man named Gary Newman whom she married in 1956. (Figures 15a-b) A family tree in ancestry indicated Renate Newman had died in England on the 3rd of March 2013. With an actual year of death, I was able to locate a death certificate in the GRO database corresponding to this lady. I ordered a copy of this document, as well. Any doubt I might have had that this was Dr. Walter Wolfgang Bruck’s daughter was dispelled when I saw the maiden name “Bruck” on the certificate with her known date of birth, the 16th of June 1926. (Figure 16) Her cause of death was specified as esophageal cancer. She had been an interior designer during her working years, while her husband had been a commodity broker.
At the time of Renate’s death in 2013, her son, Nicholas Francis David Newman, was attendant. Thinking I might finally have found a living descendant of the esteemed Dr. Julius Bruck from Breslau, I first tried looking for him in the GRO database but discovered the index of historic births ends in 1916. The database includes death records until 1957, and, then again between 1984 to the present; oddly, death records between 1957 and 1991 are not available. Regardless, knowing Nicholas Newman was still alive when his mother passed away in 2013, I searched death records for the few years postdating this year. Not expecting to find anything, I was astonished to discover he died in 2015 (registered in February 2016) at only 55 years of age. Sadly, Nicholas Newman’s death certificate stated he committed suicide and no next-of-kin were named (Figure 17), so any hopes I had of possibly finding a living descendant of the esteemed Dr. Julius Bruck have been dashed, at least temporarily. I am still trying to ascertain whether Renate Bruck might have had additional children with her third husband, or possibly children by her second husband, Harry Graham.
There is one additional search engine I want to bring to readers attention that I stumbled upon. It is entitled “FreeBMD” (Figure 18), which is an ongoing project, the aim of which is to transcribe the Civil Registration index of births, marriages and deaths for England and Wales using the GRO database, and to provide free Internet access to the transcribed records. It is a part of the “Free UK Genealogy family,” which also includes “FreeCEN” (Census data) and “FreeREG” (Parish Registers). My suggestion when using FreeBMD is to only enter a surname and check “All” under “Type” of vital records being sought; this will result in the broadest possible list of names. I have used FreeBMD to search for other family members who wound up in England and found it to be useful when I only have a name and no dates or GRO reference number to work with.
Note: In this post, I discuss the limited amount I know about my father’s 2 years and 224 days in the British Army as a member of the 338th Royal Pioneer Corps. (Figure 1) Like his five-years in the French Foreign Legion, his tour of duty in the British Army began in Algeria, though it ended in Italy. I also talk about his reason for enlisting in the English Army, and, as in previous posts, provide some historical context.
Between January 30, 1933 and May 8, 1945, there were two main laws pertaining to the loss of German citizenship. This not only affected Jews, but also Communists, Socialists, members of the Social Democratic party, conscientious objectors, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Quakers. The “Law on the Revocation of Naturalizations and the Deprivation of the German Citizenship” of July 14, 1933, deprived some persons of their German citizenship individually. Their names were listed in the “Reichsgesetzblatt” (Reich Law Gazette), and with publication of the particular “Reichsgesetzblatt” they lost their German citizenship.
The main group of former German citizens, however, lost their citizenship with the “Eleventh Decree to the Law on the Citizenship of the Reich” of November 25, 1941. This decree stripped Jews of their remaining rights, and stipulated that Jews living outside Germany were no longer German citizens. Deprived of their citizenship and their passports nullified, this effectively stranded in place Jews who had left Germany in the years before or shortly after the beginning of WWII.
I previously explained to readers that my father left Germany in March 1938 and enlisted in the French Foreign Legion in November 1938. Enlistment in the Legion did not convey French citizenship unless one served at least three tours of duty or was seriously wounded during a military operation. Thus, the Nazi decree of November 25, 1941 stripping Jews living outside Germany of their citizenship effectively rendered Jews, including my father, “stateless.” While he was still a member of the Legion in November 1941 with two additional years of service to fulfill, my father no doubt began to consider what options might be available when his tour of duty ended.
My father’s five-year enlistment in the Legion ended on the 13th of November 1943 when he was demobilized in Colomb-Béchar, Algeria (Figure 2); two days later, on the 15th of November 1943, he joined the British Pioneer Corps in Algers, Algeria, and reported to Sétif, in northeastern Algeria. (Figure 3) The Pioneer Corps was apparently the only British military unit in which “enemy aliens” could serve (Figure 4); an enemy alien is a citizen of one country living in another country with which it is at war and technically viewed as suspect as a result. According to what my father told me, he switched to the English Army in the hope that after WWII was over, he would be admitted to England and could resume his dental career there. While my father never fully explained the circumstances, it seems a fellow soldier stole his identity and committed a misdeed for which my father was blamed making his entry into England impossible.
Thousands of German nationals joined the Pioneer Corps to assist Allied war efforts and the liberation of their home country. (Figure 5-6) Typically, they were Jews and political dissidents who’d fled. Unlike the French Foreign Legion, German refugees were not given anonymous names. Obviously, serving as a German national in the British forces was especially dangerous because, in case they were captured, there was a high probability of being executed, either for being a traitor or for being Jewish. Nonetheless, the number of German-born Jews joining the British forces was exceptionally high; by the end of the war, one in seven Jewish refugees from Germany had joined the British forces. Their knowledge of the German language and customs proved particularly useful; many served in the administration of the British occupation army in Germany and Austria following the war.
Among my father’s surviving papers is his “Certificate of Demobilization” (Figures 7a-b) from the English Army, translated into French, as my father was then living and working illegally as a dentist in Nice, France. The certificate indicates my father served in North Africa and Italy from the 19th of November 1943 until the 5th of May 1946, obviously as part of the occupation army after the war ended. He was awarded the Star of Italy (Figure 8) for his involvement in the military campaign there. At the time of his demobilization on the 30th of June 1946, either in Naples or Rome, my father was a private receiving the pay of a corporal. My father served a combined 2 years 224 days in the English Army. (Figures 9a-b, 10) Unlike with the French Foreign Legion, I was unsuccessful obtaining a copy of my father’s military dossier from the United Kingdom’s “Army Personnel Centre” in Glasgow. This is conjecture on my part, but possibly because my father enlisted in Algeria rather than the United Kingdom, the military dossiers for enlistees in North Africa are archived elsewhere. My primary interest in retrieving this file would be obtaining clues on why my father was unable to immigrate to England, an event that would have been transformative.
