In 1951, some months after I was born in New York, my parents received a congratulatory card from my father’s uncle, Wilhelm “Willy” Bruck, my grandfather Felix Bruck’s surviving younger brother. (Figures 1a, 1b & 1c) Regrettably, this card, mailed from Barcelona, Spain, has not survived. At the time I began looking into my family, I knew very little about this great-uncle; it turns out his only daughter, Eva Bruck, visited New York in 1967 (Figure 2), although her connection to our family was never explained to me at the time. Still, I remember her clearly. Having been a coin collector my entire life, Eva immediately endeared herself by bringing me an Austrian 15 Kreuzer silver coin from 1686, an item still in my possession.
Eva had a very distinctive look so when I carefully re-examined my father’s pictures from Ratibor and Berlin when he and Eva were younger, she was easily recognizable. I was also able to identify her brother, Edgar Bruck, in these same images. (Figure 3)
As previously mentioned, my father took scant interest in his family and often quipped, “thank heavens we don’t have family!” When he spoke of his relatives or friends, he often used a French or German sobriquet, such as “la Socialiste,” “la Vielle,” or “Die Schlummermutter,” never mentioning surnames for these people. Given my father’s rather casual attitude about family, it’s not surprising he lost touch with them, and why I never met or knew how many aunts and uncles he had. For that matter, I was never even told how many siblings my father had, as readers may recall from my visit to the Polish State Archives in Raciborz (Post 12), where I learned of an older brother named Walter who died in infancy.
From the Ratibor microfilm records and the Polish State Archives in Raciborz, I discovered my grandfather had seven siblings and learned their dates of birth; since I track only five of the siblings into adulthood, it’s likely two died in infancy. Finding out what became of the surviving brothers and sisters during the Nazi era and uncovering whether any had children or grandchildren became a priority when I started the forensic investigations into my father’s family.
I started with my great-uncle Willy, Wilhelm Bruck. The Ratibor birth records showed he was born on October 24, 1872, while a page in FamilySearch’s “International Genealogical Index (IGI),” indicated he died on May 18, 1952, in Barcelona, and was married to an Antonie Marcus on April 2, 1904 in Hamburg, Germany; Antonie was born on July 13, 1876 in Hamburg, Germany and died in Barcelona (as Antonia) on October 10, 1942. When I began my search into my great-uncle Willy, this is all I knew. (Figures 4 & 5)
Aware of my great-uncle Willy’s connection to Barcelona, I searched the city’s White Pages for people with the surname Bruck hoping to find some of his descendants. I was a bit surprised when none showed up, although when I broadened my search to all of Spain, I found 14 people with the surname Bruck. At that instant, I decided to write to all fourteen individuals, enclosing the only photo I had at the time of my great-uncle Willy. (Figure 6)
I’ve often used this approach, writing “cold letters” to people I think may have information about my father’s family and friends. Typically, I get a response rate of about 50 percent, often absent information, although, in this instance, only two people responded. The first response was predictably negative. The second, however, was different. Early one Saturday morning, I received a call from Haifa, Israel from a gentleman named Michael Bruck; this immediately caught my attention because I was unaware of any Bruck relatives in Israel. It turns out, Michael is the first cousin of someone I’d written to in Spain, a man named Ronny Bruck. Early in January 2014, Ronny received my letter, coincidentally, on his 65th birthday. Thinking an unknown Bruck relative in America was sending him birthday well-wishes, he instead found my odd request asking about my deceased great-uncle Willy. Ronny forwarded my letter to his first cousin Michael in Israel, the family genealogist, ergo the call.
While both Ronny and Michael recognized a family resemblance between my great-uncle Willy and their ancestors, to this day we have not connected our respective branches of the family; whenever we come upon a new family tree, we immediately share it hoping to eventually find a “link.” Regardless, both Ronny and Michael have been of enormous assistance in my family research. Ronny learned Sütterlin for only one year in school, and has translated countless historic birth, marriage and death records written in this obsolete German script; Michael helped me track down one of my father’s first cousins who immigrated to Haifa after WWII, an arduous search that will be the subject of a future post. While we can’t pinpoint our family ties, I consider Michael and Ronny nothing less than intimate kin. (Figure 7)
Having basically reached a dead-end on my great-uncle Willy, I turned to the Los Angeles Jewish Genealogical Society for help contacting someone in Spain’s Jewish community thinking they might be able to assist. They put me in touch with the Synagogue Librarian for La Javurá, Ms. Alba Toscana, in Valencia, Spain (Figure 8), who suggested I contact the Comunidad Israelita de Barcelona or CIB, and they, in turn, sent me to the Cementiris de Barcelona, S.A. I emailed them in February 2014, and, within a day, they responded and confirmed that my great-uncle Willy was indeed buried in Barcelona, at the Cementerio de Montjuïc, with his wife, son and daughter-in-law; they also provided specifics on where all were entombed. The Cementiris, however, was unwilling to provide a copy of any of the death certificates for family members unless I presented myself in person and paid for the documents on the spot.
Fortunately, my wife and I already had plans in summer of 2014 to visit the places connected to my family’s diaspora, including Barcelona, so when we arrived there in July we presented ourselves to the Cementiris. (Figure 9) Payment was made in this office, then we had to trek across town to a separate office, the Ministerio de Justicia Registro Civil de Barcelona (Figure 10), where actual death certificates are obtained. The Cementiris provided a letter telling me when my great-uncle Willi and his wife died, and where they are entombed in theCementerio de Montjuïc. (Figure 11) I also received a separate document stating that payment for keeping the remains interred was current. As readers may know, it is a common practice in Spain and elsewhere in the world for relatives to pay to keep their ancestors buried, otherwise, the human remains are disinterred and placed in a charnel house after a certain number of years. The Cementiris, however, would not provide information on any living family members. Spain is a notoriously difficult place to obtain official documents and names of living and even deceased relatives because of its recent history of fascism; initially I was only able to obtain the death certificates for my great-uncle Willy (Figure 12), known here as Guillermo Bruck Mockrauer, and his son, Edgar-Pedro Bruck Marcus. (Figure 13)
A side note on Spanish names is relevant. In Spain, at birth, an individual is given two surnames, that of his mother and father. Thus, my great-uncle Willy’s father’s surname was Bruck and his mother’s maiden name was Mockrauer, so he was known in Spain as “Guillermo (Spanish for Wilhelm) Bruck Mockrauer.”
Armed with information on where my great-uncle Willy or “Guillermo” was interred, my wife and I set out to pay a visit to the Cementerio de Montjuïc. (Figure 14) I already knew Guillermo and his wife, who predeceased him by 10 years, were buried together, along with their son, Edgar and his wife, Mercedes. Interestingly, neither Willy’s son nor daughter-in-law’s names are inscribed on the headstone; this I had learned from the Cementeris before visiting the cemetery. (Figure 15)
Following our visit to the Cementerio de Montjuïc, I returned to the Registro Civil de Barcelona hoping to obtain official documents for additional family members I surmised had been born or died in Barcelona. I had the good fortune to land upon an English-speaking administrator who was enormously helpful; she asked me to come back after working hours, spent some hours on the computer, and provided me with some invaluable birth and death certificates that eventually enabled me to track down my great-uncle Willy’s grandchildren. It took some effort to decipher the significance of these documents. It was only after I returned home and correlated these documents with letters and pictures found among the personal papers of two of my renowned great-aunts, archived at the Stadtmuseum in Berlin, that I was fully able to connect the dots. This will be the subject of the following Blog post.
Note: In this post, I relate the story of my uncle Dr. Fedor Bruck’s knowledge of Adolf Hitler’s fate at the end of WWII, and how my uncle came in possession of this information. The story is told in my uncle’s own words borrowing liberally from his first-hand account of these events and describes briefly where I obtained his story. Recent discoveries and publications are also discussed.
Post 17 chronicled my uncle’s survival in Berlin during WWII, touching briefly on the post-war events that ultimately led him to flee Germany and immigrate to America. Thanks to two first-hand accounts written by my uncle following WWII, one a brief biography of his life, the second a compelling account he theatrically entitled “Former Berlin Dentist Proves Hitler is Dead,” I can now flesh out considerably more of my uncle’s life story and detail his knowledge of Hitler’s death. My uncle’s first-hand accounts were given to his illegitimate son who died in 2014 and have since passed into the estate of his son, from whom I obtained copies.
Below, I review some of what was discussed in Post 17, but most of this post deals with newly uncovered facts from my uncle Fedor’s writings and elsewhere; they add considerably more texture to my uncle’s story and provide some detail on his role as a witness to an important historical event. I also describe how my uncle came to be in possession of his information on Hitler’s fate. I can imagine dubious readers scoffing at the notion that a Jewish dentist, a recently-persecuted one at that, would be in the right place at the right time in Berlin immediately after WWII to “prove” that Hitler had indeed died at the end of the war. But, the facts are what they are as readers will learn.
The following narrative is unquestionably one my uncle would have told with more elan and precision. Regrettably, my uncle is no longer here, so I must rely on his narrative to relate how he might have told his own story. Regardless, since my uncle’s tale is also a part of my family’s overall story, I think it is important I tell it and tell it without embellishments and half-truths; enough of these already surround the topic of Hitler’s death. As my uncle’s narrative makes clear, many writers, newspapers, and parties of his day sought to distort and discredit my uncle’s story, intentionally and unintentionally; some had broader political, social, or economic imperatives in mind, notably, Joseph Stalin. My uncle lost control of his narrative, so it is my intention with this post to reestablish dominion over the story and refer to other recent sources which corroborate my uncle’s tale.
My uncle Dr. Fedor Bruck was born on August 17, 1895, in Leobschütz, Upper Silesia, Germany (today: Głubczyce, Poland). My uncle’s three siblings, including a younger brother who died in infancy, were all born in near-by Ratibor (today: Racibórz, Poland); according to my uncle’s first-hand account, my grandparents moved from Leobschütz to Ratibor when my uncle was three years old to run the Bruck’s “Prinz von Preußen” Hotel, subject of Post 11. During WWI, my uncle fought in Ukraine on the Eastern Front. (Figure 1) He studied dentistry at the University of Breslau (today: Wrocław, Poland), passed the State Board Examination in 1921, and eventually set up his own practice in 1924 in Liegnitz, Upper Silesia (today: Legnica, Poland). (Figure 2)
He owned his practice in Liegnitz from November 1924 through April 1936, when he was forced out of business by the National Socialists. Already, by March 1932, the Nazis had relieved my uncle of his responsibilities as municipal school dentist (“Schulzahnarzt“) for schools in small communities surrounding Liegnitz; a Schulzahnarzt examined pupils‘ teeth, advising them on whether a followup with a dentist was required. There was widespread support among German dentists for the National Socialist ideology, so in expectation of their rise to power many dental organizations displaced their Jewish colleagues as a sign of “anticipatory obedience.“ Since my uncle could no longer practice dentistry in Liegnitz, he left. In his own words:
“In 1936 (Figure 3), I moved to Berlin, where I continued practicing as a dentist until October 1942. In that month I went underground to escape arrest, deportation to a concentration camp and even death, after having been warned that the Gestapo was preparing to pick me up. . .After thirty months of a trying ordeal, Berlin was occupied and the Nazi regime was brought to an end.“
In my uncle’s account of the events following the end of the war, the chronicle previously alluded to entitled “Former Berlin Dentist Proves that Hitler is Dead,“ my uncle explains the circumstances that put him in a position to be a witness to history:
“By reason of an interlocking of events, I believe that I am the only person on the Western Hemisphere to bring proof that Hitler is actually dead, as far as such is possible at all for someone who has not seen the corpse. However, if the corpse has been cremated, and the remains of the teeth are the only thing left, then only the dentist is able to make an identification.
All reports of the finding and identification of Hitler’s jaws are the result of my information given to correspondents or members of the occupying armies after the occupation of Berlin by the Allies. Since my statements were only repeated in part, or were misquoted or reported not in their correct sequence, they lack any proof. I therefore believe that the time has come to publish my knowledge of the identification of the jaws of Hitler and Eva Braun, which took place between May 9th and 13th, 1945.
