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: This post is inspired by a Polish gentleman who sent me “colorized” photos of members of the Pauly branch of my extended family using an image I included in Post 45.
Given the emotionally taxing subject matter of some of my family history posts, occasionally I like to intersperse stories that are more whimsical or lighthearted in nature. The current post is one such example. It was inspired by a Mr. Marek Bieńkowski from Włocławek, Poland. This gentleman is not subscribed to my Blog, nor, to the best of my knowledge, are we in any way related. Taking a photo inserted in Post 45 showing multiple members of the Pauly branch of my family, Mr. Bieńkowski “colorized” images of 19 of the 31 people in this picture. I estimate the picture was taken in the early 1890’s in Posen, Prussia [Poznan, Poland], and, to date, I’ve been able to identify 23 of the 31 subjects using an incomplete caption on the back of the photo and comparing the individual images to others where the people are identified by name. The original photo with the heads of the figures circled and numbered is included here (Figure 1), and the table below summarizes the vital data of the known people.
** Numbers in the left-hand column correspond with the numbered, circled heads in Figure 1. Names in red refer to people whose images have been colorized.
Mr. Bieńkowski seemingly used the automated feature of an image-editing program to smooth and sharpen the individual photos. All subjects have blue eyes but given that only 8 to 10 percent of the world’s population have eyes this color, clearly this is unrealistic. Some of the colorized images are remarkably real and look like their originals, others are eerie since the proportions are imprecise and imbue the subjects with a wax-museum quality.
As mentioned, based on the estimated age of the younger subjects and their known dates of birth, I gauge the original picture was taken in the early 1890’s. While color photography is almost as old as black-and-white, the process did not become widely available until much later, certainly after the Lippmann color process was unveiled in 1891. The only color photo I have of any of the subjects is of my great-aunt Charlotte Mockrauer née Bruck when she turned 100 in 1965 and her eyes appear to be brown. (Figure 21) Additionally, I have color paintings of two of the 31 subjects in the original photograph, specifically, Julie Neisser née Sabersky (Figure 22) and Wilhelm Pauly (Figure 23). In these paintings, Julie Sabersky clearly has brown eyes, and a much older Wilhelm Pauly has blue eyes.
Regular readers know how I like making connections between seemingly unrelated things. In the previous post, Post 86, Suse Vogel née Neisser’s 1947 letter describing the last days of her father and aunt’s lives in October 1942 in Berlin was sent to her first cousin, Liselotte Dieckmann née Neisser in St. Louis. (Figure 24) Liselotte was an extremely accomplished woman and a Professor of German at St. Louis University. She wrote a short biography in English of her life, which I obtained a copy of from Nicki Stieda, Suse’s Vogel’s granddaughter. On the opening page, Liselotte discussed her grandmother without naming her. Being familiar with the Neisser family tree, I quickly ascertained she was discussing Julie Neisser née Sabersky, who is seated alongside one of her sons, Ernst Neisser, in Figure 1. Liselotte’s description of her grandmother, quoted below, comports with my preconceived notion of the strong matriarch I imagine she was:
“My Father Max Neisser, born in 1869, professor of bacteriology at the University of Frankfurt, came from Silesia which was then a Prussian province and is now part of Poland. By the time I was born in 1902, his mother [editor’s note: Julie Neisser née Sabersky], widowed for many years, lived with her brother [editor’s note: Heinrich Sabersky] whom she had well-tamed in Berlin where we visited her often. She was a fine lady, with beautiful blue eyes, who sat straight as a ruler at the edge of her chair. She was a woman of great vitality—no doubt, almost to her end in 1926, the ruling member of her family. My cousins and I owe to her a sense of family closeness rarely found among cousins. Her sons and one daughter had eight children together, with whom I am still in close touch, insofar as they are still alive.”
Julie’s regal bearing caught my attention well before I knew who she was. Interestingly, Julie’s brother, Heinrich Sabersky, mentioned in the paragraph above who is also in the group picture, similarly caught my attention because of his warm demeanor. Among my third cousin Agnes Stieda née Vogel’s personal photographs is a different one with Julie and Heinrich Sabersky seated amidst a group of ten people; this photo includes three Pauly sisters, Margarethe, Helene and Edith, all three of whom are in the larger group picture that is the subject of this post, two of whose photos are also colorized. (Figures 25-26)
To my mind, the major take away of receiving the unsolicited colorized images of people from 130 years ago is that it personalizes them and makes them seem less abstract. This comports with one of the goals of my Blog to make my ancestors come to life in a tangible way, while conceding it may not be entirely realistic.
“I am terribly afraid, but nevertheless I will go with them. Possibly God actually needs me now for the first time in my life.”—an elderly Jewish lady on the eve of her deportation to a concentration camp
(The above was said to Martin Niemöller (1892-1984), a German theologian and Lutheran Pastor, one of the founders of the Confessing Church, which opposed the Nazification of German Protestant churches. For his opposition to the Nazis’ state control of the churches, Niemöller was imprisoned in Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps from 1938 to 1945. He is best known for his opposition to the Nazi regime during the late 1930s and for his widely quoted poem “First they came …” The poem has many different versions, one of which begins “First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Communist,” and concludes, “Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”)
Note: In this post I discuss first-hand wartime accounts written by my distant cousin Susanne “Suse” Vogel née Neisser (Figure 1), mother of my third cousin Agnes Stieda née Vogel, that I unveiled in earlier chronicles. I detail how I was able to get these German narratives transcribed and translated, and further elaborate on some of Suse’s tragic narrative.
Following publication of Post 64 on Dr. Hans Martin Erasmus Vogel (1897-1973) (Figure 2), my third cousin Agnes Stieda née Vogel’s father, my friend Ms. Madeleine Isenberg, affiliated with the Jewish Genealogical Society of Los Angeles, forwarded the post to Ms. Julie Drinnenberg from Hofgeismar, Germany. Julie is the educational director of the Jewish department at the museum there which, as it so happens, is 45 minutes away from Kassel, Germany, where Dr. Vogel was the director of the art museum from 1946 to 1961. Prior to reading my article, Julie was unaware of Dr. Vogel’s importance to the Kasseler Museumlandschaft and conceded in an email that his contributions to the museum have not been appropriately acknowledged and promised to research this.
This was the beginning of a very lively and productive email exchange. At the time Julie first contacted me in October 2019, my wife and I had just returned from a cruise to Alaska that originated in Vancouver, Canada, where we had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Vogel’s daughter and granddaughter, Agnes (Figure 3) and Nicki Stieda. (Figure 4) Agnes’s personal papers and family photographs are in Nicki’s possession, who organized and graciously allowed me to peruse and take pictures of all of them. Among Agnes’s family documents is her mother, Suse Vogel née Neisser’s diary (Figure 5), which I would later learn was written roughly between the start of 1944 and April 20, 1945. The handwriting is crabbed in German, and for this reason I only photographed the first few pages of what amounts to perhaps 35 full-length sheets of paper, never anticipating I could get it transcribed and translated.
Prior to connecting with Julie Drinnenberg, and ever meeting Agnes and Nicki Stieda, I had stumbled upon a 34-page letter archived in the “John Henry Richter Collection” at the Leo Baeck Institute written by Agnes’s mother. This letter was written as a tribute to her father, Dr. Ernst Neisser, who committed suicide in 1942 after being told by the Nazis to report to an “old age transport,” a euphemism for being deported to a concentration camp, tantamount to being murdered. The letter, typed in German on the 28th of March 1947 (Figures 6a-b), was sent from Kassel, Germany to Suse Vogel’s first cousin in St. Louis, Missouri, Liselotte “Lilo” Dieckmann née Neisser. (Figure 7)
Fast forward. After establishing contact with Julie Drinnenberg, I mentioned Suse Vogel’s 1947 letter, telling her she might be interested in it to obtain more background on Dr. Vogel’s family. It was at this moment that Julie offered to translate the letter into English for me, an offer I immediately and unabashedly accepted. Below, I will quote some of the more poignant passages from this letter, so readers can get a sense of what a dreadful and horrific time people of Jewish background experienced during WWII.
As an afterthought, after Julie had translated Suse Vogel’s letter, I mentioned I had photographed the first few pages of her diary and sent her the images. Julie passed them along to one of her colleagues, Gabriele Hafermaas, who astonishingly reported she could decipher much of the crabbed handwriting. Julie again offered to help, by having her workmate transcribe Suse’s journal. I forwarded this proposal to Agnes and Nicki, who accepted it and soon sent Julie a PDF of the entire memoir. Gabriele provided a remarkable transcription. Inevitably, some words and sentences in the diary are illegible. Often, when specific people were mentioned, Suse used nicknames or letter abbreviations in the event her diary fell into the wrong hands; thus, not all people are identified by name. Using an online application, entitled “DeepL,” I translated the text; this sometimes resulted in awkward sentences that were nonetheless generally comprehendible. I highlight some passages below having taken some liberties in rewording phrases to capture what I think Suse may have been trying to say, while fully conceding I may be off the mark.
While Suse Vogel’s 1947 letter to her first cousin postdates her 1944-1945 diary, chronologically, it deals with events that took place in September-October 1942, so I begin with the more recent document.
COMMENTS ON SECTION BELOW: Suse Vogel’s parents were Dr. Ernst Neisser (1863-1942) and Margarethe Neisser née Pauly (1876-1941). (Figure 8) Margarethe was institutionalized in a sanatorium for the last few years of her life and committed suicide there in 1941. Prior to her father’s suicide in 1942, Suse Vogel was attempting to obtain exit visas for her father and aunt, ergo the reference to Sweden.
“My father who would never give up in his life, whose whole character was insistence and steadfastness, who loathed any kind of running away, who perceived life anyhow as good as he was good himself – he did not throw it away, although he was consumed by the longing for my mother. But the old doctor who of course assessed his fast progressing heart disease, knew that should he be ripped out of tender and loving care, he would not survive in the hangmen’s hands. He saw clearly that it would not only be an agonizing and awkward death for himself but would be also for me a poisoned memory forever if I had been forced to let him die in the hands of those murderers. Indeed, I accepted it, as I was under no illusion. Also, I had far too much respect for his decision. Still, deep inside, I did not accept anything at all, did not think seriously of such a terrible option. I believed in Sweden, his rescue, and his recovery there. Discussions about suicide—what a horrible word for the forced act in desperate misery—had been the daily fare in those times.”
_________________________________________
COMMENTS ON SECTION BELOW: “Aunt Lise” was Dr. Ernst Neisser’s cousin, although to date I have been unable to determine how many degrees of separation existed between them. At the time of their suicide, they resided together. Dr. Ernst Neisser had multiple nicknames, including “Ernstle.”
