Readers may have noticed that Post 134 has been removed from my blog. An astute follower pointed out inconsistencies and inaccuracies in Suse Vogel’s account of her chance encounter with the son of the notorious Nazi architect of the Holocaust, Reinhard Heydrich, who was assassinated in Prague in 1942. Unless Suse Vogel was spoofed for reasons unknown by a vengeful pretender claiming to be Reinhard’s son, which I personally doubt, at its core I think Suse’s improbable run in with Heider Heydrich took place at some point and place in time, just not accurately recalled in all its details. Consequently, I cannot ignore all the mistakes in Suse’s recollection of the event. I should remind readers that Suse’s typed letter is undated providing no frame of reference for when it was written, making it impossible to know whether her imprecise memory of the event was captured shortly after it took place or years later. Thus, in the interest of accuracy, I’ve removed the post.
Among the inconsistencies noted are the following:
Suse Vogel writes that Reinhard was murdered in 1941, when his actual assassination was in 1942.
Suse inaccurately refers to Reinhard’s son as “Reinhard.”
I have been unable to independently verify that Heider Heydrich ever set out to be a policeman or apprenticed as one in Hamburg. He received his engineering degree from the University of Hamburg and appears to have worked for the now insolvent aircraft manufacturer Fairchild Dornier in Oberpfaffenhofen near Munich, Germany in this capacity.
I can find no evidence that Heider ever lived in Wiesbaden as Suse’s letter indicates. I find Heider Heydrich listed in Munich Address Directories from 1960, 1966, and 1968 showing he was an engineer.
Heider is known to have been born in 1934, and according to Suse’s account, her encounter with him is purported to have taken place when he was 28, thus in 1962. However, the mention of the serial killer Jürgen Bartsch in 1962 cannot be accurate because Jürgen was not arrested until 1966.
Until or if I can reconcile the historical and temporal errors, I have withdrawn Post 134 from my blog.
Note: In this post I provide a short historical overview and visual sketch of Schloss Kamenz [Kamieniec Ząbkowicki Palace], the estate in Silesia where my third cousin’s father, Dr. Hans Vogel, worked for the von Preußen family during the Nazi Era. I also briefly touch on geopolitical factors that make it improbable the family will ever be able to reclaim the castle.
The von Preußen and Bruck families are not related in any but an “Adam and Evish” sort of way though both have affiliations with Silesia, now mostly located in Poland. The filament of a familial connection passes through my third cousin Agnes Stieda née Vogel whose father Dr. Hans Vogel (Figure 1) was employed by Friedrich Heinrich von Preußen (1874-1940) (Figure 2) and his second cousin Waldemar von Preußen (1889-1945) (Figure 3) following Friedrich’s death in 1940. While employed by the von Preußen family, Dr. Vogel was tasked with archiving the vast collection of art and historical treasures stored at the castle in Kamenz. (Figure 4) Not only did the family employ Hans, but they also provided a measure of protection for his Jewish wife Suse and mischling half-Jewish daughter Agnes during the Nazi Era. For this reason, to this day the family is held in high esteem by the Stiedas.
After a series of blog posts dealing with Reinhard Heydrich, one of the evilest characters in a Nazi panoply full of them, I need to step away from this emotionally draining subject to tackle a lighthearted topic. Ergo, this pictorial essay and a brief history on Schloss Kamenz [Kamieniec Ząbkowicki Palace] that Peter Albrecht von Preußen’s ancestors once owned in Kamenz, Germany [today: Kamieniec Ząbkowicki, Poland].
One side comment before I proceed. Peter Albrecht has been exceptionally gracious and helpful in tracking down and sending me an enormous amount of illustrative and research matter, related not only to his von Preußen ancestors but also to my Bruck family. For example, as it relates to my antecedents, Peter uncovered two wills archived in Opole, Poland that I ordered that may possibly be related to my great-great-grandfather, Samuel Bruck (1808-1863), the first-generation owner of the Bruck’s “Prinz von Preußen” Hotel in Ratibor [today: Raciborz, Poland]. Though I’ve had them translated and interpreted by my fourth cousin, they are challenging in the extreme to make sense of because they are handwritten in Fraktur calligraphy and never give a precise date of birth of the testator, a man named Samuel Bruck but likely not my ancestor. That said, Peter has uncovered other materials that are definitively related to “my” Samuel Bruck, and, though somewhat dry, will form the basis of a future blog post as I discuss recent intriguing findings about him.
As I proceed to give readers a pictorial sketch of Schloss Kamenz [Kamieniec Ząbkowicki Palace], let me start by providing an historical overview of the castle. The first owner was Princess Marianne of the Netherlands (1810-1883) (Figure 5) who in 1838 commissioned the most prominent German architect of the time, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, to design the structure. Noted for his neo-Classical and neo-Gothic buildings, most famously found in and around Berlin, Schinkel created a monumental palace in the form of a medieval castle.
Aware that he was dying of stomach cancer and having no surviving siblings and no children of his own, FH sold castle Kamenz along with the nearby “castle” in Seitenberg [today: Stronie Śląskie, Poland] (Figure 10), and all its belongings to his second cousin, Waldemar von Preußen (1889-1945), nephew of Germany’s last Emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II. (Figure 11) Upon FH’s death, Prince Waldemar transferred the cash to FH’s trust to be divided equally in five parts to FH’s nephew, Friedrich Karl Erich Albrecht (EA) von Preußen (1901-1976) (Figure 12), and four nieces, the daughters of FH’s youngest brother, Friedrich Wilhelm (FW) von Preußen (1880-1925). (Figure 13)
Prince Waldemar fled castle Kamenz as the Red Army was approaching in 1945, dying in Tutzing, Bavaria on May 2nd, six days before the official end of World War II in Europe. Obviously, the castle was abandoned along with all the artworks and belongings. Relocated Poles looted the castle and Russians burned and pillaged it. According to Peter Albrecht, however, Polish citizens report that 14 to 17 railroad cargo trains worth of movables were taken by the Russians and shipped to an unknown destination. The marble used for exterior construction was salvaged to construct the Congress Hall at the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw.
Following Prince Waldemar’s death, rights to the castle that he obviously no longer had physical control over passed to his younger brother, Sigismund von Preußen (1896-1978) (Figure 14), then in turn to his son Alfred Friedrich Ernst Heinrich Conrad von Preußen (1924–2013), “Uncle Alfred” (Figure 15) as he is known to Peter Albrecht. Shortly before Prince Alfred’s death in 2013, he transferred all rights to the estate to Peter including the contents of the 14 to 17 railroad cargo trains, should they materialize.
A brief word on an intriguing aside. Schloss Kamenz or Kamieniec Ząbkowicki Palace, as it is currently known, is situated within Poland. In a minor way, it figured into the negotiations leading to the eventual reunification of Germany in 1989. The “Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany,” or the “Two Plus Four Agreement,” is the international agreement that allowed for the reunification of Germany in the 1990s. The reference to “Two Plus Four” means that the agreement was negotiated between the Federal Republic of Germany and the Germany Democratic Republic (GDR), along with the Four Powers which had occupied Germany at the end of World War II, namely, France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States. This treaty replaced the Potsdam Agreement, and involved the Four Powers renouncing all rights they held in Germany, allowing Germany to become fully sovereign the following year.
As I discussed in Post 132, the “provisional border” between Poland and Germany following World War II was known as the Oder-Neisse line. This partition meant that most of Germany’s former eastern provinces, including East Prussia and most of Silesia as well as the eastern parts of Brandenburg and Pomerania, including Danzig, were awarded to Poland and the Soviet Union. (Figure 16) The German populations of these areas either fled, as in the case of Peter Albrecht’s ancestors, or were expelled. The GDR accepted the border in 1950, but the Federal Republic of Germany always demurred considering it as provisional, pending a finalized peace settlement. However, as a condition of the Final Settlement, East and West Germany agreed to the existing border with Poland, with the renunciation and exclusion of any other territorial claims, in other words Germany’s former eastern provinces.
The biggest issue for the Soviet Union at the time the “Two Plus Four Agreement” was being negotiated was Germany’s former territory of East Prussia, which today includes the Kaliningrad Oblast, the westernmost part of Russia. The other indirect issue for the Soviets was Poland which was regarded as a satellite state in the Soviet sphere of influence but was never part of the Soviet Union. Because the Oder-Neisse line was ultimately upheld as the border between the reunified Germany and Poland, any possibility that Peter’s family could make clams on Schloss Kamenz was obviated.
This was true at least until Poland joined the European Union (EU) in 2004. Peter’s family could now potentially make a claim for return of the castle. However, because of the exorbitant cost for the reconstruction of the castle, estimated at well north of $300 million, they have not yet done so. To date, the EU has already provided the city of Kamieniec Ząbkowicki €750,000 (more than $800,000) to restore the mausoleum and €5 million ($5,362,000) to fix the roof and the small copper clad spires atop the four corner towers. If the Polish government were to return the castle, they would do so in “as is” condition and the family would be compelled to reimburse the EU for all the work done to date.
The possibility exists, nonetheless, that Peter could make a claim for any of the castle’s goods secreted in the Soviet Union should they ever resurface.
Much of the information on castle Kamenz presented below is derived from personal communication with Peter. While there are multiple features that are part of the castle or grace the gardens surrounding Schloss Kamenz, I will discuss only two, the boiler house and the mausoleum. As previously mentioned, Nicholas Albrecht received the castle from his mother in 1873 upon his marriage, and in 1883 he started to build a large steam boiler house. (Figure 17) The conversion from coal to steam heat took place at this time, although the castle still had no sanitary installations.
Upon the arrival of relocated Poles to the area of Schloss Kamenz the bodies in the mausoleum were disinterred and defiled, and reportedly hung from trees. (Figure 22) Before they could be set ablaze, however, some virtuous Polish citizen calmed the rioters and reburied the bodies, carefully marking their locations on a map. Before this concerned citizen died, he gave his map to the President of the local historical society, and in 2017, the City of Kamenz and the Catholic Church of Poland exhumed the graves and held a funeral service at the reconsecrated mausoleum. (Figures 23-24)
According to what Peter reports, the European Union has provided funding for the eventual restoration of Castle Kamenz to its full glory. To date only the mausoleum and part of the main hall of the castle proper have been renovated. (Figures 25-32)
In closing, I understand if readers are overwhelmed by the von Preußen family tree. My personal interest is trying to understand how the Bruck’s Hotel in Ratibor [today: Racibórz. Poland] owned by three generations of my family, obtained a “franchise” to use the “Prinz von Preußen” surname. This entails nailing down exactly when the building that eventually became the Bruck’s Hotel was built, whether its construction preceded or coincided with my family’s acquisition of the establishment, and, if it preceded it, when exactly my family purchased it. I’m uncertain whether historic documents survive to answer these questions. And, finally, because of our collaboration, Peter (Figure 33) has now found some not-so-distant ancestors that hail from Ratibor, suggesting our families may have had business dealings long ago. So, while this post may be of limited interest to many readers, I am pursuing it to better understand my family’s deep-seated connection to Ratibor and Silesia.
Note: In this second part of Post 133, I highlight an extraordinary photograph sent to me by a reader, Peter Albrecht von Preußen, featuring high-level Nazis taken at his family’s von Preußen estate in Silesia in around 1936 or 1937 in Kamenz, Germany [today: Kamieniec Ząbkowicki, Poland]. The picture allows me to explore two issues, namely, support for the National Socialists among the aristocracy and noblemen and the so-called “Gay Nazis myth.” The von Preußens were distinguished members of the royal House of Hohenzollern, the family from which Germany’s last Emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II, came from.
In part I of Post 133, I introduced readers to Mr. Peter Albrecht von Preußen (Figure 1), a German living in the United States who is a descendant of the royal German House of Hohenzollern. Germany’s last Emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II, who abdicated the throne in 1918 following Germany’s defeat in World War I, hails from this family. In fact Kaiser Wilhelm II is Peter’s second cousin three times removed. (Figure 2)
Even more distantly, Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom is Peter’s second cousin five times removed. (Figure 3) As a further bit of trivia, Queen Victoria married her first cousin Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha in 1840, and together they had nine children. Their offspring married into royal and noble families across the European continent, earning Victoria the moniker “the grandmother of Europe” and spreading hemophilia in European royalty. Enough about sovereign relationships.
As I mentioned in part I of this post, Peter first contacted me on the 7th of March, sharing with me a unique group photo taken in 1936 or 1937 (Figure 4) at his family’s castle in Kamenz, Germany [today: Kamieniec Ząbkowicki, Poland]. (Figure 5) What makes this photo so unusual is that it shows the notorious Reinhard Heydrich (Figure 6), principal architect of the Holocaust, known as “The Butcher of Prague” and other frightful epithets, along with other high-ranking Nazis visiting the von Preußen estate in Silesia; seated in the front row of this photos is Peter’s great-great-uncle, Friedrich Heinrich von Preußen (Figure 7), the prince who protected my half-Jewish third cousin Agnes Stieda and her family during World War II.
As I explained in part I, Friedrich Heinrich was openly homosexual. Several of the high-ranking Nazis who visited Kamenz on the day the photo was taken were also bisexual or arguably bisexual. More on this below.
Beyond discussing the high-level Nazis who visited Castle Kamenz, the photo allows me to explore two topics of broader interest, namely, the question of support or resistance among the nobles and aristocrats to National Socialism and the issue of gays in the ranks of the National Socialists. As a lead-in, I would note that if I was exploring these subjects as an academic endeavor rather than simply providing context for my ancestral research, I would take a much more rigorous intellectual approach. For my purposes, however, I simply want to provide some basic background.
Before I discuss the senior Nazis photographed at Castle Kamenz, let me first attempt to answer a question I initially asked Peter after he sent me the picture, namely, what occasioned the visit by the Nazis to the von Preußen estate.
Readers will recall that in the first part of Post 133, I discussed the relationship that Prinz Friedrich Heinrich von Preußen had with members of the “Organization Consul” during the 1920s. The Consul was a right-wing organization opposed to the harsh terms imposed on Germany by the Versailles Treaty and dedicated to regime change by violent means. It was formed by members of the disbanded Freikorps group Marine Brigade Ehrhardt and operated in the Weimar Republic between 1920 and 1922, when it was banned. Following the ban, Prince Friedrich Heinrich, also opposed to the “repressive measures” of the Versailles Treaty, allowed its former adherents to conduct live fire exercises at Kamenz. Many supporters of the banned Organization Consul went on to join the National Socialist Party.