The main person in this connection is Mrs. Käthe Heusermann, née Reiss regarding whom I must mention more details, because of the importance attached to her in this matter. She was born in 1909, and I trained her as a dental assistant in my office in Liegnitz, Silesia, in the year 1926 (Figure 4). She practiced in this profession until 1945, at least 15 years. Over this time, she worked with me for three-and-a-half years, and from 1937 on, that is for over eight years, she worked with Blaschke, Hitler’s dentist. She quickly advanced to the position of first assistant and, during the last years, she was mostly present during Hitler’s treatments, whether they took place in the Reich Chancellery or on the Obersalzberg estate. She was very much interested in her profession and possessed great experience. She had the special gift to remember very well the peculiarities of the patients’ mouths . . .”
Regarding Hitler’s American-trained dentist, Professor Hugo Blaschke (Figure 5), my uncle made the following observations:
“. . .He [Blaschke] studied at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia before the first World War, from which he graduated. Since he had not passed any examination in Germany, he was only rated a dental technician there. Having joined the [Nazi] Party early, he had a membership number below 40,000. He had already treated Hitler before 1933. Upon a decree by Goebbels, he was awarded the title of dentist, without having to pass any examination, and was later given the professor title by Hitler. His knowledge was that of an average dentist . . .“
It is important to emphasize the point my uncle Fedor was making about Hitler’s dentist. In former times, there were two types of German dentists which were distinctly different, one called a “zahnarzt,” the other a “dentist,” confusingly, both of which translate as dentist in English. Dr. Blaschke would today be called a “zahntechniker,” a non-academically trained dental technician primarily responsible for producing bridges and dentures, or “zahnbehandler,” dental practitioner. A “zahnarzt” in today’s parlance is an academically-trained dentist. This distinction as it relates to Dr. Blaschke becomes important later, insofar as the technical work he performed on Hitler.
Continuing with my uncle’s story:
“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.“
My uncle recounted what Käthe told him:
“When the bombardment of Berlin became disagreeable, she went to the Reich Chancellery for reasons of safety, where she worked as a nurse in the hospital shelter. On April 20th, Hitler’s birthday, Blaschke fled to Obersalzburg by plane. She was almost punished for disobedience by the SS for her refusal to go along. On April 28, Hitler and Eva Braun got married. Upon having received the news of Himmler’s offer of negotiations with the Allies, and when the army which was supposed to liberate Berlin did not arrive, which was to have been led by Wenck, Hitler had temper tantrums, but then calmed down, but was depressed and personally distributed cyanide capsules to everybody present. Käthe herself showed me—while relating the events—the capsule she had received.
On April 30th, Hitler and Eva Braun committed suicide, he by taking a cyanide capsule between his teeth, and shooting himself in the head. The corpses were then taken into the Reich Chancellery garden by the SS, drenched in gasoline and burned.
Goebbels and his wife also committed suicide, his children having previously been given injections with poison, by doctors.
Käthe’s reports with respect to these happenings coincides almost completely with statements made later by other witnesses . . .”
Following Hitler’s death, the staff in the Reich Chancellery divided themselves into smaller groups, hoping to break through the Russian lines, and get to the West. Resuming:
“The group which Mrs. Heusermann has joined, came to heavy combat with the Russians at the Weidendamm Bridge. In this battle, Deputy Leader [Martin] Bormann died . . .Of about 80 persons, only 30 were left, and these fled into the subway shaft. They hoped to get somewhere behind the Russians but were caught by the Russians at a station. The men were deported, while Mrs. Heusermann was taken along by a soldier and raped by him. Then he let her go, and she had to take the long walk home, through debris and corpses, always in fear of new insults.”
After recounting these events to my uncle, Käthe Heusermann advised my uncle to obtain permission from the pertinent authorities to take over Dr. Blaschke’s dental practice. The dental office was intact, and Dr. Blaschke had already fled to Obersalzburg, as previously mentioned, and was hardly likely 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 (Figure 6); as discussed in Post 17, post-WWII Address Directories locate my uncle at this address. (Figure 7) My uncle’s knowledge of the events surrounding Hitler’s fate, thus, stem both from his friendship with Käthe Heusermann, as well as his occupancy of Dr. Blaschke’s dental office.
“Then, during the days following . . . happenings took place which I believe to be proof that Hitler actually died. 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.
Since the Superintendent could give them no information, I declared that Blaschke had fled and that I now had his practice. Then they asked me for written details regarding the treatments which Hitler had received. Upon my remark that I presumed they wanted to identify parts of corpses found, the Lieutenant Colonel made a sour face and put his finger to his mouth, from which I assumed that my suspicion had been correct. Then they came to the office, where we looked for reference cards as well as X-rays of Hitler. However, only those of Göring, Goebbels, Himmler, Ley and other high-ranking party members could be found, which the Russians took with them. Upon their question whether anybody knew about Hitler’s teeth, I called in the former technician of Blaschke, Fritz Echtmann, who lived with his family in the same apartment [building]. He could not give them any information, since he never was present at a treatment, and since the technical work had been done before his time. When it was found that Käthe Heusermann had been present for many years at all treatments of Hitler, I was asked to get her. “
My uncle found Käthe at the home of a neighboring doctor’s. She was apparently very hesitant to come with my uncle because of her previous experience with the Russians and her fear she would be considered a prominent Nazi. However, feeling she had no choice, she came along and was questioned by the Russians about Hitler’s mouth and provided the following information:
“On a front tooth there was a so-called rim-crown, furthermore there was a cut-off bridge in his mouth, since the molar, which would have served as support, had to be removed. She gave them more details regarding some crowns and other treatments . . .She furthermore declared that the written data regarding Hitler’s treatments were kept in a box which was either still at the Chancellery, or which Blaschke had taken with him to Obersalzberg.
Then the Lieutenant Colonel asked her to come along with him to the Chancellery, to look for the box . . .”
Käthe was not returned to her apartment until two days later, on Friday, May 11th, at which point the Russians then took the technician Fritz Echtmann. (Figure 8) My uncle visited her on Saturday, and she painted the following picture of what had transpired:
“First of all, they asked that she give as detailed as possible a description of Hitler’s teeth, with pertinent sketches. Then she was shown a number of skulls and parts of jaws, on which there was still some flesh, which in some instances were charred or burned. Among these, she definitely recognized the jaws of Hitler, with the aid of the details written down, and the peculiarities she had noted. One jaw, which contained a bridge made from Palapont (i.e., artificial colophonium on a colloidal base), was identified as that of Eva Braun, who had received this bridge only a few weeks previously. She declared, upon questioning that the technical work had been done by Fritz Echtmann, Blaschke’s technician. This fact most probably was the reason for later on picking up Fritz Echtmann.
During the entire time, the Russians took down in writing the proceedings, which Käthe had to sign on each page. She also had to swear that she would not speak of the identification of the remains of Hitler, until the Russian Press and the Radio would have published same. Lola, of whom Käthe only had heard . . . that she was an agent of the Russian Secret Service, said to her ‘Mrs. Käthe, you will be a very famous woman, you are the only person who not only knows, but also can prove that Hitler is really dead’”
My uncle learned from Fritz Echtmann’s wife that her husband came home on Sunday, May 13, 1945, accompanied by two Russian Officers, and was given about two hours to pack his suitcases before again being taken away. Käthe was also taken away at the same time, told she would be needed for longer but not to be afraid. From that time on, my uncle did not learn of their whereabouts for many years.
The above were the facts as reported by my uncle insofar as the days in May 1945 are concerned, but my uncle also wrote about happenings thereafter, specifically related to news correspondents and writers and the inaccurate accounts they published:
“In the beginning of July 1945, the Allied occupation forces arrived in Berlin. The U.S. Correspondent Sigrid Schulz met with Käthe Heusermann’s doctor . . .and this doctor told her that the Russians had taken Käthe along. She [Sigrid Schulz] came to me with a few American Correspondents on July 5, 1945, to my practice, in order to find out whether Käthe had come back. On this occasion I told her about the identification of Hitler’s teeth, but I noticed from the questions that my report was regarded as fantastic and not believed. On July 7th, three English correspondents, lead by William Forrest of the London’News Chronicle‘ came to me. I gave them the report of what had happened, and within the next few days, a story appeared in the English newspapers, without any commentary and so distorted that no burden of proof could be put on these reports. However, this publication of my name and address made it possible to contact my family in England again, who believed me dead as victim of the Nazis.“
It is clear from the above that because my uncle’s story was so seemingly preposterous and unbelievable, news correspondents took the opportunity to weave their own tales. Consequently, my uncle almost immediately lost control of the story he had to tell and its factual basis. Continuing:
“Thereafter, I was frequently called upon by correspondents who, however, greatly doubted my stories, and therefore most of those reports showed incorrect facts. One paper said I was the Führer’s dentist, another one said that I had identified the corpse. Aside from many strange statements, the identification of Hitler’s jaws was branded as false. ‘France-Soir,’ on January 1, 1946, reported that the corpse had been discovered on December 19, 1945 by the Russians and that Hitler’s dentist, who [they claimed, albeit falsely] was a captive of the Russians, had identified the corpse. However, Blaschke is a prisoner of the Americans . . .Even the publication in ‘Oral Hygiene,’ 35th year, page 1540, September 1945, is very incomplete and distorted . . .how little importance was given to my knowledge regarding the circumstances, is shown by the fact that no mention was made in Trevor-Roper’s book at all [1947 Edition].”
Hugh Trevor-Roper was the author of “The Last Days of Hitler,” initially published in 1947. More will be said on Trevor-Roper below.
In his account, my uncle addresses some objections raised by correspondents. A few claimed that everyone in the Reich Chancellery could have been told that Hitler committed suicide when in fact he didn’t, but how then does one explain the existence of jaws for a non-existent corpse?
Alternatively, Selkirk Paton of the “Daily Express” wondered how my uncle knew that Hitler was really in the Reich Chancellery, suggesting the jaws found there might have been that of one of Hitler’s doubles. Beyond the fact that Käthe Heusermann would have noticed a double, the conditions for this scenario to have played out are practically inconceivable. At the least, this would have required that the dental work done on the double correspond with the work known to have been done on Hitler, that the double then shoot himself or be shot, the body burned, and the jaws or another prepared skull left in a place where the Russians could find it, an implausible sequence of events. Only Dr. Blaschke and Käthe Heusermann knew anything about Hitler’s teeth, so one or both of them would have had to be party to the deception. To believe the jaws found at the Reich Chancellery belonged to a double requires too lengthy a list of suppositions to merit serious consideration.
Yet another objection to my uncle’s explanation of events was that with the amount of gasoline employed, no remains would have been left to find. My uncle was easily able to refute this:
“This assumption is erroneous; I myself have seen many charred corpses during the last fighting days in Berlin, where parts were undamaged or could be recognized in part. I myself am astonished that the bridge of Eva Braun made of Palapont material, which is easily combustible, was not destroyed, but I could imagine that the entire body was not enveloped by gasoline, especially, since Käthe mentioned explicitly that some flesh, either charred burned or raw, was still on the bones.”
Returning to a subject I alluded to earlier, regarding the rim-crowns and cut-off bridges with which Hitler was fitted by Dr. Blaschke, my uncle made a few interesting observations related to this work:
“. . .The peculiarities of Hitler’s jaws are very extraordinary ones. Rim-crowns are seen very rarely only, since present-day dentists do not make them any longer, and cut-off bridges are not frequent either . . .
I had pointed out to correspondents a rim-crown as being ‘old-fashioned’ which, because of its comparative rarity, necessarily constituted an important factor [in the identification of Hitler’s jaws].
The fact that Dr. Blaschke knowingly performed ‘old-fashioned work’ on ‘his Führer,’ seems to me, as expert, rather ridiculous. On the other hand, he does not owe his title of professor, nor his various other titles, to the fact that he was an ace in his profession, but only to the fact that he was a faithful Nazi having a party membership number somewhere around 36,000 . . .”
After immigrating to America in July 1947, my uncle continued to follow news reports of Hitler’s fate. My uncle remarked on a series of six articles published by the “New York World-Telegram,” between July 19 and July 24, 1948, entitled “Is Adolf Hitler Dead or Alive?” written by Capt. Michael A. Musmanno, USNR, Judge International War Crimes Trials, Nuremberg.