“In a confidential talk Aunt Lise had advised me of her resolution. ‘I am going with Ernstle,’ she told me in a determined and conclusive tone. And, almost off-handedly, she had added, ‘I should like to be buried in German soil. Berlin is my home.’ And once Aunt Lise who always had disliked heroics told me unexpectedly: ‘Whatever will happen, you can always say to yourself one thing, that you did everything possible that a human being can do for another, remember that!’ At that moment I was almost embarrassed by those exaggerated words—but how much I was comforted by these loving words later, when second thoughts and misgivings, which never abandons survivors, tortured me.”
COMMENTS ON SECTION BELOW: Dr. Ernst Neisser and his cousin Luise “Lise” Neisser lived together at Eichenallee 25 in the Charlottenburg District of Berlin. (Figure 9) Suse and her husband Hans Vogel lived in the Berlin suburb of Potsdam. Two other nicknames for Dr. Ernst Neisser were “Väterchen,” affectionate term for father, and “Bärchen,” or “little bear.” The “honorable privy councilor” referred to below was a principled lawyer, Mr. Karl von Lewinsky (1872-1951), who worked tirelessly on behalf of his Jewish clients to help them obtain exit visas to leave Germany before and during WWII. As followers can read, Ernst and Lise Neisser were ordered to report for deportation at 8 a.m. on the 1st of October 1942, and both likely attempted suicide in the early morning hours on that day. “Mundi” is Ernst Neisser’s granddaughter (Figure 10) and Suse Vogel’s daughter, Agnes Stieda née Vogel, my 93-year old third cousin.
Suse alludes to what can only be referred to as “mob or herd mentality,” when otherwise “rational” Germans spotted Jews on the street during Nazi rallies and heaped abuse or worse on them.
“I told myself, I would go home [the 30th of September 1942] and only the following day go to Eichenallee. The unrest surely was an understandable reaction of my nerves. But I heard this voice – not any voice, but ‘that’ voice, the mysterious companion of my life. I heard it very rarely, but if I heard it, it was distinct, irresistible—’I had to obey!’ I jumped off the tram and went to Eichenallee.
Despite the inner instruction I was in a good mood, full of hope, like I hadn’t been for a long time. Now everything had to go well. The honorable privy councilor surely was the sign from heaven that everything would go well. My beloved Väterchen would be happy, too. Oh, I was looking forward to finding him working at his writing table, to seeing his meaningful dark eyes shining towards me. The usual thoughts of worries touched me only hazily. . . I walked through the cellar entrance, passed the flat of the friendly caretaker-family, and went upstairs to the flat. No need to ring the bell, the good deaf aunt never heard it anyway. Strange, she was not in the kitchen—though it was time for the evening meal. And, there was no light in the living room—though it was already dusk.
I knocked at the door and entered. In the room was silence, the two old ones were sitting next to the window, their silver-white heads leaned towards each other. My heart grew frozen—something had happened. ‘What happened?’ I whispered. Only then did they notice me. Quickly my father came towards me, serious, changed and without the tenderness that had connected us our entire lives. ‘You, my child, where are you coming from at this time? I have no use for you now!’ he said firmly, with the authority that he surely had used with other people often enough but never with me. I didn’t answer but only said startled: ‘Aunt Lise, what’s the matter?’ Silently she pointed to the table. There was laying the order of deportation. I don’t know what was written on it, I never read it. Only the words were burnt into my mind. . . transport to Terezín tomorrow October 1st, 1942. Tomorrow at 8 o’clock in the morning, not in three weeks or eight days, or at least three days, like it used to be with other people. No, tomorrow morning at 8 o’clock. This could only be a mistake. It had never happened before, only perhaps as revenge—I was thinking ‘it must, it had to be a mistake!’ It was the only moment that I remember when I implored my father not to act immediately. Indeed, I knew why he was so serious, so determined. We did not talk much, ‘Please. Please, wait! For your sake, yes!’
I hastened away. The phone box was empty. It was like in a nightmare, only much worse. I said to myself, ‘Lord help me that I get the connection to Potsdam, hope that Hans is at home, hope that he hears the ringing.’ He answered, terrified—we had always anticipated something bad happening. We had a conversation most taciturn: ‘You have to come immediately!’ ‘Something bad?’ he asked. ‘Yes!’ ‘I am coming!’ ‘But please eat something first!’ ‘Yes!’ Reading these words, you might think, ‘How can someone think of eating in a situation like this?’ I thought like this in former times, but by now I know. You can think of eating even in the hour of death, you can think about drinking, a warm blanket, a piece of bread during a bitter farewell.
By now I know that simple people were way ahead in this regard and in many other respects. They are connected to the simple truths of life in a deep and confident way, without those superficial feelings, the over-refined sensibilities, the cluttered idealisms that the sophisticated citizen dwells on for a long time. All this, the daily bread, a shroud, money to pay with, a roof above one’s head and a warm room. . .if it is also blessed with love, it is enough.
After my call to Potsdam I wanted to call the director of the sanatorium where my mother had been for many years and died. My father, too, had been living there, where we believed him to be secure and safe. And now the number—I could’t remember the telephone number! I had used it a thousand times, believed it to be etched in my mind – and now I’d forgotten it! The phone box was in darkness—I have no matches, and time was racing, racing—I had to get hold of the professor on the phone—’help heavenly host!’ And on its own my hand dialed the right number. ‘Herr Professor, it is life-endangering! Do you think, you could help once again?’ He understood at once. Paused. In a suppressed voice he said, ‘Please come immediately, I am waiting here for you!’
I returned to my father. ‘Poor beloved Bärchen—please wait!’ He was nodding: ‘But child—tomorrow morning at 8:00—there’s not much time—look, what’s the use of it?!’
At the sanatorium, there was the professor and his employee. It was the same one who went to bat for us exactly one year and a day before. It was when they even wanted to tear my mother out of the coffin for testing to see if a suicide ‘was in doubt.’ The professor and his employee—they also had been angels in the valley of the shadow of death. When at that time my mother should have been buried without a pastor in an unknown grave, they offered us their morgue cellar where we were able to celebrate a small catacomb obsequy with some friends. Of course, this was absolutely forbidden. The staff was believed to be reliable, but of course, you never knew. What if someone had denounced us? But nobody did so. People toddled into the cellar and wanted to have a look at my mother. She had been in a psychiatric sanatorium where there was so much anguish and awfulness. A beautiful dead like a Gothic image of saints. They all stood in front of her in silence and whispered to each other, shook our hands shyly. If there had been need for proof of immortality, looking at this beautiful, consummate face it became clear: such a conversion after three years of an awful soul-wrecking illness and bitter end—God was creating something new where we saw only death and destruction.
The professor and Ms. Sch. were talking to me, but I only heard their voices from afar. I thought to myself, ‘Does it make any sense to take my father back to the sanatorium? The henchmen will come tomorrow at 8:00—they will not find my father—then what? And what will become of Aunt Lise?’ Also, in former times she did not go outside with us: ‘It’s impossible, I look too Jewish’—and we kept silent or said in a dry manner, ‘you are right.’ The consequences for looking Jewish were the usual hysteric inferno, typically when many people congregated officially. Privately, the same people were helpful and attentive, be it on the street or in a shop. The ‘fission of the souls’ was incredible and scary. But that also belonged to the dreadful humiliation, the vulgar unworthy grotesque dissimulating. Only the superior and dignified smile of the Jewish-looking ones, their smiles of subtle irony, comforted the less Jewish-looking ones or even the Aryan-looking ones for their shameful and pitiful misery.
Everybody in our house and in the neighborhood knew where the trail would lead; everybody knew the nearby sanatorium as well as our address in Potsdam. Therefore, a flight to there or to us made no sense. And, it made no sense and could not be, to rob my father’s time—his only freedom—to dissipate it by powerless rescue attempts for the hundredth time.
I thought to myself, ‘Why not call the Jewish community again one last time? All the orders of the Gestapo were going through it. Possibly my young friend [Hanni] would know what to do?’ The professor agreed—just this was a courageous act. Hanni herself was on the phone. ‘Hanni, what can be done?!’ I understood how she was feeling. ‘What is it?’—I kept silent as an answer. She said, ‘When?’ ‘Tomorrow morning at 8 o’clock.’ ‘What is he about to do?’ ‘Go.’—She paused, then in a stifled whisper said, ‘I can do nothing more. Please let him!’ ‘Hanni. . .’ Loudly and coldly and nearly threateningly a voice repeated: ‘I beg you, let him. It will be better for him!’ Then, a pleading helpless voice whispered my name, ‘Please let him—it will be better—do you understand?!’ And the receiver was put down. This had been my last hope.
I came to myself when the professor called me. There was no time to lose. It was the time to have my wits about me. ‘I’ll take you along in my car. Has your father everything he needs?’ ‘Not enough for both of them.’ ‘I’ll take everything with me. May I come with you?’ A short silent ride. I don’t remember anything about it. But I remember the professor taking my hands firmly in his good warm hands—a doctor’s hands—like those of Bärchen.
My father came up to meet us, earnest and somehow disconnected from reality, but calm and friendly, as always. The room was full of people. My husband pale and perturbed, my beloved heart. I didn’t dare touch him—I didn’t want to lose my composure then. Hildegard v. W. was present, the young doctor, she had been in my father’s home as a child. She had wished to visit my father. She was crying in silence. Another friend from the house was there. Accidentally? No, not accidentally. She too had felt anxious for him. She was Otto Hahn’s wife, the world-famous nuclear scientist. She and her husband always had belonged to the ‘good angels’—fearless, faithful, loving. Aunt Lise was scurrying about, whipping away her tears furtively. She smiled, prepared some food, packed things up for us, ‘You have to save these things, you may need them!’ We were not able to deter her from it.
I drew Hans aside. ‘I am going to the Gestapo now. I am aware that everything could be bungled—even for us—you know it!’ He didn’t need a second to think about it, ‘That’s nothing to think about at a moment like this!’ Suddenly Bärchen was standing by our side, ‘What are you going to do? How can you do such a thing to me at the end of my life—to ruin yourselves? Susel, Susel I forbid it!’ Beloved Bärchen. He never in my whole life had forbidden me something in such a severe tone. And I obeyed. And for years I blamed myself for having done so, that I did not go trusting in God’s help. I know, I know it would have been madness—yet still it was and remains against my conscience and against God’s commandment!