Note: In this post, I talk briefly about the origins of the French Foreign Legion’s romanticized reputation and its depiction in popular culture, followed by a presentation of a few of my father’s photos showing his time in the Legion in Algeria between November 1938 and November 1943.
My father, Dr. Otto Bruck, signed up for the French Foreign Legion on the 9th of November 1938 in Paris (Figure 1), and reported for duty in Sidi Bel Abbès, Algeria (Figure 2) on the 18th of November 1938. As discussed in the previous post, as a Jewish refugee in the lead-up to WWII without a visa to a safe haven, his options were limited, so he heeded the advice of one of his first cousins and enlisted in the Legion.
Before embarking on a presentation of some of my father’s visual images of his time in la Légion, I want to tell readers a little more about the Legion’s history to supplement what I discussed in the previous post, focusing primarily on the origins of the Legion’s romanticized reputation and its depiction in popular culture. There is no intent on my part to be comprehensive, so interested readers are encouraged to research the Legion’s history to obtain a more broad-based understanding.
The Legion was established on March 9, 1831 by King Louis-Philippe as a military unit to support France’s conquest of Algeria, which they had invaded the previous year. The Legion’s debut was inauspicious because of mismanagement in Algeria, nationally homogeneous battalions, resistance to military discipline among recruits, widespread desertion, and an unqualified officer corps. In 1835, the Legion was transferred into Spanish service to help Queen Regent María Cristina de Borbón put down a Carlist rebellion, though was resurrected in December 1835 by Louis-Philippe once he realized the continuing need for legionnaires in Algeria. The latter became known as the nouvelle légion (“new legion”), which staked out a reputation for military valor during the 1837 storming of Constantine, Algeria.
At the time, legionnaires were often used for labor rather than combat, a situation which began to change only with the arrival in 1840 of Thomas-Robert Bugeaud as commander in chief in Algeria. Recognizing the vulnerability of static legionnaire units in isolated locations that could be overwhelmed by Algerian resisters, Bugeaud instituted a counterinsurgency strategy that took the battle to the enemy and demanded incessant marching; the campaigns, while grueling, improved the Legion’s morale and performance. The Legion’s officers also then began to understand “. . .that leadership of foreign mercenaries requires finesse, appeals to the men’s sense of honor, and nonjudgmental, non-xenophobic attitudes.” Around this time, the Legion began to be more accepted as a full-fledged branch of the French army. The prior practice of nationally homogeneous military units was abandoned, discipline improved, and an ameliorated esprit de corps began to develop.
While historically the Legion had many cutthroats, political refugees, outlaws and others who required strict, often merciless, discipline, by the mid-19th century the Legion had established its reputation as a formidable fighting unit. French imperial expansion that took place between 1871 and 1914 corresponded with the Legion’s “golden age.” The corps, which numbered about 10,000 legionnaires at the time, participated in campaigns in southeastern Algeria and in the conquest of Morocco. The campaigns were then spear-headed by mule-mounted units, the old Montées, as I explained to readers in the previous post. These units became a permanent fixture of Legion operations in North Africa into the 1930’s. The “Batterie Saharienne Portée de Légion,” of which my father was a member, originated as a mule-mounted unit, though by the time he joined it was a motorized infantry company.
The Legion’s reputation as a band of romantic misfits began to capture the public’s imagination during the Legion’s golden age, augmented by what is referred to as the anonymat, the requirement to enlist under an assumed name. This anonymity allowed legionnaires to invent fabulist pasts, unconstrained by reality. What also appealed to many recruits was the possibility of starting life anew with a clean slate, in an environment of macho hardships and challenges.
Readers will recall from my previous post that the Legion had always had a large complement of Germans in its rank. Ironically, German propaganda contributed to the allure of the Legion by depicting it as a band of criminals commanded by sadistic NCOs which, counter-intuitively, seduced the naïve and innocent. Literary works, such as Ouida’s Under Two Flags (1867) and Percival Christopher Wren’s well-known Beau Geste (1924), further kindled the public’s idealized view of the Legion.
By 1933 the Legion numbered more than 30,000 soldiers that were based in Sidi Bel Abbès under the oversight of an inspector general. The Legion’s first inspector general was Paul Rollet who was responsible for creating many of the Legion’s current traditions. Among other things, he sought to secure the Legion’s place in the public’s imagination by reviving the uniform legionnaires had worn during the 19th century consisting of white uniforms and white kepis, and commissioning a glamorized history of the legion, Le Livre d’or de la Légion étrangère (“The Golden Book of the Foreign Legion”); he even had artistic battle scenes painted showing legionnaires in white kepis to reinforce his belief that they were members of an elite and exclusive military unit.
Rollet’s efforts were partly intended to counter what he perceived as an orchestrated attempt to vilify the Legion and thinly veiled attacks on France. Hollywood productions of novels about the Legion, including Under Two Flags (1936) and Beau Geste (1939), as well as the French film Le Grand Jeu (1934; “The Full Deck”) were also responsible for promoting the romanticism, adventure, and the opportunity for atonement through hardship; these possibilities were at the heart of the Legion’s appeal.
In the case of my father, the Legion offered a much simpler option, a lifeline. Still, there is a paradoxical intersection between the draw the Legion’s idealized view in popular culture may have had upon my father and the name he assumed upon his arrival in America in 1948, “Gary Otto Brook.” Recently, I asked my still-living mother why he adopted the name “Gary,” and she thought it was because he liked the actor Gary Cooper. This seems like a reasonable proposition, and the fact that Gary Cooper was one of the featured actors in Beau Geste, the 1939 movie about the French Foreign Legion, is not lost on me and does not seem coincidental.
With this rather lengthy prologue, let me turn now to a presentation and brief discussion of a few of my father’s photos of his time in the Legion.
Maxime Weygand (Figure 5) was a French military commander in World War I and World War II. Weygand initially fought against the Germans during the invasion of France in 1940, but then signed the armistice with and partially collaborated with the Germans as part of the Vichy France regime before being arrested by the Germans for not fully collaborating with them.