The fifth article in this series, dated July 23, 1948, was of particular interest to my uncle since it dealt with the testimony of a Hans Fritzsche, who, as it turns out, had been in a Russian prison with Fritz Echtmann, Blaschke’s dental technician. My uncle surmised they were imprisoned together at the Lubyanka prison in Moscow, where Fritzsche was held by the Russians before he was brought to Nuremberg for trial. In any case, Fritzsche testified that Echtmann claimed he turned over X-rays of Hitler’s teeth to the Russians, and that together with Käthe Heusermann had identified a jaw shown to him as that of Hitler. My uncle knew this was not true. In his own words:
“Echtmann was Blaschke’s dental technician, but never his assistant; moreover, he had never done any technical work for Hitler, was never present at any treatment, and had no opportunity to gain any knowledge regarding the Führer’s mouth. While Hitler’s jaw had already been identified by Käthe Heusermann between May 9th and May 11th, 1945, Echtmann was not questioned by the Russians before May 11, when they [the Russians] brought back Mrs. Heusermann.
Echtmann could not have given the Russians the X-rays of Hitler’s teeth, since these were not in his possession. They were actually in a case which either remained on the Obersalzberg, or whom Blaschke took with him when he fled. When the Russians appeared for the first time in my office in Berlin, and questioned Echtmann about Hitler’s teeth, X-rays, etc., in my presence, he declared that he knew nothing whatsoever about these things . . .He had far too great a craving for importance to make plausible any such hiding of his knowledge. It was probably this same desire to prove himself important that explains his version of the story as told to Fritzsche . . .”
Clearly, in my uncle’s opinion, Echtmann was nothing but a self-aggrandizer, although my uncle left open the faint possibility that Echtmann had taken a few X-rays from the files at an earlier date as souvenirs, which he produced when questioned by the Russians.
From Fritzsche’s testimony, as described in the New York World-Telegram, my uncle, however, was able to learn about Echtmann’s more recent fate. Echtmann was finally released by the Russians in the spring of 1954 (Figure 9), while Käthe Heusermann returned to her family in 1955, after having been declared dead in 1950.
My uncle lamented his inability to parlay his knowledge of Hitler’s fate into something marketable:
“I tried very hard to interest some magazines in my story, among them Colliers, Life, Time, Newsreel, and Saturday Evening Post, but was not successful. My story appeared so fantastic that nobody believed it was true. Some editors advised me that they were publishing only staff-written manuscripts (Figure 10), others that my story did not correspond with the tenor of their magazines or that there was no public interest anymore in a story about Hitler. Finally, the time element diminished the possibilities to develop my story into a saleable manuscript.”
Hugh Trevor-Roper, following the release by the Russians of Fritz Echtmann, Käthe Heusermann, and others, published a Third Edition in 1956 of his book “The Last Days of Hitler.” My uncle remarked about this:
“Professor H. R. Trevor-Roper . . .refers in the Introduction . . . of his book to the fact that two Russian officers, a man and a woman, called on May 9, 1945 at the surgery of Dr. Hugo Blaschke, Hitler’s dentist, which was then carried on by me, and asked for Hitler’s dental records. Apart from newspaper reports, this was the first time, that the names of Fritz Echtmann, Käthe Heusermann, as well as my name were mentioned in a book of historical importance and value. Though Trevor-Roper’s story contains many inaccuracies, it generally covers what happened on and after May 9, 1945 with respect to the identification of Hitler’s jaws.”
My uncle Fedor passed away in February 1982, too soon to see himself vindicated and have his account of events in May 1945 validated. But validation has come, and, interestingly, in just the past few years and months.
Travelling with the Soviet vanguard when they entered the center of Berlin on April 29, 1945, was a 26-year-old Jewish woman named Elena Rzhevskaya, born Elena Moiseyevna Kagan in Belarus in 1919. 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 reported. As the Soviet forces advanced through Berlin, Rzhevskaya’s unit was tasked with finding people who could provide information on Hitler’s whereabouts.
Let me provide a little more context. The Soviets entered Hitler’s underground command center, the Führerbunker under the Reich Chancellery, on May 2nd. The next day, they apparently discovered the bodies of Joseph and Magda Goebbels’ six children in their bunk beds. Then, on May 5th, some charred human remains, including parts of a skull, some jawbones, and some teeth, were found in a shell crater in the Reich Chancellery garden. These were apparently taken to SMERSH headquarters in the north of Berlin and given to pathologists under strict instructions to keep their work under wraps.
Rzhevskaya was summoned to the pathology lab, and entrusted by her boss, Colonel Vassily Gorbushin, with a large, satin-lined, dark-red cigar box, containing what he believed to be Hitler’s remains. Ms. Rzhevskaya was asked to verify this. As my uncle recorded, the Soviets eventually learned about Käthe Heusermann when they visited Dr. Blaschke’s practice where my uncle had taken up residence. It is my very strong belief that “Lola . . .the female agent of the Soviet secret police,” referred to in my uncle’s account of events, was in fact Elena Rzhevskaya. In any case, after locating and interrogating Käthe Heusermann, as my uncle reported, Käthe confirmed the teeth were Hitler’s.
According to Elena Rzhevskaya’s memoir, Käthe Heusermann lead the Soviets to a special office that Blaschke kept at the Reich Chancellery where Hitler was treated; it was a dental office, fully stocked with dental tools and reclining chair, where Hitler’s dental X-rays were also discovered, the irrefutable evidence identifying Hitler’s teeth. Either Käthe never mentioned to my uncle that the X-rays of Hitler’s teeth had been found in the Reich Chancellery, had been instructed by the Russians not to discuss this, or he oddly failed to make note of this important fact in his account; we may never know. Regardless, the Soviets knew all along that Hitler was dead but, Stalin, for reasons we can only guess at, likely believed that if Hitler was alive, then Nazism was an ever-present danger; his desire to conceal the truth may also have been his opening salvo in the nascent Cold War. Consequently, Stalin squelched the truth and detained those who could prove Hitler was dead. Heusermann and Echtmann were arrested and secretly moved to Moscow, an eventuality my uncle was alerted to by American authorities, explaining why he decamped to America in 1947. Heusermann was held in solitary confinement for six years without trial, eventually charged, and sentenced to 10 years in the Gulag in 1951. However, her release was negotiated in 1955 by the West Germans, a few years after Stalin’s death.
In 1965, 12 years after Stalin’s death, during the comparatively liberal Khruschev years, Ms. Rzhevskaya was permitted to publish some of her notes on “Berlin, May 1945,” in the Russian literary magazine “Znayma.” During the Gorbachev era in 1986, she published her first memoir, “Berlin, May 1945: Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter,” but the editor removed any mention of the identification of Hitler’s teeth. It is only in 2017 that an English version of her memoir, “Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter: From the Battle of Rzhev to Hitler’s Bunker,” was published and that mention of Ms. Rzhevskaya’s role in helping identify Hitler’s teeth was made.
There’s an interesting and personal family anecdote to this story. As mentioned, the English-language version of Ms. Rzhevskaya’s book was published only in 2017, shortly after her death. In connection with the release, “The Times of Israel” published an article entitled, “The woman who carried Hitler’s teeth on V-Day,” and interviewed her grand-daughter Liubov Summ. According to Ms. Summ, Käthe Heusermann and Elena Rzhevskaya bonded during questioning and Käthe shared personal stories with Elena. Among them, Käthe told Ms. Rzhevskaya that at various times she had hidden in her home a Jewish dentist for whom she had worked before the war, the dentist obviously being my uncle Fedor. According to Ms. Rzhevskaya, my uncle showed up in late April 1945 and asked whether Käthe could hide him in her apartment, this when she was still reporting for work at the Führerbunker. While I have no doubt my uncle occasionally sought refuge with Käthe in his 30 months underground, I sincerely doubt this happened in April or May 1945.
A very recent development also warrants mention. An article was published on May 21, 2018 in “Deutsche Welle,” entitled “Hitler’s teeth analysis dispels myths of Nazi leader’s survival.” A team of French pathologists was recently allowed to examine a set of teeth kept in Moscow that were recovered in Berlin in May 1945. According to the article, this is the first time the Russian authorities had allowed anyone to examine these remains in over 70 years. The researchers’ conclusions, published in May 2018, in the “European Journal of Internal Medicine,” unambiguously concluded the teeth belonged to Hitler and proved he died in 1945.
My uncle certainly would have felt some measure of satisfaction in having the naysayers, self-aggrandizers, and purveyors of half-truths get their comeuppance as to the facts of Hitler’s fate. But, my uncle was a boundless optimist, not a vengeful man and certainly not one to dwell on “what-might-have-been,” and would have been happy that the truth of what happened to Hitler in the waning days of WWII eventually came out. A confirmation of the role he played in bringing facts to light and acknowledgement that his story was true would have brought him enormous pleasure. So, in some small way, I hope this Blog post accomplishes this.
REFERENCES
Charlier, P., Well, R., Rainsard, P., Poupon, J., and Brisard, J.C.
2018 The remains of Adolf Hitler: A biomedical analysis and definitive identification. European Journal of Internal Medicine.
Chase, Jefferson
2018 Hitler’s teeth analysis dispels myths of Nazi leader’s survival. Deutsche Welle (May 21, 2018).
Linge, Mary Kay
2018 How the woman who identified Hitler’s dental remains ended up in prison. New York Post (July 16, 2018).
Masis, Julie
2017 The woman who carried Hitler’s teeth on V-Day. The Times of Israel (September 6, 2017)
Rzhevskaya, Elena
2018 Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter: From the Battle of Rzhev to Hitler’s Bunker. Greenhill Books. London.
Trevor, Roper, H.R.
1947 The Last Days of Hitler. The Macmillan Company. New York.
1987 The Last Days of Hitler (Sixth Edition). The University of Chicago Press. Chicago (p. 32-33)
Note: This postscript provides an opportunity to acknowledge a “righteous man,” Mr. Kazimierz Świetliński, the Polish gentleman I learned was responsible for photographing and documenting the tombstones in the former Jewish Cemetery in Ratibor. I recently learned about this Polish gentleman from Mr. Paul Newerla, the retired lawyer and Racibórz historian, who was a friend of Mr. Świetliński. In the process, I also learned about “lost treasure” recovered in Racibórz.
Readers will recall from my earlier post that the former Jewish Cemetery in Ratibor was “liquidated,” not during the Third Reich but rather during Poland’s Communist era. I learned that prior to its destruction, all the tombstones, the oldest of which dated to 1821, the youngest to 1940-1941, and their locations within the cemetery were photographed and plotted on a map. I was told the original photographs and plan maps are stored at the Muzeum Raciborzu, so I arranged with the museum to view and photograph all these materials in 2015.
It had been cynically suggested that the headstones had been photographed perhaps by an agent of the Polish security services, possibly to fend off future attempts by Jewish descendants to reclaim property confiscated from their relatives by the Nazis. Exactly how documenting the tombstones would have blocked such claims is not clear, on the contrary.
Regardless, in June 2018, when I met Mr. Paul Newerla, Racibórz historian, I asked him whether he knew the history about the images. Paul told me the pictures and maps had been made by a now-deceased friend of his, Mr. Kazimierz Świetliński. (Figure 1) Mr. Świetliński was the college-educated Chief of Racibórz’s Parks Department, and an excellent gardener. He produced two copies of all the images and photo albums (Figure 2), one of which he donated to the Muzeum Raciborzu, the other which he retained for himself. Produced as they were in the days before digital photography, developing the pictures came at great personal cost and sacrifice.
In anticipation of preparing this post, Paul Newerla passed along an article, which I will return to below, that included a little background on Mr. Świetliński and on the fate of the Jewish kirkut or “cemetery” in Racibórz. Roughly translated from Polish, I quote:
“In 1972-73, the kirkut was liquidated. Local stonemasons were permitted to remove Classical, neo-Gothic, and modernist matzevot [“tombstone”], which they later turned into tombstones in Catholic cemeteries. Today, only old trees remain in the necropolis.” (Figure 3)
From this article, we learn Mr. Świetliński photographed the tombstones sometime before 1972, and the disposition of the Jewish tombstones.