Bärchen said almost gaily, ‘Dear children, we don’t want to mope about. I am happy that so many dear friends are here just now. Let’s drink a good bottle of wine as a farewell.’ A ‘harmless’ drop [i.e., an ordinary wine] was standing in the corner ‘illegally’ [i.e., during the Nazi era, Jews were prohibited from buying alcohol, which was moot since they were not issued ration cards for purchases of liquor]. We all drank. We were all in a state of lethargy and paralysis, but my father was stronger than us. He thanked the professor for bringing along the poison. ‘This was a friendly turn, dear colleague. You are taking a huge risk for me.’ We were talking in our normal voices; the women were smiling with tear-stained eyes. I, too, was smiling, holding Bärchen’s hand all the time. ‘I have had a good life, I heard him say. Only my husband was silent and deathly pale. He reached for my free hand. ‘Do not move, do not loose lose self-control!’ ‘I had it good—undeservedly,’ my father says, ‘at first my mother cared for me, then I had my Gretel and, in the end, my faithful children and you, dear Lise. Come and sit with us!’ But she didn’t want to, she was writing a couple of letters. She gave this and that to me, contemplating everything, though tears were running down her face relentlessly. Oh, don’t believe that such a voluntary dying was easy! Perhaps, for someone who does not love anything in this world anymore. Maybe for my mother’s darkened heart, especially as she did it under the delusion of sheltering my father from the Nazis, because she believed he would follow her at once. Such a dying is possibly—I don’t know—easy. But for someone, though being old and sick, who was full of life and love, it remained hard to die voluntarily—without the Grim Reaper present.
Whoever has stood next to a deathbed knows that death really ‘enters the room.’ I saw how my young brother sank towards him from one second to the other. But here death was not among us—nothing in this room, in our being together had been touched by him! Yes, my father was right. It was against nature. And woe to anyone who brings to his fellow men such terrible hardship to be forced to die! But in my father’s heart there was nothing like woe or bitterness, hate or malediction. Later when we three were alone and the friends were gone, Aunt Lise was writing next door, he answered to my cry: ‘I don’t believe it! It is impossible! It is really unbelievable’—and for a moment the fire of youth flashed in his eyes. And immediately he added, ‘You must see it like this. I kind of succumb to the enemy.’ And when I was going to lose my composure, he said tenderly but firmly, ‘Susel, don’t begrudge me going to my Gretel—I want so much to do so, I am so sick, sicker than you may know.’ From then on, his will was stronger than my pain. It was like him holding us all with his strong will. Once we even joked and laughed all three of us. Then my father talked about Mundi full of love and care, ‘Take your time with her. She is developing slowly but safely.’ We could not overload her small heart with the manner of his death. Not before she was old enough to understand and accept his motivations would she know about it.
Then, he said I should not worry about his funeral. As nice as my mother’s funeral was last year it wouldn’t be possible this time. He pleaded with me not to worry about his funeral. My husband later freed me from my promise. Bärchen himself would have allowed me to find my peace by looking at his wonderful and glorified expression.
We sensed that we had to go now. There were no more words, no tears—a short farewell from Aunt Lise—she smiled, stroked my hair, I kissed her hand, and we departed the residence. And at the front door in darkness only one embrace, a kiss on his hand. And I went away, left him. . . I never will forgive myself for it! Though it was him who compelled us to do so, his will was above ours that night, but not God’s will, I felt it. That must be said. God left me alone. And perhaps I did not call out loudly enough for Christ who had performed so many miracles within my life.”
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COMMENTS ON SECTION BELOW: Ernst Neisser and Lise Neisser poisoned themselves, likely in the early morning hours of October 1, 1942. Lise Neisser died immediately, but Ernst Neisser lingered for several days. He was taken to the Jewish Hospital in the Wedding District of Berlin where he succumbed on October 4, 1942. Suse Vogel’s worry was that he would be resuscitated.
“. . .when Hans and I came to the Jewish hospital to hear how my father was doing, my only prayer was, ‘Dear God don’t let him come back to life again.’ But the young and tender nurse did not give me a terrified look when I said objectively that hopefully no attempt at resuscitation would be made, and hopefully there was no danger of a return to consciousness. In response, she comforted us by saying ‘he would sleep towards death.’ She spoke briefly and soberly like me, but her eyes told me something entirely different. This is what I experienced many times. . .a dry harshness of conversation without any obligation in the tone, but a glance in the eyes and a pressing of the hand, this had a deeper meaning. And, from this sign I drew comfort. After Hans had looked in on my father where he lay with other sleeping persons, we had to leave quickly. At that time, each night old and sick people who had gotten the order for deportation took their own lives. The number of them was frighteningly high.”
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COMMENTS ON SECTION BELOW: “Kafkaesque” is suggestive of Franz Kafka, or his writings, and is defined as “having a nightmarishly complex, bizarre, or illogical quality.” In reading Suse Vogel’s description of meeting the Nazi inspector at her father’s apartment in Eichenallee following his suicide, the unreal characterization of events reminded me of Kafka’s writings. I’ll let the readers draw their own conclusions, but the narrow-minded, vulturous and rapacious nature of the Nazi overlords boggles the mind.
“Now I had to go to the detective squad. For my husband it was awful to await again without being able to help and stand by me. We separated in a Café. There everything was business as usual. It was not advisable to catch somebody’s attention by perturbed behavior or whispering. We even did not even shake hands. ‘Farewell! I will pick you up here.’ The short way to the police station seemed endless. I felt petrified from complete exhaustion. At the same time, I felt that anxious wakefulness and cold determination that had helped me time and again. An officer received my report. ‘Oh. I see, it’s because of the Jew in the Eichenallee?’ he said leisurely. I did not answer. He looked at me and suddenly nodded to me. ‘A good sign.’ Then he came nearer and said in a low voice: ‘Just go to the Eichenallee, Madame, the inspector will be there too,’ and again he nodded to me encouragingly and alarmingly all at once—oh, I understood. I nodded back in silence and disappeared as shadowy as I had come. Thank God, no interrogation before a Nazi-commissar. They sent an inspector to the Eichenallee, possibly well-intentioned, ‘perhaps everything would go well.’
I waited in front of the sealed door of my father’s apartment until the inspector came. A small blond man, middle-aged, a vacuous face, sharp and wary light blue eyes. A pinched hard ass, not quite likeable. I stepped towards him without offering my hand (Jews were not allowed to shake hands). And I came to the point immediately, ‘Mr. Inspector, I am so grateful that you came here. You know how hard the situation is for me.’ He looked at me wonderingly. A shadow of condolence flashed over his unreadable face. ‘The concierge shall come.’ He questioned her in my presence. She behaved gorgeously, told him without timidity how much she had loved and admired the ‘Herr Professor’ (I was thinking, ‘How could she say, “Herr Professor!” That was strictly forbidden!’) and how she had loved ‘Fräulein Lise.’
The inspector unlocked the door. I entered the room that I had left last night—not 24 hours ago. No time for feelings, he was observing me sharply. A broken off morphine syringe was on the table. ‘Why was it broken off?’ My heart was tensing up. Very quickly he turned to me, ‘With what did your father poison himself?’ My answer came calmly, ‘I don’t know.’ ‘When were you here last?’ ‘The day before yesterday in the evening.’ ‘There it was the lie!’ And now I anticipated he would ask me who else had been here and I would have to mention Hans. I looked at him and he looked at me. I was sure he did not believe me, but he wanted to help me. Therefore, he was no Nazi, I was skilled at that! He was only a ‘dog in service’ (expression for somebody who only pretended to be a Nazi).
It looked desolate in my father’s room. The henchmen had rioted here—not a stone was left unturned. The bed was rumpled, the books were pulled out, the desk’s content spread all over the ground. Thank God they could not find any addresses of friends and acquaintances, nothing that would have incriminated others. We had destroyed everything. In a strained voice the inspector said, ‘Where is your father’s identity card? We were not able to find it. The relevant department was upset. He must have an identity card. Otherwise you will not get the corpse for burial. And there will be endless trouble for you and me. You must have it!’ ‘I don’t have it. I don’t know what my father has done with it.’ ‘Why have all the papers disappeared? I cannot understand. I do not understand your father! Unfortunately, I must deal with things like this every day. One at least leaves behind his papers in an orderly state. Nothing was to be found. He did not even have a watch with him—strange!!’
‘Aha, that was the reason for the rage of the relevant department.’ My father wanted so much that my husband got back his watch. It was Hans’ watch, a gift from his confirmation. Years ago, he had given it to my father because we did not want to leave his golden watch to the robbers—a gift from his grandfather. So, we hid it. None of us had thought of the covetousness and rapacity of the pursuers. But despite the threatening ‘strange!’ the inspector did not continue asking. I felt he didn’t want to know, didn’t want to be the hangman. Yet still he had protocols to follow. ‘You seem to be rather harassed by the occurrences,’ he grunted and looked at me meaningfully. And I seized the rescuing hint. And he wrote on his paper confused, impossible, stupid answers of a flustered wife. ‘How smart of him!’ I was aware of the Nazi’s obstinacy—if they ever got something official, a document, they were often content with it.
The concierge, a silent shadow and witness, was looking at me stunned, so well was I ‘playing’ my role. Oh, if she only knew what this was all about! He did not even ask for my address. The watch and the identity card that was all he was harping on about. ‘Could you at least procure the identity card?’ ‘No, I am sure I don’t know.’ I never confessed that my father gave it to us. That would have been the greatest foolishness! My father had hoped that the card, this ‘piece of evidence,’ could be useful. That perhaps this could save his small residual assets for Mundi. This meant a lot to him.
Before me I saw several photographs showing my parents, my late brother, pictures of our voyages. My father’s favorite books were still there. ‘Oh, if I only could take some with me.’ I begged the inspector. He refused. I tried once again. He clasped his hands together. ‘Please don’t!’ he said harshly, ‘I cannot allow it, do you understand! People ask me daily to do this. I am not allowed!’ And he looked at me angrily. Then suddenly he became rude, snapped at the concierge and me, finally laughed and sent the concierge away, snapped at me once again and said, ‘You will accompany me!’ My heart sank. ‘Was it all comedy?’ But as soon as we were alone, he took his bicycle, and shouted loudly, ‘As soon as your father is dead, you will report!’ And simultaneously his left hand reached for mine, pressing it firmly as he muttered, ‘Don’t worry. We’ll get you father under the soil even without his identity card.’ And, with that he departed, leaving me feeling released.