While never a member of the Nazi Party, Friedrich Heinrich’s relationship with future Nazi party elite no doubt stems from the friendships he established during the 1920s. Given his sexuality, it makes sense that he would have associated with other gays. Regardless of his sexual and political leanings, however, it seems highly unlikely that Friedrich Heinrich would have been in any position to reject an overture by Reinhard Heydrich to visit Castle Kamenz for a few days. It’s safe to assume that Reinhard Heydrich and his entourage invited themselves to the von Preußen estate.
Charles Edward, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (1884-1954) (Figure 8) was the last sovereign duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha until 1918 when the Prussian monarchy and Germany’s 22 constituent monarchies were abolished following the German Empire’s defeat in World War I. Apropos of what I mentioned earlier about Queen Victoria, Charles Edward was a male-line grandson of her and Prince Albert. Though he spent his childhood years in the United Kingdom he was sent to Germany in his mid-teens. His support for his adopted country during World War I led to him being viewed with increased hostility in the United Kingdom, where he was eventually stripped of his British titles. After this, he drifted towards far-right politics, and later became involved in the Nazi regime. After World War II, he was fined by a Denazification court and lost ownership of land in what later became East Germany.
Reinhard Heydrich (1904-1942) (Figure 10) was talked about in part I of Post 133, so I refer readers to my earlier discussion for more details. I will only add the following quote from Wikipedia about Heydrich’s assassination because it explains why Kurt Daluege, another visitor at Castle Kamenz in 1936 or 1937, succeeded Heydrich as the Deputy/Acting Protector of Bohemia and Moravia: “Heydrich was mortally wounded in Prague on 27 May 1942 as a result of Operation Anthropoid. He was ambushed by a team of Czech and Slovak soldiers who had been sent by the Czechoslovak government-in-exile to kill the Reich-Protector; the team was trained by the British Special Operations Executive. Heydrich died from his injuries a week later. Nazi intelligence falsely linked the Czech and Slovak soldiers and resistance partisans to the villages of Lidice and Ležáky. Both villages were razed; the men and boys aged 14 and above were shot and most of the women and children were deported and murdered in Nazi concentration camps.”
Kurt Daluege (1897-1946) (Figure 11) was chief of the national uniformed Ordnungspolizei (Order Police) of Nazi Germany. Following Reinhard Heydrich’s assassination in 1942, he served as Deputy Protector for the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Daluege directed the German measures of retribution for Heydrich’s assassination, including the Lidice massacre. Wikipedia notes other war crimes of which Daluege was guilty: “During the war in 1941, he attended a mass shooting of 4,435 Jews by Police Battalion 307 near Brest-Litowsk and a mass shooting of Jews in Minsk. Furthermore, in October 1941 Daluege signed deportation orders for Jews from Germany, Austria and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, to Riga and Minsk. On 7 July 1942, he attended a conference led by Himmler which discussed the ‘enlargement’ of Operation Reinhard, the secretive Nazi plan to mass-murder Polish Jews in the General Government district of occupied Poland, and other matters involving SS and police policies in the east.” After the end of World War II, he was extradited to Czechoslovakia, tried, convicted, and executed in 1946.
Gottfried Graf von Bismarck-Schönhausen (1901-1949) (Figure 12) was a grandson of the 19th century Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, well-known to readers. He was a member of the Nazi Party and in 1933 he was elected to the Reichstag as a Nazi member. In 1935 he became chairman of the regional council (Regierungspräsident) for Stettin [today: Szczecin, Poland], and later also for Potsdam. By 1942, presumably disillusioned by the course of the war and Germany’s worsening prospects, he reached out to other members of the German aristocracy who were working against the Nazi regime with the aim of beginning negotiations with the Allies; some of these aristocrats were involved in the 20th of July 1944 Plot to assassinate Hitler. Despite being aware of these plans and having connections to the plotters, after the failed attempt, von Bismarck merely lost his position in the Reichstag and was expelled from the SS but was not tortured. His powerful connections and name recognition saved him, though he was nonetheless incarcerated in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp until the camp was liberated by the Red Army in April 1945. In September 1949 Bismarck and his wife were killed in a car accident near Bremen in the American Occupation Zone.
The presence of the aristocrats and Nazi Party members including Charles Edward, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha and Gottfried von Bismarck-Schönhausen at Prinz Friedrich Heinrich von Preußen’s Silesian estate in 1936 or 1937 attests to an ongoing relationship between former members of the monarchy and the National Socialists.
In layman’s terms, below I will attempt to succinctly explain what may initially have attracted noblemen and monarchists to National Socialism and some events that took place during the 1930s when Hitler consolidated power often at the expense of the aristocrats. To understand the extent of their resistance to the Nazi regime in this period, I asked my fourth cousin, Dr. Frank Thomas Koch (Figure 13), for some background on this question, so some of the following discussion is a synopsis of what he explained.
The National Socialists were adherents of the so-called Völkisch movement, a German ethno-nationalist movement active from the late 19th century through to the Nazi era and beyond. The principal belief of ethno-nationalists is that nations are defined based on a shared heritage, such as common language, common faith, and a common ethnic ancestry. Individuals who don’t share this common heritage are deemed to be second-class citizens. Völkisch nationalists generally considered Jews to be from a different Volk (“race” or “folk”) than Germans and deemed them to be inferior. This was the central tenet which led to the Holocaust. Many noblemen also adhered to Völkisch nationalism, thus drew common cause with the National Socialists in this regard. Other aristocrats and monarchists, however, kept a critical distance from National Socialism, viewing Hitler as an “upstart” and the Sturmabteilung (SA, literally “Storm Detachment” or Stormtroopers) as “uneducated thugs.”
Very quickly after his ascension to power in 1933, Hitler eliminated critics within his administration from the noble classes and the Wehrmacht, the German Army. During the so-called Röhm Putsch in 1934, Hitler had Ernst Röhm, leader of the SA, who had been an early ally but whom he saw as a growing threat, executed by the SS during the “Night of the Long Knives.” In the Blomberg-Fritsch affair of 1938, Hitler succeeded, in the context of partly contrived stories, in deposing Werner von Fritsch, Commander-in-Chief of the Army, and Werner von Blomberg, Minister of War, who had dared to object to his aggressive foreign policy. Then, during the September Conspiracy in 1938, the so-called “Valkyrie Conspiracy,” Hitler faced the first attempt by Germans to bring down his regime; headed by the Chief of the German General Staff at the time, Franz Halder, it was supported by many senior army generals. Halder lost his nerve and the coup attempt was ultimately undermined because of the Munich Agreement when France and Great Britain accepted Hitler’s word that signing away the Sudetenland was Hitler’s “last” territorial ambition, and they called the agreement “Peace in our Time.”
The attitude of the Hohenzollerns was one of opportunism. By nurturing the hope that the monarchy would be restored, the Nazis hoped to enlist the support of Germany’s last Emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II. (Figure 14) Support for the Nazis among the Hohenzollerns and the constituent monarchies was a mixed bag, so to speak. So, for example in the case of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s eldest son, Crown Prince Wilhelm, who had initially promoted the rise of the Nazis later promised in July 1941 to make himself available to the resistance, only to reverse course again shortly thereafter. More clearly aligned against the Nazis, by contrast, was the House of Wittelsbach from Bavaria, notably Crown Prince Rupprecht.
As World War II ground on and Germany’s fortunes changed and their atrocities came to light, an increasing number of initially enthusiastic and moderately supportive grandees distanced themselves from National Socialism and became opponents of the regime. Aristocrats often played a leading role within resistance circles, and military officers from noble families also played a central role in a series of specific attempts to assassinate Hitler. This was particularly in evidence during the 20th of July Plot.
One curious side note. Peter Albrecht shared with me a series of news articles he discovered related to a purported “purge of princes” by Hitler in 1939, including from his royal House of Hohenzollern. The story was printed in London’s “Daily Herald” (Figures 15a-b); New York’s “Daily News” (Figures 16a-b); and the “Cleveland Plain Dealer” (Figure 17) on the 14th of November 1939. As it turns out, several weeks prior, Peter’s great-grandfather, Joachim Albrecht von Preußen (b. 27 September 1876-d. 24 October 1939) (Figure 18) had passed away of natural causes. Since Joachim Albrecht had been friends with the head of Germany’s Foreign Office, the story was shared with correspondents in London. While no foul play was ever suspected, the foreign press, intentionally or unintentionally, mischaracterized Joachim’s death as part of a “monarchist putsch” by Hitler, possibly for propaganda purposes. Regardless, contrary to what western papers reported at the time, there was no monarchist purge in 1939.
The above is all I will say about aristocratic support for and opposition to National Socialism. Next, I want to move on to a discussion of the question of homosexuality within the ranks of the Nazi Party.
There is a widespread and pervasive myth claiming that homosexuals were prevalent and prominent as a group within the Nazi Party, a falsity referred to as the “Gay Nazis myth.” As the German cultural historian Andreas Pretzel has written in his article “Schwule Nazis (Homosexual Nazis),” “The legend of the homosexual Nazi has been used for decades after the Nazi era to deny or marginalize the extent and intensity of homosexual persecution, as well as to deny the memory of, discredit or prevent the memory of persecuted homosexual men.”
The impression that homosexuality was ubiquitous in Nazi organizations was created by antifascist leftists, including the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). The clause in the German Criminal Code that criminalized homosexuality was adopted in 1871 and was referred to as Paragraph 175. While both the SPD and the KPD were supporters of repealing this provision, both parties opportunistically used accusations of homosexuality against opponents. For example, in what is referred to as the Röhm affair of 1931 and 1932, anti-Nazis including the SPD, publicly disclosed Ernst Röhm’s homosexuality in an apparent bid to delay the Nazi seizure of power when supporters of the democratic Weimar Republic justifiably sensed their time was running out.
According to a footnote in the Wikipedia entry on “Gay Nazis myth,” there are three events which firmly established the stereotype that homosexuality was a characteristic of the Nazi system: (1) the just mentioned Röhm scandal of 1931 and 1932; (2) the Reichstag fire in 1933 when the parliament building was destroyed and a clique of homosexual stormtroopers was blamed; and (3) the previously discussed Night of the Long Knives or the Röhm Putsch in 1934 when a large number of leaders of the SA, many allegedly gay chieftains promoted by Röhm, were liquidated for political reasons. While leftists have largely been blamed for spreading the idea that homosexuals were prominent in the Nazi Party, it benefited Hitler to exaggerate the extent of homosexuality within the SA to justify his 1934 purge. Thus, it can be argued that the avowedly homophobic Nazis themselves contributed to the notion that gays were widespread in their ranks.
According to Andreas Pretzel, “What role homosexuality actually played in the Nazi movement, however, is largely unanswered, because important sources, such as those on the murdered homosexual SA leaders, are missing, because they were destroyed after the murder campaigns of the summer of 1934. Therefore, there have been various attempts to explain the significance of homosexuality for the Nazi movement through gender-historical perspectives and to find explanations as to why the avowedly homophobic Nazi movement attracted homosexuals, tolerated them for a while and even allowed some to rise to leadership and executive positions.” What is clear though is that while some gay men joined the Nazi Party, there is no evidence they were overrepresented.
In closing, let me return to the high-level Nazis that visited Castle Kamenz and Friedrich Heinrich von Preußen in 1936 or 1937. Friedrich Heinrich is clearly known to have been gay. His Wikipedia entry confirms this, as does a 1959 article in Der Spiegel magazine entitled “Die Insel der Wachteln” speaking of the time Friedrich spent on Italy’s Isle of Capri where gays often congregated. By contrast, the Wikipedia entries for the other attendees make no mention of their sexuality, and in fact state all were married with children. This is not surprising given that the Nazi movement was admittedly homophobic; it’s likely gays would have stayed “in the closet” and been married to mask their sexual proclivities.
According to Peter Albrecht, however, both Karl Daluege and Gottfried Graf Bismarck-Schönhausen were bisexual, and Reinhard Heydrich was also arguably bisexual. The source of this information is one of Peter’s friends, Warren Allen Smith, who wrote a book entitled “Who’s Who in Hell: A Handbook and International Directory for Humanists, Freethinkers, Naturalist, Rationalists and Non-theists”; while researching this book Mr. Smith came across information confirming these Nazis’ sexuality. Fundamentally, however, the war crimes these individuals committed is not a reflection of their sexuality, merely evidence they were inherently evil.
REFERENCES
Anti-monarchist purge by Gestapo rumored. (1939, November 14). Cleveland Plain Dealer.
“Die Insel der Wachteln” (1959 May 5). Der Spiegel, (19/1959).
Name ex-Kaiser in bomb plot: Report royalist, army purge. (1939, November 14). Daily News.
New purge of princes. (1939, November 14). Daily Herald.
Pretzel, Andreas (2014). Schwule Nazis: Narrative und Desiderate. In Michael Schwartz (Ed.) Homosexuelle im Nationalsozialismus (pp. 69-76). Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg.
Smith, Warren Allen. Who’s Who in Hell: A Handbook and International Directory for Humanists, Freethinkers, Naturalist, Rationalists and Non-theists. Barricade Books, 2000.
Note: In Part I of this two-part post, I talk about a homosexual member of the royal House of Hohenzollern, Friedrich Heinrich Prinz von Preußen, whom I first introduced to readers in Post 64. I was recently contacted by his great-grand-nephew who sent me a historically significant group photo showing his relative in the presence of several high-ranking Nazis including Reinhard Heydrich, the principal architect of the Holocaust. Part I of this post lays the groundwork for a discussion on the story behind the photo.
It is hard to know how to begin a story where the protagonist, Reinhard Heydrich, was one of the darkest figures in the Nazi regime. Often referred to as “The Butcher of Prague,” he had other equally disquieting nicknames, “The Hangman,” “The Blond Beast,” “Himmler’s Evil Genius,” and the “Young Evil God of Death.” Even Adolf Hitler described him as “the man with the iron heart.”