The Commissione Italiana d’Armistizio con la Francia (“Italian Armistice Commission with France”) or CIAF (Figure 19) was a temporary civil and military body charged with implementing the Franco-Italian armistice of 24th June 1940 and coordinating it with the Franco-German armistice of 22nd June. It had broad authority over the military, economic, diplomatic and financial relations between France and Italy until the Italo-German occupation of France on the 11th November 1942. It liaised with the German Armistice Commission, which I discussed in Post 80, which likely accounts for their presence in Ouargla, Algeria.
Note: In this post, I discuss the five years my father was deployed in the French Foreign Legion in Algeria between November 1938 and November 1943. This installment provides an opportunity to discuss some of the Legion’s history, explore the “conflicted” role the Legion played during WWII and, by extension, explain how my father was able to travel from North Africa to France in 1941 during the war, seemingly across “enemy” lines.
My father voluntarily enlisted in la Légion étrangère, the French Foreign Legion, in Paris on the 9th of November 1938, for a required five-year stint. The French Foreign Legion is a military service branch of the French Army that was founded in 1831 and was initially stationed only in Algeria, the largest country in Africa. During the 19th Century, the French Foreign Legion was primarily used to protect and expand the French colonial empire throughout the world. It is unique in that it is open to foreign recruits willing to serve in the French Armed Forces; enlistees serve under the command of French Officers. Given the limited options available to people of Jewish extraction in the lead up to WWII, my father heeded the advice of one of his first cousins and decided to enlist in la Légion. (Figure 1)
Sidi Bel Abbès, located in northwestern Algeria less than 50 miles from the Mediterranean, was the headquarters of the Foreign Legion until 1962. Named for the tomb of the marabout (saint) Sīdī Bel ʿAbbāss, it was established as a French military outpost in 1843; from this time on the city was closely associated with the French Foreign Legion. The city was the location of the Legion’s basic training camp and the headquarters of its 1st Foreign Regiment. After Algerian independence in 1962, all French troops and legionnaires were evacuated from Sidi Bel Abbès and transferred to Aubagne, France.
As nearly as I can tell from my father’s “Livret Matricule,” military file (Figures 2a-d), he reported to the 1st Foreign Regiment, 1erRégiment étranger (1er RE), to which he’d been assigned in Sidi Bel Abbès on the 18th of November 1938. He was incorporated into the Dépôt commun des régiments étrangers (D.C.R.E.), the Communal Depot of the Foreign Regiments (D.C.R.E.), which was administratively dependent on the 1st Foreign Infantry Regiment. For reasons that will become clearer, I’m uncertain whether upon enlistment my father was originally issued dog tags under his birth name, Otto Bruck, or under his nom de guerre, “Marcel Berger.” Among my father’s remaining personal effects, I have French Foreign Legion D.C.R.E. dog tags under both names. (Figures 3a-b; 4a-4b)
According to the history of the 1st Foreign Regiment, the Dépôt commun des régiments étrangers (D.C.R.E.), the Communal Depot of the Foreign Regiments, was created on the 1st of October 1933 in Sidi Bel Abbès. The Depot was under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel Azan, whom, interestingly, my father once photographed. (Figure 5) According to my father’s military dossier, upon his arrival in Algeria, he was initially assigned to the D.C.R.E.’s Compagnie de Passage No. 3, a logistics operation company, on the 19th of November 1938; then, to the D.C.R.E.’s Compagnie d’Instruction No. 2, a training company, on the 4th of December 1938; and, subsequently, to the D.C.R.E.’s Compagnie de Passage No. 1, a different logistics operation company, on the 2nd of April 1939.
A word about the role of a “Compagnie de Passage.” This group seemingly provided logistical support for soldiers in those rare moments of relaxation during the war related to housing, library services, general information, reading or writing rooms, barber shops, sports venues, cinemas, etc. It was also used to perform banking operations for the soldiers, such as withdrawing money to pay for their purchases. My father’s specific job(s) during these assignments is unknown to me.
On the 1st of October 1939, my father was transferred to the Compagnie Automobile de Transport du Territoire des Oasis (C.A.T.T.O.), the Saharan transport unit of the Legion. C.A.T.T.O. was merged into the Batterie Saharienne Portée de Légion (B.S.P.L.), Saharan Battery Legion Range, on the 29th of June 1939, the date the B.S.P.L. was created in Ouargla, Algeria; my father was assigned to the 1st B.S.P.L. on the 1st of November 1940 (Figure 6), which may correspond with his relocation to Ouargla from Sidi Bel Abbès, though I’m uncertain when this took place.
A word about the French Military term “Portée” as in “Batterie Saharienne Portée de Légion.” Technically, the term translates into English as “mobile,” although that’s inaccurate; the old Montées, the mule-mounted units from which the Portees originated, were also considered highly mobile. Therefore, the term Portée is supposed to mean “motorized” to distinguish the modern vehicle-mounted motorized infantry companies from the old Montées, the mule-mounted ones. (see “French Legion Mounted Companies“)
So far, I’ve related dry details on the military units to which my father was assigned, their presumed function, and when these assignments took place. Let me turn now to the Legion’s history during WWII for context. Initially, I was narrowly focused on trying to specifically understand how my father was able to travel from Algeria to mainland France for a two to three month stay between September and November 1941 to visit friends and family living there. (Figures 7-8) This visit in the middle of the war seemingly involved travel across “enemy” lines, and on the face of it was baffling. In looking into this, I stumbled upon a fascinating article by Edward L. Bimberg, entitled “World War II: A Tale of the French Foreign Legion,” that originally appeared in the September 1997 issue of “World War II” magazine. Below I summarize some of this author’s findings.
According to Mr. Bimberg, the Legion had always had a large complement of Germans in its rank. In the late 1930’s, intelligence officers at the headquarters of the French Foreign Legion in Sidi Bel Abbès, however, were puzzled by an even greater number of Germans pouring in, despite the Nazis’ widespread campaign to discourage them from enlisting. In this period, the German press was violently attacking the Legion, and the Nazi government demanded that recruiting be stopped. Still the Germans kept coming until half the privates and 80 percent of the non-commissioned officers in the legion were German. Eventually, it became clear that this influx had been orchestrated by German intelligence, the Abwehr. The goal was to destroy the Legion from within, which the German legionnaires nearly succeeded in doing.