I thought, ‘Oh, it had come to that! Anxiety and every day’s horrors had become so commonplace that stupid and falsely contrived situations got weight and importance. On the other side hand, wasn’t this like reality, when this narrow-minded clerk who combined Prussian blind obedience with his personal honor, who had at least freedom of choice, chose lies and foolishness rather than word-for-word-accuracy?’ He himself knew better than me what would have happened if he had had examined everything exactly and if he had found the identity card and the watch. Only the connivance of a ‘forbidden’ suicide would have been to blame. There would have been interrogations about the origin of the poison, our statements would have been scrutinized for deviations from each other, possibly under the Nazis’ infamous interrogation methods. Once again, the ‘moral inferiority of the Jews and their comrades’ would have been affirmed. It would have resulted in deportation to a labor camp in Poland as a natural consequence. Moreover, friends and enemies would have shaken their heads about our incomprehensible stupidity and our lack of consideration, and that’s what the inspector knew definitively, and I knew it as well. Now you possibly understand why I met the grey face of my husband with a beaming smile. You understand that we went home by tram arm-in-arm and became human beings for a short while.”
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SECTIONS FROM SUSE VOGEL’S 1944-1945 DIARY
Suse Vogel’s diary includes numerous literary and religious references. I quote a few of these along with short passages from Suse’s diary to round out what I related above or in earlier posts.
COMMENTS ON SECTION BELOW: Suse Vogel had multiple nicknames for her relatives. She alternately referred to her husband, Dr. Hans Vogel, as “Hase” (=rabbit), Fiddie, Eukuku, Schieperle, Kuchenmännchen (= “cake mate”), Hanschen. Among their daughter Agnes’s surviving papers are numerous pencil drawings Hans did. He typically depicted himself as a rabbit, Suse as a dachshund, and Agnes as a bunny. (Figure 11)
“On Christmas I got a pencil drawing from Fiddie showing his little castle room in Seitenberg; in the background sits ‘Hase.’ Hanschen, smoking his pipe. The expression of his somewhat sublime, clever bunny face is collected, serious and as ‘bright’ as I had hoped ever to see again after those infernal years.”
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COMMENTS ON SECTION BELOW: Suse Vogel had multiple nicknames for her father, Dr. Ernst Neisser, including Bär, Bärchen and Igilchen (=hedgehog). Among her father’s personal items she had salvaged was his armchair, which retained his contour, enveloped her when she sat in it, and gave her a sense of comfort and well-being.
4th January 1944
“In Igelchen’s armchair I believed I felt it like a gentle closeness.”
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COMMENT ON SECTION BELOW: In multiple passages in her diary, Suse recalls visits with her father and aunt in Berlin before they were summoned for deportation and opted to commit suicide together.
12th January 1944.
“Often, I am attacked by images of the past when Hans and I lived in Potsdam, outside Berlin—up early around 6am, breakfast heated, tidied up, dinner pre-cooked, everything prepared, nothing forgotten—11am already! Getting out of the Westend, rushing up the stairs, is the 54 and 154 coming straight (train numbers)? Of course not straight. Waited. Rushed up Kastanienallee, Branitzer Platz, around the corner from Eichenallee—is everything still standing? Is there nobody in front of the door—can I still find everything? Waited outside the door for hours, no one hears–then finally Aunt Lise’s touching but exhausting welcoming speech past the door; there he sits at his desk, so small and wilted, old, angry, with signs of pain, but the black eyes shine towards me, oh, what I would give to see his old hedgehog face shining like that again!—‘Hush, my soul, it’s over.’- And the walks, small and grey by my side—and always fear—and always fear—but that sat only in the innermost depths of his heart and in his eternally watchful gaze—but only loving and benevolent eyes looked from father to daughter and back, and we smiled so clearly at the resemblance, and we had so much to tell each other—never did we run out of material to tell one another.”
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COMMENT ON SECTION BELOW: As previously mentioned, “Mundi” was an affectionate name for Suse and Hans Vogel’s daughter, Agnes Stieda née Vogel. In 1944, when Suse humorously remarked the following, Agnes was 17 years old and already had strong opinions about what type of a husband she wanted.
“Mundi says she’d rather marry a pussy, ‘I want the upper hand with my husband!’”
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COMMENTS ON SECTION BELOW: In her writings, Suse made frequent exaltations to God, alternating between feeling He had answered her prayers and forsaken her. Clearly, while Suse and both her parents were of Jewish descent, in the past, their ancestors had converted to Protestantism; nonetheless, in the eyes of the Nazis, they were Jewish. In the later stages of the WWII, Hans Vogel was hounded by the Gestapo for his “mixed marriage” status to a Jew.
Regarding the Prince’s palace in Seitenberg [today: Stronie Śląskie, Poland], for a time castles were deemed “off-limits” to bombing by the Allies.
6th January 1944
“Fiddie writes [he received] news from Berlin that the castle is now secured as a place to stay! Thank God.”
31st August 1944
“Tomorrow begins the 6th year of the war. ‘Keeper, is the night almost over?’”
30th November 1944
“‘My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken us!’. . . at the moment I don’t even have a longing to die—just fear and pain and fear and need and fear, fear, fear—and God is silent!”
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COMMENTS ON SECTION BELOW: “Schieperle,” as mentioned above, was another affectionate name Suse had for her husband. Suse, Hans and Agnes lived in a small town in Silesia called Baitzen, which was just outside of Kamenz [today: Kamieniec, Poland]. Hans worked for Friedrich Heinrich Prinz von Preußen at his estate in Seitenberg [today: Stronie Śląskie, Poland]. While Kamenz and Seitenberg are only 22 miles or 35km apart (Figures 13a-b), Hans had his own room at the castle where he lived during the work week.
Hans Vogel had been seriously injured during WWI, making him unfit for service during WWII. The term in German for badly wounded is “schwer verwundet.” His status as a seriously injured veteran of WWI afforded his Jewish wife Suse and his “mischling“ daughter Agnes a measure of protection, at least until the later stages of the war, when the Nazi noose began to tighten around any people of Jewish descent. For Suse and Agnes, it never came down to a decision to take their own lives as it had with Suse’s parents and Aunt. While Agnes was no longer permitted to attend school within a year of her grandfather’s death, ironically, she was for a time a member of the “Bund Deutscher Mädel (B.D.M.),” the female section of the Hitler Youth.
In the passage below, Suse is voicing her consternation at the fact that her husband was shanghaied into shoveling snow for Kamenz.
18th September 1944
“My Schieperle is gone! They took him for snow shoveling—oh, it’s like a bad dream—oh, he will come back—he can’t shovel at all! And in the Seitenberg employment office they had promised him that he would work in an office. But Kamenz took him.”
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COMMENT ON SECTION BELOW: Suse Vogel made frequent mention of her debilitating menstrual periods, referring to them by the initials “EW”; interestingly, this stands for “das Ewig-Weibliche,” the concept of the “eternal feminine” from Goethe’s “Faust.” For Goethe, “women” symbolized pure contemplation, in contrast to masculine action, parallel to the eastern Daoist descriptions of Yin and Yang.
“But I am also particularly disparaged by EW.”
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COMMENT ON SECTION BELOW: “Wafi” is a reference to Suse Vogel’s mother, Margarethe Neisser née Pauly, who was confined to a sanatorium for the last several years of her life and eventually committed suicide there in 1941, a year before Ernst and Luise Neisser took their lives. At moments, Suse Vogel felt she too was slipping away like her mother had.
“I think I’m already mentally ill like Wafi!”
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COMMENTS ON SECTION BELOW: Suse and Agnes Vogel left Silesia as the Russians were approaching and made their way to Potsdam, bordering Berlin, arriving there around the 11th of April 1945. In February, possibly earlier, Hans Vogel, while handicapped from an injury he sustained during WWI, was nonetheless conscripted to a military unit and assigned responsibility for taking the unit’s mail to the train. When he noticed one train was headed to Berlin, he jumped aboard and went AWOL, making his way to Potsdam, where he miraculously reunited with Suse and Agnes. The family barely survived a massive bombing of Berlin in the waning days of the war in an underground bunker.
20th April 1945, written in a basement in Potsdam under the terrible thunder of gunfire
“. . .the eve of the battle, after the horrible attack on Berlin two days after our arrival here[Potsdam]. I cannot write much, only that we decided to go to him very quickly on the 11th of April. Everything worked out. After a 26-hour drive, we managed to arrive behind the Front. The longed-for, longed-for reunion was given to us! So wonderfully sweet, so wonderfully lovely, but amid rising hell and fear. . .”
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In conclusion, while I fail to do justice and adequately capture the depth and nuance of Suse Vogel’s words, I hope I have conveyed at least a small part of her wrenching story and the constant misgivings and survivors’ guilt she felt for not having saved her father from the Nazis.
Note: In this post, I relate the story of uncovering multiple copies of a family portrait rendered in the Biedermeier style in what I estimate was the early 1830’s.
During a recent email exchange with my 92-year old third cousin, Agnes Stieda née Vogel (Figure 1), subject of several earlier posts, I casually mentioned other topics I want to eventually write about on my Blog. This includes one illustrious branch of my Bruck family, the von Koschembahrs, about which more is said below. This prompted Agnes to tell me in passing she has a family portrait of them hanging in her apartment in Victoria, Canada. A short while later she sent me several photos. (Figure 2) They show a touching depiction of two children, one holding a rabbit, painted in what I would learn was the Biedermeier style. Agnes quickly added this is a revered painting within her family.
Other than knowing it portrayed two von Koschembahr children, no doubt from the period when the Biedermeier style was in vogue in Germany between 1815 and 1848, Agnes had no further information as to the painter, the subjects, nor the exact year it was painted. Obviously curious whether the painting or the boy and girl might be known to other members of my extended family, I decided to send a copy of the photo to another of my German third cousins, Kurt Polborn. (Figure 3) He is a close descendant of the von Koschembahrs, and I thought he might recognize the artwork. And, indeed he did. He promptly told me they depict Leopold von Koschembahr (1829-1874) (Figure 4), and his slightly older sister, Mary von Koschembahr. Judging from the approximate age of the children, and Leopold’s year of birth, 1829, I estimate it was done in the early 1830’s, well within the timeframe the Biedermeier style was popular.
Let me briefly explain to readers how my Bruck family is related to the von Koschembahrs. The first-generation owner of the family hotel, the Bruck’s “Prinz von Preußen” Hotel in Ratibor [today: Racibórz, Poland], the town where my father was born in 1907, was Samuel Bruck (1808-1863) (Figure 5), my great-great-grandfather. Ownership of the hotel was acquired by his son, Fedor Bruck (1834-1892), my great-grandfather. (Figure 6) Fedor’s youngest brother was my great-great-uncle Wilhelm Bruck (1849-1907), (Figure 7) who married a baroness, Margarete “Grete” Mathilde von Koschembahr (1860-1946) (Figure 8), sometime before 1885; Leopold and Mary von Koschembahr were, respectively, Grete’s father and aunt. The term “von” is used in German language surnames “either as a nobiliary particle indicating a noble patrilineality,or as a simple preposition used by commoners that means of or from.” On account of his wife’s noble patrilineality, Wilhelm Bruck added her surname to his upon marriage. Thus, in Germany, this branch of the family was known as “Bruck-von Koschembahr,” but upon their arrival in America they completely dropped the Bruck surname. Suffice it to say, this complicates the family tree.