Heydrich (Figure 1) was the founding head of the Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service, SD), an intelligence organization charged with seeking out and neutralizing resistance to the Nazi Party via arrests, deportations, and murders. He helped organize Kristallnacht, a series of coordinated attacks against Jews throughout Nazi Germany and parts of Austria on the 9th-10th of November 1938, and was also chief of the Reich Security Main Office (German: Reichssicherheitshauptamt, RSHA), including the Gestapo, Kripo, and the SD. Reinhard Heydrich, however, is perhaps best known for chairing the January 1942 Wannsee Conference, the summit which formalized the plans for the “Final Solution to the Jewish question,” that’s to say, the deportation and genocide of all Jews in German-occupied Europe. Simply put, Heydrich was the principal architect of the Holocaust.
Readers might justifiably theorize that members of my extended family were victims of the genocidal policies formulated by this sinister character, and they would be correct. It seems almost obscene to speak the names of my revered ancestors in the same breath as I utter the name of this horrifyingly wicked individual. Yet, given the tenuous and divisive times we are currently living through, I think it’s important to talk about despicable people from the past to provide context for equally vile individuals running around today who espouse similarly annihilative intentions. Such people and policies should not be permitted to spawn in darkness and anonymity.
I can best begin this post by reintroducing readers to Agnes Stieda née Vogel (b. 1927) (Figure 2), my cherished 95-year-old third cousin from Victoria, Canada. Regular followers know that she and her parents have been the subject of several earlier posts, and I refer readers to those publications. Agnes’ parents were Dr. Hans Vogel (1897-1973) and Susanne Vogel née Neisser (1899-1984). (Figure 3) The Nazis used the pejorative term “mischling” to denote persons of mixed “Aryan” and non-Aryan ancestry, such as Agnes, who was half-Jewish. The Nazis applied a lot of pressure on their Aryan population to divorce their Jewish spouses, but in the case of Dr. Vogel he refused their exhortations.
Suse Vogel was a prolific writer. (Figure 4) Memories of her father, Dr. Ernst Neisser, and his final days were the subject of Post 48, while her 1944-1945 wartime diary was the basis for Post 86. Rather than summarize her recollections, I refer subscribers to my previous posts.
“From 1925 until 1932, Dr. Vogel worked as an art historian. He was a volunteer at the Kunstgewerbemuseum in Leipzig; established an art and local history museum in Zeulenroda in the state of Thuringia; was an assistant at the Städtisches Museum in Moritzburg; and was a lecturer for art history and a librarian at the Staatliche Kunstakademie in Kassel; after the Kunstakademie closed in 1932, he worked as a “wissenschaftlicher Hilfsarbeiter,” an unpaid scientific assistant, at the Gemäldegalerie and Landesmuseum in Kassel. In 1934, Dr. Vogel’s continued employment at the museum in Kassel was no longer possible because of his so-called ‘mixed marriage’ to Agnes’s Jewish or ‘non-Aryan’ mother, Susanne Vogel née Neisser. Between 1934 and 1935, while trying in vain to emigrate, he managed to secure a grant to inventory the building content and art collection of the Hohenzollern in Sigmaringen in southwestern Germany. This work caught the attention of Friedrich Heinrich Prinz von Preußen, who was a Prussian officer and member of the House of Hohenzollern and led to a project in 1936 cataloging the Prince’s library and copperplate collection; by 1937 though Dr. Vogel was relegated to a clerical position in the property of the Prince.”
As I further discussed in Post 64, Agnes has fond memories of Friedrich Heinrich Prinz von Preußen (1874-1940) (Figure 5) because he and his relatives protected her family and provided employment for her father during World War II. Friedrich Heinrich studied law at Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, and upon graduation joined the military. (Figure 6) However, in early 1907 he was relieved from the military because of his homosexuality. He was excluded from the Prussian army for this reason, but at the beginning of WWI he was once again allowed to become a soldier, but only at the rank of Gefreiter, basically a Private First Class, with no opportunity for promotion.
In late 1906, Friedrich Heinrich was nominated by Kaiser Wilhelm II as Lord Master of the Order of St. John or the Johanniter Order (German: Johanniterorden) as the successor to his late father, Prinz Albrecht von Preußen (1837-1906) (Figure 7), who’d died earlier that year; the Johanniter Order is the religious order of the House of Hohenzollern, the dynasty to which Friedrich Heinrich belonged. The poorly kept secret of Friedrich’s homosexuality, however, caused him to ask the Kaiser to withdraw his nomination, which he did. His secret eventually became public, so upon the advice of contemporaries, he left Berlin, eventually withdrawing to his estates in Kamenz [today:Kamieniec Ząbkowicki, Poland] (Figure 8) and Seitenberg [today: Stronie Śląskie, Poland] (Figure 9) in Lower Silesia where Dr. Vogel would later work for him.
Until recently, the above was the extent of my knowledge of Friedrich Heinrich’s life. However, as has been happening with increasing frequency of late, I’ve learned more about multiple people I’ve written about over the years, including Prince Friedrich. On the 7th of March, through my blog’s Webmail, I received a fascinating email from a German gentleman living in the United States named Peter Albrecht von Preußen (Figure 10); astonishingly, he explained that Friedrich Heinrich was his “second great uncle” (i.e., great-great-uncle).
Peter stumbled upon Post 64, and obviously interested in the subject, sent me a unique group photo showing Friedrich Heinrich and a handful of high-ranking Nazis, including Reinhard Heydrich, taken in 1936 or 1937 at Prince Friedrich’s estate in Silesia. I will get into a prolonged discussion about this exceptional image in Part II of this post but in Part I, I will discuss some other things Peter mentioned in his various emails that eventually provided the context for the cataloguing work that Dr. Hans Vogel was doing for the von Preußen family at their estates in Silesia.
There are multiple levels on which the current story intersects with topics I have previously discussed, so splitting the current post into two installments makes sense.
As a brief aside, soon after being contacted by Peter Albrecht, I asked him whether any of his relatives had lived in Ratibor, erroneously assuming that the Bruck’s “Prinz von Preußen” Hotel had previously been owned by a member of his House of Hohenzollern. Peter explained that it was not uncommon for the use of the family name, e.g., von Preußen, Prinz von Preußen, Prinz Albrecht Hotel, etc. to be licensed to business owners for a small annual fee. This is an early example of a franchise.
The Weimar Republic, officially named the German Reich, was the historical interval of Germany from the 9th of November 1918 to the 23rd of March 1933, during which Germany was a constitutional federal republic for the first time in its history. At the time, Friedrich Heinrich Prinz von Preußen owed back taxes to the German Reich. To pay them, in 1926 he agreed to rent the government the Prinz-Albrecht-Palais in Berlin, the palace the family once owned in the present-day Kreuzberg district of the city that was destroyed during World War II. This was a Rococo city palace in the historic Friedrichstadt suburb of Berlin built between 1737 and 1739 and acquired by the royal House of Hohenzollern in 1772. (Figures 11-12)
With Hitler’s take over of power in 1933, the arrangement that Prince Friedrich had with the Weimar Republic was annulled and Friedrich Heinrich once again took possession of the Prinz-Albrecht-Palais that year. One of Prince Friedrich’s younger brothers and Peter Albrecht von Preußen’s great-grandfather, Joachim Albrecht von Preußen (1876-1939), moved into the palace as the sole occupant. However, in 1934 the German government, now the National Socialists, again sued Prince Friedrich for the back taxes that he still owed. Friedrich Heinrich, however, had contacts with certain homosexual members of the SS, the Schutzstaffel, the Nazi organization most responsible for the genocidal murder of the estimated 5.5 to 6 million Jews and millions of other victims during the Holocaust. Accordingly, he was able to cut a deal with Reinhard Heydrich to again lease the Palais to the government, and the Nazis’ lawsuit ended. Peter’s great-grandfather moved into an apartment that Peter’s grandfather, Friedrich Karl Erich Albrecht von Preußen (1901-1976), Erich Albrecht for short (Figure 13), rented for him on the same block where he operated his car rental business.
Some further explanation regarding Friedrich Heinrich’s association with the gay community is useful. It is not my intention to reveal salacious details to readers about Prince Friedrich’s homosexual lifestyle, but rather to provide some relevant context which happens to be engrossing. Within the family, Friedrich Heinrich’s nickname was “Uncle Freddy.” He was known in Berlin’s gay community as “Straps Harry,” with “Straps” referring in German to garter belt stockings; as a cross-dresser he had an obsession for wearing these with French high heels.
Following the death of Friedrich Heinrich’s father, Friedrich Wilhelm Nikolaus Albrecht (1837-1906) (Figure 14), Friedrich Heinrich would throw lavish parties at the Prinz-Albert-Palais. Even though these events took place in the throes of the Victorian age which placed severe restrictions on the liberty of certain groups and occurred at a time when homosexuality was outlawed, because Friedrich Heinrich was a member of the House of Hohenzollern, there was nothing the Berlin police could do. Because of his ability and willingness to openly flaunt public norms and engage in what was tantamount to illegal activity, according to Peter Albrecht, Prince Friedrich was a “legend for gay rights,” even within the American gay community and even to this day. (Figure 15)
In the early through mid-1920s, Friedrich Heinrich allowed members of the so-called “Organization Consul” to use his estate in Kamenz for live fire and hand grenade exercises. (Figure 16) Wikipedia describes this organization as “. . . an ultra-nationalist and anti-Semitic terrorist organization that operated in the Weimar Republic from 1920 to 1922. It was formed by members of the disbanded Freikorps group Marine Brigade Ehrhardt and was responsible for political assassinations that had the ultimate goal of destroying the Republic and replacing it with a right-wing dictatorship.” While the group was technically banned by the Weimar Republic in 1922, live fire exercises apparently were not disallowed by the government until around 1926 so continued at Kamenz until then. It was around this time, that many members of the Consul joined the SS/SA and the Nazi Party. Friedrich Heinrich’s connections to the Nazi Party, specifically to its gay members, stem to this period.
Knowing that Friedrich Heinrich had protected Dr. Hans Vogel’s Jewish family, I wondered about Prince Friedrich’s support of an organization that Wikipedia characterizes as “anti-Semitic.” I asked Peter Albrecht about this, and he explained that between roughly 1948 and 1953, the U.S. Government started a full-blown investigation into the history of the Organization Consul. According to Peter, the study “revealed a staunch anti-armistice [i.e., Versailles Treaty] sentiment but wrote or documented very little about anti-Semitic motives within the organization.” It appears the assassinations were targeted at politicians who had signed or helped negotiate the Versailles Treaty, rather than at any members of the Jewish community. Peter stressed there’s no knowledge that Friedrich Heinrich was anti-Semitic, rather the opposite. However, what is clear is that he was a stalwart supporter of any group which opposed the Versailles Treaty.
One other thing is worth mentioning. The Organization Consul consisted of 5,000 or more members, and, likely, those of its members who were committed anti-Semites later joined the various Nazi organizations and were involved in the implementation of the “Final Solution.”
Let me resume the story. There is a relevant entry in Wikipedia under the history of the Prinz-Albrecht-Palais about the period after the palace was leased by the Nazis:
“The last chapter in the Palais’ history began after the Nazi Machtergreifung in 1933. In May, the headquarters of the newly established Gestapo secret police moved into a neighbouring building around the corner on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. When in 1934 the Sicherheitsdienst intelligence agency of the Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler took control over the Gestapo, Sicherheitsdienst chief Reinhard Heydrich moved from Munich to the Berlin Prinz-Albrecht-Palais. In 1935 also the neighbouring buildings at 101 Wilhelmstrasse and 103/104 Wilhelmstrasse were taken over and integrated into the large complex, which in 1939 became the main administrative seat of the SS-Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA).”
As a related aside, in a previous post, Post 131, I discussed the apartment where Curt and Elsa Glaser lived, displayed their extensive art collection, and held their regular art salons. It was located on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse in the same building later confiscated by the Gestapo for use as their headquarters and was one reason the Glasers were evicted from their residence.
After the Nazis leased the Prinz-Albrecht-Palais from Peter’s ancestors, it required the entire household of the Palais to be moved to the family estate in Kamenz. Peter Albrecht’s grandfather (see Figure 13), the most practical member of the family according to Peter, orchestrated the move. It was accomplished between October and December 1934, and involved the use of an armed 10-ton truck to move the valuable items during multiple trips, and several railroad box cars to move the rest of the belongings; on the receiving end, Friedrich Heinrich’s employees from his forestry operations unloaded the box cars. By the beginning of 1935, the complete inventory of two large castles, which had accumulated since approximately 1830, were stored in the basement in Kamenz.
Clearly, Friedrich Heinrich needed someone like Dr. Hans Vogel to assist in inventorying the valuable items and art work after Prince Friedrich’s bookkeepers had tallied the household items and furniture. This was a time-consuming operation since more than 50 tons of artwork needed to be catalogued. Suse Vogel, Dr. Vogel’s wife, indicates her husband stayed in the castle in Seitenberg, but Peter thinks this would have been impractical because the 20-miles between Kamenz and Seitenberg was connected by a cobblestone road that would have taken an hour of travel each way. There would have been ample accommodation for Dr. Vogel in Kamenz since Prince Friedrich had converted 50 of the 100 or so rooms in the castle to apartments with full baths, telephones, radio, electricity, and steam heat.
The circumstances of Dr. Vogel’s living arrangements and ongoing relationship with the von Preußen family are clarified in Suse Vogel’s diary. Friedrich Heinrich had an estate building in Seitenberg [today: Stronie Śląskie, Poland] which was his office and served as the headquarters of his brewery, vineyard, and forestry/agricultural operations. The prince’s primary residence was the castle in Kamenz [today: Kamieniec Ząbkowicki, Poland]. (For reference, Kamenz is approximately 373 miles northeast of Munich, Germany. (Figure 17))
Dr. Vogel had an apartment in the Castle Kamenz until the death of Friedrich Heinrich in November 1940 of prostate cancer. Upon Friedrich Heinrich’s death, his second cousin Prinz Waldemar von Preußen (1889-1945) purchased both Kamenz and Seitenberg from the community of heirs, consisting of Friedrich’s nephew and four nieces, along with 90 percent of the collections. (Figures 18-19) As a matter of interest, Prinz Waldemar was the nephew of the last German Kaiser, Wilhelm II. (Figure 20) In any case, Prince Waldemar relocated Dr. Hans Vogel to the Seitenberg estate following the death of his second cousin while Hans continued to catalog the von Preußen collection.