Among the photographic images captured by Mr. Świetliński from the former Jewish Cemetery in Ratibor are ones showing the “kindergräber,” or children’s graves (Figure 4); most of these graves appear to have headstones inscribed with the name and dates of birth and death of the children, some with sufficient clarity to make out specific information. (Figure 5) I had hoped I might be able to find an image showing the grave of my father’s older brother, Walter Bruck, who died in infancy in Ratibor in 1901, to no avail.
The former children’s tombstones in Ratibor are unlike the kindergräber I recently had the opportunity to visit in the Jüdischer Friedhof Weißensee in East Berlin, where at least three of my ancestors are interred, including one of my father’s first cousins who also died in infancy; here, the children’s tombstones are inscribed only with numbers (Figure 6), but without an index it is impossible to know who was buried where. Fortunately, an index does survive for the cemetery in East Berlin.
The information on Mr. Świetliński and the disposition of the headstones from the Jewish Cemetery in Ratibor in the article sent to me by Paul Newerla are only footnotes to the broader subject of the article. The original article deals with an intriguing bit of local history and relates to a file from 60 years ago marked “CONFIDENTIAL” that was found at the Polish State Archives in Racibórz.
Apparently, a chest of papers and documents owned by Leon Blum, the former Socialist Prime Minister of France who was Jewish, wound up in Racibórz, hidden there in 1943 by the Germans; seemingly, the chest was squirreled away in the synagogue at the Jewish cemetery, once located on the outskirts of town along Leobschützstraße [today: Wilczej Górze and Fojcik głubczycki streets]. The problem, according to maps drawn by Mr. Kazimierz, is that no synagogue or chapel existed on the cemetery grounds. Possibly, the chest was stored at the synagogue on Schuhbankstraße [today: ulica Szewska], once located in Ratibor’s city center. (Figures 7 & 8) While torched on Kristallnacht (Figure 9), the synagogue survived WWII but was ultimately dismantled during the Communist era. Interestingly, a black, sealed chest belonging to Leon Blum was eventually discovered in Racibórz, although the final correspondence, dated December 22, 1945, found in the “Confidential” file, makes no mention of where. Possibly it was found in one of the larger family tombs at the cemetery, perhaps in the synagogue, or maybe even in the private home of a person who hid Blum’s souvenirs. It’s assumed the black, sealed chest was transferred to Katowice, as Polish authorities had requested be done in 1945, and from there to the French embassy.
Needless, to say, the question of how Leon Blum’s chest of personal papers wound up in Racibórz very much intrigued me, almost like a scene out of “The Monuments Men,” so I posed this question to Paul Newerla. According to Paul, Leon Blum’s papers were confiscated by the Nazis in Paris around 1943 by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg or “ERR,” the Nazi Party organization dedicated to appropriating cultural property during the Second World War and deposited in Racibórz. At the time, the town was deemed to be sufficiently out of reach of Allied bombers and Russian forces to ensure the papers were not inadvertently destroyed.
Mr. Świetliński is owed a major debt of gratitude. I characterize him as a “righteous man,” because in my mind he anticipated that one day Jewish descendants might want to know where their ancestors had been buried, see images of their ancestors’ graves, and know that someone, unrelated to the deceased, cared enough to record the existence of their relatives. And, possibly, Mr. Świetliński thought future generations of Poles might be curious that a Jewish community once thrived in Racibórz and want to know how and why it disappeared.
Note: This short postscript provides additional historic context about the events that ultimately led to the demolition of the Bruck’s “Prinz Von Preußen” Hotel in Ratibor, Germany, information obtained from Mr. Paul Newerla, retired lawyer and Racibórz historian.
Unlike Tiegenhof, in the former Free State of Danzig (today: Nowy Dwor Gdanski, Poland), where my father practiced dentistry between 1932 and 1937, where many elegant buildings from the German era still stand, in Ratibor (today: Racibórz, Poland), where my father was born, few of the classic German structures still exist in the city center. I touched on the reason for this in my original post, as well as in the first postscript.
As too often happens, when one is not a student of European history or when one relies too heavily on Wikipedia or other superficial Internet sources, the nuances of history are lost or distorted. Such is the case with the explanation of why the Bruck’s “Prinz Von Preußen” Hotel, owned by three generations of my family, was torn down after WWII. In the interest of setting the record straight and of adhering to my principle of being as historically accurate as possible, I’m adding another postscript. I owe clarification of the actual historic events to Racibórz historian, Mr. Paul Newerla (Figure 1), although I assume full responsibility for any mischaracterization or inaccuracy surrounding the exact circumstances that sealed the hotel’s fate.
Readers will recall a post-WWII picture of the Bruck’s Hotel included in the original post capturing at a distance a view of the still standing hotel. (Figure 2) To the untrained eye, it appears the hotel was largely intact, and could easily have been rebuilt. This was confirmed by Mr. Newerla, who observed that only the roof had been burned but that the walls and the vaults between the floors seemed to be in good condition, and that the building could have been restored. Mr. Newerla explained why this never occurred, which gets to the crux of why one sometimes needs to probe more deeply into the explanation of historic events.
Ratibor was “conquered” by the Soviets on March 31, 1945. Naturally, some sections of the city had been destroyed by air raids and street-by-street fighting in the final stages of WWII. Nonetheless, during April and even into May, following German capitulation, Soviet soldiers continued to routinely destroy parts of Ratibor, systematically burning houses. Mr. Newerla sent me a 1949 map of Ratibor’s city center, showing in red buildings that were burned or damaged, and in yellow structures that had been demolished. (Figure 3)
According to the findings of Polish authorities, Ratibor’s city center had been 80 percent destroyed, although Mr. Newerla estimates the actual percentage was closer to 60 percent. Following WWII, however, no construction work was carried out, and one building after another was torn down. The goal was to obtain bricks for the reconstruction of Warsaw. Even houses that had suffered only minimal damage that could have been rebuilt with limited financial resources were torn down. In the Racibórz Archives, Mr. Newerla discovered a letter dated 1950 from the city administration justifying their plan; in a section entitled “Demolition,” city administrators established a “quota” of 5,000,000 bricks Ratibor was expected to provide for the reconstruction of Warsaw. A poor reproduction of this letter written in Polish is included. (Figure 4) Mr. Newerla told me it took the city several years to amass this number of bricks.
The question of why Ratibor was expected to ante up 5,000,000 bricks, however, requires further examination.
Racibórz, administratively once part of Upper Silesia, Germany and now in the southwestern part of Poland, is located on the western banks of the Oder River. In the post-WWII period, Polish authorities were still not certain where the German-Polish border would be established. It was assumed the line would be set along the Oder River, so that Ratibor would remain a part of the “new” Germany. Operating under this assumption, the Poles probably felt it was their “due” to retrieve what they could from Germany, the country that had been largely responsible for widespread destruction throughout Poland during WWII. Ironically, though, the boundary with Germany in southwestern Poland was established not along the Oder River, but further to the west along the Neisse River (Oder-Neisse Line); Polish authorities never dreamed the border would be established this far west. Thus, towns in what became Poland were needlessly destroyed, idiomatically-speaking, a case of “cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face”; this included not only Ratibor, but also Oppeln (today: Opole, Poland), Breslau (today: Wrocław, Poland), etc. By contrast, Mr. Newerla explained that former German towns on the right bank or east of the Oder River, such as Gleiwitz (today: Gliwice, Poland), Beuthen (today: Bytom, Poland) Hindenburg (today: Zabrze, Poland), etc. that authorities knew would remain Polish, were never dismantled.
The impact of the wholesale demolition of Ratibor’s city center in the early 1950’s is visible even today. Most of the city center is not built up, and there are green spaces or concrete squares where German buildings once stood. The systematic demolition of German-era buildings impacted yet another structure associated with my family’s connection to Ratibor, specifically the Berliner Brauerei, subject of Post 14. This brewery was located on Neumarkt, and in historic photographs and postcards of this square, one can see the monument to John of Nepomuk in the foreground. (Figures 5 & 6) Interestingly, this column still stands today, in the middle of a parking lot, while the family brewery is long gone. (Figures 7 & 8)
I typically interject myself into Blog posts only to relate forensic discoveries related to my family research. This post is an exception. Below readers can see images from my wife’s and my recently completed European vacation to Spain, Germany, Poland, Czech Republic and Austria. We were gone 44 days, stayed in 22 different places, flew more than 14,000 miles, drove 4,000 miles, and walked over 250 miles. The number that stands out though are the roughly 35 family, friends, and acquaintances we met or revisited along the way, a family history “pilgrimage” of sorts. These people greatly enhanced our journey, inspired us, educated us, furthered my family research, and expanded our horizons. To these fellow travelers we dedicate this Blog post.
The tone for our family history tour was set by the actual pilgrimage my wife Ann and I made along a portion of the historic route to Santiago de Compostela in Spain that earned us our “Compostela.” (Figure 1) The Compostela is the accreditation one receives by completing the pilgrimage to the Tomb of St. James in Santiago de Compostela, Spain. In our case, we obtained our accreditation by walking the last 118km, or 73 miles, of the pilgrimage route from Sarria to Santiago over five days between May 16th and May 20th, 2018.
Below, readers will find a gallery of portraits of family, friends and colleagues we met on our journey.
Note: This article provides a brief update to another Blog post of August 2017 about Hans “Mochum” Wagner, a once-close friend from my father’s years living in Tiegenhof.
Unlike “Die Schlummermutter,” “Grete Gramatzki,” towards whom my father had almost maternal feelings and spoke of fondly and often, my father never once mentioned Hans “Mochum” Wagner’s name when I was growing up. As a matter of fact, nowhere in my father’s photo albums is his name even written. This seemed odd given the many pictures there are of him. Once again, it was my father’s 94-year-old friend, Peter Lau, who recognized Mochum Wagner (Figure 1) and told me what he could remember of him. Given the National Socialist era through which my father lived, perhaps I should not be surprised that Mochum Wagner was a wraith. Like many Germans at the time, Mochum likely calibrated that remaining friends with a Jew was not only impossible but dangerous. I can hardly imagine the pain and disappointment my father felt at losing a close friend, probably one of many. Still, perhaps this provided the necessary impetus for my dad to leave Tiegenhof while he still could and enabled him to survive WWII.
Among the things Peter Lau told me about Mochum Wagner was that his father was a “Schornsteinfegermeister,” a chimney sweep, and that Mochum was killed early during WWII. I was able to confirm the former from Günter Jeglin’s book “TIEGENHOF und der Kreis Großes Werder in Bildern”; towards the back of this book there are listings of former businesses in Tiegenhof and their operators, and under the profession of “Schornsteinfegermeister,” appears the name “WAGNER, J.” As to when or where, or even whether, Mochum Wagner had died, I had not previously been able to confirm this.
In the previous two posts, I’ve discussed the assistance that a member of “Forum.Danzig.de,” Peter Hanke, has graciously provided in resolving several troublesome issues related to former residents of Tiegenhof whom my father was acquainted with. In Post 29, I mentioned that Peter directed me to a database on FamilySearch entitled “Heimatortskartei Danzig-Westpreußen, 1939-1963.” This is a civil register of refugees from the former province of Danzig-Westpreußen, Germany, now Gdańsk and Bydgoszcz provinces in Poland. Consisting of handwritten and typed index-sized cards, it was developed by the German Red Cross after WWII to help people find their families who’d been expelled from this region. All the available cards have been photographed and uploaded to FamilySearch.
Peter sent me a download of a “Heimatortskartei,” for a JOHANNES WAGNER (Figures 2a & 2b), the father of Mochum Wagner. Of the roughly 4,000 cards I’ve studied from this database, it is among the most informative. It provides the names and dates of birth of Johannes Wagner’s seven children by his wife, HEDWIG née AUSTEN; it gives their dates of birth and the date Johannes’s wife died.