During my conversation with my third cousin Kurt Polborn who’d identified the von Koschembahr children, he mentioned in passing the painting belongs to his aging von Koschembahr uncle, Clemens von Koschembahr, living in Ohio. Clemens is about to turn 94 and is the grandson of Wilhelm Bruck-von Koschembahr and the sole surviving child of Gerhard von Koschembahr (1885-1961) (Figure 9) and Hilda Alexandra von Zeidlitz und Neukirch (1891-1954), who immigrated to America in 1938 with their 13 children. (Figures 10a-b, 11) Kurt’s claim that the family portrait of the von Koschembahr children is still in the family, while entirely reasonable, left me puzzled. (Figure 12) What then is the version owned by Agnes, an original or a copy? I would add that Clemens, being told that another version of this family portrait exists, was quite surprised.
Things got even more puzzling when I probed into this more. Agnes remembered having visited her cousin Klaus Pauly (Figure 13) in Germany and hanging in his house was yet another copy of this same painting! Curious as to how many copies of this painting might exist, I immediately sent an email to Klaus’s son, Andi Pauly (Figure 14), whose name I’ve often mentioned. The existence of this copy, at least, could be explained. During one of Klaus’s visits to see Agnes, he’d greatly admired the painting and tried to talk her out of it. Agnes, naturally, was unwilling to part with this family heirloom, but, Klaus, undeterred, photographed the “original,” and upon his return home turned it into a full-size photo which he framed. Problem solved!
Still, the existence of two seemingly high-quality versions of the Biedermeier-style portrait is intriguing. It seems unlikely the von Koschembahrs would have allowed the original to leave the family, so I’d argue that version is the one owned by Clemens von Koschembahr. Admittedly, while I can only gauge this from low resolution images, it would seem the older looking of the two copies is also that one. Unfortunately, neither copy of the paintings is signed; Kurt explained this was not uncommon in paintings done of royals and aristocrats of the time, where the “star,” so to speak, was the king, queen, or noble. The creates an obvious problem where originals can easily be forged and claimed as authentic. Absent a professional side-by-side comparison, the question of which is the original portrait will remain an open one. Things, though, could get even more confusing should yet more high-quality versions of this portrait emerge from other members of the family! This may not be as implausible as it sounds given the endearing quality the von Koschembahr artwork possesses and the possible desire by others to have had their own copies.
Note: This is a post about Dr. Hans Vogel, father of my Canadian third cousin Agnes Stieda née Vogel who was the subject of Posts 46 and 63. In this post, I briefly relate a few aspects of Dr. Vogel’s life and highlight one of his major accomplishments.
In the course of doing forensic investigations into my Jewish ancestors, I often learn they were renowned and very accomplished people. Where the forebears are unknown to me, I typically begin by searching their names on the Internet. Since all my father’s immediate ancestors were German, I also search for them on German Wikipedia. This post is the tale of one such individual, Dr. Hans Martin Erasmus Vogel, my third cousin Agnes Stieda née Vogel’s father. (Figures 1-2) Regular readers will recall that Agnes has been the subject of two earlier posts, and that her father has been mentioned in both. It is not my intention to present Dr. Vogel’s biography here, but merely to highlight a few relevant facts that reflect the era in which he lived and one of his major achievements.
I’ve previously told readers of my father’s family ties to Ratibor [today: Racibórz, Poland] in Upper Silesia, but there are other larger Prussian cities to which my extended family was connected, notably, Posen [today: Poznan, Poland], where my Pauly relatives were from, Breslau [today: Wrocław, Poland], and Stettin [today: Szczecin, Poland]. Dr. Hans Vogel was born in Stettin on the 28th of July 1897, and graduated from the Gymnasium, high school, there in 1916. Following his graduation until 1918, he was a Sergeant Major during WWI, and was badly wounded during the war. Upon his recuperation in 1919, he studied political science and in 1923 received his Dr. rer. pol. (Doctor rerum politicarum), Doctor of Political Science. Then, from 1923 to 1925, he studied art history in Marburg and Leipzig, and graduated with his Dr. phil. (Doctor philosophiae), Doctor of Philosophy.
From 1925 until 1932, Dr. Vogel worked as an art historian. He was a volunteer at the Kunstgewerbemuseum (Museum of Applied Arts) 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 (Figure 3), 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.
Dr. Vogel’s daughter Agnes has fond memories of Friedrich Heinrich Prinz von Preußen (1874-1940) (Figures 4-5), not the least because he protected her family and provided work for her father during the war. Friedrich Heinrich was an interesting character. He studied law at Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Bonn; upon graduation he joined the military under a position of à la suite, which was a military title given to those who were assigned to the army or a particular unit for honor’s sake, and entitled to wear a regimental uniform, but otherwise had no official position. However, in early 1907 he was relieved from his position à la suite as a regimental commander 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 as the successor to his late father who’d died earlier that year. The poorly kept secret of Friedrich Wilhelm’s homosexuality, however, caused him to ask the Kaiser to withdraw his nomination, which he did. Eventually, the press learned and published the motive for the change in leadership for the Knights of St. John, “because he [Friedrich Heinrich] suffers from the inherited perversion of the sex instinct.” Having been “outed,” he was urgently advised to leave Berlin. After stays in southern France and Egypt, Friedrich Heinrich lived from then on withdrawn on his Silesian estates where Dr. Vogel worked for him. According to published accounts, Friedrich Heinrich contributed greatly to the economic development of the southeastern part of the county of Glatz [today: Kłodzko, Poland] where his estate was located and was popular among his subjects because of his concern for their well-being.
Dr. Vogel remarked that living in the countryside in a state of complete social isolation left him with much time to continue his private art history studies, which served him well after the war. As the war progressed, Dr. Vogel was increasingly at risk from the Gestapo, on account of his “mixed marriage.” Forewarned in time, he fled to Potsdam, a suburb of Berlin. In Post 46, Agnes described it as such:
My father was responsible for bringing his Unit’s mail to the train, and when he noticed the train was headed to Berlin, he took that opportunity to jump onboard and defect, hoping to find us when he arrived in Potsdam; we had always found shelter there in the apartment of the mother of one my mother’s good friends. By defecting, my father had taken a huge risk since defectors were shot on sight. But he was not discovered and entered Berlin which was aflame.
Following the end of WWII, Dr. Vogel was unable to immediately find employment in a museum, so for a time worked at the local Municipal School Office in Potsdam retraining former teachers and training new ones. Then, in 1946, he was hired as the Director of the Staatlichen Kunstsammlungen Kassel (Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel). When Dr. Vogel arrived, he found a bomb-destroyed gallery, so the reconstruction of the Kassel Museum after the war was largely his doing. Many of the museum’s monuments and paintings had been moved elsewhere during the war for safekeeping. One of the most important events during Dr. Vogels’s tenure as Director was the return of the so-called “Viennese Pictures” in 1955; this involved the repatriation of 64 very precious paintings including Rembrandt’s “Jacob Blessing the Sons of Joseph,” as well as artworks by Albrecht Dürer, Titian, Rubens and von Dyck. (Figures 6a-b) Given the legitimate hostility countries felt towards Germany after WWII and the prevailing “cold war,” it was certainly not a given all countries would return art work that had been squirrelled away inside their borders; a few might reasonably have viewed retention of these valuable masterpieces as reparations. Regardless, the fact that Dr. Vogel, on behalf of the Museumslandschaft Hessen (Museum of Hessian History (MHK)) (Figures 7a-b), was able to recover the Viennese Pictures certainly stands as one of his most significant achievements, almost a “monuments men” moment.
Dr. Vogel’s professional career, even circumscribed as it was by the Nazi era, was certainly more multi-faceted than the narrow description I’ve provided. MHK houses a diverse collection, carefully organized under Dr. Vogel’s tutelage, including the library and copper cabinet, picture gallery, pre- and early-historical collections, collections of folk art and costumes, the astronomical and physics cabinet, the collection of urban costumes, furniture and ceramics, as well as items from the former landgrave art chamber. On behalf of the museum, Dr. Vogel enriched the Old Masters Picture Gallery by acquiring 20 works by Jacob Jordaens, Thomas de Kayser, and an anonymous student of Rubens, as well as a series of paintings from the Tischbein Circle. He also purchased 14 Rembrandt etchings to form as a counterpart to the Rembrandt paintings hanging in Kassel retrieved from Vienna.
Having little to do with Dr. Vogel’s professional work, among his daughter Agnes’s papers, survives a very touching and simple hand-drawn picture by Dr. Vogel. It shows Dr. Vogel and his wife standing on the shore, depicted as a rabbit and a dog, watching sadly as Agnes, shown as a rabbit, sails aboard an ocean liner headed to Canada from Germany. (Figure 8)
Note: In this post, I recall through a series of sometimes poignant and touching images some of my ancestors, several of whom were murdered in the Shoah. The photos embedded in this post originate with my 92-year old third cousin who knew and was intimately acquainted with these individuals as a young child growing up in Germany before and during the Nazi Era.
I first introduced readers to my third cousin Agnes Stieda née Vogel in Blog Post 46. (Figure 1) Our respective great-grandmothers were sisters, Rosalie Pauly née Mockrauer (1844-1927) (Figure 2), and Friederike Bruck née Mockrauer (1836-1924). (Figure 3) I first learned about Agnes from another third cousin who, tired of incessant questions on family matters he couldn’t answer, referred me to her. We became acquainted in February of this year, and ever since we’ve engaged in a very active and lively email correspondence. I wrote about Agnes in Post 46. What’s made our exchanges so fascinating is that Agnes lived through historic events and was close to a few of the people I’ve researched and written about, including some who perished in the Holocaust. This post provides an opportunity to remember through photographs a few of these people seen in the throes of life before they knew what tragedy awaited them, and their lives were abruptly ended.
Agnes, I learned, lives in a retirement community in Victoria on Vancouver Island, about an hour-and-a-half west of Vancouver by ferry. Prior to meeting Agnes, my wife and I had already planned a cruise to Alaska departing from Vancouver to see the glaciers before climate-change deniers ensure their disappearance. After months of communication, it was only natural that Agnes and I should get together. (Figure 4) We arranged to meet in person at her eldest daughter Nicki Stieda’s home in Vancouver. (Figure 5) Nicki is the curator of her mother’s personal papers and photos, so upon learning of my upcoming visit, she organized all the items for my convenience. (Figure 6) Given that I neither speak nor read German, I focused on taking pictures of Agnes’s photos. Additionally, thanks to her perfect recall of the people in the images, we spent several enthralling hours talking about Agnes’s memories of them.