Suse Vogel provides a precise date in her diary when the von Preußen family and the German community evacuated Kamenz and the surrounding towns, the 11th of April 1945. This corresponds with the same week that the Soviet Red Army overran Breslau [today: Wrocław, Poland] and was closing in on Kamenz. The Vogel family fled to Berlin, while Prince Waldemar and his kin left for Bavaria; the Prince died there in 1945 of a blood disease.
The castle was looted and set ablaze by the arriving Soviet troops and then, what remained, was looted by the newly transferred Polish inhabitants. (Figure 21) Ultimately, the Polish government removed the remaining marble from the castle, and as with the Bruck’s “Prinz von Preußen” Hotel, transferred it to Warsaw to be used for the reconstruction of buildings there. In the case of the marble stripped from the castle in Kamenz, it was used to construct the Congress Hall at the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw. (Figure 22)
The von Preußen mausoleum at Castle Kamenz was desecrated by the newly arriving Poles with the burials disinterred. (Figures 23a-b) Fortunately, an honorable Polish citizen ended things before they got too out of hand and reburied the remains in the forest near the castle, carefully noting their location on a map. Before this concerned citizen died, he gave his map to the President of the local historical society, and in 2017, the City of Kamenz and the Catholic Church of Poland exhumed the graves and held a funeral service at the reconsecrated mausoleum. The European Union has provided funding for the rebuilding of the castle which is being overseen by the City of Kamenz.
This concludes Part I of this post. Part II will involve a discussion of the group photograph sent to me by Peter Albrecht showing his great-great-uncle Friedrich Heinrich von Preußen and the high-ranking Nazis who visited the Castle Kamenz in 1936 or 1937.
Note: In this post, I discuss the fate of the hotel my family owned for three generations in Ratibor [today: Racibórz, Poland]. Largely intact following the cessation of hostilities after WWII, it appears to have been demolished for a combination of reasons, including geopolitical ones and the Soviet Union’s desire to remove historical traces of German connections to Silesia.
Regular readers know I periodically revisit topics or people I’ve talked about to amplify new findings. Since the process of learning rarely follows a linear path, one is often left to reevaluate previous findings or conclusions considering more recently uncovered evidence.
The family establishment in Ratibor [today: Racibórz, Poland], the Bruck’s “Prinz Von Preußen” Hotel, was owned for what I estimate are roughly three generations, from the early 1850s to around the mid-1920s. (Figures 1-2) A historic police file found at the “State Archives in Katowice Branch in Racibórz” indicates the business was sold in around 1926, and subsequently went through a series of owners. (Figure 3)
I thought I had previously laid to rest the issue of why the building does not stand today. It would be reasonable to assume the structure was destroyed during World War II, by Allied bombing of the city prior to its capture or in the waning days of the war when the Soviets encircled and seized the city. However, a post-WWII photo given to me by a curator at the Muzeum w Raciborzu proves the structure was largely intact possibly apart from the roof; the photo, while of high resolution, is taken at too great a distance to ascertain how badly the roof was damaged. (Figure 4)
Realizing the Bruck’s “Prinz Von Preußen” Hotel, which oddly retained its name throughout its existence despite its Jewish origins, outlasted the cataclysmic events of WWII, I sought another explanation for why it might not have survived. This was provided, so I thought, by Mr. Paul Newerla (Figure 5), my friend from Racibórz, a retired lawyer who now researches and writes extensively about the history of Silesia and Ratibor. Paul sent me a copy of a letter he found in the Racibórz Archives dated the 27th of March 1950 from the so-called Racibórz Municipal Board to the Municipal National Council in Racibórz (Figure 6); in essence, the letter states that damaged buildings in the town had been evaluated for their “historic character” and found lacking, so that parts of or all a structure could be dismantled to provide 5,000,000 bricks needed for the reconstruction of Warsaw.
Indicative of the method used to clear burned and destroyed houses and buildings in Racibórz, Paul found another letter dated the 12th of January 1948 sent from the Konservator of the Voivodeship, essentially the province, to the Technical Department of Racibórz’s Municipal Department. (Figure 7) The province was reminding the Municipal Board that the use of explosives to clear these damaged structures in the vicinity of historic edifices such as the Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Racibórz was prohibited. It is safe to assume that explosives were similarly used to take down the Bruck’s Hotel.
Why the city of Racibórz would have agreed to or recommended the dismantling of perfectly functional structures like the former family hotel probably requiring only minor reconstruction at a time when housing was likely in short supply seems to defy logic. Paul jumped to my assistance to explain broader geopolitical factors that apparently dictated why the former family establishment was torn down. I will attempt to explain this to readers.
The address for the Bruck’s “Prinz Von Preußen” Hotel was Oderstraße 16 (Figure 8); the hotel was located on an east-west street that terminated along the west bank of the Oder River [Polish: Odra]. (Figure 9) The historic walled city of Ratibor lay along the west side of the Oder River, as does much of the current central part of Racibórz. The location of the hotel along the west side of the Oder River is significant, as I will demonstrate. Spoiler alert. The destruction of the Bruck’s Hotel may be partially related to the anticipated location of the German-Polish frontier following the end of WWII.
The subject of Poland’s western frontier was brought up by the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin as early as late 1943 at the Tehrān Conference; this was a meeting between U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin held in Tehrān between November 28–December 1, 1943. The chief discussion centered on the opening of a “second front” in western Europe. Stalin agreed to an eastern offensive to coincide with the forthcoming Western Front. On the Polish question, the western Allies and the Soviet Union were at sharp odds. While the Americans were not interested in discussing any border changes during the Tehrān Conference, Roosevelt agreed in principle that Poland’s western border should be extended west to the Oder River.
At the Yalta Conference, during the second of the Big Three conferences between Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin held in February 1945, American and British officials agreed on the basics of Poland’s future borders. In the east, the British agreed to the Curzon line, the proposed demarcation line between the Second Polish Republic and the Soviet Union, two new states emerging after World War I; this line was first proposed in 1919. The British acknowledged that the Americans might push for Lwów, current-day Lviv in western Ukraine, to be included in post-war Poland. It was generally agreed that Poland should receive part of East Prussia, Danzig, the eastern part of Pomerania, and Upper Silesia; for reference Ratibor, present-day Racibórz, was in Upper Silesia.
In terms of this blog post, the following observation in Wikipedia is relevant: “With respect to Poland’s western frontiers, Stalin noted that the Polish Prime Minister in exile, Stanisław Mikołajczyk, had been pleased when Stalin had told him Poland would be granted Stettin/Szczecin and the German territories east of the Western Neisse [River]. Yalta was the first time the Soviets openly declared support for a German-Polish frontier on the Western as opposed to the Eastern Neisse. Churchill objected to the Western Neisse frontier, saying ‘it would be a pity to stuff the Polish goose so full of German food that it got indigestion.’ He added that many Germans would be shocked if such large numbers of Germans were driven out of these areas, to which Stalin responded that ‘many Germans’ had ‘already fled before the Red Army.’” The question of Poland’s western border was ultimately left to be decided at the Potsdam Conference.
Let me digress briefly to give readers a sense of geography regarding the whereabouts of the Western and Eastern Neisse Rivers in relationship to the location of Racibórz. The Neisse River, in Polish Nysa, is two rivers in present-day southwestern Poland. The better-known Nysa Łużycka, or Lusatian Neisse, is the more westerly and longer of the two rivers running 157 miles or 252 km; the Nysa Kłodzka, or Glatzer Leisse or Neisse of the city of Kłodzko (Glatz), is the shorter is 113 miles or 182 km and lies entirely within Poland. Both rivers rise in the Sudeten Mountains, flow northward, and empty into the Oder River. (Figure 10) Near the village of Ratzdorf, the Lusatian Neisse discharges into the Oder River.
Görlitz, located on the more westerly Lusatian Neisse River, is the easternmost town in Germany (easternmost village is Zentendorf), and lies opposite the Polish town of Zgorzelec. Görlitz is slightly less than 200 miles west-northwest of Racibórz (Figure 11), while Kłodzko along the Eastern Neisse is only about 90 miles to the west-northwest of Racibórz. (Figure 12)
As readers can easily discern for themselves, the Soviet proposal to establish Poland’s western frontier along either the Western Neisse or Eastern Neisse would have resulted and did ultimately result in considerably more land being included within Poland. However, at the time of the Yalta Conference, the precise location of Poland’s western border was still an open question. The western Allies accepted in general that the Oder River into which both the eastern and western Neisse rivers emptied would be the western border of Poland in that area. Still in doubt at the time was whether the border would follow the eastern or western Neisse. The western Allies sought to place the border on the eastern Neisse closer to Breslau [today: Wrocław, Poland]. Suggestions of a border on the Bóbr River (Bober) were also supposedly rejected by the Soviets.
At the latitude at which Racibórz is located, the eastern and western Neisse are situated much further to the west of the Oder River. In none of the materials I’ve read have I seen any mention that the Allies were seriously considering establishing the border between Germany and Poland along the Oder at this latitude; as mentioned above, the discussion always revolved around establishing the western frontier along the Neisse rivers or conceivably along the Bober River. (see Figure 10) While this may be true, as far as the local authorities in Racibórz may have been concerned, there may have been sufficient uncertainty as to where the final frontier would be established. Thus, to hedge their bets, the Communist authorities may have decided to dismantle the Bruck’s Hotel and salvage the bricks fearing it would remain on the German side of the border.
A recent citation sent to me by Paul Newerla sheds additional light on how the Bruck’s Hotel was destroyed. On page 69 of a book entitled in Polish “Od Joannitow Do Ratownikow–Czyli Dzieje Strazakow Ziemi Raciborskiej,” translated roughly as “From the Joanites to the rescuers or the history of firefighters of the Racibórz Land,” there is an eyewitness account by a former firefighter who worked for the fire brigade in Racibórz. (Figures 13a-c)
“One day (it was 1945, without further date) the fire brigade was alerted and ordered to the fire of the Hotel Bruck on the corner of Oderstraße and Bollwerkstraße (now Reymonta-Straße). The hotel was in unusually good condition after the war. When the firefighters appeared with their firefighting trailer in front of the burning hotel, they met Russian soldiers equipped with weapons. They refused to have the hotel deleted [sic]. The Polish administration was also powerless. So the beautiful hotel burned.”
It would appear, based on this account, that perhaps an evening of drunken debauchery by occupying Russian soldiers “accidentally” led to the Bruck’s Hotel being set on fire and to the establishment’s ultimate destruction; clearly, the soldiers had no interest in seeing the fire extinguished when the firefighters showed up. Depending on the intensity of the fire, it’s likely the bricks would still have been usable and likely salvaged.
Time and again through history, we have seen foreign invaders attempting to destroy traces of earlier history and culture in places they occupy, to rewrite the past, so to speak. The Nazis sought to eradicate Jewish culture. Currently, we are witnessing in the Ukraine Russians plundering museums in places like Kherson and Mariupol, because, above all, according to Putin’s propaganda, “Ukraine as a country doesn’t exist, it’s part of Russia—so they can grab anything they want.” Thus, like today, it’s probable the orders to wipe out evidence of earlier cultures in Racibórz following WWII were coming from someone high in the Kremlin, likely Stalin himself. Later, during the Communist Era, the headstones in the former Jewish Cemetery in Ratibor were removed and sold off because again, after all, Jews were never considered a part of the cultural fabric of the city.
In closing, let me make a few observations about the frontier between Germany and Poland, and the territorial losses that both suffered because of WWII. The Potsdam Agreement between the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union concluded on the 2nd of August 1945, in anticipation of a final peace treaty, placed the German territories east of the Oder-Neisse line under Polish administration. All Germans remaining in the old and new Poland, it was decided, should be expelled. The Oder-Neisse line marked the border between the former East Germany and Poland from 1950 to 1990. The then-two Communist governments agreed to the border in 1950, while then-West Germany, after a period of refusal, conceded with reservations in 1970. Notwithstanding West Germany’s misgivings about this frontier, with the reunification of Germany, they eventually agreed to it when the German-Polish Border Treaty was signed on the 14th of November 1990.
Ultimately, Poland for its loss to the Soviet Union of 72,000 sq. miles (187,000 sq. km.) of lands east of the Curzon line was compensated with 43,000 sq. miles (112,000 sq. km.) of former German territory. The final borders resulted in Germany’s loss to Poland of most of Silesia, half of Pomerania, the eastern portion of Brandenburg, a small part of Saxony, and part of East Prussia. The northern part of East Prussia, including Königsberg [today: Kaliningrad, Russia], was annexed by the Soviet Union, while Memelland became part of the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic, today Lithuania. (Figure 14)
Thus, while we may wish to believe frontiers and borders are immutable, as we’ve seen in just the past nine years since Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula, they are ever-changing and much more fluid than we would expect.
REFERENCES
Dafoe, Taylor. “Before Retreating from Kherson, Russian Troops Emptied One of Ukraine’s Top Museum of Nearly 15,000 Objects.” Artnet News, 14 Nov. 2022, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/russian-troops-loot-kherson-museum-2209777
Geanous, Jacob. “Russian art curators have reportedly helped loot dozens of Ukraine museums.” New York Post, 4 Feb. 2023, https://flipboard.com/article/russian-art-curators-have-reportedly-helped-loot-dozens-of-ukraine-museums/f-1f12bf14a5%2Fnypost.com
Grutchot, Katarzyna (ed.) “Od Joannitow Do Ratownikow—Czyli Dzieje Strazakow Ziemi Raciborskiej.” (“From the Joanites to the rescuers or the history of firefighters of the Racibórz Land”). Nowiny Publishing House.
Note: In this post, I talk about Dr. Curt Glaser, a prominent Jewish art historian, museum director, art critic, and art collector, who until recently lost his place in the history of art and was almost completely forgotten following the Nazi seizure of power. He is a distant relative by marriage. I discuss the ongoing and challenging efforts by his heirs to obtain a fair and just settlement for the large and outstanding art collection Glaser was forced to sell in 1933, a collection that wound up scattered around the world.
With this post, I embark on a series of articles that may be of broader interest to readers. While the upcoming posts are inspired by circumstances that impacted members of my family, near and distant, they touch on historical events and people that followers may have some familiarity with. That’s to say, some of the topics transcend and relate to affairs and happenings that affected more than just my family.