According to the Heimatortskartei, Hans Wagner, my father’s one-time friend, was born on June 12, 1909 in Tiegenhof. His profession was “Sportlehrer,” or physical education teacher. (Figure 3) He died during WWII, as Peter Lau had asserted. He was killed or went missing on February 11, 1942, in Volkhov, Russia [German: Wolchow], located 76 miles east of St. Petersberg, formerly Leningrad. Mochum may have died during the Russian offensive launched in January of 1942 against the Germans around the Wolchow River. Peter Hanke checked the German website, “Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge e.V.,” with data on German war casualties, and confirmed birth and death information. (Figure 4)
The Wagner family Heimatortskartei provided other information, including the names and birth dates of Mochum Wagner’s six siblings; three of these siblings are listed in the 1927-28 Tiegenhof Address Book. (Figure 5) In Post 6, I discussed names found in my father’s 1932 Pocket Calendar. Under December 5th, my father recorded “Truden,” one of his girlfriends (Figures 6 & 7); this is clearly Mochum Wagner’s sister, Gertrud “Truden” Wagner, whose date of birth was December 4, 1912 (the difference of one day is not considered significant since such information was sometimes approximated by family).
In his 1932 Day Planner, my father also records an indecipherable name by the date June 12th, the day Mochum Wagner was born (Figure 8); this may be a notation of his former friend.
One Wagner whose identity cannot be confirmed from the Wagner family Heimatortskartei is that of “Hanni Wagner.” In two photos taken in Steegen [today: Stegna, Poland] showing Mochum Wagner is his German Army Lieutenant’s uniform, she is alongside him. (Figures 9 & 10) Since Mochum is not known to have been married, I’ve always assumed this was one of his sisters, although “Hanni” is not a typical diminutive for any of their names, so her identity remains in doubt. Since Mochum Wagner, or “Johannes Wagner,” as he was officially named, died in February 1942, the two pictures with Hanni Wagner and Alfred Schlenger taken in 1942 were likely recorded only weeks before Mochum died.
Note: This article provides an update to my Blog post of August 2017 about “Die Schlummermutter,” the landlady and owner of the building on Markstraße 8 in Tiegenhof where my father had his dental practice and lived.
Readers may recall the frustration I expressed in my original post about being unable to figure out who exactly the Schlummermutter was. I explained the lengths to which I went to ascertain her identity, and how I eventually learned from three Tiegenhof “old-timers” that her married name had been Ms. Grete Gramatzki, and that she’d been referred to as “Dicke Grete” (“Fat Grete”), because of her size; no one, however, could tell me her maiden name. (Figure 1)
Upon my father’s departure from Tiegenhof, roughly in mid-1937, Ms. Gramatzki gave my father a signet ring that had once belonged to her husband. The main element of the coat of arms on the ring shows a sloped battle axe embedded in a shield on what was once a red background, today only very faintly visible. (Figure 2) The Gramatzki family is Polish aristocracy of the so-called Topór tribe or clan, once living around Preußisch Eylau [today: south of Kaliningrad, Russia]. And, in fact comparing the ring’s coat of arms to that of the Topór tribe shows them to be remarkably similar. (Figure 3) Thus, in searching for Ms. Gramatzki’s origins, I kept looking for a baronial connection which I was unable to find. To remind readers what I wrote in my original post:
“I came across a gentleman, named ‘August Archibald von Gramatzki’ born in 1837 who died in May 1913 in Danzig, within the period I am seeking, who coincidentally was married to a ‘Margarethe Clara von Gramatzki, née Mönch’ born January 7, 1871, seemingly about the Schlummermutter’s age. By all measures, this would have seemed a perfect fit, since this Archibald von Gramatzki was a Baron with long-standing connections to nearby-Danzig, first as the District Administrator (Landrat) for ‘Kreis Danzig-Land’ from 1867 to 1887, and, after it was subdivided, for ‘Kreis Danziger Niederung,’ from 1887-1895. The only thing that belies this conclusion is that in 1937, the year my father left Tiegenhof for good, a birthday party was held in the Schlummermutter’s honor on the 13th of June.”
I’ve previously mentioned that periodically readers send me documents, photos and/or information related to my Blog posts. Recently, one reader suggested I register for a German Forum, “Forum.Danzig.de,” discussed in Post 29, which devotes an entire section to Tiegenhof. In my first post after registering I asked members for their help in learning more about “Die Schlummermutter.” People were exceptionally helpful, and a few members uncovered a different “Margarete” married to yet another member of the Gramatzki family. This lady also seemed a possible candidate, but, once again, her date of birth did not match that of Die Schlummermutter, June 13th. Given my father’s penchant for exactitude, I never contemplated that because my father would soon be leaving Tiegenhof for good that he and Ms. Gramatzki’s friends would move her birthday celebration forward. If my father wrote June 13th as Grete’s birthday, I knew this was her date of birth. (Figure 4)
Several days passed with no further developments. Then, Mr. Peter Hanke, the Forum member discussed in Post 29 who has been of enormous help, sent me a very poor copy of a marriage record between a “HANS ERICH GRAMATZKI” and a “MARGARETHA WILHELMINE GLEIXNER” that took place on October 4, 1919; at the time of their marriage, Erich Gramatzki was 40, born around 1879, and Margaretha Gleixner was 34, born around 1885, thus, within the general time-frame I was searching. Peter uncovered this marriage record in “archion.de,” a web portal of the German Protestant Lutheran Church, to which he’s subscribed. Without Peter’s help, it’s unlikely I would have stumbled upon this record on my own.
This Margaretha began to appear like a “viable” candidate. And, this was confirmed the next day when Peter sent me additional documentation from the registry of baptisms from Tiegenhof’s Protestant Church for the year 1885. Here, Peter found Margaretha Wilhelmine Gleixner listed, identifying her parents as GUSTAV THEODOR GLEIXNER and his wife AUGUSTA née KINDER, and, most importantly, giving her birthday as the 13th of June, just as my father had asserted; Margaretha was baptized on the 26th of July, with four godparents present, including an uncle named RICHARD GLEIXNER. (Figures 5a, 5b & 5c)
Having finally discovered the Schlummermutter’s maiden name after years of searching was exhilarating. Next, I turned to ancestry.com and found a surprising number of historic documents related to the Gramatzki and Gleixner families. I found copies of both documents Peter had sent me, including a more legible copy of the marriage register. (Figure 6) I learned Margaretha’s father-in-law, KARL ADOLF GRAMATZKI, had been a “kornmeister,” a grain operator dealing in cereals who also kept the books. Margaretha’s father, Gustav Theodor Gleixner, had been a dye-house owner, and her husband, Hans Erich Gramatzki, a general practitioner. I located Hans Erich Gramatzki’s birth certificate showing he was born on August 10, 1879. (Figure 7) For the Gleixner family, I partially reconstructed five generations ranging from the late 18th century to the early 20th century, while for the Gramatzki family I found three generations of relatives. This included the birth register for Richard Hermann Gleixner, Margaretha’s godfather and uncle, who I learned was born on July 14, 1861.
After confirming the names of Margaretha’s father, uncle, and husband, I searched for them in the various Tiegenhof Address Books (i.e., 1910, 1911, 1925, 1927-28, 1930, and 1943). An Erich Gramatzki is listed in the 1910 and 1911 directories (Figure 8), then again in the 1930 directory (Figure 9), in all instances identified as a “prakt. Arzt [= praktikumer Arzt],” or general practitioner. In 1910 and 1911 he is living on Vorhofstraße, and in 1930 at Markstraße 8. When I wrote the initial post, I was uncertain whether Erich Gramatzki was related to Grete Gramatzki, but he was clearly her future husband. Finding him living at Markstraße 8 in 1930 confirms their relationship, and suggests he was still alive at the time. By the time my father arrived in Tiegenhof in 1932, Erich may have been dead, but since there are no known Tiegenhof Address Books between 1930 and 1943, I can’t confirm this.
The 1925 and 1930 address books show Margaretha’s father, Gustav Gleixner, living at Markstraße 8 (Figures 10 & 11); this is the building later owned by the Schlummermutter where my father lived and had his dental practice. Two Richard Gleixners are also listed, one a bäckermeister, a baker, the other a rentier, an archaic German word for “a well-off person or pensioner,” both located at Bahnhofstraße 153. Initially, I thought they were the same person because of the identical street address, but now think they are nephew and uncle.
Curious as to whether the edifice where the bakery was located still exists, I asked Peter whether a contemporary street map of Tiegenhof with numbered buildings exists. Peter made an interesting discovery while looking for such a map. In Günter Jeglin’s book “TIEGENHOF und der Kreis Großes Werder in Bildern,” there is a picture whose caption in German reads as follow:
“Vor dem Haus Schlenger stehend, ein Blick in die Bahnhofstraße. Links: Haus Herm. Schulz, Otto Enders, Klizke-Bäcker Gleixner, wie seine Schwester, die Dicke Grete Gramatzki, ihn nannte. Rechts: der um 1900 erbaute Machandel-Speicher, dahinter Haus Labowski, der hohe Giebel Welnitz/Gertler.”
Translated: “Looking down Bahnhofstraße from the front of the Schlenger house. To the left: House of Herm. Schulz, Otto Enders, Klizke-baker Gleixner, as his sister, fat Grete Gramatzki, referred to him. To the right: The Machandel store, built around 1900, the Labowski House, then the high gable, Welnitz/Gertner”
As explained to me, “klizke” or “klitzke” is a Low German expression for the nowadays better-known words “klitschig” or “klietschig,” meaning “doughy.” This may imply the baker Gleixner was overweight like his sister, Dicke Grete Gramatzki.
Figure 12-Richard Gleixner identified as a “Bäckermeister” (baker) and Ida Epp as a “Werderkaffeegeschäft” (coffee shop) in the 1943 Tiegenhof Address Book
Regardless, the caption provided the first revelation that Margaretha had a brother and that he was a baker. Presumably, this was the Richard Gleixner listed as a “Bäckermeister” in the Tiegenhof address books for 1925, 1927-28, 1930 and 1943 (Figure 12), not to be confused with the uncle Richard Gleixner living at the same address who was by 1925 already a “rentier,” but formerly a baker too according to birth and/or death registers I found for three of his children.
After learning of Margaretha’s brother, I found the registers for his baptism (Figure 13) and marriage (Figure 14), showing he was born as GUSTAV ADOLF RICHARD GLEIXNER on June 20, 1880, was baptized on August 1, 1880, was married to ELLA EMMA MARIE EICHNER in Berlin on April 5, 1905, and gave birth to URSULA CHARLOTTE GLEIXNER on September 14, 1919, with a different wife, WANDA GLEIXNER née FEDERAU.
In the 1930 Tiegenhof Address Book, I made another interesting discovery. I found the following listing “GRAMATZKI und [=and] EPP, FIRMA MARGARETE. SUSANNA, WÄSCHE UND HANDARBEITSGESCHÄFT [=Lingerie & handicraft business], MARKSTRAßE 8.” (Figures 9 & 15) In Post 5, I assumed the two sisters, Idschi & Suse Epp, with whom my father had once been friends, had simply boarded in the same establishment as my dad. Instead, it seems both had been business partners of the Schlummermutter; in the 1943 directory, only Ida Epp is listed at Adolf Hitler Straße 8, as Markstraße was known during the Nazi era (Figure 12), confirming that Grete Gramatzki was no longer alive (i.e., one informant told me she died in 1939 or 1940, although, to date, I’ve not located her death certificate).
Peter Hanke uncovered a fleeting reference on “Forum.Danzig” that even as a child Grete Gramatzki was overweight and already referred to as “die dicke Grete Gleixner,” the fat Grete Gleixner.
Readers are no doubt overwhelmed with the multitude of names that have been thrown at them. Suffice it to say, that between the information collected and sent to me by Peter Hanke from “Forum.Danzig.de” and the various address books from Tiegenhof spanning from 1910 to 1943, I was incrementally able to ascertain the Schlummermutter’s maiden name and origin, as well as her family’s connection to Tiegenhof. I remain optimistic that with more forensic investigation, I may ultimately be able to identify Grete Gramatzki’s family members in my father’s pictures. This is a long-shot, but not impossible given where I started and what I’ve already learned.
“The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.”—Oscar Wilde
Note: This story has me going back to the town in the Free State of Danzig, Tiegenhof, where my father was a dentist between April 1932 and April 1937, to talk about a man whose destiny has remained opaque, a man named Heinrich “Heinz” Regehr. Though I relate this tale in a linear fashion, the way I learned things did not follow a straight line.