According to my father, the Legion attracted its share of unsavory types, such as ex-convicts, criminals, murderers, pederasts, etc. More importantly, however, the French Foreign Legion had always attracted the dispossessed, such as Spanish Republicans who’d fought on the losing side of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939); Jews, such as my father, escaping Nazi persecution; then, later Czechs and Poles who’d fled as the German Army began its march across Europe. Obviously, these refugees did not mix well with the new Germans in the Legion; the German non-commissioned officers terrorized the non-Germans resulting in frequent fights and courts-martial. The French officers could not trust their own non-commissioned officers, and morale in the Legion plummeted, almost to the point of disbanding the entire corps.
WWII is generally said to have begun with the German invasion of Poland on the 1st of September 1939, and the subsequent declarations of war on Germany by France and the United Kingdom. With the declaration of war, the situation in France became critical, but the questionable loyalty of the Germans in the Legion made shipping them to fight in Europe too risky. Instead, four more foreign regiments were raised in France and trained by veteran Legion officers from North Africa. These newly created regiments garrisoned the Maginot Line, the line of concrete fortifications, obstacles, and weapon installations built by France in the 1930s to deter invasion by Germany. These legionnaires remained inactive during the so-called “phony war,” the period of comparative inaction at the beginning of World War II between the German invasion of Poland (September 1939) and that of Norway (April 1940).
Despite the general reluctance of sending entire Legion units to France, the French authorities decided something had to be done with the loyal elements of the Legion marking time in North Africa but anxious to fight. So, in early 1940, volunteers were called for, and two battalions of 1,000 men assembled, one in Fez, Morocco, and the other in Sidi Bel Abbès, Algeria; the volunteers were carefully vetted. The remaining German legionnaires of unquestioned loyalty were given non-German names and false identity papers to protect them in case they were captured by the Germans. Possibly, my father acquired his alias, Marcel Berger, at this time.
The two battalions were joined into the 13th Demi-Brigade (13e Demi-Brigade de la Légion Étrangère) and put under the command of a Lieutenant-Colonel Magrin-Verneret, a WWI veteran apparently typical of military eccentrics who often turned up in the Foreign Legion. When the 13th Demi-Brigade arrived in France, these desert-trained veterans were surprisingly issued a new type of uniform and skis, trained to fight in the Arctic, and outfitted as mountain troops with heavy parkas, boots, and snow capes. They were initially bound for Finland, but after the capitulation of the Finns to the Russians when the latter were still in league with the Germans, thus before the brigade could be deployed there, the war in Finland ended.
Instead, the 13th Demi-Brigade was shipped to Norway to capture the northern port of Narvik from the Germans to prevent ore shipments from neutral Sweden needed by the Nazi regime. After bitter fighting, the legionnaires captured control of Narvik on the 28th of May 1940. For the next few days, they pursued the retreating Germans through the snow-covered mountains toward the Swedish border; their aim was to capture General Edouard Dietl, who’d led the German garrison at Narvik, and his remaining troops and force them into Swedish internment. Regrettably, when the 13th Demi-Brigade was only 10 miles from the Swedish border, they were ordered to return to France where they were needed in defense of France. The “phony war” was over with the German invasion of the Low Countries a few weeks earlier.
Edward Bimberg picks up the narrative: “The 13th Demi-Brigade returned to France from Norway, sailing into the harbor at Brest on June 13, almost at the same time the Germans were marching into Paris. Colonel Magrin-Verneret was ordered to form a line as part of a proposed last-ditch Breton Redoubt, but it was no use. The Germans had broken through.
While on a forward reconnaissance mission to determine what could be done to delay the enemy, Magrin-Verneret and some of his officers became separated from the main body of the 13th Demi-Brigade, and when they returned to Brest they could not find any trace of the unit. The reconnaissance party assumed that the main body had been over-run, and the colonel determined that he and his companions should try to get to England, where the British planned to fight on. Every boat seemed to have been taken over by fleeing British and French troops, but the Legion officers finally found a launch that took them to Southampton. Miraculously, most of the 13th Demi-Brigade had already found a way to get there.”
The point of relating the above history to readers is to explain why from this point forward the French Foreign Legion was so sharply divided during WWII. On June 18, 1940, the French General Charles de Gaulle, leader of the new Free French movement, was now also a refugee in England. Magrin-Verneret immediately offered the services of the 13th Demi-Brigade to de Gaulle, and soon they were training at Trentham Park near Stoke-on-Trent.
On June 25, 1940, the Franco-Italian armistice went into effect, which ended the brief Italian invasion of France during WWII. This followed by a few days the Franco-German armistice of June 22, 1940, which divided France into two zones: one under German military occupation and one left nominally under full French sovereignty, referred to as “Vichy France.” These armistice agreements meant war was over for now for the French Army, which was reorganized into the Armistice Army. That’s also why in, November 1940, a major reorganization took place within the Legion. Not coincidentally, as mentioned above, my father was reassigned to the 1st B.S.P.L. on the 1st of November 1940 in Ouargla, Algeria.
With the implementation of the armistice agreements on June 25, 1940, the men of the 13th Demi-Brigade were given a choice, fight on with de Gaulle, or return to North Africa, which was now under the control of Marshal Henri Philippe Petain’s newly formed Vichy government. The 1st Battalion, strongly influenced by Captain Dimitri Amilakvari, a 16-year Legion veteran who’d fought valiantly to capture a key hill in the battle of Narvik, elected to stay with de Gaulle. The 2nd Battalion went back to Morocco and was disbanded.
Edward Bimberg resumes the story: “The French Foreign Legion, like the rest of the French empire, was now sharply divided. The 13th Demi-Brigade had given its allegiance to the Free French, while the rest of the Legion, scattered throughout North Africa, Syria and Indochina, remained under the thumb of the Vichy government, which meant being under the sharp watch of the German Armistice Commission.