In Post 97, I introduced readers to Dr. Curt Glaser (1879-1943), a relative by marriage. For context, Dr. Glaser’s second wife was Maria Milch (1901-1981) (Figure 1), my third cousin once removed, so by no means a close relative. Curt and Maria were married on the 30th of May 1933 in Berlin, following the death of Curt’s first wife, Elsa Glaser née Kolker (1878-1932) (Figure 2) at the age of just 54 from a serious illness. In Post 97, I related the sad fate of Curt and Maria’s only child, Eva Renate Glaser (1935-1943), who died of Trisomy-21, the most common form of Down Syndrome.
This post is focused instead on the extensive art collection that Curt amassed with his first wife, its fate following the Nazi ascension to power in 1933, and the ongoing efforts by Dr. Glaser’s heirs to receive just compensation for the forced sale of Curt and Elsa’s accumulation of exceptional artworks.
Curt was born on May 29, 1879, in Leipzig, Germany, the son of the businessman Simon Glaser (1841-1904) and his wife Emma Glaser née Haase (1854-1927). Curt’s parents moved to Berlin shortly after his birth. Curt Glaser received his doctorate in medicine in Munich in 1902, then immediately began a second degree in art history, a topic that had always interested him. He first studied in Freiburg and Munich, then in Berlin where he worked with Heinrich Wölfflin. He wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on Hans Holbein the Elder and received his doctorate in 1907. Glaser, born Jewish, converted to the Protestant faith in around 1911.
In 1903, Curt married his first wife Elsa Kolker from Breslau [today: Wrocław, Poland], the daughter of the industrialist and art collector Hugo Kolker. (Figure 3) Starting around 1910, with the support and in part at the bidding of Glaser’s father-in-law, Curt and Elsa began to build a significant art collection that encompassed, among others, the works of Edvard Munch, Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and Hans Purmann. To give readers an idea of the extent of the art collection Curt and Elsa amassed, according to a footnote in Wikipedia on Curt Glaser, “The German Lost Art Foundation lists 1806 objects that belonged to Glaser and his wife in its database.” It’s not clear, however, from this footnote whether this constitutes an itemized inventory.
Beginning in around 1902, Glaser began to be active as an art critic and became one of the most important critics and commentators in Berlin over the next thirty years. Yet, as a central figure in Berlin’s art scene, he has largely been forgotten in the years since his death.
Glaser started working in 1909 at the Königliches Kupferstichkabinett where, by 1912, he began significantly expanding their collection of modern and contemporary art and promoting it through numerous exhibitions. Curt’s tenure at the Kupferstichkabinett corresponded with the publication of some of his most important scholarly works, including monographs on Lucas Cranach the Elder (1921) and Hans Holbein the Younger (1924).
In 1924, Glaser became the director of Berlin’s Kunstbibliothek (State Art Library), where he was tasked with redefining it “as an art historical research library.” By 1925, Curt and Elsa had moved into a civil service apartment unattached to Curt’s position as director of the Berlin Art Library in which the Glaser’s art collection could be suitably exhibited. Curt’s lofty position and the Glasers’ luxurious apartment where they could host important art salons meant they now belonged to Berlin’s intellectual elite. (Figures 4-7) The Glaser home on Prinz-Albrecht-Straße [today: Niederkirchnerstraße] became a meeting point for art intellectuals.
Curt Glaser’s fate was reflective of that of many Jews living in Germany during the 1930’s. Following the seizure of power by the National Socialists in January 1933, the “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service” was enacted in April 1933. As a result, Glaser was swiftly placed on administrative leave, then fired from his post at the Berlin State Art Library. By May 1933, he was forced from his apartment, a building which came to house the Gestapo headquarters.
May 1933 also corresponds with the period that much of the Glasers’ collection was auctioned in Berlin. The bulk of Glaser’s art collection and library, as well as his home furnishings, were auctioned at the Internationales Kunst- und Auktions-Haus on May 9, 1933, and at the Berlin Buch- und Kunst-Antiquariat Max Perl on May 18-19, 1933. These auctions in 1933 resulted in Glaser’s collection being scattered across the globe.
An auction was believed to be the option that provided the opportunity to obtain the best possible prices given the circumstances at the time. These circumstances included the world economic crisis, the National Socialists’ seizure of power, and an increasing number of auctions of entire collections belonging not only to fleeing Jews but recently impoverished owners as well. There’s no question that many museums and private collectors tried to take advantage of these conditions to make inexpensive purchases of sought-after art collections. It’s clear that Glaser largely dissolved his collection for personal reasons, but also under pressure from the National Socialists. More will be said about this below in connection with the purchase in 1933 by the Kunstmuseum in Basel of almost 200 drawings and graphics from the Glaser collection.
According to a report by the Kunstmuseum in Basel entitled “Curt Glaser Report: III. Summary of the Historical Facts,” “While proceeds from auctions by Jewish consignors were already being transferred to blocked accounts during the first years of the Nazi regime, in Glaser’s case the research assumes that he received the proceeds of the auctions. It cannot be ascertained whether and to what extent Glaser had access to his salary and bank accounts from abroad in 1933 due to the foreign currency legislation of 1931.”
This report also makes the following observation as to the final sale amounts realized at the Glaser auction in Berlin, specifically the Max Perl auction, and its impact on Glaser’s fortune: “The final sale amounts at the auction reflect the trend that important pieces attained high prices while less important works remained below expectations. The two prominent lithographs by Munch that were acquired for the Kunstmuseum Basel were bid up above the appraisal (by 29.2% and 8.3%), while the total price of all 200 works acquired for the museum amounted to 10.1% below the appraised value. Existing research, as well as the Glaser compensation proceeding of 1963, indicates that Glaser lost a considerable portion of his fortune in the auctions.”
A brief digression. Following the death of Curt Glaser’s first wife Elsa in 1932, as a tribute to her life as a wife, collector, and patron of Edvard Munch’s work, Curt donated Munch’s painting “Music on Karl Johan Street (1889)” to the Nationalgalerie in Berlin. This painting was eventually returned to Curt Glaser by the Nationalgalerie, no doubt as a part of the Nazi effort to remove from museums what they deemed as “degenerate” art. This included works of Expressionism, Dadaism, the New Objectivity, Surrealism, Cubism, and Fauvism; more than 21,000 objects were seized by the Nazis, many of which were presented in the exhibition “Degenerate Art,” which traveled throughout Germany. In any case, Glaser took Munch’s painting with him when he later left for Switzerland. No longer able to afford donating it, he sold it to the Kunsthaus Zürich in December 1940 for 12,000 Swiss Francs.
Curt Glaser was permanently dismissed from the civil service on September 27, 1933, Ironically, in January 1934, he was awarded a pension by the Nazi government, although it amounted to only three-quarters of what would have been paid to an Aryan civil servant. Apparently, Glaser’s pension was transferred abroad, although after November 1, 1936, the Reich Flight Tax introduced by the Nazis was deducted.
Following the liquidation of his art collection, Curt left Germany with his future second wife Maria Milch. In June/July of 1933 they stayed briefly in Paris, then moved temporarily to Ascona, Switzerland. Between 1936 and then again between 1938-1939, the Glasers stayed in Florence, Italy with their daughter, who was born in 1935, probably in Ascona. After WWII was declared and Italy became part of the Axis powers, the Glasers emigrated to America in 1941 via Italy and Cuba without their daughter. Curt died in New York in 1943, aged just 64, never having managed to reestablish a professional career either in Switzerland or the United States following his departure from Germany.
As mentioned briefly above, about 200 works in Curt Glaser’s collection were acquired by the Kunstmuseum Basel at the Max Perl auction. In what can only be considered another ironic development, in the summer of 1938, Glaser had applied unsuccessfully for the directorship of the Kunstmuseum in Basel that had acquired so many of his artworks.
Next, I want to contrast the differing approaches taken vis a vis Glaser’s heirs by the Kunstmuseum in Basel and the family of the Norwegian shipowner Thomas Olsen who recently auctioned a masterpiece by Edvard Munch that once belonged to Curt Glaser.
First, however, let me briefly touch on the 1998 Washington Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets. This was a conference hosted by the Department of State and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum at the Department of State from November 30 through December 3, 1998. Forty-four countries as well as numerous international non-governmental organizations with a stake in these issues participated. The attendees adopted eleven basic rules, known as the Washington Principles, that are meant to help resolve open questions relating to Nazi-looted art. Museums are urged to review their collections, fill in gaps in the histories of the works, and identify illegal changes in ownership. As necessary, museums should initiate steps to return and restitute the works in question to the rightful owners or seek another form of “just and fair solution.”
A subsequent conference, the Holocaust Era Assets Conference, took place in Terezín, Czech Republic, the site of the Theresienstadt Ghetto, in June 2009. This resulted in the Terezin Declaration, a non-binding declaration by 47 countries agreeing on measures to right economic wrongs that accompanied the Holocaust against the Jews and other victims of Nazi persecution in Europe. It is neither a treaty nor a legally binding international agreement. As far as the current discussion is concerned, the Terezin Declaration ruled that forced sales fell under the terms of the Washington Conference on Holocaust-era Assets and were thus entitled to a “fair and just solution.” A forced sale would apply to the 1933 auctions of the Glaser collection.
According to the guidelines in the Terezin Declaration, while restitution of the property itself is preferred, the participating countries acknowledged, however, this is not always possible; alternatively, the guidelines suggest possible compensation that is “genuinely fair and adequate.” Since the declaration is not legally binding, it does not define how countries should act on its principles.
In terms of the artworks acquired by the Kunstmuseum in May 1933, the Glaser heirs initially approached the Basel government demanding restitution in 2008. This was roundly rejected by the city government who argued that under civil law the purchase had been lawful and was still legally binding. They further claimed, falsely as it turns out, that they had been unaware the acquisitions came from the Glaser collection. For readers interested in this issue, I refer them to the previously cited “Curt Glaser Report” by the Kunstmuseum.
By November 2017, when the heirs once again approached the Basel government, the political landscape had shifted. German museums had by then paid out millions in restitution, so the Basel government felt pressured to act to protect their reputation. They handed the question over to their Art Commission who sought a face-saving solution.
Applying the Washington Principles the Commission sought a “fair and just” settlement, writing in their report “because it is not primarily a question of legal issues, but of moral issues.” However, fearing being disavowed by the then left-green city government majority, the Commission made it clear that the government’s decision of 2008 was not being called into question, in other words, there was no “right of return” of the artworks. Rather, they argued Glaser had to be regarded as a victim of National Socialism and thus his heirs were entitled to a “fair and just” settlement. Having established the framework for an agreement that “an extrajudicial restitution of the drawings and graphics was excluded,” the Art Commission finessed the situation and negotiated financial compensation with Glaser’s heirs in 2020. This included organizing an exhibition on Glaser as an art collector and art historian and covering the legal fees and expenses for the heirs to travel to Switzerland to attend the exhibition. The exhibition allowed Curt Glaser to be remembered as one of the most important and influential museum directors of his time. While the Basel government eventually came to an amenable resolution, it took decades for Glaser’s heirs to attain satisfaction.
Let me move now to a discussion of a “fair and just” settlement recently reached with the Glaser heirs related to a painting by Edvard Munch that once belonged to Curt Glaser. This has been characterized by the Glaser family’s lawyer, David Rowland, as a case that was handled in an “exemplary” manner.
As a brief aside, I am in touch with Curt Glaser’s wife’s niece, Bettina Basanow née Meyer. (Figure 8) Following publication of Post 105 where I lamented my failed attempt to obtain restitution from the French Ministry of Culture for paintings confiscated by the Nazis in December 1940 from my father’s first cousin, Bettina referred me to David Rowland. David recommended a French-speaking law school classmate of his who in turn put me in touch with the French lawyer who is representing me in my restitution case.
One painting Curt Glaser was forced to sell under duress after the Nazis came to power was “an expressionist masterpiece” by Edvard Munch entitled “Dance on the Beach.” It was part of a pioneering 12-panel work, referred to as “The Reinhardt Frieze.” The work was originally commissioned in the early 20th century by Max Reinhardt, the famed Jewish financier of plays, operas, and concerts, for his avant-garde theater in Berlin. As Southeby’s explained in media materials, this 12-panel work was designed as an “immersive installation” before audience members stepped into the Berlin theater’s upper level. Eventually in 1912 when the theater was being refurbished, the frieze was split into its component parts, and Glaser, who was a friend of Munch, acquired the piece.
After Glaser was forced to sell “Dance on the Beach,” the Norwegian shipowner Thomas Olsen acquired the painting at a sale in Oslo in 1934. Like Glaser, Olsen was a friend and patron of Munch, and after the Nazis invaded Norway in 1940, he hid the painting in a barn. It stayed hidden until the end of the war, and since 1945 had remained in the hands of the Olsen family, the only part of the original Reinhardt-commissioned frieze still in private hands. On March 1st of this year, the painting was auctioned by the Olsen heirs, and sold for $20 million. Prior to its sale, Petter Olsen, the scion of the Olsen family, reached a “fair and just” settlement with the Glaser heirs that avoided litigation.
I’m not privy to the terms of the settlement, although Bettina Basanow, Maria Milch’s niece, tells me there are four groups of Glaser heirs involved in ongoing litigation. A 2021 New York Times noted that “Since 2007, 13 private collectors or institutions — including the Dutch Restitutions Committee, the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation in Berlin, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne and the city of Basel — have concluded that Glaser sold his collection in May 1933 as a result of Nazi persecution, and agreed to either return or pay some compensation to his heirs for art he sold that wound up in their collections.”
The New York Times article goes on to say, however, that “. . .the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston have repeatedly rejected the heirs’ claims for paintings that were sold at the same auctions. They argue there is not enough evidence that Glaser sold under duress.” Similarly, David Rowland is critical of the United Kingdom’s Spoilation Advisory Panel conclusion in 2009 that while “Nazi oppression” was a “predominant reason” for Glaser’s sale of eight drawings in 1933 to the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, the “moral claim was insufficiently strong to warrant the transfer of the drawings” to Glaser’s heirs.
Suffice it to say, it is reasonable to assume that time-consuming and expensive litigation will continue with these and other institutions and individuals until some “fair and just” settlement is reached with Glaser’s heirs on his behalf.