For readers who have regularly followed my Blog, you may recall from Post 2 that my father’s now 94-year-old friend, Juergen “Peter” Lau, whom he first met in Tiegenhof as a young boy, recognized numerous people in my father’s photographs. This story begins with one such identification, an individual named Heinrich “Heinz” Regehr. The sole photograph of Heinz Regehr shows him walking across the street in the former East Prussian city of Königsberg (today: Kaliningrad, Russia) in April 1936, in the company of two other friends, one of whom is known to me, Hans “Mochum” Wagner discussed in Post 4. (Figure 1) When Peter first identified Heinz Regehr, he told me his name, nothing more.
In yet another post, Post 6, discussing the names in my father’s 1932 Pocket Calendar, under the date January 13th I mentioned finding a “Linchen Regehr,” who I would later learn was the wife of this Heinz Regehr. (Figure 2) Seemingly, the Regehrs, husband and wife, were friends or acquaintances of my father’s, so I became intrigued about what had happened to them.
Thus, upon my return to the United States in 2013, I turned to the membership index in the back of the “Tiegenhofer Nachrichten,” the now-defunct annual journal for former German residents of Tiegenhof and their descendants. On multiple occasions over the years, the index of members has been immeasurably useful, in part because the maiden names of women are provided. I used the index to identify all the people with the surname “Regehr,” and went on a letter-writing campaign in the hopes I could learn Heinz Regehr’s fate.
One German lady to whom I wrote was a Ms. Anneliese Franzen née Regehr. Some weeks passed, and eventually I was contacted on her behalf by her daughter living in Atlanta, Georgia, Ms. Meike Guenzerodt. She explained to me that Heinz Regehr was her mother’s father, that’s to say, her grandfather, who had disappeared in fighting at the end of WWII and was presumed dead.
Ms. Guenzerodt provided a little history about the family’s escape from Tiegenhof towards the end of WWII. Meike explained that Anneliese’s mother had been involuntarily institutionalized in a psychiatric facility outside Tiegenhof, and this delayed the family’s departure as the Russians were approaching. Eventually, however, families of institutionalized patients were assured by German authorities their loved ones would be evacuated to Bremen, in the western part of Germany, before the Russians arrived. With these assurances in hand, Anneliese’s grandfather took Anneliese and her two sisters and fled westward; at the time, Anneliese, the youngest, was six years old (born 1938); the middle sister, Evamarie, was 16 (born 1928); and the oldest, Lore, was 21 (born 1923). Their father, Heinrich Regehr, was in the German Army at the time and they would eventually learn had gone missing in action in 1945 near Küstrin, 60 miles outside Berlin in the German state of Brandenburg, on the Oder River along the border with Poland.
The promised evacuations of the patients in the psychiatric facility never materialized, and the doctors and nurses decamped, leaving the inmates to fend for themselves. With no staff to prevent them from wandering off, Anneliese’s mother made her way back to Tiegenhof. There, a nurse found her wandering the streets and took her in, where she survived a mere three weeks before succumbing to disease in 1945. After the war, the family was visited by this former nurse and learned of the mother’s fate.
Meike explained that because of the family’s hasty retreat from Tiegenhof, no family photos of Heinz Regehr had survived. She asked whether I could send her a copy of my father’s picture of him for her mother, an entreaty I was most happy to oblige.
Believing I had resolved the question of Heinz Regehr’s fate, I set the issue aside. In 2014, when I again visited Peter Lau in Germany, our conversation veered to Heinz, and I mentioned I’d learned he’d gone missing in action during the war and presumably died. I can practically visualize Peter’s look of disbelief when I told him this. He recounted that Heinz Regehr had in fact survived WWII, and eventually immigrated to Alberta, Canada. He’d previously married Lina Regehr, following the death of her first husband, Franz Schlenger, a son of Otto Schlenger, owner of Tiegenhof’s Dampfmahlmuehle (steam-operated flour mill). I would later learn from a descendant of Hedwig “Hedsch” Schlenger, to which Post 10 was devoted, that Lina and Heinz had had two boys, Henry Regehr, born in 1932, and Martin Regehr, born in 1940.
At this point, I started to wonder whether I’d uncovered the proverbial “skeleton in the family closet.” I began to question if Heinz Regehr had not had two families, that’s to say, that he had somehow survived WWII. With one wife, I knew he’d had three daughters born, respectively, in 1923, 1928 and 1938, and with Linchen Regehr, he’d apparently had two sons, born, respectively, in 1932 and 1940; the fact that he’d had his third daughter by his first wife between the time he had his two sons with his second wife troubled me greatly. As implausible as this may seem, readers must remember that Anneliese had “affirmatively” identified her father, and Peter Lau had confirmed my father’s picture depicted Heinz Regehr. Nonetheless, I never felt entirely comfortable with my conclusion, so I set the issue aside for future consideration as I continued researching other facets of my family’s history.
It wasn’t until I began writing stories for this Blog that I came back to the question of Heinz Regehr. I turned to ancestry.com, and did a query on him, and, lo and behold, was directed to “Find-A-Grave,” which confirmed that Heinrich Regehr (1898-1965) and his wife, Lina Regehr (1901-1968), were buried in Mountain View Memorial Gardens in Alberta, Canada. I also uncovered an obituary for the older of Heinrich and Lina Regehr’s sons, Henry Regehr (1932-2012). (Figure 3) The obituary confirmed that Henry Regehr was born in Tiegenhof on June 11, 1932, and provided names of surviving family members, including a son named Robert Regehr. Armed with this information, I turned to Alberta’s White Pages, and phoned several Regehrs who seemed promising. A few days later, Henry’s son, Robert Regehr, returned my call and confirmed he was Heinrich Regehr’s grandson. We exchanged information, he shared a little of his family’s story, and eventually he would confirm that my father’s picture was indeed his grandfather. So, it now seemed I had the “proof” that Heinz had survived the war and immigrated to Canada, seemingly abandoning his first family.
Not wanting to leave any stone unturned, I tried to learn more about Anneliese Franzen’s father who’d gone missing in action during WWII, thinking there might be updated information or something to suggest it was a different Heinrich Regehr. I discovered a German website (https://www.volksbund.de/en/volksbund.html) with data on German war casualties. This organization describes itself as follows: “Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge e.V. is a humanitarian organization charged by the government of the Federal Republic of Germany with recording, maintaining and caring for the graves of German war casualties abroad.” This website included the name of the Heinrich Regehr I presumed was Anneliese’s father, so I requested a copy of the documentation. What I received confirmed what Anneliese’s daughter had told me, namely, that her grandfather had gone missing on March 1, 1945. (Figure 4) An additional piece of information that Volksbund Deutsche provided was the date of birth of Heinrich Regehr, specifically, March 27, 1897. While not necessarily significant, it differed by a year from what I’d discovered on “Find-A-Grave” for the Heinrich Regehr in Alberta. Hoping to resolve this discrepancy, I contacted Alberta’s Provincial Government trying to obtain his death certificate but was told, not unexpectedly, only family members could obtain this document.
Within the past month, I again queried “Heinrich Regehr” on ancestry.com. Because “Regehr” is a common Mennonite name, often tens of thousands or even millions of “hits” will appear. Perhaps, because I’d never previously scrolled through enough of the names, on this particular occasion I was directed to an 1927-28 Address Book for the “Kreis Großes Werder,” the “kreis” or “state” (i.e, the equivalent of a county) in which Tiegenhof was located; I’d never previously come across this directory for Tiegenhof, a comprehensive one 23 pages long. What I discovered gave me further pause. It included two listings for Heinrich Regehr, one on Lindenstraße, the second on Schloßgrund. (Figure 5) However, knowing that Heinrich had been a “Bankbeamter,” or “bank official,” at the “Kreissparkaße,” or district savings bank, and knowing this bank had been located on “Schloßgrund,” I considered that the second listing might be his private residence. By itself, this was still not enough to conclude there were two Heinrich Regehrs.
A brief digression is necessary. Occasionally readers will send me photographs or documents related to my Blog posts or provide other useful information. One such reader recently suggested I register for a forum, entitled “Forum.Danzig.de,” which devotes an entire section to Tiegenhof. Because this forum is in German and requires painstaking use of Google Translate, which in the case of German yields completely tortured transliterations, it took me time to sign up. With an English-speaking member’s assistance, I eventually negotiated the process, and uploaded my first question. While this forum has turned into an absolute boon, results of which will be presented in upcoming posts, in this post I want to focus on Heinrich Regehr.
The gentleman from “Forum. Danzig.de” who assisted me, Mr. Peter Hanke, has been gracious and helpful beyond measure. In the span of less than two weeks, Peter has helped me solve no fewer than three thorny issues that have confounded me for several years, including the question of Heinrich Regehr. Uncertain whether the Danzig Forum knew of the 1927-28 Address Book for the Kreis Großes Werder I’d discovered on ancestry.com, I offered to make the Tiegenhof portion of it available to members. Peter confirmed the Forum’s awareness of this directory, then gave me a link to additional directories for Tiegenhof, which he offered to send. After looking through the list, I asked him for two address books for landowners in Kreis Großes Werder, one for 1925, the other for 1930.
After receiving these address books, I searched for Heinrich Regehr, hoping, once and for all to resolve the question of whether I was dealing with one person or two. Unlike the 1927-28 address book, the 1925 address book included only the one Heinrich Regehr listed at Lindenstraße, seemingly related to a Hermann Regehr, a “hofbesitzer,” or farm owner, and “getreidehandlung,” someone involved in crop treatment. (Figure 6) The 1930 address book again included this Hermann Regehr, but also “Lina Regehr” at Vorhofstraße. (Figure 7) While unlikely, I briefly considered Heinrich had first been a farmer, then later gone into banking. While I had no definitive answer, because Lina Regehr’s address was different, I became more certain there were two different Heinrichs.
I mentioned in passing my quandary to Peter Hanke, and, unexpectedly, within a day he confirmed two Heinrich Regehrs had lived in Tiegenhof and provided the following information on each:
Heinrich REGEHR I (Figures 8a & 8b)
Business: Merchant
Rank: Unteroffizier (non-commissioned officer)
Date of birth: May 27, 1897
Place of birth: Neukirch [today:Nowa Cerkiew, Poland]
Address in Tiegenhof: Marienburgerstr. 14
Home State: Kreis Großes Werder
During WWII: Ground personnel in Elbing [today: Elbląg, Poland]
Missing in action since May 1, 1945 (somewhere near Küstrin/Reppen/West-Sternberg/Zorndorf)
Relatives: Father Hermann Regehr, born January 29, 1867
Place of birth: Rückenau [today: Rychnowo Żuławskie, Poland]
Address in Tiegenhof: Neue-Reihe 1-3
Business: Director of the Kreissparkaße
Immigrated to Canada after WWII: Calgary, Alberta
Wife: Lina, née ZULAUF widowed SCHLENGER
Children: Heini (Heinrich) (born June 11, 1932); Martin (born June 5, 1940)
Lina’s children by her first marriage: Brigitte SCHLENGER (born August 25, 1922 in Danzig-Langfuhr); Rudolf SCHLENGER (born October 11, 1923 in Neuteich)
Surprised as to the speed with which Peter had confirmed the existence of two Heinrich Regehrs, born in consecutive years, living in Tiegenhof at the same time, I naturally asked where the data came from. It was clear it didn’t originate from any Address Books. Peter gave me a link to a free online catalog on FamilySearch entitled “Heimatortskartei Danzig-Westpreußen, 1939-1963,” a database whose existence was previously unknown to me. This is a civil register of refugees from the former province of Danzig-Westpreußen, Germany, now Gdańsk and Bydgoszcz provinces in Poland. Consisting of handwritten and typed index-sized cards, it was developed by the German Red Cross after WWII to help people find their families who’d been expelled from this region. All the available cards have been photographed and uploaded to FamilySearch.