Let me provide a little more context. Agnes is the granddaughter of Dr. Ernst Neisser and Margareth “Gretl” Neisser née Pauly, both victims of the Holocaust who committed suicide in Berlin, respectively, in 1941 and 1942; this was the subject of Post 48. Gretl Neisser was one of nine children of Dr. Josef and Rosalie Pauly, all of whom have been discussed in earlier posts and all whose fates I’ve now worked out. Ernst and Gretl Neisser had two children, Agnes’s mother Susanne Dorothea Vogel née Niesser (1899-1984) and Agnes’s uncle Peter Heinrich Neisser (1906-1929).
Dr. Ernst Neisser was a medical doctor in Stettin, Germany [today: Szczecin, Poland], who delivered Agnes. (Figure 7) Another Pauly daughter, Edith “Dietchen” Riezler née Pauly (Figure 8) also lived in Stettin with her husband, Dr. Walter Riezler (Figure 9), who was the Director of the Muzeum Narodowe w Szczecinie, the National Museum, Szczecin; Walter and Edith Riezler were the subjects of Post 53. In writing that post, I communicated with curators at the museum to try and procure photos of Dr. Riezler; I eventually obtained some from my third cousin Andi Pauly that I shared with the museum since they had none at the time. Among Agnes’s photos were yet more of Dr. Reizler that I’ve also sent them.
Because of Agnes’s family ties to Stettin following her birth in 1927, many of her photos date from this period. They illustrate in intimate fashion the close bond Agnes grandparents had with one another (Figure 10) and with their granddaughter (Figures 11-13). Several also show the deep affection between Agnes and her great-aunt Dietchen Riezler (Figures 14-15); Agnes has particularly fond memories of all three. There are multiple images of Agnes as a child at the beach along the Baltic Ocean, which is about 100km or 60 miles north of Szczecin. This series naturally includes photos of her parents Hans and Suse Vogel. (Figure 16)
Dr. Hans Vogel (Figure 17) will be the feature of an upcoming post. Suffice it for now to note that Dr. Vogel was, among other things, an art historian, and, like Dr. Walter Riezler, also the Director of a museum, the Hessisches Landesmuseum in Kassel, Germany. (Figure 18) In anticipation of writing a future post about Dr. Vogel, I’ve also communicated and shared images of him with them.
One photo hanging in Nicki Stieda’s home is of her grandparents’ wedding in 1926 in Berlin. (Figure 19) Having learned from a tribute Suse Vogel née Neisser, Agnes’s mother, had written in honor of her father (Dr. Ernst Neisser) that she and Hans had gotten married in the Charlottenburg Borough of Berlin, I was able to track down and order from the Landesarchiv Berlin the original certificate. (Figures 20a-b) Finding a photo linked to a marriage certificate I’d obtained from a completely foreign source is one thing that makes doing forensic genealogy so entertaining.
Particularly poignant images included among Agnes’s papers are some of her uncle Peter Neisser, who died prematurely of septicemia at 23 years of age in 1929 in Heidelberg, Germany as he was training to become a doctor. Photos of Peter span from when he was a toddler (Figures 21-22) to an adult (Figures 23-24), probably shortly before he died; one shows him with his grandmother, Julie Neisser née Sabersky (1841-1927). (Figure 25) I don’t expect readers to remember but I included one picture in Post 45 of a Pauly family get-together, reproduced here (Figure 26), estimated to have taken place around 1895, that included Julie Neisser. In examining Neisser family trees on ancestry.com, I came upon one that used as a profile image a painting of Julie Neisser, the original of which interestingly is in the possession of Agnes’s daughter Nicki Stieda. (Figure 27) This is yet another serendipitous connection.
Another of Josef and Rosalie Pauly’s daughters with a connection to Stettin was Elizabeth “Ellchen” Herrnstadt née Pauly who was married to Arthur Herrnstadt (1865-1912); they had two daughters, Aenne Herrnstadt (1896-1942) and Ilse Herrnstadt (1897-1943). While Arthur died in Stettin well before the Nazis ascended to power, his wife and two daughters were all murdered in the Holocaust, at Theresienstadt. (Figure 28) Aenne Herrnstadt, it turns out, was Agnes’s godmother, and several photos survive (Figures 29-30), including the two of them together when Agnes was a toddler. Interestingly, while Aenne and Ilse were only a year apart, Agnes has no recollection of Ilse, and thinks she may have been institutionalized for unknown reasons.
There exists a picture among Agnes photos reproduced here, showing Ellchen Herrnstadt, her daughter Aenne, and Agnes’s mother, Suse Vogel, taken between 1916 and 1918. (Figure 31)
Helene Guttentag née Pauly was yet another of Josef and Rosalie Pauly’s daughters who, along with her husband Dr. Adolf Guttentag, committed suicide in Berlin in 1942 after being told to report for deportation. I told their story in Post 50. They had one son, Otto Guttentag, who escaped to America, served in the U.S. Army during the war, was stationed in Europe for a time after the war, and eventually became a doctor in California. While stationed in Europe, Agnes and Otto Guttentag met (Figure 32); they were first cousins once removed. (Figure 33)
In closing, I concede this post (Figures 34-35) will be of limited interest to many, though I would only add that what may resonate with readers is the process by which they may pursue their own genealogical investigations to track down images and stories of their own ancestors. Admittedly, this can be a challenging though not insurmountable problem.
Note: This Blog post briefly summarizes a 34-page personal account written in German by Susanne Vogel née Neisser, the daughter of Dr. Ernst Neisser and Margarethe Neisser née Pauly, describing the last months of her father’s life during WWII.
To remind readers, Margarethe Neisser née Pauly (1876-1941) was one of my great-great-aunt Rosalie Pauly née Mockrauer’s (1844-1927) (Figure 1) nine children with Josef Pauly (1843-1916) (Figure 2); Margarethe Pauly and Dr. Ernst Neisser (1863-1942) (Figure 3) married on September 5, 1898 in Stettin, Germany [today: Szcezcin, Poland], and together they had two children, Susanne Vogel née Neisser (1899-1984) (Figure 4) and Peter Neisser (1906-1929). Susanne Vogel authored the moving account of her father’s last months in a 34-page letter she wrote to her first cousin, Liselotte Dieckmann née Neisser (1902-1994) (Figure 5), on March 28, 1947; to further orient the reader, Susanne Vogel was the mother of Agnes Stieda née Vogel (1927-still living) (Figure 6), whose wartime memories were the subject of Post 46.
Susanne Vogel’s account of her father’s last months is on file at the Leo Baeck Institute NewYork/Berlin, but I discovered it while researching Dr. Ernst Neisser on the Internet. Agnes would later tell me about it and suggest it needed eventually to be translated from German. Consequently, Agnes and I have agreed to collaborate on this, so in coming months Agnes will translate her mother’s letter into English, I will edit it, and we’ll make it available to readers through my Blog. In the interim, I asked one of my cousins to summarize the contents. What follows are some highlights of Susanne Vogel’s account, which fill in a few gaps in the timing of the unfortunate events in Ernst and Margarethe Neisser’s lives.
Dr. Ernst Neisser, nicknamed “Bärchen,” was the Director of the municipal hospital in Stettin, Germany from 1895 until his retirement in 1931. Prior to 1909 he published multiple papers on tuberculosis. Beginning in 1902, Dr. Neisser began calling for the establishment of “tuberkulose krankenhäuser,” tuberculosis hospitals, rather than isolation houses for people with heavy consumption, “Schwere Schwindsucht.” For many years, his proposal was ignored, as most physicians wanted to retain the character of what were called “Heilstätten,” sanatoriums, which would be lost if people seriously sick and dying of tuberculosis were admitted. Nonetheless, Dr. Neisser finally prevailed, receiving financial support from the city of Stettin to build the Tuberkulosekrankenhaus in Hohenkrug [a part of Szczecin, Poland] which opened in 1915. This turned out to be such an excellent model that eventually many of the best Heilstätten became tuberculosis hospitals.
Another of Dr. Neisser’s signature accomplishments was the consolidation of all institutions involved in the treatment of tuberculosis (e.g., tuberkulose krankenhäuser, tuberkulose Fürsorgestelle (welfare center), etc.) under one umbrella, resulting in better supervision, improved organization, and enhanced care. Dr. Neisser left the field once he had achieved this goal. Whether by accident or design, his accomplishments in the treatment of tuberculosis do not appear to be acknowledged in sources generally available on-line.
Dr. Neisser was co-inventor with a man named Pollack in 1904 of what is called a “hirnpunktion,” a brain puncture. What I have concluded this involves is a procedure to relieve pressure in the brain caused by an edema (i.e., a condition characterized by an excess of watery fluid collecting in the cavities or tissues of the body, including the brain), or a hematoma (i.e., a solid swelling of clotted blood within the tissues, including the brain). The procedure entails placing a patient on their side with their head bent forward, making a cut along the median line of the head, then pushing through the membrane with a probe to draw out the excess fluid to relieve pressure on the brain.
As researcher and hospital director, Dr. Neisser was interested in lead and arsenic poisoning; pernicious anemia; iodine treatment for these ailments; tick therapy; psittacosis (i.e., “parrot fever”, a zoonotic infectious disease in humans contracted from infected parrots, macaws, cockatiels, etc.); and more. He advocated for a “Krankheitserscheinungen Fortlaufende Beobachtung,” an institute for the continuous observation of illnesses from their onset to their fully-fledged maturation and organized such a department in 1918 at the municipal hospital where he was director. Following his forced retirement in 1931 because of age, 68 at the time, Dr. Neisser became chief of a sanatorium in Altheide [today: Polanica-Zdrój, Poland]. After he was likely forced out of this position because of Nazi ascendancy, he and Margarethe moved to Berlin.
Dr. Neisser loved music and the arts, and to this day some of his descendants are professionally involved in these endeavors.