“Glaser, Curt.” Dictionary of Art Historians, https://arthistorians.info/glaserc
Hickley, Catherine. “Did the Nazis Force an Art Sale? The Question Lingers 88 Years Later.” New York Times, 6 Jul. 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/06/arts/design/nazis-art-forced-sales.html
Kunstmuseum Basel. Curt Glaser Report: III. Summary of the Historical Facts. https://www.bing.com/search?q=curt+glaser+report%3A+III.+Summary+of+the+historical+facts&form=ANNTH1&refig=4bbfef8a88ec40c29ae32f9547d03369
Mensch, Christian. “Curt Glaser Case: The squaring of the cultural circle: in the case of Glaser, an agreement has been reached.” BZ Basel, 27 Mar. 2020, https://www.bzbasel.ch/basel/basel-stadt/die-quadratur-des-kulturzirkels-im-fall-glaser-wurde-eine-vereinbarung-getroffen-ld.1414834
Parzinger, Hermann. “Remembrances of Curt Glaser: A cosmopolitan, forced into exile.” Commemorative plaque unveiling: May 9, 10:30 a.m. in the foyer of the Cultural Forum of the Kunstbibliothek. https://rowlandlaw.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Parzinger-Essay-ENG.pdf
Philpot, Robert. “Heirs of Nazi-persecuted collector hail justice in auction of Edvard Munch painting.” Times of Israel, 24 February 2023, https://www.timesofisrael.com/heirs-of-nazi-persecuted-collector-hail-justice-in-auction-of-edvard-munch-painting/
Note: This post tiers off an earlier one where I discussed my failed attempt to obtain compensation for my family from the French Ministry of Culture for artworks confiscated from my father’s first cousin by Nazi authorities at the port of Bordeaux in December 1940. As I explained in Post 105, I’m my father’s cousin’s closest surviving blood relative. The Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), the Nazi’s primary agency of plunder, spearheaded the seizure of artworks in Bordeaux but was also heavily involved in the plunder of libraries and archives throughout the areas the Nazis occupied. Surprisingly, many of the books wound up in Ratibor [today: Racibórz, Poland], the town in Silesia where my father was born.
This story begins in 2014 when I spent 13 weeks in Europe traveling from Poland to Spain exploring places associated with my Jewish family’s diaspora. This included visiting the Stadtmuseum in Spandau, Berlin’s westernmost borough, where the surviving papers of two of my renowned great-aunts, Franziska Bruck (1866-1942) and Elsbeth Bruck (1874-1970), are archived; both have been the subject of recent posts. I photographed all the documents, pictures, and personal effects in the files for later study.
Upon my return to the states, I tried to make sense of what I’d obtained. Obviously, the letters were most useful though some were handwritten in Sütterlinschrift or Kurrentschrift, historical forms of German handwriting that are indecipherable to me as well as most contemporary Germans; fortunately, I know a few older German friends and relatives who learned Sütterlin in school who were able to translate these letters for me.
The most informative letter, however, was a typed one, composed by one of my father’s first cousins, Jeanne “Hansi” Goff née Löwenstein, to her aunt, my great-aunt, Elsbeth Bruck in East Berlin. In this letter written in 1946, Hansi explained that a painting by her recently deceased brother Fédor Löwenstein had posthumously sold for 90,000 French Francs. (Figure 1) Realizing this represented a significant amount of money at the time, I began to suspect Fédor was an accomplished artist. I already knew of his existence from photographs and other letters found among my great-aunt’s papers. (Figure 2) Additionally, knowing Fédor had died in 1946 in Nice, France, I’d previously obtained his certificat de décès, death certificate, when I visited L’Hôtel de Ville in Nice, Nice’s City Hall.
I began my investigation in Nice by contacting the lady I know at L’Hôtel de Ville asking if she could find and send me Fédor’s obituary. This acquaintance did one better and sent me several web links with information about Fédor Löwenstein. Unbeknownst to me during my 13 weeks in Europe the Musée des Beaux-arts in Bordeaux, France had featured three of Fédor’s oil paintings on display between May 15th and August 24th. Naturally, had I known about this special exhibit, I would have detoured there to see the artworks.
The exhibit catalog (livret_lowenstein.pdf (musba-bordeaux.fr) included a lot of detail on Fédor and his paintings, and their history. (Figure 3) The exhibit and the new information confirmed what I already suspected, namely, that Löwenstein had not been an ordinary painter. He was born on the 13th of April 1901 in Munich. He studied at the School of Decorative Arts in Berlin, then at the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden. In 1923, he moved to Paris, France, attracted by the artistic influence of the capital. Between the two world wars, an artistic movement dominated there referred to as École de Paris, the School of Paris, which was not an actual school. It was in this rich artistic context that Löwenstein painted and drew. His early works reflected the influence of cubism, and his subsequent creations evolved towards abstraction, although his personal style was on the border between the two. In 1936, Fédor joined the Salon des Surindépendants, an association of artists who no longer wanted an admission jury and questioned the restrictions imposed by the new regulations of the Salon des Indépendants of 1924.
Fédor Löwenstein is often referred to as a Czechoslovakian painter because his father’s family was from there. The Munich Agreement concluded on the 30th of September 1938, provided for the German annexation of land on the border between Czechoslovakia and Germany called the Sudetenland, where more than three million, mainly ethnic Germans, lived. Undoubtedly the signing of this agreement in the city where Fédor was born and involving the country where his father’s family originated inspired him to paint one of his iconic works, “La Chute,” “The Fall.” As the Bordeaux exhibit catalog notes, “The composition and iconographic vocabulary of the work are reminiscent of the convulsed and screaming silhouettes of Picasso’s Guernica. . .”
When France entered the war on the 3rd of September 1939, Löwenstein, like many artists, left Paris. As a foreigner, he had to hide to escape the exclusion laws. Briefly, some background on this. During the interwar period, France was one of the more liberal countries in welcoming Jews, many of them from eastern Europe. However, in the wake of a significant influx of refugees fleeing Nazi Germany and the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, the French government began to reassess their “open-door” policy. By 1939 the authorities had imposed strict limitations on immigration and set up several internment and detention camps for refugees, such as Gurs and Rivesaltes, in southern France. Various of my German ancestors got caught up in these detentions.
In the case of Fédor, however, he went to Mirmande in the Drôme Valley, more than 400 miles south of Paris, on the advice of a fellow artist, a place he’d previously stayed in 1935 and 1938. At the time, Miramande was a village in ruins that became a refuge for many Parisian artists of foreign origin. All seemed to lead a peaceful existence there except for the difficulties obtaining art supplies. In any case, sometime in May 1940, Fédor left Miramande for Paris to select works of art to be shipped to a gallery in New York City via the port of Bordeaux. These works would eventually be seized there in December 1940 by the Nazi authorities.
Bordeaux is located in Aquitaine, a historical region in southwestern France. Quoting from the exhibit catalog: “Considered a sensitive and strategic coastal area, the Atlantic coastline was governed in a special way by the army, and access to it was forbidden. Very quickly, the military authorities blocked the shipment of all goods then leaving the port of Bordeaux. December 5 [1940] seems to have been the date of an important seizure operation by the ERR (Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg), two sets of goods on their way out were confiscated.” This included Fédor Löwenstein’s consignment of works destined for America.
A little more history. German forces invaded France on May 10, 1940, and by June 22, 1940, France signed an armistice with Germany that went into effect on June 25, 1940. Under the terms of the armistice, Germany annexed the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, and occupied the remainder of northern and western France. However, southern and eastern France remained unoccupied until November 1942. There a French collaborationist government, referred to as the Vichy Regime, governed. However, the suppression of the demarcation line in November 1942 caused the artist colony gathered in Miramande to break up. From then on, it was the French Resistance network that protected the refugees of Miramande, allowing many Jewish painters to escape.
By the fall of 1943, Fédor was already ill and traveled to Paris under a false identity to consult a specialist at the Curie Institute, though his disease was not diagnosed. His mastery of the French language, his support network, and his discretion about his religion were undoubtedly responsible for his survival during the Nazi occupation. Shortly after the war on the 4th of August 1946 he was hospitalized and died a few days later of Hodgkin Lymphoma in Nice.
The 2014 exhibit at the Musée des Beaux-arts de Bordeaux (livret_lowenstein.pdf (musba-bordeaux.fr) was prompted by the rediscovery of three looted works of art, entitled “Landscape (Composition (Paysage)) (Figure 4),” “The Poplars (Les Peupliers),” and “The Trees (Arbres)” painted by Fédor Löwenstein that had been confiscated by the Nazis. As previously mentioned, the three works displayed were part of a consignment that F. Loevenstein, as Fédor signed his works, tried to send to an American gallery in New York. Seized at the port of Bordeaux in December 1940, they were sent to the Jeu de Paume in Paris, to be stored in the so-called “Salle des Martyrs,” “Martyrs Room” (Figure 5), a chamber to which works in a style repudiated by the aesthetics of the Third Reich, were relegated. It was only at the end of 2010 that the connection between these works that were held at the Musée National d’Art Moderne housed at the Centre Pompidou and the Löwenstein seizure at Hanger H in the port of Bordeaux was made.
Researchers Alain Prévet, Thierry Bajou, Edouard Vasseur, along with the curator of the Bordeaux exhibit Mme. Florence Saragoza, about whom more will be said below, identified the paintings. They accomplished this using two negatives preserved in the Archives of the National Museums that showed views of the Salle des Martyrs of the Jeu de Paume. The researchers undertook detailed digitization of these negatives, painting by painting, and reconciled this with data that had been recorded by Rose Valland, then curatorial attaché at the Jeu de Paume. (Figure 6) In the list that Rose Valland had drawn up in March 1942, she listed eleven works—six watercolors being grouped together in one lot—that had been stolen from Fédor Löwenstein. At least two of the artist’s paintings are visible in one of the photographs taken of the Salle des Martyrs.
The Salle des Martyrs of the Jeu de Paume became the central repository of the works of art confiscated in France by the Nazi services, the contents of which were made available to the ERR, the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (the Reichsleiter Rosenberg Taskforce). The ERR was one of the primary Nazi Party organizations dedicated to appropriating cultural property during WWII. It was led by the ideological henchman of the Nazi Party Alfred Rosenberg, from within the NSDAP Office of Foreign Affairs. Between 1940 and 1945, the ERR operated in France, Netherlands, Belgium, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Greece, Italy, and on the territory of the Soviet Union.
The Löwenstein works mentioned by Rose Valland and rediscovered in 2010 had also been catalogued by the ERR agents. They were listed under ERR file numbers Löwenstein 4 (Landscape), Löwenstein 15 (The Poplars), and Löwenstein 19 (The Trees). Following the war, the works were kept at the Musée National d’Art Moderne. The researcher Alain Prévet previously mentioned involved in the identification of the Löwenstein works has shown that the works were inventoried in 1973 as coming from an anonymous donation. The Bordeaux catalog notes the following:
“According to the minutes of the session of the Commission des Musées Nationaux of December 6, 1973, this ‘donation’ was in fact a regularization of artistic goods that had been ‘lying around’ in the Louvre; works that had ‘remained unclaimed, some of them for forty years,’ in a storeroom of the national museum. Because of the lack of knowledge of the real provenance of these works, it was decided to register them as ‘anonymous gifts’. . . works that had been deposited in the Louvre during the Occupation, following the Nazi spoliations, were . . . part of this collection. . .”
As the Bordeaux exhibit catalog notes, Löwenstein’s works, which are conserved to this day at the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou “. . .bear the stigma of their aesthetic condemnation: a large red cross indicating that they were among others destined to be discarded. The files drawn up by the ERR bear the mention vernichtet, ‘destroyed’. . .The curator at the Jeu de Paume, Rose Valland, confirms this fatal destiny on July 20, 1943: ‘Scholz and his team continue to choose from among the paintings in the Louvre’s escrow and stab the paintings they do not want to keep. This is how they destroyed almost all of Masson’s works, all of Dali’s. The paintings in the Löwenstein, Esmont (sic), M[ichel]-G[eorges] Michel collections are almost all shredded (…)’’. . . On July 23, she added: ‘The paintings massacred in the Louvre’s sequestration were brought back to the Jeu de Paume. Five or six hundred were burned under German surveillance in the museum garden from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.. . .’” That Löwenstein’s three paintings escaped destruction is astonishing and is probably due to the fact they were classified as “paintings of lesser importance.”
Contained within the materials on the Löwenstein exhibit was the name of the curator who organized the show, Mme. Florence Saragoza, previously mentioned as one of the people involved in identifying Fédor’s works from the negatives of the Salle des Martyrs.
Intriguingly, also included within the Bordeaux museum’s promotional materials was the following statement in French:
“Si près de soixante-dix ans après la fin du conflit, de nombreux cas de restitution d’objets d’art restent en attente, trois d’entre eux sont désormais sortis de l’ombre et attendant maintenant l’identification des ayants droit de Wilhelm Fédor Löwenstein (1901-1946) pour être remis à leurs propriétaires légitimes.”
Translated :
“While nearly seventy years after the end of the conflict, many cases of art object restitution remain pending, three have now emerged from the shadows and are now awaiting the identification of the rightful owners of Wilhelm Fédor Löwenstein (1901-1946) to be returned to their rightful owners.”
This is a significant “concession.” Oftentimes, heirs of Jews whose works were either confiscated by the Nazis or whose sale was forced at a deeply discounted price and/or that eventually and illicitly wound up in museums spend years litigating their cases against these museums or private owners. The fact that the France Government’s Premier Ministre’s Commission for the Compensation of Victims of Spoliation or “CIVS” acknowledged that it was looking for the rightful heirs of goods taken illegally by the Nazis suggested the process of receiving compensation or acquiring possession could theoretically be short-circuited.
As I explained in detail in Post 105, I was able to establish contact with Mme. Florence Saragoza (Figure 7) who was literally brought to tears to learn that someone from Fédor Löwenstein’s family still exists. Florence, who I hold in the very, very highest esteem helped me file a claim in 2014 with the CIVS for compensation on behalf of my family; this involved requesting compensation for 25 pieces of art seized and/or destroyed.
For orientation, my father and Fédor were first cousins (Figure 8), so I would be Fédor’s first cousin once removed. Being intimately acquainted with my family tree and knowing that neither Fédor nor his two siblings ever had any children, I quickly realized I’m his closest surviving blood relative. Notwithstanding this fact, as I deeply lamented in Post 105, when the CIVS finally rendered their decision in June 2021, they refused to acknowledge I had any rights to compensation for the destruction and confiscation of Fédor’s artworks. Suffice it to say, because France is ruled by the principles of civil law rather than common law, my rights have been supplanted by Fédor’s siblings, who are obviously no longer alive, or by the heirs named in his sibling’s wills. The living heirs are referred to as “universal legatees,” and their rights according to French law supersede my own. That said, there is still some gray area based on which a French lawyer I’ve hired is contesting the decision. Stay tuned for further updates.