I reviewed the index cards on roughly 4,000 former residents of Tiegenhof. Not only did I relocate the Heimatortskartei for Heinrich Regehr I and II, but I also found a card for a Hermann Regehr (Figures 10 a & 10b); the names and dates of birth of Anneliese and her two siblings are included on the flip side of the card confirming this was the grandfather who fled Tiegenhof with his three grand-daughters. (Figure 11) This Hermann Regehr is found in the 1925, 1927-28 and 1930 Tiegenhof Address Books. In ancestry.com, I was also able to locate his birth register. (Figure 12) Additionally, Peter Hanke accessed the Church books of the Mennonites, a paid service, and discovered the family overview for Hermann Regehr’s father, Johann Regehr. (Figure 13) While not detailed here, the Mennonite books also contain information on Johann Regehr’s parents going back yet another generation
Similarly, for the family of the Heinrich Regehr II who wound up in Alberta, Canada, Peter accessed the Mennonite Church books for his father and grandfather, both also named Heinrich Regehr. (Figure 14)
The Heimatortskartei catalog often provides invaluable clues as to family connections, spouses, vital events, and more. Beyond the Regehrs, in at least three other instances, I connected names and/or dates on the cards to the corresponding information in my father’s 1932 Pocket Calendar or to pictures in my father’s collection. These will be the subject of future Blog posts.
I can hear readers saying, “It’s obvious there were two different Heinrich Regehrs!” And, while I would be inclined to agree, I try to avoid making facts fit a false narrative. The “fact” is that both Anneliese Franzen and Peter Lau recognized the same Heinrich Regehr. What I initially failed to consider is that because her father disappeared from her life when she was very young, no older than six years old, Anneliese may have had only vague recollections of what her father looked like and may have jumped to the conclusion, based on the name I provided, that the picture I sent was of her father. Regardless, taking the time to patiently research Heinrich Regehr has led to a finding that supports what Anneliese and her family have always known and dispels any notion their father “abandoned” them.
REFERENCE
Jeglin, Günter
1985 TIEGENHOF und der Kreis Großes Werder in Bildern.
Note: This story is about an accomplished German Post-Impressionist painter, Emmy Gotzmann, whom my great-aunt Elsbeth Bruck in East Berlin was asked to help after WWII.
Forays into my family’s history occasionally reveal encounters relatives had with historic or renowned personages. Following WWII, my Uncle Fedor Bruck took over Hitler’s dentist’s office, recovered valuable historic documents, and was an indirect witness to the Fuhrer’s fate. My great-aunt, Franziska Bruck, the renowned florist, hosted the last Crown Princess of Prussia, Cecelie, in her shop and counted among her clients the last German Kaiser; she corresponded with the renowned German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, another client, letters of which survive. Going back to 1850, the Bruck’s “Prinz von Preußen” Hotel in Ratibor hosted two symphonic performances by the famous Johann Strauss the Younger. This story is about a much lesser-known but enormously talented individual who crossed paths with one of my ancestors, my great-aunt Elsbeth Bruck, “la Communiste,” as she was referred to when I was growing up.
As readers may recall from Post 15, following my great-aunt Elsbeth’s exile in the United Kingdom during WWII, she returned to East Berlin and became a Communist Party apparatchik in the former German Democratic Republic. She was ultimately awarded the “Vaterländischer Verdienstorden in Silber,” the “Patriotic Order of Merit in Silver,” for “special services to the state and to the society.”
This story has to do with my family only insofar as it relates to a letter sent to my great-aunt Elsbeth by the niece of one of my second great-aunts. A little background is helpful. In Post 15, I told readers about the Stadtmuseum, located in Spandau, outside Berlin, where the surviving personal papers of two great-aunts, Elsbeth and Franziska Bruck, are archived. In 2014, my wife and I examined all these papers and took pictures of everything. After returning home, I sorted through what I’d acquired. It included hand-written letters sent between 1947 and 1954 by my grandmother, Else Bruck, née Berliner, to my great-aunt Elsbeth in Berlin from both Fayence, France, later from New York City. Interested in the content of these letters, I asked my distant cousin, Ronny Bruck, if he could translate them; all were written in Sütterlin, which Ronny learned in school. Mistakenly, I included a letter in Sütterlin also sent from New York by a similarly named woman, Else Milch. (Figures 1a & 1b)
Once I received the translation, I realized my mistake. While the letters written by my grandmother were interesting because they mentioned some of my relatives and myself, the letter written by Else Milch on February 26, 1948, was fascinating for altogether different reasons. For one thing, Else remarked on the superficiality of people she’d met in America; for another, Else referred to people I eventually learned were very accomplished in their fields of endeavor. I quote the relevant section of a longer letter:
Letter from Else Milch to Elsbeth Bruck, dated 26th of March 1948:
My Dear Elsbeth,
. . . People can say about the Germans whatever they want, but they loved and esteemed their character and their individuality.
I had an interesting life with a circle of really “living” people.
The “liveliness” of the people living here is only superficial and does not mean anything. But I suppose that if you want to become acquainted with somebody, then you must probably look for the most capable ones.
I think you have to live here a couple of years before you understand all of this. I am here now almost six years and I hope to travel in about four weeks to visit my youngest child in Brazil.
But, now, I come to the reason for this letter.
I don’t know whether you will have the time for this, if the transit system is yet operational, nor whether you’re willing to do this. But, I have the feeling you are the right person to ask.
I have a girlfriend, one of the last ones from my time living in Berlin. . .she is an artist, the former wife of Ludwig Hardt (long-ago divorced). Already, when I left in 1941 she was a renowned artist and formerly the Chairwoman of the “Verein Berliner Künstler” (Berlin Artist Association); politically, she has the same views as you. She could hate (and love), but now she seems to have collapsed. . .at first mentally, but I have heard she now also has heart issues.
I have sent parcels to her but can no longer do so. The last one I sent to her was in mid-December. I also sent a letter, but it has not yet arrived.
I asked friends to look in on her and they did so, but it didn’t work out because those friends were not like-minded. Now, I have the feeling you would be the right person for her.
Of course, she could come visit you if her heart is strong enough. She lives not too far away, in Berlin-Lichterfelde, in the part of the city that is closer to Berlin-Steglitz.
She is a Christian and has family ties to high-ranking officials and accomplished artists; she had mainly Jewish friends, despised the Nazis, and cared for hidden Jews during the war, but now is very lonely.
For a while, she had so-called “Starvation psychosis” [anorexia] meaning she talked about having to starve; I know this because someone told me. Unfortunately, she always needed a lot to eat, much more than me (although she was slim and athletic).
She lives in a dilapidated villa that belonged to her mother. A part of it is rented out. Absolutely lonely!! I wish she could get someone suitable in her house.
Well, if you could write to her asking her to visit, perhaps she would come. I received her last letter at the end of October, and now she doesn’t answer anymore, and that’s why I’m so worried.
Letters such as these are intriguing. Naturally, I researched both Emmy Gotzmann, and her one-time husband, Ludwig Hardt. For Emmy Gotzmann, my Search Engine directed me to a website dubbed “Linosaurus,” which touts itself as “A Blog on the Lesser Gods and Goddesses of linoleum and woodblock printing. And all other things worth sharing.” I contacted the Blog Administrator, explaining I had uncovered an interesting letter mentioning Ms. Gotzmann, including a copy of the original and the translation; I received an enthusiastic reply from Mr. Gerbrand Caspers. He’d forwarded the items I sent to a Mr. Ferdinand Ruigrok van de Werve, who, coincidentally, had just published a biography on Ms. Gotzmann in November 2015. (Figure 2)
Mr. Caspers is a retired dentist and university teacher, who is currently researching and writing a book on German woman artists (painters) born between 1850 and 1900 who were pioneering with color woodblock printmaking from 1905 to 1940. And, Mr. Ruigrok van de Werve is a retired art dealer living in Flensburg, Germany, on the German-Danish border, where Ms. Gotzmann trained from around 1905 to 1909.
Ms. Gotzmann’s full name was “Emmy Auguste Elizabeth Gotzmann,” and she was born in Frankfurt am Main on March 19, 1881. (Figure 3) Emmy may have received her formal art training at the “Verein der Künstlerinnen und Kunstfreundinnen zu Berlin” between 1901 and 1904, although most of her training appears to have come at private schools and artist colonies. (Figure 4) German art historian Ulrich Schulte-Wülwer writes about this: “The triumph of open-air painting at the end of the 19th century was the birth of artists’ colonies. For painters who were denied access to the art academy, artist colonies offered a welcome opportunity to compete with their male counterparts. In Ekensund. . .Emmy Gotzmann-Conrad outclassed her contemporaries, painting in the style of van Gogh and French Pointillists.”
Gotzmann’s first marriage in 1905 to the lawyer Walter Conrad (Figure 5) lasted until 1913, but it is her second marriage (Figure 6) to the Jewish actor and “declamator” (i.e., one who declaims or speaks in a rhetorical manner), Ludwig Hardt (Figure 7), that is briefly mentioned in Else Milch’s letter. This marriage lasted until about 1928 and brought Emmy into contact with “literary expressionism” and its actors and moved her increasingly into Jewish circles. As Else Milch noted, Ms. Gotzmann was the Chairwoman of “Verein Berliner Künstler,” from 1928 to 1930. During the time of National Socialism, because her Post-Impressionist paintings were deemed “degenerate art,” she was cut off from the art business and became increasingly impoverished. Most of Emmy’s paintings were destroyed during WWII, and only those in her parents’ home and stored with relatives survived. The few paintings that survive speak to Ms. Gotzmann’s tremendous talent. (Figure 8)
Emmy passed away in Berlin on September 27, 1950, so almost 2 ½ years to the day after Else Milch wrote to my great-aunt. It is unclear whether Elsbeth Bruck and Emmy Gotzmann ever actually met, though I like to believe so.
Emmy Gotzmann’s second husband, the actor Ludwig “Leo” Hardt was born on January 16, 1886 in Neustadt, Upper Silesia, Germany (today: Prudnik, Opolskie, Poland); he immigrated to America, and passed away in New York City in 1947. Interestingly, he is interred in Mount Hebron Cemetery in Flushing, Queens, only a short distance from where I grew up.
The author of the letter to my great-aunt, Else Milch, née Kantorowicz, was born in Posen, Prussia (today: Poznan, Poland) on May 2, 1875, and died in Queens, New York on February 16, 1963. In February 1948, earlier the same year that Else Milch wrote to my great-aunt in East Berlin, she traveled to Brazil to visit her children. Attached to her Immigration Card from this visit to Brazil is her photograph. (Figure 9) In a story that will be related to readers in a future post, one of my German third cousins gave me a copy of a letter written to his father by one of Else Milch’s daughters from Porto Allegre, Brazil in 1989. Included in this letter were a few poor-quality images of a much older Else Milch. (Figure 10)
Note: This story consists of extracts from a first-hand account describing deportation of Jews from the notorious WWII French detention center of Gurs beginning in August 1942. It was written in French by one of my father’s first cousins, Eva Zernik, née Goldenring, sister of Fritz Goldenring, who perished in the Shanghai Ghetto in 1943, as detailed in Post 25.
When we last encountered Eva Goldenring, she was a guest at the “Villa Primavera,” in Fiesole, Italy, outside Firenze (Florence), between May and June of 1938, overlapping my father’s stay there. (Figure 1) After leaving the Villa Primavera, Eva may have joined her mother in Rome, where Helene Goldenring was known to have gone after leaving the Villa Primavera in 1937 (Figure 2), or she may have quit Italy. As readers will recall from Post 21, 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 seems certain that by September 1938, Eva Goldenring had left for France, and her brother, Fritz Goldenring, for Shanghai. Their mother, Helene Goldenring, may have returned to Berlin for a while because, surprisingly, her name continues to appear in Berlin Address Books in both 1939 and 1940. (Figure 3) Regardless, the path and timing of Helene’s escape from Europe is unknown.
The reason we know Eva Goldenring went to France is that she wrote a lengthy account of the deportation of Jews beginning in August 1942 from the French detention center of Gurs, where she was interned. Eighteen pages of a much longer chronicle, written in French, along with a series of anti-Nazi poems, written in German from Madrid following Eva’s release from Gurs, survive. They were donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum by Eva’s stepson, Alfred Zernik, following Eva’s death.
The circumstances and details of Eva’s immigration to France are lost to us, but, like my Aunt Susanne and Uncle Franz Müller, she may have been able to live there openly as a Jewish refugee for several years. What is known is that Eva spoke and wrote impeccable French, judging from her account of Gurs, and this no doubt was helpful.