The Germans demanded that the men that had been planted in the Legion be returned to the Reich, and the Legion was not sorry to see them go. But the Commission had other, not so welcome demands. They had lists of refugee Jews, Germans, Poles, Czechs, Italians, and others they wanted back, to send to concentration camps.
There were many men in the French army in North Africa, particularly in the Legion, who had no sympathy for the Vichy government and hated the Germans. Besides, the Legion had a reputation for taking care of its own. Its intelligence system usually discovered the Armistice Commission’s visits well in advance and knew the names of the legionnaires on the lists. The wanted legionnaires were given new names, new papers and new identity discs. When the Germans came too close, the refugees would be transferred to far-off Saharan outposts where the Commission seldom took the trouble to visit.”
Edward Bimberg’s story provides some context about my father’s time in the French Foreign Legion. Obviously, after the Franco-German armistice went into effect in June 1940, Algeria, where my father was stationed, was under the control of the Vichy government. According to Bimberg, while many of the Legion’s officers and men in North Africa would have liked to join de Gaulle’s forces, they were hesitant to desert; also, the surrounding mountains and desert prevented them from reaching the Free French in large numbers, so they were forced to bide their time. Still, because the Legion looked after their own, they probably gave my father a new identity after the establishment of the German Armistice Commission. Some of my father’s pictures, which I will feature in my next Blog post, were taken in remote outposts in the Saharan desert, places I presume he and fellow at-risk legionnaires were sent to put them outside the Commission’s reach. My father’s two to three-month trip to mainland France between September and November 1941 was clearly possible because the Legion units in North Africa were under the control of the Vichy government, so technically his travel did not involve crossing enemy lines. Additionally, his lengthy stay may have been orchestrated to distance him from planned visits by the German Armistice Commission.
The 13th Demi-Brigade, which rallied to Charles de Gaulle’s Free French forces following France’s capitulation to Germany in June 1940, was incorporated into the British Eighth Army as the 1st Free French Legion. It spearheaded the Gaullist conquest of French colonies in sub-Saharan Africa and Syria, where it actually fought against Legion units loyal to the collaborationist Vichy government. The Allied invasion of French North Africa in November 1942 reunited the fractured branches of the Legion. Still, political rancor was slow to dissipate on account of confrontation between the opposing units in Syria. The feuding between the pro-Gaullist and ex-Vichy legion units continued in Italy, where the Legion participated in the breakthrough at Monte Cassino in 1944. By this time, my father was no longer a member of the French Foreign Legion, having by then enlisted in the British Army, a subject of a future Blog installment.
The reuniting of the legion units in November 1942 explains why my father was able to fight against the Germans in the Battle of Tunisia between February and April 1943, likely the only combat action he ever saw. (Figure 9)
Stumbling upon Mr. Bimberg’s article on the history of the French Foreign Legion during WWII was instrumental in helping me understand why my father was in certain places during his five years in the Legion. The story also explains why the Legion’s morale was so low: “The Vichy Legion in North Africa was not only constantly harassed by the German Armistice Commission but was short of weapons, gasoline and sometimes even food and tobacco. Legion strength fell to less than 10,000 men, and the German authorities continually urged the Vichy authorities to disband it altogether. Morale was at rock bottom, and the rate of desertions and suicides was rising.” Given the Legion’s tenuous position, I can imagine the situation for Jewish men like my father must have been nerve-wracking, even with French aliases.
The following post will be a photo essay of images from my father’s years in the French Foreign Legion.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bimberg, Edward L. “World War II: A Tale of the French Foreign Legion.” World War II, September 1997.
Note: Beginning with this post, I shift to the timing and chain of events that led to my father’s enlistment in the French Foreign Legion in November 1938, followed in an upcoming post by a discussion of my father’s time in this French military unit.
My father received his dental accreditation from the University of Berlin’s Zahnheilkunde Institut, Dentistry Institute, on the 31st of May 1930. Soon thereafter, he moved to the Free City of Danzig, Freie Stadt Danzig in German, where he apprenticed with a Dr. Fritz Bertram. I think his relocation to Danzig may have been related to the fact that he was very close to his aunt and uncle, Rudolf Löwenstein and Hedwig Löwenstein née Bruck, and two of their three children, Jeanne (Figures 1-2) and Heinz Löwenstein, who all lived there. In Post 71, I described the tragic circumstances of Rudolf Löwenstein’s death in a plane crash in then-Czechoslovakia on the 22nd of August 1930, when my father resided with him and his family.
By April 1932, my father had gained enough technical expertise to strike out independently, and open his own dental practice in the nearby town of Tiegenhof [today: Nowy Dwór Gdański, Poland]. While this was undoubtedly a signature achievement in my father’s life, slightly more than eight months later, on the 30th of January 1933, Hitler was appointed Germany’s Chancellor by the President Paul von Hindenburg, and then became Führer in 1934. An October 1934 picture of the office building in Tiegenhof where my father lived and had his practice was festooned with Nazi flags (Figure 3), clearly demonstrating the predictable impact of political developments in Germany on the Free City of Danzig and the looming danger. By April 1937, my father was devoid of clients, so he shuttered his practice. Judging from the dates on his photos, he appears to have stayed in Tiegenhof until fall of that year.
I think my father then briefly went to Berlin to “lose” himself in the relative anonymity of a larger city. His adored sister Susanne and her husband, Dr. Franz Müller, had already fled Berlin in favor of Italy by March 1936. However, his older brother, Dr. Fedor Bruck, who would ride out the entire war in Berlin hidden by friends and family, was still practicing dentistry in Berlin in 1937 under the auspices of a non-Jewish dentist when this was still feasible. Perhaps, my father stayed briefly with his brother, but, regardless, by March 1938, his dated pictures place him in Vienna, Austria between the 5th and 9th of March. (Figure 4) His ultimate destination though was Fiesole, Italy, where his sister and brother-in-law were then living. His entered Italy on the 10th of March 1938 but arrived in Fiesole only on the 26th of March (Figure 5), spending the intervening period skiing in the Dolomites.