Following their determination in 2021, the CIVS notified me that one of Fédor Löwenstein’s painting entitled “Composition” had been shipped to the Jewish Museum of New York for an exhibit entitled “Afterlives: Recovering the Lost Stories of Looted Art,” scheduled to run between August 20, 2021, and January 9, 2022. This was one of the paintings I had filed a claim for with the CIVS. Even though I’d been denied restitution by the French Minister of Culture, I took an avid interest in how the CIVS would handle the process going forward. For this reason, I ordered the exhibition catalog which, during Covid, took many months to arrive.
Tucked into the book was a surprising picture labeled as having been taken in Ratibor [today: Racibórz, Poland]. This is the town where my father and many of his immediate family were born and where the family business, the Bruck’s “Prinz von Preußen” Hotel, operated through three generations. The photo shows crates containing thousands of books. According to the caption, in 1943 the Nazis established a research and sorting operation for plundered libraries in Ratibor. Eventually more than two million books were transported there. The photograph was included in the photo records of the Offenbach Archival Depot. (Figure 9) The Depot was a central collecting point in the American Sector of Germany for books, manuscripts and archival materials looted, confiscated, or taken by the German army or Nazi government from the occupied countries during World War II.
The relocation of the ERR’s Book Control Center (Buchleitstelle) from Berlin to Ratibor in mid-1943 was prompted by the increased Allied bombing of Berlin, and a desire by the Nazis to save the books, at least until they’d had time to sort and save those they could use for propaganda. More on this below.
While I’d previously been unaware how my father’s hometown had been used during the war, Patricia Kennedy Grimstead, an academic from the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, has written extensively on the subject. In a seminal paper entitled “Roads to Ratibor: Library and Archival Plunder by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg” she goes into great detail on her findings. According to Grimstead, the ERR Silesian research center in Ratibor “. . .was the recipient of archives and books the Nazis plundered as part of a vast ideological, political, and cultural policy. Unlike art, archival and library seizures were not for display, prestige, or profit. If they bolstered Hitler’s imperial pretensions or exposed the evils of ‘Bolshevism,’ then by all means they should be sought. . .Specialists catalogued, analyzed, and preserved the materials, treating them not only as the heritage of ‘enemies of the Reich’ but as raw material for propaganda for ‘operational’ use’” Books that did not meet these criteria were burned in spectacular bonfires or sent to pulping factories. (p. 391)
According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s website, in a section on “Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg: A Policy of Plunder,” in January 1940 Hitler informed all offices of the Nazi Part that Alfred Rosenberg, head of the ERR, “. . .should be assisted in assembling a library for the planned new educational and research institute of the Party, the Hohe School, to be located at the Chiemsee in Bavaria. The library would contain 500,000 volumes. . .Preparations for the Hohe School also included other branches within the Reich, such as a ‘Center for Research on the Jewish Question’ in Frankfurt.”
The Jewish Museum exhibit catalog emphasizes this same point: “The segregation of Jews was enforced in a variety of ways. One distinctive strategy was to treat Jewish culture as the subject of historical inquiry, much as one might study a rare but obsolete specimen. Hitler called this an ‘anti-Semitism of reason,’ or ‘scientific anti-Semitism,’ which explicitly identified Jews in racial terms, rather than by religious affiliation. By the late 1930s research centers, institutes, and university departments had been founded throughout Germany and Austria to accommodate this burgeoning field and to inspire looting of works that were to be ‘saved’ expressly for the purpose of spurious academic research. Prominent among these was Alfred Rosenberg’s Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question (IEJ). It housed an estimated five hundred thousand books and manuscripts stolen from synagogues, Masonic temples, and private collections. Key to his mission was to set up a great Nazi university on the Chiemsee, in Bavaria, from the spoils of his plunder, including masterworks of both art and literature that would be instrumental in forming the curriculum.” (p. 54)
In this lengthy post, I reviewed and augmented what I had previously discussed in Post 105 regarding my failed attempt to obtain restitution on behalf of my family for paintings seized by the Nazi’s Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) from my father’s first cousin. In the process, I learned more about this agency’s role in plundering books that wound up in Ratibor where my father was born. Following the capitulation of Ratibor at the end of WWII, many of the books confiscated by the Nazis in Western Europe were later moved by the Soviets to Minsk, capital of Soviet Belorussia. To this day, an estimated half a million of these books have not been returned to their countries of origin and are referred to as “twice plundered” books.
REFERENCES
Afterlives: Recovering the Lost Stories of Looted Art. 20 Aug. 2021-9 Jan. 2022, Jewish Museum, New York.
Alexander, Darsie & Sam Sackeroff. Afterlives: Recovering the Lost Stories of Looted Art. Yale University Press, 2021.
“Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg: A Policy of Plunder.” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, https://www.ushmm.org/information/exhibitions/online-exhibitions/special-focus/offenbach-archival-depot/einsatzstab-reichsleiter-rosenberg-a-policy-of-plunder
Fédor Löwenstein (1901-1946), trois œuvres martyres. 15 May-24 Aug. 2014, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux, Bordeaux.
“France.” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/france
Grimstead, Patricia Kennedy. “Roads to Ratibor: Library and Archival Plunder by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg.” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, vol. 19, no. 3, Winter 2005, pp. 390-458.
Musée des Beaux-arts de Bordeaux. Fédor Löwenstein, destin tragique d’un élève d’André Lhote.
Photographs of the Operations of the Offenbach Archival Depot. United States National Archive, 541611, https://catalog.archives.gov/search-within/541611?availableOnline=true&typeOfMaterials=Photographs%20and%20other%20Graphic%20Materials
Note: In this brief post, I discuss a few findings I made about Michael Bruck’s ancestors since the recent publication of Post 128. Also, based on the context in which some photos sent to me by Michael and his siblings were found, I speculate as to who the individuals might have been. It’s my hope that distant members of Michael’s family, some of whom have trees on ancestry, might stumble upon this post and either confirm or rebut my suppositions.
In Post 128, I discussed the family of an American gentleman named Michael Bruck (Figure 1) whose ancestors came from west of Frankfurt, Germany, and whose German surname originally had an “umlaut” over the “u.” Michael Bruck’s great-uncle, Max Brück (1884-1942) (Figure 2), and Max’s oldest son, Eugen Kurt Brück (1920-1942) (Figure 3), both perished in Auschwitz. Their fates had previously been unknown to Michael and his siblings, although rumors circulated within the family that an unnamed uncle had “disappeared” during the Holocaust. While investigating Michael’s relatives I learned that somehow Max’s wife, Elsa Brück née Neumeyer (1890-1993), and his daughter, Hilda Ruth Nathan née Brück (1925-2018), escaped Nazi Europe and made their way to the United States to live long productive lives. As discussed in Post 128, I confirmed this in a “Geneanet Community Tree Index” I found for Max Brück. (Figure 4)
I have yet to figure out what made Elsa and Hilda’s escape to America possible while Max and Eugen Brück were unable to emigrate. From Elsa Brück’s January 1942 “Declaration of Intention” to become a U.S. citizen (Figure 5), I know she arrived in New York on the 20th of August 1941 aboard the “SS Ciudad de Sevilla” and emigrated from Barcelona, Spain. Incredulously, on this declaration, Elsa reports that her son Eugen was then “residing” in “Camps des Milles,” outside Aix-en-Provence, France. One could hardly refer to Camps des Milles as a residence since it was a temporary detention center for Jews being deported to Drancy, outside Paris, then on to Auschwitz.
Euphemisms aside, knowing that Elsa and Hilda Brück survived, I Googled them. I quickly discovered both were featured on the “Alabama Holocaust Education Center” website. (Figures 6-7) As sought after speakers on the Holocaust, they helped fulfill the Education Center’s mission of “keeping the history and lessons of the Holocaust alive.” Unlike many other German Jews who converted, they remained practicing Jews and were active in the Congregation B’nai Shalom in Huntsville, Alabama. Of particular interest to Michael and me was that Elsa’s personal page on the Education Center’s website included a picture of she and Max (Figure 8); similarly, Hilda’s personal page showed a picture of her later in life. Elsewhere, on a family tree on ancestry I discovered a heartwarming picture of Elsa Brück, also from later in life. (Figure 9)
Michael and his siblings shared other unidentified photos found among their grandfather Arthur Brück’s surviving papers. The only identification on one of the pictures is “father”; he is seated alone in this picture (Figure 10), but in an accompanying image is photographed at his marriage with a woman who is obviously his wife. Knowing Arthur’s family tree from the Community Tree Index, I surmise the photo is of Max and Arthur’s parents, Karl Simon Brück (1844-1927) and Christiane Karoline Brück née Kuhn (1854-1929). (Figure 11) The minimal identification and the context in which these photos were found is what confidently causes me to believe they are Arthur’s parents.
Michael shared another set of photographs. One picture shows a couple (Figure 12), the second the same lady alone. (Figure 13) Again, the context in which these pictures were found, and the estimated age of the photos provides a clue as to who is illustrated.
In Post 128, I discussed a picture-postcard mailed in around 1934 from Munich signed by Max Brück’s wife Elsa and their three children, Eugen (1920-1942), Werner (1922-1936), and Hilda (1925-2018). (Figures 14a-b) The card was addressed to Max Brück’s sister and brother-in-law, Selma Daniel née Brück (1886-1965) and Albert Daniel. The card was mailed to the corset factory in Saarbrücken owned by Albert Daniel. I am reasonably confident the unidentified couple are Selma and Albert Daniel.
In making these tentative identifications, it is not my intention to presumptuously override any thoughts that Michael and his siblings may have as to who is pictured. Rather, it is to provoke any distant family members with further knowledge or ancestral trees posted on ancestry to hopefully stumble on my blog post and come forward to corroborate or refute my speculations.
Note: While continuing my longstanding search for Heinz Ludiwg Berliner, one of my father’s first cousins who is reported to have wound up in Bolivia, I learned that he was merely one of about 20,000 Jews who escaped there from Nazi Europe. I discuss Bolivia’s motivation for allowing so many European Jews into the country when the doors to them in most other countries had been closed.
The Circulo Israelita de Bolivia (Jews of Bolivia (haruth.com ) is the highest synagogue on earth, located at an altitude of more than 12,000 feet in La Paz, Bolivia. The synagogue serves the 500 to 700 Jews in a country where the citizens are predominantly Catholic. It retains copies of various documents and newspaper clippings related to the immigration of Jewish people to Bolivia and the creation of the Jewish communities in La Paz, Cochabamba, and Santa Cruz. I first contacted the Circulo Israelita de Bolivia in 2019 after learning that my father’s first cousin, Heinz Ludwig Berliner, survived the Holocaust by somehow making his way there. (Figure 1) I had hoped they might have evidence of Heinz’s presence in the country, but regrettably not.
After my last contact with the synagogue in January 2020, shortly before the Covid pandemic burst upon the global scene, I set aside my pursuit to track down my father’s first cousin. Thus, it came as a big surprise when the Circulo reached out to me recently with new information. I’d clearly planted a seed during our earlier exchanges. Synagogue staff explained that an anthropologist named Dr. Sandra Gruner-Domić is currently in Bolivia doing research on the history of Jews there, and the topic of Heinz Berliner came up.
It turns out, Dr. Gruner-Domić had found a so-called “Censo De Extranjeros,” a foreigner census form (Figure 2), for a gentleman named Erich Blumenthal Berliner. This document is a mandatory declaration that Bolivia’s Minister of Immigration required be filled out by all foreign immigrants. Obviously, given the identical surname to my ancestor Heinz Berliner caused synagogue staff and Dr. Gruner-Domić to wonder whether there might be any connection between these two Berliners. After briefly getting my hopes up, I quickly realized they are not related in any way I can easily discern.
Still, as I had done and discussed in Post 129 for my unrelated but similarly surnamed individual named Dr. Henrik Brück, interred in “El Cementerio Judio” in Presidencia Roque Sáenz Peña in Chaco Province, Argentina, I searched in ancestry for any evidence of Erich Berliner’s life in Germany. Intriguingly, I found his marriage certificate showing he married a woman a widow or divorcee named Edith Charlotte Rotenstein née Totschek in Berlin in 1934 (Figures 3a-c); this matches the maiden name of Erich Berliner’s wife on his foreigner census form. So, just as I had tracked Dr. Henrik Brück to his place of birth in Alba Iulia, Romania from Argentina, I was similarly able to backtrack from Bolivia Erich Berliner to his place and date of marriage in Berlin. Relevantly, however, neither is related to me.
I exchanged a few emails with Dr. Gruner-Domić incidentally sharing Erich Berliner’s Berlin marriage certificate ruefully remarking this Berliner is unrelated to Heinz. Sandra then sent me a page from the database of individuals buried in the Jewish cemetery in Cochabamba with the names of two other Berliners, Frida and Lothar Berliner, with their specific birth and death dates. (Figure 4) This also allowed me to check their names in ancestry. I was very precisely able to find a birth certificate for an Adolf Lothar Berliner who was born in Berlin on the 11th of October 1883 matching the date of birth from the Cochabamba database. (Figures 5a-b) I also found Lothar’s marriage certificate showing he got married on the 11th of July 1921 in Berlin to a woman named Frieda Anna Pauline Dammann born the 24th of November 1887. (Figures 6a-c) While her forename matches the Berliner buried in Cochabamba and I believe her to be Lothar’s wife, her date of birth is different. What to make of this is unclear.
In trying to find a photo of Sandra to include in this post (Figure 7), I learned much more about how Jews found refuge in Bolivia during the Nazi era. I’ll briefly review the historical context for this based on a Webinar Sandra delivered at the JDC Archives in May 2022: “Sandra Gruner-Domić Lectures on Bolivia, a Forgotten Refuge During the Holocaust: Jewish Immigration 1937-1941 | JDC Archives” This is a topic of potentially much greater interest to readers than my search for Heinz Berliner, although it fits well into trying to better understand how he wound up in Bolivia.
