POST 125: MY FATHER’S DENTAL APPRENTICESHIP IN FREIE STADT DANZIG (FREE CITY OF DANZIG)

 

Note: This post is the result of a recent contact with a Dr. Dominik Gross who is developing an encyclopedia of dentists, dental technicians, and oral surgeons who worked during the Nazi era as either perpetrators or enablers or victims of the regime’s policies. Evidence provided by Dr. Gross has allowed me to identify the Jewish dentist in Danzig [today: Gdansk, Poland] with whom my father apprenticed after obtaining his dental license from the University of Berlin in 1930.

 

Related Post:

POST 1: OTTO BRUCK & TIEGENHOF: THE BEGINNING

Post 6: OTTO BRUCK & TIEGENHOF: 1932 POCKET CALENDAR

POST 31: WITNESS TO HISTORY, “PROOF” OF HITLER’S DEATH IN MY UNCLE FEDOR’S OWN WORDSPOST 31: WITNESS TO HISTORY, “PROOF” OF HITLER’S DEATH IN MY UNCLE FEDOR’S OWN WORDS

POST 67: THE SUSPICIOUSLY BRUTAL DEATHS OF MY FATHER’S PROTESTANT FRIENDS FROM DANZIG, GERHARD & ILSE HOPPE (PART I)

POST 67: THE SUSPICIOUSLY BRUTAL DEATHS OF MY FATHER’S PROTESTANT FRIENDS FROM DANZIG, GERHARD & ILSE HOPPE (PART II)

 

I was recently contacted by a Dr. Dominik Gross who is a German bioethicist and historian of medicine. (Figure 1) He is Professor and Director of the Institute of History, Theory and Ethics in Medicine at the RWTH (Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule) Aachen, the North Rhine-Westphalia Technical University of Aachen, Germany. His research focuses on medicine under National Socialism and the professionalization of the medical and dental profession. From 2017 to 2019 he headed the national project to review the role of dentists under National Socialism.

 

Figure 1. Dr. Dominik Gross in 2017 (source: Wikipedia)

 

Dr. Gross has been working on a “lexikon,” in essence an encyclopedia or dictionary, on dentists, dental technicians, and oral surgeons who worked or emerged during the time of the Third Reich as well as before 1933 or after 1945. It is titled “Lexicon of Dentists and Oral Surgeons in the ‘Third Reich’ and in Post-War Germany: Perpetrators, Followers, Members of the Opposition, Persecuted, Uninvolved Volume 1: University Teachers and Researchers.” As his publishing house describes the work it “. . . brings together ‘perpetrators, followers, members of the opposition, persecuted’ and politically ‘uninvolved,’ whereby the relationship of the individual to National Socialism is . . . a central part. Further focal points are the professional achievements as well as the personal network structures in which the individual specialist representatives were involved.”

As we speak, Dr. Gross is working on Volume 2 of his lexikon, specifically on biographies for dentists, dental technicians, and oral surgeons who had private practices or worked under the auspices of academically trained dentists.

It is worth pointing out a distinction in terminology that once existed in Germany with respect to dentists. Two German words, “zahnarzt” and “dentist” both translate into English as “dentist.” However, a German “dentist” was a job title for dentists without academic training that existed in Germany until 1952 alongside academically trained dentists. “Dentisten” (plural) were essentially dental technicians who, after successfully completing relevant training, were allowed to treat patients.  In Germany, the term “dentist” is now used as a derogatory title.

As a related aside, I remarked the following in Post 31 about Hitler’s dentist, Dr. Hugo Blaschke: “Dr. Blaschke would today be called a ‘zahntechniker,’ a non-academically trained dental technician primarily responsible for producing bridges and dentures, or ‘zahnbehandler,’ dental practitioner.  A ‘zahnarzt’ in today’s parlance is an academically trained dentist.” Hitler elevated Blaschkle to the status of a zahnarzt though he was not academically trained as one.

I digress. Among the biographies that will be included in Dr. Gross’s Volume 2 lexikon are ones for my father, Dr. Otto Bruck (Figure 2), and my uncle, Dr. Fedor Bruck. (Figure 3) Since some of the information about both was drawn from posts on my family history blog, Dr. Gross asked me to review his drafts. While I anticipated learning new things about my uncle’s professional life since he never told me his life’s story, I had more modest expectations regarding my father’s dental career in Germany. Still, I learned that my father had apprenticed for a Dr. Paul Herzberg in Danzig [today: Gdansk, Poland] after taking his dental examination at the University of Berlin in May 1930 and being licensed as a zahnarzt. What I was most surprised to learn was that as part of being certified prior to 1935 as a Dr. med. dent., a Doctor of Dental Medicine, he wrote a dissertation; to date, Dr. Gross has not been able to track it down nor discover the subject of my father’s dissertation.