From Post 45, regular subscribers may recall my discussion about the timing of Margarethe Neisser’s death. From one family tree to which I’ve referred multiple times, “Schlesische Jüdische Familien,” Silesian Jewish Families, I discovered Margarethe Neisser died in December 1942; this never seemed credible because Dr. Neisser committed suicide in October 1942, so I could not understand why she would not have killed herself at the same time. I contacted the family tree manager about this discrepancy, and she told me her data came from two other trees; however, upon reexamining those trees, the family tree manager realized she had erroneously transcribed Margarethe’s death date, and that in fact she had died in December 1941. While this makes much more sense, it turns out even this date was incorrect. According to Susanne Vogel’s account where she summarizes vital statistics for Dr. Neisser and his immediate family, Margarethe died on October 12, 1941. (Figures 7) I want to again caution readers to seriously question information found on other family trees, particularly when no supporting documentation is referenced or attached. Personally, I would rather omit data than incorporate faulty statistics in my family tree.
As a related aside, in an upcoming Blog post I will explain to readers how to use the difficult-to-navigate “Landesarchiv Berlin” database, containing information on births, marriages, and deaths for people who resided in the multiple boroughs and districts of Berlin. As it happens, I was able to locate the death register listing for Margarethe Neisser and confirm she died in October 1941 (Figures 8a-b); I’ve requested a copy of the death certificate, but the Landesarchiv currently has a four-month backlog in processing orders.
According to Susanne Vogel, her mother Margarethe Neisser suffered from chronic depression, and spent the last three years of her life in a sanatorium; it was here she committed suicide in October 1941 and where a funeral service was secretly held in the facility’s cellar. The need to hold the service in secret was likely due to prohibitions on Jewish funerals during the Nazi Era. Ending one’s life was referred to as “going on a journey into the distant country.”
Susanne Vogel spoke of her own circumstances during the war. She wanted to divorce her husband, Hans Vogel (1897-1973) (Figure 9), so that he could work as an art historian, his chosen profession; as the husband of a Jewish wife Hans was forced to do menial clerical work. Despite these circumstances, he would not agree to a divorce. Susanne also mentions that she had hoarded enough poison to end her life if that became necessary, likely Veronal and Scopolamine-Entodal.
Dr. Ernst Neisser’s first cousin, Luise “Lise” Neisser (1861-1942), former teacher, kept house and cooked for him. Circumstances for Jewish people were becoming increasingly restrictive—they could not obtain coal, they were not permitted to use public transportation, and they were only allowed to buy food between the hours of 4 and 5pm.
Whenever Hans and Susanne Vogel visited Ernst and Lise, they would secretly take big, heavy bags with Professor Neisser’s possessions, for example paintings. This was strictly prohibited and dangerous. Ernst may still have believed he would survive the war, and these material things would again matter.
Dr. Neisser and Lise had already decided they would take their own lives if they were ordered to present themselves for deportation. On September 30, 1942, Susanne decided spontaneously to visit them where they lived in Eichenallee [Charlottenburg, Berlin]. Upon arriving at her father’s apartment, she learned he and her aunt Lise had been ordered to present themselves for deportation to Theresienstadt the following morning; typically, Jews received their deportation orders a few weeks in advance. Upon learning of their critical situation, Susanne immediately went to a telephone booth, and called her husband, the sanatorium where her mother had died, the Jewish Community, and their attorney Karl von Lewinski (Figure 10), trying to find a hiding place for her father and aunt, all to no avail; ironically, Mr. v. Lewinski had by that time been able to procure an entry visa for Ernst and Lise to Sweden, but by then Jews could no longer legally leave Germany.
By the time Susanne returned to the apartment, several friends had already gathered there, including Susanne’s husband, as well as the director of the sanatorium who’d brought enough poison for Ernst and Lise. Ernst then opened the last bottle of wine he had saved for this event, which everybody partook of. All persons eventually said their goodbyes, and left Ernst and Lise to take the poison. The following morning the Gestapo had taken Lise to the morgue, but Ernst lingered in a coma for another four days at the Jewish Hospital where he’d been taken, before he too expired, never having regained consciousness. (Figure 11)
Susanne Vogel was investigated by the police department because her father’s clock and identity card were missing, which Susanne had in fact taken. The police also searched the apartment where Ernst and Lise had lived, but all personal papers had already been destroyed. A sympathetic detective superintendent accompanied Susanne to her father’s apartment to inquire about the missing objects, as well as the source of the poison, and “believed” her when she told him she didn’t know. The detective also questioned the building superintendent, who spoke kindly of Ernst and Lise, but she too could shed no light on what had happened to Dr. Neisser’s personal belongings.
Susanne discusses the difficulty she faced in convincing the Nazi authorities to allow her to cremate her aunt, as well as her father. Because the Gestapo had taken away Dr. Neisser’s suit, he was wrapped and cremated in a shawl.
Susanne demurs telling Lieselotte Dieckmann about the three years her mother spent in the sanatorium, as well as about the last three days she spent with her cousin Aenne Herrnstadt, who readers may vaguely recall was Agnes Stieda’s godmother and who was deported and murdered in Theresienstadt in 1943.
Susanne Vogel’s account of her father and aunt’s final days is difficult enough to read as a brief summary, so readers need only imagine how melancholy reading the document in its unabbreviated form must be. Still, it is my intention in a future post to present the complete translation so readers may understand the circumstances of Dr. Neisser’s final years, as well as those of similarly “vulnerable” Jews.
I first introduced my third cousin, Agnes Stieda née Vogel (Figure 1), to readers in the previous Blog post (Post 45). She is the granddaughter of one of my Pauly relatives, Margarethe Neisser née Pauly (Figure 2), one of Josef and Rosalie Pauly’s daughters; Margarethe predeceased by less than a year her husband, Dr. Ernst Neisser (Figure 3), who along with his cousin committed suicide in Berlin on October 4, 1942, rather than be deported to a concentration camp.
Release of my previous post prompted Agnes to put down in writing memories of her wartime years, fulfilling a request from her children. Agnes graciously shared these recollections with me and was open to the idea of turning them into a Blog post. What follows is Agnes’ firsthand account of some wartime memories in Germany, including a few footnotes to provide a historic and geographic context for her tale.
Briefly, some backdrop. Agnes was born in May 1927 at the municipal hospital in Stettin, Germany [today: Szczecin, Poland] where her grandfather, Dr. Ernst Neisser, was the Director. She lived in various places growing up, including two-and-a-half years in Kassel, Germany [northern Hesse, Germany], then three years in Switzerland before her parents eventually settled in the small Lower Silesian village of Baitzen, Germany [today: Byczen, Poland], not far from the German-Czechoslovak border; she attended boarding school in the not-too-distant German town of Gnadenfrei (i.e., 27km or 17 miles north-northwest of Baitzen), known before 1928 as Ober-Peilau [today: Piława Górna, Poland]. Gnadenfrei/Ober-Peilau (Figure 4) was for many years “the longest village in Germany,” because it stretched for several miles along a brook, the Peile River. Piława Górna is 54km or 34 miles south of the regional capital of Wrocław [German: Breslau].
In 1945, after WWII, Gnadenfrei was transferred from Germany to Poland. Today, it is in Dzierżoniów County, Lower Silesian Voivodeship, in southwestern Poland, about 10km (6 miles) southeast of Dzierżoniów, Poland [formerly Reichenbach, Germany]; the latter is located at the foot of the Owl Mountains [German: Eulengebirge], a mountain range of the Central Sudetes, also known as the Sudeten after their German name. The view from Agnes’s parents’ living room was of these mountains, a place she often hiked.
As mentioned, Gnadenfrei and Baitzen were only a short distance from the border with then-Czechoslovakia, and Baitzen was located along the main road that led there; the areas along the border with Germany were predominantly inhabited by German-speaking people, and during the interwar period, these native German-speaking regions within Czechoslovakia were referred to as the “Sudetenland.” (Figure 5)
Students of history will recall the Munich Agreement, or the “Munich Betrayal” as the Czechs refer to it; this was an agreement between France and Nazi Germany that France would not provide military assistance to Czechoslovakia in the upcoming German occupation of the Sudetenland, effectively dishonoring the French-Czechoslovak alliance and allowing Nazi Germany’s annexation of the area, a region of western Czechoslovakia inhabited mainly by German speakers (i.e., 3.67 million inhabitants including some 2.9 million Germans). Adolf Hitler announced it was his last territorial claim in Europe, and the choice seemed to be between war and appeasement. An emergency meeting of the main European powers – not including the Soviet Union, an ally to both France and Czechoslovakia – took place in Munich, Germany, on 29-30 September 1938. An agreement was quickly reached on Hitler’s terms. It was signed by the top leaders of Germany, France, Great Britain, and Italy. Czechoslovakia was not invited to the conference. Between October 1st and 10th, 1938, the German Wehrmacht occupied the Sudetenland.
With this brief background, what follows is Agnes’ story. Numbers in parentheses correspond to my footnotes at the end of the narrative.
“When WWII started with the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, I was in a Moravian-run boarding school in Gnadenfrei. When we heard the news on the radio, all the teachers started crying, a scary sight for us pupils. Only one younger teacher was happy—her home was in Danzig, a city in the Polish ‘corridor,’ which meant that it once again became German. I remember German Wehrmacht soldiers marching into Czechoslovakia, day and night, along the road on which my parents lived in Baitzen, Germany (Figure 6), though this may be a memory of when the Germans invaded the remainder of Czechoslovakia earlier that same year, in March 1939. We were only 20km (12 miles) from the border with Czechoslovakia.
I stayed at an all-girls boarding school in Gnadenfrei until I was 15 years old. Only later did I learn that the Director of the school had been sent multiple questionnaires asking whether any of her girls there had a Jewish background, which the Director threw unanswered into the garbage, a real act of courage. The Director and the students all had to salute the Nazi flag every morning, raising their arms and saying, ‘Heil Hitler”; once I raised my left arm and was reprimanded for it by the Hitler Youth leader. Although I was well-aware of my Jewish background, my mother’s Neisser family had long-ago converted to Christianity at a time when Germany let Jews convert. Nonetheless, for the Nazi Regime it was all about race, not religion.
I had a very close friend in the boarding school in Gnadenfrei, Karin, who was the daughter of landowning Silesian aristocrats, the von Czettritz/Neuhaus family. (Figure 7) I was often a guest at their house and spent the summer holidays in their home in Reichenbach. I saw my parents during the Christmas and Easter holidays. Karin commuted everyday by train from Reichenbach to Gnadenfrei to attend school there but was never a boarder. Sadly, Karin died of typhoid when she was 16, and my parents would not allow me to attend her funeral, afraid I would endanger her parents’ safety. This was a very bitter pill to swallow because of all the time I had spent with her and her family.
I remember being drafted into the ‘Jungmädchen’ [2], then into the B.D.M. [3]. We were required to pledge our personal allegiance to Hitler. I just put my free hand behind my back and stretched my fingers out, meaning the oath went in and out again of my consciousness. . .I thought it was rather a lark.