During Italy’s Fascist era, all out-of-town visitors were required to appear with their hosts at the Municipio, City Hall, provide their names, show their identity papers, indicate their anticipated length of stay, and complete what was called a “Soggiorno degli Stranieri in Italia,” or “Stay of Foreigners in Italy.” The surviving records for Fiesole are today kept at a branch of the Municipio called the “Archivio Storico Comunale,” the “Municipal Historic Archive.” (Figure 6) These registration logs and forms, while highly intrusive, are enormously informative for doing genealogical research, uncovering names of visitors, and establishing timelines for these guests. (Figure 7)
While 1938 was hardly a serene time, by June or July, my father nonetheless decided to tour parts of Italy and adjoining Switzerland, including Florence, Rome (Figure 8), Pompeii (Figure 9), Naples, Sorrento, the Island of Ischia, and Ascona; his travels lasted until September. By the 15th of September 1938, he was back in Fiesole according to a surviving immigration register on file at Fiesole’s “Archivio Storico Comunale.” This record indicates an anticipated two-week visit, though it’s not clear how long my dad actually stayed. (Figure 10)
Let me briefly digress and provide some historical context for what was happening in Italy at the time. On the 9th of May 1938, Adolph Hitler had visited Florence escorted by Italian Duce Benito Mussolini, and toured some historic sites. Soon after, on July 14, 1938, Mussolini embraced the “Manifesto of the Racial Scientists.” Basically, this Manifesto declared the Italian civilization to be of Aryan origin and claimed the existence of a “pure” Italian race of which Jews were no part. Between September 2, 1938 and November 17, 1938, Italy enacted a series of racial laws, including one forbidding foreign Jews from settling in Italy.
It quickly became apparent to my father, his sister, her husband, and my grandmother, Else Bruck née Berliner, also living in Fiesole, that remaining in Italy was no longer possible. Again, according to records on file at Fiesole’s “Archivio Storico Comunale,” my aunt and uncle are deleted from the population records of the city, in Italian “Data dalle quale decorre la cancellazione dal Registro di popolazione,” beginning on the 16th of September 1938. (Figures 11-12) Thus, my father’s arrival and registration in Fiesole the day before was likely timed to help his relatives pack up and leave, though he may have stayed longer.
The next stop along my family’s odyssey was Fayence, France, roughly 42 miles west of Nice, France; Fayence is one of the “perched villages” overlooking the plain between the southern Alps and the Esterel massif. My uncle Dr. Franz Müller’s daughter by his first marriage, Margit Mombert née Müller, lived there with her husband, brother-in-law, and mother-in-law on a fruit farm the family owned. I discussed this in Post 22 so refer readers to that publication. I place my aunt, uncle and grandmother’s arrival in Fayence towards the end of September 1938. While the collaborationist government of Vichy France would not be established in the southern part of metropolitan France until July of 1940, my ancestors’ recent displacements and the reach of the Nazis would have made them extremely nervous. Clearly, in the case of my father, riding out the impending storm in France or elsewhere in Europe was not a viable option at the age of only 31.
Coincidentally, by 1938, but likely years before, his widowed aunt Hedwig Löwenstein née Bruck and her two children, discussed above, with whom my father had lived in Danzig between 1930 and 1932, had relocated to Nice, France. (Figure 13) Hedwig’s daughter, Jeanne “Hansi” Goff née Löwenstein (1902-1986), was close to my father throughout his life. Realizing the danger he was in, she advised him to enlist in the French Foreign Legion, which is precisely what my father, Dr. Otto Bruck, did.
In one of my father’s surviving post-WWII letters, dated the 7th of January 1946, he requested a Carte d’identité, an identify card, from the Department of Alpes-Maritimes in southeast France, where Nice is located. In this letter, my father provides some dates that help establish where he was at various times before and during the war. According to this correspondence, by October 21, 1938, my father had arrived in Paris, France, where he applied for admittance to the French Foreign Legion, to which he was conscripted on the 9th of November 1938 for a five-year hitch. So far, I’ve been unable to determine my father’s whereabouts between September 16, 1938, when he was in Fiesole, Italy, and October 21, 1938, when he arrived in Paris.
The French Foreign Legion is a military service branch of the French Army established in 1831. The Legion is unique in that it is open to foreign recruits willing to serve in the French Armed Forces. My father was given a French nom de guerre, an alias, “Marcel Berger.” (Figures 14a-b) From the French Foreign Legion, I was able to obtain my father’s “Livret Matricule,” military file, which states that Marcel Berger was born on the 6th of January 1907 in Strasbourg in the French Department of Bas-Rhin, and that his profession was “Chirurgien dentist,” dental surgeon. (Figure 15) While my father’s profession is correctly indicated, he was in fact born on the 16th of April 1907 in Ratibor, Germany [today: Racibórz, Poland]. My father’s fluency in French would have afforded him a measure of protection had he been taken prisoner.
Readers may think the title of this post somewhat odd, as though to imply that my father’s enlistment in the French Foreign Legion was somehow preordained. While my father was very much inclined to believe in kismet, fate, I am a strong believer that you control your own destiny. That said, realistically, without an exit visa to a “sanctuary” country a Jewish person’s options would have been extremely limited in the lead-up to WWII, so my father was fortunate the French Foreign Legion was open to him and that he was unmarried and had no children to look after.
In the following post, I will provide substantially more background on the history of the French Foreign Legion during WWII to account for the Legion’s “conflicted” role at the time and explain how my father was able to travel to France in 1941 “across enemy lines” to visit his beloved sister Susanne one final time.
Note: In this post, I discuss an article published in the Nazi Party’s newspaper in May 1935 describing a run-in my father’s friend from Tiegenhof, Kurt Lau, had with the Nazis that resulted in him being incarcerated for 30 days for “insulting the National Socialist government.”
My father met Kurt Lau, the Managing Director of the “Tieghenhofer Oelmühle,” the rapeseed oil mill, in 1932 after he moved to Tiegenhof [today: Nowy Dwór Gdański, Poland] (Figure 1); unlike other people whom he befriended there they remained lifelong friends. (Figure 2) By the time my father left the area in 1937, Kurt and his wife Käthe were among the few people who still spoke to him, despite the pressure Germans were under to dissociate themselves from and isolate Jews. When I first started my forensic investigations into my family, reminded that Kurt and Käthe’s son and daughter-in-law are still alive, I reached out to Juergen “Peter” (b. 1923) and Hannelore “Lolo” Lau (b. 1925) (Figure 3) for help identifying some of the people in my father’s photos. They were helpful and gracious beyond all measure. Connecting with Kurt and Käthe’s descendants has allowed our families to continue a friendship that now spans four generations, really five, taking the youngest great-great-grandchildren into account.