Dr. Gruner-Domić is a migration scholar and is on a Fulbright Scholarship to Bolivia for the 2022-2023 academic year. Recently, she has been examining the immigration of Jewish refugees in Bolivia during the Holocaust, including the role played by a Moritz Hochschild, a Jewish entrepreneur, and the second-wealthiest man in Bolivia at the time.
The immigration of Jewish refugees to Bolivia is a lesser-known chapter of the Holocaust. Amazingly, approximately 20,000 Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Europe arrived in Bolivia between 1937 and 1941, at a time when other Latin American countries had closed their doors. Bolivia was among the 32 nations who attended the Évian Conference in July 1938 at Évian-les-Bains, France, to address the problem of German and Austrian Jewish refugees wishing to flee persecution by Nazi Germany. The conference was deemed a failure because aside from the Dominican Republic, delegations from the participating nations failed to come to any agreement about accepting the Jewish refugees fleeing the Third Reich. At the Évian Conference Bolivia also refused to accept any Jewish refugees.
However, a month after the conference Bolivia notified the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees of their willingness to begin accepting Jewish refugees. So, along with Shanghai and the Dominican Republic, Bolivia was the last country in the world in the lead up to WWII still issuing visas to Jews trying to flee Nazi persecution. Regular readers will recall that in Post 122, I talked about how another one of my relatives, Herta Brauer, escaped to the Dominican Republic.
As just mentioned, Bolivia issued 20,000 visas to Jewish refugees between 1937 and 1941. Let’s briefly examine Bolivia’s motivation for deciding to do so.
Between 1932 and 1935, Bolivia and Paraguay fought the Chaco War over control of the northern part of the Gran Chaco region, known in Spanish as Chaco Boreal, which was thought to be rich in oil. (Figure 8) The Chaco War was the bloodiest interstate military conflict fought in South America during the 20th century and was fought between two of the continent’s poorest countries, both of whom had lost territory to neighbors during 19th century wars. Bolivia lost its Pacific coast to Chile during the 1879 War of the Pacific, while Paraguay lost almost half of its territory to Brazil and Argentina in the Paraguayan War of 1864 to 1870. As a result both countries wound up landlocked. Although the 600,000 km2 of the Gran Chaco region was sparsely populated, control of the Paraguay River running through it was especially important to Bolivia because it would have provided access to the Atlantic Ocean.
In any case, because of the war, Bolivia lost almost 60,000 people, or roughly 2 percent of its population; in addition, Paraguay captured around 10,000 Bolivian civilians, many of whom decided to stay in Paraguay after the war. Clearly, Bolivia was hemorrhaging people. Following the war, Bolivia was trying to counter its population loss as well as stem further losses by people seeking better economic opportunities in surrounding countries.
After the Chaco War, Bolivia was at an important historical crossroad amidst a nationalist resurgence. Immigration was one step in the country’s transformation, the goals of which were to modernize and repopulate the country, as well as colonize the eastern region of the country with the aim of expanding agricultural development there. Beginning in January 1937, President José David Toro Ruilova once again allowed the free entry of foreigners into the country that had been suspended during the Chaco War. Shortly thereafter Jews began to arrive in Bolivia.
The year 1937 was a turning point for Jews in Europe, with a massive exodus beginning in 1938, and the years 1938 and 1939 being characterized as the “Panic Migration Years.” The involvement of Moritz (Mauricio) Hochschild, a Jew who’d emigrated to Bolivia during the 1920’s, played a part in allowing Jews from Nazi Europe to enter the country. As Bolivia’s second wealthiest man and a leading mining industry businessman, he became an economic advisor to President Toro; the two of them found commonality and their personal relationship played a role in convincing Bolivia to allow Jewish migration. According to Dr. Gruner-Domić, the refugees arriving from Europe were viewed primarily as Europeans and secondly as Jews.
The first concrete measure taken by the Bolivian government was an agreement it signed in January 1937 with the Polish government to allow the resettlement of 250 Jewish families; an agreement was also signed with then-Czechoslovakia. In a few instances, even Jews who’d been incarcerated in concentration camps were released if they’d been lucky enough to obtain a Bolivian visa.
Prior to the mass migration of Jews into Bolivia, which peaked in 1939, there were only about 200 Jews in the entire country. It’s reported that on the 22nd of February 1939 alone, more than 800 Jews arrived. The arrival of this many Jews at once strained the country’s infrastructure, so a decision was made to limit the number of refugees to 250 a month, though it’s unclear this limit was ever implemented.
The path by which most European Jews who’d secured a Bolivian visa came was via boat leaving from Hamburg, Germany or Milano, Italy, traveling through the Panama Canal, landing in Arica, Chile (Figure 9), then taking the train to La Paz; others came via train from Argentina or Brazil. Most Jews who found refuge in Bolivia in the late 1930’s and 1940’s did not stay, so today’s Jewish population is estimated at between 500 and 700. Following the war, those who had families elsewhere left. Judging from the relatively small number of Jews in Bolivia today, I reckon that Heinz Berliner was among those who decamped to a yet unknown country.
Note: In this post I talk about the failed search for my first cousin twice removed Dr. Erich Bruck whom I have tantalizing evidence wound up in the Argentinian part of Tierra del Fuego. I discuss the proof I obtained in confirming that a similarly named Dr. Enrik Bruck who is buried in Presidencia Roque Sáenz Peña, a town more than 2,300 miles away from Tierra del Fuego, is not my distant cousin.
Dr. Erich Bruck is my first cousin twice removed born in Ratibor, Germany [today: Racibórz, Poland], same town as my father Dr. Otto Bruck, on the 31st of August 1865. I have evidence of his birth from the Family History Library’s Microfilm Roll 1184449 for Jewish births in Ratibor. (Figure 1) He was one of 14 or 15 children born to my great-granduncle- and -grandaunt, Oskar Bruck (1831-1892) and Mathilde Bruck née Preiss. At the tail end of Post 113, I included a table with the available vital statistics on these children. Astonishingly, to date, I’ve been unable to find a single living descendant for any of these offspring.
Unlike some of his siblings who perished in the Holocaust, Erich is believed to have survived. As briefly mentioned in Post 113, a tantalizing clue as to Erich’s fate was found in the “Pinkus Family Collection 1500s-1994, 1725-1994” archived at the Leo Baeck Institute. On the Oskar Bruck-Mathilde Preiss family page, names and some vital data on 12 of their 14 or 15 “kinder,” children, can be found, including information on Dr. Erich Bruck. (Figure 2) It confirms he was born on the 31st of August 1865 in Ratibor, was a doctor in Argentina, and emigrated to “Feuerlandinseln,” Tierra del Fuego Islands in the 19th century. Beyond the fact this is an unusual place for an individual to have emigrated to, this is the closest I’ve been to finding a Jewish ancestor in Antarctica, still more than 2,300 miles away, the only continent where my family’s diaspora has not yet taken me.
Some brief geography. Tierra del Fuego, Spanish for “Land of the Fire,” is an archipelago off the southernmost tip of the South American mainland, across the Strait of Magellan. The archipelago consists of the main island, Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego, with an area of 18,572 sq. mi. (48,100 km2), and a group of many islands, including Cape Horn and Diego Ramírez Islands. Tierra del Fuego is divided between Chile and Argentina, with the latter controlling the eastern half of the main island and the former the western half plus the islands south of Beagle Channel and the southernmost islands. Ushuaia is the capital of Tierra del Fuego, with a population of nearly 80,000 and claims the title of the world’s southernmost city. The family page from the Pinkus Family Collection makes it clear that Dr. Erich Bruck was a physician in Argentina, not in Chile.
My quest to discover what may have happened to Dr. Erich Bruck has been ongoing for several years interrupted by investigations into other ancestors. Obviously aware of an Argentinian connection, in 2021 I contacted the “Asociación de Genealogía Judía de Argentina (AGJA),” the Jewish Genealogical Society of Argentina, asking whether they or another genealogical association or group could provide any information about my distant cousin. I received a prompt response from a Ms. Estela Rappaportt (Figure 3) referring me to a Facebook group located in the Ushuaia community of Tierra del Fuego. I contacted them but never received a reply.
More intriguingly, Estela mentioned there is a tomb in the province of Chaco in Argentina, in the city of Presidencia Roque Sáenz Peña, of an Enrik Bruck, who died there on 31st of May 1931. Given that Erich Bruck was born in 1865, the age of this individual at death at least seemed like a plausible match. Moreover, I thought his forename might well have been changed to Enrik in Spanish. Ignoring the fact that Tierra del Fuego and Sáenz Peña in Chaco Province are more than 2,300 miles apart (Figure 4), I became obsessed with the notion that my distant relative is interred there. How Erich Bruck might have wound up in Sáenz Peña after living in Tierra del Fuego was an afterthought.
Presidencia Roque Sáenz Peña in Chaco Province is under 700 miles from Buenos Aires (Figure 5), and has a population of 83,000 people, mostly descendants of settlers from Spain, Italy, Russia, Poland, then-Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Ukraine, as well as Jewish families from elsewhere in Argentina. Sáenz Peña was founded in 1912 and has developed as a commercial and industrial center serving the surrounding agricultural region of the Gran Chaco plains. In 1945, the Jewish population numbered around 200 families, though today fewer than ten Jewish families remain.
With Jews having lived in and around Sáenz Peña, it stands to reason there would be a Jewish cemetery. And, in fact, I learned about Saenz Peña’s “El Cementerio Judio,” a Jewish cemetery dating from 1920 with 120 graves, formerly called “Presidencia Roque Sáenz Peña Cementerio.” The information about this Jewish cemetery was derived from the International Jewish Cemetery Project, which is a volunteer, cooperative effort of the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies and JewishGen, Inc.’s “JewishGen Online Worldwide Burial Registry” or “JOWBR” which seeks to identify Jewish burial sites and interments throughout the world.
I tried contacting the Sáenz Peña’s Ayuntamiento, the city’s town hall, but never received a response. I tried working through a friend at the Jewish Genealogical Society of Los Angeles and her Rabbi to establish a local contact but this too failed. I even tried having South American relatives call the Jewish cemetery’s caretaker, all to no avail. Because information on the International Jewish Cemetery Project regarding gaining entry to the cemetery implied the process was rather informal (Figure 6), I set the issue aside for future consideration. Nonetheless, I remained stubbornly convinced that my ancestor was interred in the Jewish cemetery in Saenz Peña and had eventually intended to go on a letter-writing campaign to confirm this.
Let me briefly digress. Like most avid genealogists, I have a “bin” of unresolved genealogical questions, quests if you will. In Post 62 and Post 62, Postscript, I discussed my father’s first cousin, Heinz Ludwig Berliner, who, like Erich Bruck and my father, was born in Ratibor; “Berliner,” incidentally, was my paternal grandmother’s maiden name. Hearsay from Heinz’s branch of the family suggests he committed suicide in 1948, place unknown.
Heinz’s last known location is in Bolivia. A brief reference in MyHeritage stated he wound up there. In 2019, I contacted the Jewish synagogue in La Paz, the Circulo Israelita de Bolivia, hoping they might have immigration or other records on Heinz, which they do not. At the time, I mistakenly concluded the theater where Heinz had performed under his stage name “Enry Berloc,” the “Teatro Municipal,” was in Buenos Aires rather than in La Paz (Figure 7); as a result the Circulo referred me to the AMIA in Argentina, the central institution of the country’s Jewish community. AMIA, in turn, directed me to the “Asociación de Genealogía Judía de Argentina (AGJA),” which is how I encountered Ms. Rappaportt.
My contact with the Circulo Israelita de Bolivia was not for naught, however, as I will explain in another postscript to Post 62.
Getting back on track. A recent email from the Circulo Israelita de Bolivia reminded me I had never connected with Saenz Peña’s El Cementerio Judio, so I decided to again contact Ms. Rappaportt from AGJA asking her who I should write to in Saenz Peña about Enrik Bruck. Estela sent me the name and email of the President of the Kehilá or village of Sáenz Peña, but then almost immediately sent me a photo of Enrik Bruck’s headstone. (Figure 8) To say I was flabbergasted would be an understatement given that I’d been looking for such information for years.
While I never asked Estela where she obtained the photo, I eventually located it on my own on the JOWBR website. I have literally looked at hundreds of burial registry records on JOWBR’s website (Figures 9a-b), and this is the first time I’ve ever seen one with a picture of the individual’s gravestone, so I consider myself fortunate to have obtained this image without going down more rabbit trails.
At first glance, Enrik’s tombstone appears unreadable but enlarging and zeroing in on the text I realized that a lot of information was decipherable. (Figure 10)
EL 16 DE DICIEMBRE xxxx (the 16th of December xxxx)
FALLECIO EL 31 DE Mxxxx (passed away the 31st of xxx (May according to JewishGen))
DE MUERTE PE (of death xx)
Armed with what seemed like rather scant details, I first turned to Google to learn where “Alba Julia” is located. I discovered it is in Transylvania, the historical and cultural region in Central-Eastern Europe, that now encompasses central Romania. Alba Iulia, as it is called, was the seat of residence of the princes of Transylvania in the 16th and 17th centuries, and for several centuries was administered by Hungary. In the 17th century there were about 100 Jews living in Alba Iulia, and by 1930, 1,558 out of 12,282 people living there were Jewish. By 1941, all Jewish community property had been confiscated, and the men seized for forced labor. The Jewish population peaked in 1947 at over 2,000, but by the beginning of the 21st century, the Jewish population in Alba Iulia, as well as in the rest of Romania, was very small.
Next, I searched in ancestry for Enrik Bruck in Alba Iulia, and surprisingly found two births registers listing a Henrik Brück, with an umlaut over the “u,” born there on the 16th of December 1888. (Figures 11a-c) Since the place and day of birth match the information on the headstone located in Saenz Peña, I am certain the individual interred there is Dr. Henrik Brück.
While disappointed so far not to have tracked down my distant cousin Dr. Erich Bruck in Argentina, I am now certain he is not interred in Sáenz Peña. Ms. Rappaportt, who has relatives in Ushuaia, the capital of Tierra del Fuego, tells me there is no Jewish cemetery there. An online search of the cemetery records in Ushuaia and Río Grande, Tierra del Fuego’s two largest cities, show no Brucks interred there. So, while the question of where Erich Bruck wound up remains unresolved, I was finally able to establish the identity and origin of the Brück who lies in Sáenz Peña.