By 1942, my poor directors in both school and dormitory could no longer keep me, so from one day to the next, my years in Gnadenfrei were terminated and I returned to my parents’ home in Baitzen. The worst thing during the war years is that the brothers and fathers of many of my girlfriends were drafted into Hitler’s army, and died on the Front. Upon learning of their father’s or brother’s deaths, my girlfriends cried, and we, their friends, lay beside them in bed and tried to comfort them. I tear up even now thinking how awful this was for them and their families. To this day, I don’t know what happened to some of my girlfriends. After 1945, when that part of Germany became Polish, we had a ‘round letter’ that circulated twice a year with addresses of our schoolmates, but from a few we never heard from.
While we lived in Silesia, we would hear the Russian bombers flying overhead, but, living in the countryside, we never heard a bomb fall. We had food rations, but the real starvation came after 1945, when we had fled to Potsdam, a suburb of Berlin under Russian occupation.
Back to 1942. By the time I left school, ‘gymnasiums,’ schools which prepared you for university, were long closed to Jews and half-Jews. So, I did a lot of different things until I entered a gymnasium in Potsdam after the Nazi collapse to catch-up on my lost school years. My father could not work in his field as an art historian but managed to find a job with a Prince from the German aristocracy, I think a nephew or cousin of the last German Kaiser, who owned a large castle in Silesia; he gave him a job as a bookkeeper.
Later, the Russians threw us out of the house where we lived as refugees in Potsdam following Russian occupation of the area; we ended up living in a row house with a Frau von Mandelsloh and her husband, the sister and brother-in-law of my father’s former boss from Silesia. . .Frau von Mandelsloh was a veritable ‘angel.’
For about a year during the war, I was an au pair for a pastor and his wife who needed a housemaid for their two young children. During this time, we went back-and-forth between Potsdam and Silesia, living in both places. Obviously, as the war went on, anyone of Jewish ancestry was in more and more danger. Once, I remember, the Gestapo came to our small village. The mayor called us by telephone, which placed him in great danger, and warned us that we should disappear until everything was clear again. Can you imagine, the mayor calling?! Promptly, my mother and I trudged to the railway station in Kamenz [today: Kamieniec, Poland] (Figure 6) a half-hour’s walk away, through the freezing weather and caught the first train to Breslau [today:Wrocław, Poland], where we had relatives.
My father and many older or injured people were the last ones drafted to hold the Eastern Front line by digging ditches, etc. My father had had his thumb shot off during WWI and spent nine months in a field hospital; he never recovered the use of his left hand, unable to grip anything, but this saved him from being drafted into the German Army. During the Nazi era, they honored those who’d been wounded during WWI.
Except for the Gestapo incidence, the Nazis left us alone mostly. We think that a young woman who lived in the same house denounced us. When the Gestapo came to my parents’ house, they removed books by Martin Niemöller [4], one of the founding members of the Confessing Church [5], which was known for opposing the Third Reich; one of their prominent members, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, was incarcerated and killed by the Nazis.
In Breslau, my father’s brother was exempt from the military because he was a Director of a large brewery, an important man who owned a large apartment with spare rooms. He could take me in but not my Jewish mother. She found refuge in the tiny apartment of a distant relative sleeping in an armchair.
In 1942, the Nazi Regime went quickly to work on their ‘Final Solution,’ as they called it. They gathered all non-Aryans and ordered them to report for deportation. My grandmother had already died a year before [1941] but my grandfather, his cousin, and many other relatives were ordered to register. Knowing what was coming, they instead took their own lives. My mother [Suse Vogel née Neisser] wrote about this, and her memoirs can be found on the Internet, but only in German; they are really in need of translation into English.
Back to the war. I had never experienced an air-raid but that was to come. Back in Silesia, I worked for a farmer from morning to night and loved that job. It was strenuous work, but being outside all day I was carefree, and never thought much about not being in school.
My grandfather, to whom I was very close, was still alive at the time. I have a very distinct childhood memory of being in his apartment in 1941 in Berlin when he learned of my grandmother’s death, of him standing by a window with tears running down his face; in all the years, I’ve never forgotten this image. I learned about my grandfather’s death when my parents sent me his obituary but found out only later why he had died. Of my grandmother’s sisters and their spouses who also committed suicide, I continue to learn about them even today. My dear parents tried to protect me from the Nazi horrors as much as they could and kept me innocent and naïve for a long time. When it became obvious that Germany would lose the war, Nazi rules became even stricter.
After one finished the B.D.M., every young girl was drafted and sent East to ‘defend’ the Fatherland. I was no exception. My mother, however, was unwilling to accept these circumstances and asked the advice of a doctor friend, aptly named Dr. Freund [German ‘freund’=friend]. He wrote a document for the authorities stating that I had streptococcus that had caused a heart valve disease. Streptococcus is so contagious it did the trick of my not being drafted. But I had to go to many clinics in Breslau to have my heart valve disease diagnosed; of course, the doctors could not find it because I was perfectly healthy. This strep was so indoctrinated into me that for years I was convinced I really had it.
In most ways the Hitler regime was very organized, but in others it was chaotic, and things were overlooked. Our wonderful neighbors in Silesia were very worried about my mother and me, more on account of the rapidly approaching Russian and Polish armies than the Nazis. Their newly-married daughter begged us to come with her and her parents, whom she also sought to protect, deep into the Silesian mountains where her husband’s parents owned a butcher shop and a restaurant in the small town of Lichtenwalde [today: Poreba, Poland] (Figure 8); the daughter’s husband was at the Front. We knew lots of wonderful and courageous people. I met only two fervent Nazis, one was my father’s own nephew, who, despite his fanatic beliefs, never denounced us. Still, he suggested my mother divorce my father, and, worse, urged her to commit suicide; my father was enraged with his nephew. When we left for the mountains, we could only bring one pack with us. Upon our arrival there, we found other people who’d fled from the heavy bombing in west German cities, notably Berlin.
Figure 8. Detailed map showing location of Lichtenwalde [today: Poreba, Poland] the mountain village where Agnes and her mother took refuge with the family of neighbors from Baitzen; Seitendorf to the south is a town Agnes remembered having passed throughMy mother had tried to reach my father in his Unit but had no success. Since we had fled our home [Baitzen], my father had no way to connect with us. My mother’s thoughts were entirely focused on how we could reconnect. My father was responsible for bringing his Unit’s mail to the train, and when he noticed the train was headed to Berlin, he took that opportunity to jump onboard and go AWOL, hoping to find us when he arrived in Potsdam; we had always found shelter there in the apartment of the mother of one my mother’s good friends. By going AWOL, my father had taken a huge risk since deserters were shot on sight. But he was not discovered and entered Berlin which was aflame. I’ve never understood how my mother found out where my father was.
My mother and I took literally the last train leaving Silesia, which was already overcrowded with German refugees. My mother made it on the train, but I made it only to the running board. People, seeing we would be separated, lifted me up and shoved me in; despite the incredible chaos, they helped us find one another. Now came the nail-biting part of the journey, hoping my Jewish mother would not be discovered. Fortunately, she did not have to wear the Star of David [6]. . . Near Berlin the train stopped because it was being shot at from above, although not bombed. So, we entered Berlin, the burning images still vivid in my memory. And, there stood my father, waiting for us at the Potsdam train station. My mother and I, who had never quarreled before, argued about who would be the first to hug my father. I relented and gave her that privilege. I think this was the most decisive and happy moment of our lives.
On that very first night, there was a terrible air-raid that entirely flattened Potsdam. It was my first experience with bombings. Finally, the sirens sounded telling us it was safe to leave the air-raid shelter. Upon reaching street-level, we walked to one of the main arteries which was entirely engulfed in flames on both sides of the street with a strong wind blowing. . .we did not yet know most of the city had been destroyed. When the planes came the following night to finish the job, I remember sitting in my mother’s lap so scared I could not control my trembling. The next day or the day after that, my father said, ‘we cannot remain here, or we will be killed.’ We had a friend who lived in the country, so we loaded our backpacks and left Potsdam.
I don’t remember how many hours or even days before the Reich crumbled. I can’t even remember any celebration, because right away came, first the Polish soldiers, then the Russians, with their built-up hatred, bent on revenge for all the German Army had done to them. Fortunately, neither my mother nor I was raped, but in both cases, it was a close call.
But I better stop here because I try to erase these terrible memories.”
[1] The “Heim ins Reich” was a foreign policy pursued by Adolf Hitler during World War II, beginning in 1938. The aim of Hitler’s initiative was to convince all Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans) who were living outside Nazi Germany that they should strive to bring these regions “home” into Greater Germany, but also, relocate from territories that were not under German control, following the conquest of Poland in accordance with the Nazi-Soviet pact. The Heim ins Reich manifesto targeted areas ceded in Versailles to the newly reborn nation of Poland, as well as other areas that were inhabited by significant German populations such as the Sudetenland, Danzig, and the south-eastern and north-eastern regions of Europe after October 6, 1939.
[2] The Jungmädelbund (“Young Girls’ League”) was one of the original two sections of the “League of German Girls” or “Band of German Maidens” [German: Bund Deutscher Mädel, abbreviated as BDM], the girls’ wing of the Nazi Party youth movement, the Hitler Youth. The Young Girls’ League was for girls aged 10 to 14, and the League proper for girls aged 14 to 18. In 1938, a third section was introduced, the BDM-Werk Glaube und Schönheit (“Faith and Beauty Society”), which was voluntary and open to girls between the ages of 17 and 21.
[4] Martin Niemöller (1892-1984) was a German theologian and Lutheran pastor, and was best known for his opposition to the Nazi regime during the 1930’s. While he was initially a supporter of Adolf Hitler, he became a co-founder of the “Confessing Church,” which opposed the Nazification of German Protestant Churches. Interestingly, while Martin Niemöller is by no means a household name, a poem he wrote, multiple variations of which exist, will be extremely familiar to many readers:
First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
[5] “Confessing Church” [German: Bekennende Kirche], as explained above, opposed the Nazification of German Protestant Churches.
[6] Students of history will know that the Nuremberg Laws in 1935 banned marriages between Jews and non-Jews, and that Nazis designed policies to encourage intermarried couples to divorce. However, even among intermarried couples, there was a hierarchy, at least for a period. Families with an Aryan husband and baptized children were part of the category classified as “privileged mixed marriages”; they received better rations and the Jewish wife did not have to wear the yellow Star of David. Although Agnes was baptized, on her birth certificate it is written: “I bring to your attention that this child had Jewish ancestors.” So, even though Agnes was born in 1927, as readers well-know, anti-Semitism existed long before the Nazis came to power.