Among the items Peter shared with me when we first connected in 2012 was a poor-quality xerox of a newspaper article he thought dated to 1935 or 1936 about his father running afoul of the National Socialist government (Figure 4); written in elaborate German Gothic font, the text was naturally indecipherable, but according to Peter the article describes judicial proceedings the Nazi authorities launched against his father for “defaming the government.” At the time, I was not so interested in the specifics of the case.
Fast forward. Readers will recall that Mr. Peter Hanke, affiliated with “forum.danzig.de,” recently found newspaper clippings in old Danzig [today: Gdansk, Poland] dailies of people I’ve lately written about. This includes my great-uncle Rudolf Löwenstein, subject of Post 71, and, Dr. Franz Schimanski, subject of Post 76. Thinking Peter Hanke might be interested and able to read the article Peter Lau had once given me, I sent it to him, asking if he could transcribe it. He not only did that, but he also translated it. The article gives a glimpse into the mindset of the Nazi overlords and describes Kurt Lau’s arrest and trial. Below is a transcription and translation of the article (a few words are illegible), followed by a discussion of the historical context of the events described.
TRANSCRIPTION:
“Freistadtgebiet
Unerlaubte Kritik
Drei Monate Gefängnis wegen Beleidigung der Regierung
Der Direktor der Tiegenhöfer Ölmühle, Kaufmann Kurt L., hatte am Dienstag eine eilige Reise nach Danzig vor und wollte sich noch schnell rasieren lassen. Als er um 8 Uhr früh das Friseurgeschäft F. in Tiegenhof betrat, war nur der Lehrling da. Im angrenzenden Damensalon saß jedoch eine Kundin, Frau B. aus Tiegenhof, was jedoch Direktor L. nicht wusste. Als nach kurzer Zeit der Kaufmann Gustav Kr. den Herrenraum betrat, knüpfte er mit dem ihm bekannten Direktor L. ein Gespräch an, das fortgesetzt wurde, während der Gehilfe K. Direktor L. rasierte.
L. und Kr. kamen in ein Gespräch über die Guldenabwertung. Aus der Unterhaltung war zu entnehmen, dass L. wie Kr. durch den Guldensturz erhebliche Verluste beim Warenverkauf erlitten hatten, die durch den Zuschlag von 20 Prozent nach Ansicht der Geschäftsleute nicht ausgeglichen werden könnte. Hierauf wandte sich dei Unterhaltung zwei Strafprozessen gegen zwei Kaufleute in Tiegenhof und Neuteich zu. L. war der Meinung, dass der Jude ??? in Neuteich zu Unrecht verurteilt worden wäre und erging sich dabei in einer unpassenden Kritik über die Regierung. Er bemängelte zunächst, dass abgeblich keine Wirtschaftler gehört worden seien, es es könne auch mit Aufrufen allein nichts geschafft werden. Hierbei fielen von ihm die Worte ‘Das grenzt an Betrug.’! Als sich Direktor L. verabschiedete, machte er eine drastische Bemerkung, in der das bekannte Wort vom Grundeis vorkam.
Die Kundin im Damensalon war namentlich über die letzten Worte empört und erkundigte sich nach dem Namen des Sprechers; sie erstattete dann Strafanzeige gegen L. Dieser wurde noch am selben Tage in einem Danziger Café festgenommen und in Schutzhaft überführt. Er hatte sich am Mittwoch vor dem Tiegenhofer Amtsgericht wegen Verleumdung der Regierung zu verantworten. Insbesondere wurden ihm der Ausdruck “Das grenzt an Betrug!” und der letzte Satz seines Gesprächs zur Last gelegt.
Bei der Beweisaufnahme bestritt der Angeklagte, sich irgendwie schuldig gemacht zu haben. Er habe nicht das Gespräch angefangen, sondern der Kaufmann Kr. Ferner habe er es eilig gehabt und könne bei einer Rasur sich philosophische Reden gehalten haben.
Als Belastungszeugen waren Frau B., die Friseuse R. und der Gehilfe K. geladen worden. Ihre eidlichen Aussagen ergaben, dass die Unterhaltung in der eingangs beschriebenen Form statt gefunden haben musste und die inkriminierten Worte gefallen waren. Auch der Kaufmann Kr. musste die Möglichkeit der Ausdrücke zugeben.
Der Verteidiger, Rechtsanwalt M., glaubte zunächst an Hand von Presseberichten feststellen zu können, dass ‘überall geschimpft’ worden sei. Ferner war er der Ansicht, dass auch der Wert der Zeugenaussagen problematisch sei. Es könne in der heutigen Zeit von keinem Kaufmann Begeisterung über die schwierigen Wirtschaftslage verlangt werden.
Der Angeklagte habe ‘nicht die Absicht gehabt, zu provozieren,’ sondern sich nur im Rahmen der Allgemeinheit verhalten. Die Vorsätzlichkeit einer Beleidigung sei zu verneinen, der letzte Satz ist als zulässiger Herrenwitz zu werten.
Der Vertreter der Anklagebehörde sah dagegen einen Verstoß gegen die Strafparagraphen ??? und 105a als gegeben an. Eine Kritik über die Abwertung des Guldens dürfe nicht zur Beleidigung der Regierung ausarten. Der Beschuldigte als gebildeter Mensch und Parteigenosse hätte vielmehr die Pflicht gehabt, beruhigend zu wirken und als Wirtschaftler seine Bedenken an geeigneter Stelle vortragen können.
Desgleichen legte das Gericht dar, dass der Angeklagte als Wirtschaftsführer sich über die Folgen seiner Handlungen hätte bewusst sein müssen.
Die Provokation verlange schwere Sühne, strafmildernd sei nur, dass der Angeklagte sich bisher einwandfrei geführt hatte. Das Urteil lautete auf drei Monate Gefängnis.