The Gurs camp was located at the base of the Pyrenees in southwestern France and was originally established by the French government in April 1939 to intern political refugees and members of the International Brigade fleeing Spain after the Spanish Civil War. It was one of the first and largest detention camps before WWII in France. Early in 1940, the French government interned about 4,000 German Jewish refugees in Gurs as “enemy aliens,” along with French leftist leaders who opposed the war with Germany. There seems little doubt this mass arrest of Jews swept up Eva Goldenring, wherever she was holed up.
The French armistice with Germany, which was signed in June 1940, placed Gurs under the administrative authority of the treasonous French government, the Vichy regime, the supposed “free zone.” Conditions at the camp were appalling, overcrowded with a perpetual shortage of water, food, and clothing. Internees were crammed into dark filthy barracks with sealed windows, rats, lice, and fleas. During rainstorms, the roofs leaked, and the swampy land turned to mud so thick that, incredibly, prisoners couldn’t walk to the latrines for fear they might drown. Eight-hundred internees are known to have perished in Gurs between 1940-41 from contagious diseases, including typhoid fever and dysentery, although more than 1,100 prisoners in all are known to have died in the camp.
Compounding the crowded conditions, in October 1940, Germans deported roughly 6,500 Jews from southwestern Germany (Baden-Pfalz-Saar) into the unoccupied part of France, most of whom wound up in Gurs. This deportation, named for the two Nazi administrators who engineered it, was referred to as the “Wagner-Bürckel-Aktion.” The day after the deportations, Wagner proudly proclaimed his area of Germany to be the first to be “Judenrein,” free of Jews, in accordance with Hitler’s desire.
Between August 6, 1942 and March 3, 1943, Vichy officials handed over 3,907 Jewish prisoners from Gurs to the Germans, the majority of whom were sent to the Drancy transit camp outside Paris. From Drancy, they were deported in six convoys to concentration camps in German-occupied Poland, primarily Auschwitz. Drancy is the same assembly point my Aunt Susanne was deported from on September 7, 1942, also destined for Auschwitz, although she had transited through Camp des Milles.
Much of Eva Goldenring’s account of Gurs details events surrounding the selection process related to three convoys that departed Gurs after August 1942. Because of her language skills, this may have provided Eva a measure of personal protection. Werner L. Frank, author of a book entitled “The Curse of Gurs: Way Station to Auschwitz,” touches on the benefit of speaking French: “Barrack and îlot chiefs were appointed to represent the interests of their constituency to the camp’s management as well as to maintain order with their jurisdictions. Individuals having French language facility were especially valuable in assuming leadership roles.” (p. 246)
Select passages of Eva’s account of the Jewish deportations from Gurs are presented below under general categories; the complete translation of Eva’s 18-page account is attached for interested readers.
Roundups
At the beginning of the summer of 1942, the camp saw an influx of foreign Jews—mostly Polish and Czech—coming from the occupied zone, especially Paris. The newcomers told us in detail about the hunts for Jews, people being arrested in the streets, arrested while they slept in their beds at night.
This time, they [German authorities] helped themselves to men, women, youths, and even children. Families were separated. . .People told stories of a train waiting in a station outside Paris, full of little children crying, calling their mothers who were gone. A line of guards surrounded them, prohibiting anyone from approaching them or bringing them something to eat or drink.
Destroying Children’s Cultural Identity
Traces that would have allowed the children to one day be identified—even reunited with their parents, if their parents were still alive—had been destroyed. The system had been applied even to babies in the cradle.
“Illusions”
Among ourselves, we were still clinging to the illusion of the “border” that was the demarcation line [between the occupied part of France and the free zone]. The noontime new reports were always optimistic. The war could not last much longer now—we would spend the last winter at Gurs—afterwards would come the end, liberation, peace.
French Collaboration
At the end of June 1942, the camp received an almost unnoticed visit from a small commission of three or four tall, blond young men. They glanced inside a block, inspected the infirmary, the central hospital, the C.C.A.’s [Comité Central d’Assistance] office. They asked this or that prisoner their place of birth. If the response was “Germany”—they simply said “Ah—hm.” Later we learned that it was a commission of the Gestapo.
Establishing Deportation Lists
One fine evening, one of the first days of July one of the block leaders informed his colleagues on behalf of the Director that the next day the blocks would be “consigned”, which meant total prohibition from entering or leaving. This would be in order to establish lists.
Unfortunately, there was not a single directive—neither for the inmates nor for those who were making the list. No one realized how mortally important it was.
But as it was, little by little the ones making the list got tired, and we had to finish the whole thing that afternoon—it was a hot sunny day—so decisions about the lives and welfare of thousands and thousands were made without knowing why, with a levity free of qualms.
“Quotas”
From that day on, a certain jitteriness developed in the camp. . . But, … the night of July 30-31, the English radio reported that Hitler had asked Mr. Laval to hand over to him the foreign Jews in the free zone. This piece of news was naturally not divulged in the noontime news report.
On July 31, the Camp received a visit from Mr. Lowry, President of the Nimes Coordination Committee which brought together the Red Cross, the Quakers, the YMCA, the American Joint [Distribution Committee], the Children’s Aid Society (the OSE, “Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants”) and others. As usual, the representatives of social institutions in the Camp had a meeting, at the end of which the author [I] asked Mr. Lowry if the bit of news from the English radio was in line with the truth. “Since you already know it,” he replied, “I must tell you that it is true—unfortunately.”
In exchange for the release of the French prisoners, Mr. Laval had offered Mr. Hitler the foreign Jews in the free zone. The figure was fixed at 10,000 individuals. Later, under the pretext that the 10,000 had not been delivered by the agreed-upon deadline, the Germans demanded 15,000, then 20,000; finally, it became a general measure. The Quakers offered to take the 10,000 into their care—Mr. Laval refused.
Faustian Bargain
In the camp, fears took shape more and more. . .
. . .rumors and news continued to circulate. People talked about a long train of livestock cars at the station in Oloron, about the arrival of a whole posse of trucks and buses; people reported that at Gurs a hundred or more of the new State Police had arrived.
That afternoon, sure enough, two young officers in black uniforms —modeled after the German S.S. uniforms—walked in. At the same time, the Director went from block to block, calling many people over to ask them whether they would want to stay if their parents, children, spouses left the camp or whether they would rather go with them. They were given one minute to make their decision and sign the paper saying that they would be leaving of their own will.
Kafkaesque Nightmare
The Director worked all night. . .making the lists.
The next morning, the blocks were consigned. The camp was surrounded by rows of “black-coats.” Even the block leaders were not allowed to go out. Through an almost unbearable silence, we heard the lists from the Directory come in. They came in around 9:30am. The barrack leaders were assembled in the block secretary’s office—the crowds waited outside. The block leader read off the names. They fell from his mouth one by one, like death sentences.
The first thing we noticed was that the list contained, in alphabetical order, almost all the people of German or Austrian nationality.
. . .Since the whole thing had been a complete secret up to the very last minute, we were so distraught, so in the dark as to the criteria for the deportation, that when this first convoy was taken away, there were practically no attempts to intervene to help this or that person affected; no one tried to hide or risk trying to escape.
We had one last meal, then the call to go to the blocks, luggage in hand—in the men’s blocks almost everyone was ready—the names were called one after another—people said goodbye to each other—the person who was called went out into the road—little by little the groups assembled. As the last one was put in order, the caravan slowly started out towards the entrance of the Camp, towards the two large train sheds—those who were left stood along the wire fences waving goodbye with their hands or handkerchiefs—many of the ones leaving tried to keep a good face on—even to smile.
It could be said that the police presence was unnecessary. Sometimes it even seemed that they disappeared, in the face of the peaceful and disciplined attitude of the prisoners. Especially during the night hours when the departures happened, when they put their helmets on, rifles in hand—really, we were surprised if we paid any attention to it at all. It was as if people’s glances landed beside them, or over their heads.
This air of silent dignity was, it is true, partly a result of the fact that some of these poor people were too weary to really realize what was happening. They had seen their fate approaching, they had trembled, fought against it—now it was decided—there was nothing more to do.
“God Did Not Hear Them”
The next day rumors circulated that the train had not left; then, that it was traveling with the doors open at a very reduced speed. Later, that the Germans had not accepted them, that they had been expecting laborers, and would send them back. In those days, such floods of prayers went up to heaven, prayers from the heart, —but God did not want to hear them.
Deportation Criteria
We knew that a second convoy was supposed to follow it two days behind. On Thursday, the block leaders and the charities’ efforts to learn the criteria governing the deportation measures were met with success. We learned that, essentially, the measures concerned all Jews of German, Austrian, Polish, and Czech origin who had entered France after 1936. It was expected that there would be exceptions for: persons over 60 years of age (later 65); members of the clergy; children under 16 without family; husbands of pregnant women; parents of French children; those who were “Aryan” (in the camp this was interpreted to mean individuals who had a non-Jewish parent or spouse); parents of children less than two years old; and individuals who had rendered some kind of service to the France nation: those who had belonged to a combat unit for at least three months, or were particularly valuable to the French government or economy.
“Matter of the Interventions”
For those who were conscientious of what was going on realized the real issue in the matter of the interventions [relative to names on the official list of deportees]: They had to hand over a fixed number. To save one meant condemning someone else in their place—and did they have that right?
The outcome of all the brouhaha with the lists was that in the end, there were so many exceptions that it was necessary to find “new material.” The wretches in the blocks kept waking up to the sound of cars flying down the road. How many of those poor souls who thought that they had been forgotten, exempt, rescued, suddenly saw a guard next their bed: “Quick, quick, get up, get your luggage”—hearing those heavy footsteps approach already made everyone in the barracks tremble—is he going to pass by—is he going to come in here? Many stopped sleeping in their barracks.
“Errors”
In the first convoy, there being no directives—at least not that the charities or internees were aware of—a great number of people were deported who should not have been. This time the interventions tried to fix some of the errors. Not all.
A man named Max Sternmeiler left despite his Romanian papers which he had in his possession and had shown to the Director. Later, when his wife, who had been brought to the Rivesaltes camp, telegrammed to ask for a paper from the Gurs camp confirming her husband’s Romanian nationality, and thus hers as well, the husband had already left with his papers in his pocket. The woman was condemned, too.
“The best ones”
In general, we noticed that it was the best ones who had left. Among those from the old crowd who had stayed, besides the true exceptions, there were many clever types, with a lot of information and sometimes a lot of money, in a word people with connections and street girls.
“Nothing was sacred”
Nor could anyone forget the case of the Gutmann children, not that it was an isolated case. The father, being “untransportable”, had stayed in the village. The poor mother had come with her three children between 3 and 6 years old. These people could not have been rich—their clothes made that plain enough. But each one of the children was properly dressed, clean, hair neatly brushed; each one wore their little piece of ribbon in their hair. They slept all three together on a cushion on the ground, with their arms around each other’s necks—that night the mother did not leave them out of her sight for one second. What was going through her mind? Later, we saw the children again—without their mother. Nothing was sacred for them anymore, not even a mother. —-
Eva was eventually released or escaped from Gurs. Quoting again from Werner L. Frank on the issue of camp security: “Gurs security was somewhat loose, allowing for visits by the prisoners to nearby areas in order to conduct trade and even for off-site work. Outsiders were permitted access to the campgrounds, including children who had been separated from their interned parents and were now living at remote safe houses. Such laxity would suggest that an escape could be managed quite easily. However, there were deterrents to unauthorized departures including lack of official identity documents, apprehension about leaving loved ones behind, lack of French language skills and general fear of the unknown. Nevertheless, there were escapes. . .” (p. 276)
Certainly, Eva’s language skills would have allowed her to blend in with the local populace had she escaped. However, it is more likely her fluency in French made her useful to one of the aid groups operating in the internment camp, and they may have helped her procure safe conduct documents or false papers. In any case, Eva eventually made her way to way to Madrid, Spain, where she lived until 1947 when she immigrated to America (Figure 4) and rejoined her mother, who’d emigrated from Valparaiso, Chile that same year. (Figures 5 & 6) Eva got married in 1952 to Curt Zernik. (Figure 7). She passed away in 1969 (Figure 8), a year after her mother. (Figure 9)