Der Strafprozess,hatte in Tiegenhof verständlicherweise großes Aufsehen erregte, der überfüllte Zuhörerraum musste schon vor der Verhandlung ??????????”
TRANSLATION:
“Free city area
Unauthorized criticism
Three months in prison for insulting the government
The director of the Tiegenhöfer Oelmühle, businessman Kurt L., was planning an urgent trip to Danzig on Tuesday and wanted to have a quick shave. When he entered the F. hairdresser’s shop in Tiegenhof at 8 a.m., only the apprentice was there. However, a customer, Mrs. B. from Tiegenhof, was sitting in the adjacent ladies’ salon, but Director L. did not know this. When the merchant Gustav Kr. entered the gentlemen’s room after a short time, he started a conversation with director L., whom he knew, which was continued while the assistant K. was shaving director L.
L. and Kr. got into a conversation about the devaluation of the Gulden. From the conversation, it could be gathered that L. and Kr. had suffered considerable losses in the sale of goods as a result of the fall of the Gulden, which in the opinion of the businessmen could not be compensated by the surcharge of 20 percent. The conversation then turned to two criminal proceedings against two merchants in Tiegenhof and Neuteich. L. believed the Jew ??? had been wrongly convicted in Neuteich, and in doing so he made an inappropriate criticism of the government. First, he criticized that no economists had been heard, and that nothing could be achieved even with appeals alone. Here he used the words ‘This borders on fraud!’ When director L. said goodbye, he made a drastic remark in which the well-known f***-word was mentioned.
The customer in the ladies’ salon was outraged by the last words and inquired about the name of the speaker; she then filed charges against L. He was arrested in a café in Danzig and transferred to protective custody the same day. On Wednesday he had to appear at the Tiegenhof District Court for defamation of the government. In particular, he was charged with the expression ‘That borders on fraud!’ and the last sentence of his conversation.
At the hearing of evidence, the accused denied having been guilty in any way. He had not started the conversation, but the businessman Kr. Furthermore, he had been in a hurry and couldn’t have made any philosophical speeches while being shaved.
Ms. B., the hairdresser R. and the assistant K. had been summoned as witnesses for the prosecution. Their sworn statements showed that the conversation must have taken place in the form described at the beginning and that the incriminating words had been spoken. The merchant Kr. also had to admit the possibility of the expressions.
The defense counsel, attorney M., initially believed that he could establish from press reports that ‘everyone bitches.’ Furthermore, he believed the value of the witness statements was also problematic. Nowadays, no businessman can be expected to be enthusiastic about the difficult economic situation.
The accused had ‘not intended to provoke’ but had only behaved in the context of the general public. The willfulness of an insult was to be denied, the last sentence was to be regarded as a permissible joke.
The representative of the prosecuting authority, however, considered it a violation of the penal clauses ??? and 105a as given. A criticism about the devaluation of the Gulden should not be allowed to degenerate into an insult to the government. The accused, as an educated person and party comrade, should rather have had the duty of have a calming effect and, as an economist, should have voiced his concerns in a suitable place.
Similarly, the court stated that as an economic leader, the accused should have been aware of the consequences of his actions.
The provocation demanded severe atonement, the only mitigating factor being that the defendant had previously conducted himself impeccably. The sentence was three months in prison.
The criminal trial understandably caused a great stir in Tiegenhof, and the crowded auditorium had to be ????? before the hearing.”
One thing to note about the original article is that only the forename and first one or two letters of the surname appear; there can be no doubt locals would have known who was being discussed, although it’s unclear to me why the need to partially mask identities. Even so, with access to Tiegenhof Address Books and a list of local businesses of the time, I have been able to identify some of the parties. The defendant is obviously “Kurt Lau.” “Gustav Kr.,” I was able to determine referred to the businessman Gustav Kretschmann, Manufaktur und Kurzwaren, manufacturing and haberdashery. (Figure 5) Similarly, the friseur, hairdresser, initial “F.” refers to Sally Folchert (Figure 6), and the defense attorney, initial “M.,” can only be the Rechtsanwalt und Notar, lawyer and notary, “Markfeldt,” as he’s the only lawyer in Tiegenhof at the time whose surname begins with an “M.” (Figure 5)
Before describing the historical context leading to Kurt Lau’s legal troubles, let me say a few words about the Free City of Danzig, in German, Freie Stadt Danzig. It was a semi-autonomous city-state created according to the terms of the Treaty of Versailles following WWI, that existed between 1920 and 1939. It consisted of the Baltic seaport of Danzig along with nearly 200 towns in the surrounding area, including Tiegenhof where my father briefly had his dental practice; Tiegenhof was about 25 miles SE of Danzig. The Free City was not an independent state, but rather was under the protection of the League of Nations. The Free City’s population was 98% German, and by 1936 a majority of the Senate, the Free City’s governing body, was composed of Nazis who agitated for reunification with Germany.
In Post 8, I described Nazi parades my father documented that took place, respectively, in 1933, 1934 and 1935, along the street that fronted the building where he lived and had his dental practice. (Figure 7) On the 5th of April 1935, Hermann Göring (Figure 8), a German political and military leader as well as one of the most powerful figures in the Nazi Party, participated in that parade in support of the slate of Nazi candidates running for parliament in the Free City. Göring’s appearance would have occurred just before these elections on the 7th of April 1935, cited above. These were assuredly very scary times for my father.
Returning now to Kurt Lau’s run-in with the law. Based on events reported in the New York Times on the 3rd of May 1935 (Figure 9), on May 2nd the Free City’s Senate devalued the Danzig Gulden by 42.37 percent. However, according to Peter Hanke, the Nazi government judiciously avoided use of the term “devaluation,” and instead referred to it euphemistically as a “revaluation.” The local populace did not react as the Nazis had expected and wanted. Most people immediately withdrew their savings and purchased any available goods before prices were increased. Less than a week after the devaluation of the Gulden, prices for almost all goods were increased. This is the context in which Kurt Lau and Gustav Kretschmann complained about the considerable losses they’d suffered and caused Kurt Lau to “insult the Nazi government.” Rich indeed. As to the victims of Nazi “insults,” they never received retributive justice.