 

Figure 2. My father Dr. Otto Bruck in his dental uniform in Danzig in 1931

 

Figure 3. My uncle Dr. Fedor Bruck working on a dental patient in his practice in Liegnitz, Germany [today: Legnica, Poland]

Dr. Gross sent me a copy of the source of the information on my father’s apprenticeship to Dr. Herzberg, specifically, the “Deutsches Zahnärzte-Buch. 17. Ausgabe Des Adresskalendars der Zahnärzte Im Deutsches Reich Freistaat Danzig und Im Memelland 1932/33, translated as “German dentist book. 17th edition of the address calendar of dentists in the German Reich Free State of Danzig and in Memelland 1932/33.” According to this address book, Dr. Herzberg’s office was located at Langer Markt 25 (Long Market 25) In Danzig, known today as Długi Targ. (Figure 4a-b)

 

Figure 4a. Cover of the “German dentist book. 17th edition of the address calendar of dentists in the German Reich Free State of Danzig and in Memelland 1932/33”

 

Figure 4b. Pages 438 and 439 of the German dentist book from 1932/33. Page 438 lists my father’s name showing he was an assistant to Dr. Paul Herzberg. On the opposing page 439 the name “Hoppe” appears under the town “Neuteich” who was my father’s good friend Gerhard Hoppe

 

My father’s photo albums include several taken in Danzig including one with his close friends Ilse and Gerhard Hoppe. (Figure 5) Regular readers will recall Posts 67, Parts I & II where I discussed the particularly brutal deaths of these companions. Like my father, Gerhard Hoppe was a dentist; he worked in the town south of Tiegenhof called Neuteich [today: Nowy Staw, Poland]. In the 1932/33 address book sent to me by Dr. Gross, readers will note the Hoppe surname under Neuteich. (see Figure 4b)

 

Figure 5. My father with Gerhard & Ilse Hoppe walking along Grosse Wollwebergasse [today: Tkacka] in Danzig during the Winter of 1931-1932

The only previous reference I had found that my father was a dentist in the Free City of Danzig was in a 1934 Danzig Address Book. Quoting what I wrote in Post 1: “Danzig Address Books can be accessed on-line at the following site: http://wiki-de.genealogy.net/Kategorie:Adressbuch_f%C3%BCr_Danzig.  ‘Teil III’ (Part III) in the back of the directory is like our Yellow Pages, listing people by occupation.  In the 1934 Danzig Address Book, there is a separate listing of dentists which includes Tiegenhof and the other towns in the Free City of Danzig. Tiegenhof [today: Nowy Dwor Gdanski, Poland] includes two listings, a woman by the name of Dr. Zeisemer, for which no address is provided, and a DR. HEINZ BRUCK, located at Markstrasse 8, the address corresponding exactly to my father’s dental office . . .  Clearly, this is a reference to my father, although why his first name is incorrectly shown is unclear. (Figure 6) Unfortunately, no separate listing of dentists in the Danzig Address Books exists for before or after 1934 that specifically includes Tiegenhof and the towns surrounding Danzig, so it is not possible to further track my father.” Clearly, in writing the last line, I was obviously unaware of the address calendar of dentists from 1932/33 that Dr. Gross sent me.

 

Figure 6. Page from 1934 Danzig Address Book listing dentists including a Dr. Heinz Bruck at Markstrasse 8 in Tiegenhof, a clear but mistaken reference to my father, Dr. Otto Bruck

 

I suspect the reason no early 1930’s Danzig residence address books include my father’s name is because he was living with his aunt, Hedwig Löwenstein née Bruck, and two of her three children, Jeanne and Heinz Löwenstein, two of my father’s first cousins.

Curious whether I might uncover any information about Dr. Paul Herzberg, I turned to ancestry.com. There, I unearthed Paul’s 1925 marriage certificate to a Mathilde Marie Fleischmann, married Heineck; clearly, Mathilde was divorced or widowed when she remarried. At the time they married they were living at Langer Markt 9/10, a stone’s throw from Dr. Herzberg’s office. (Figures 7a-d)

 

Figure 7a. Cover page of Dr. Paul Herzberg and Mathilde Marie Fleischmann, married Heineck’s 1925 marriage certificate

 

 

Figure 7b. Page 1 of Dr. Paul Herzberg and Mathilde Marie Fleischmann, married Heineck’s 1925 marriage certificate
Figure 7c. Page 2 of Dr. Paul Herzberg and Mathilde Marie Fleischmann, married Heineck’s 1925 marriage certificate

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 7d. Transcription and translation of Dr. Paul Herzberg and Mathilde Marie Fleischmann, married Heineck’s 1925 marriage certificate

 

The marriage certificate, as I suspected, established that both Paul and Mathilde were Jewish. Checking Yad Vashem, I can find neither of their names as Holocaust victims so there is a good possibility they emigrated to an unknown destination. Expectedly, Dr. Gross confirmed there is no record of Dr. Paul Herzberg in post-WWII German phone directories.

Among my father’s surviving papers are two letters of recommendation from dentists he briefly apprenticed with prior to training with Dr. Herzberg. From the 1st to the 15th of July 1930 my father worked under a Dr. Franz Schulte from Königsbrück in the German state of Saxony (Figures 8a-b), then from the 17th of July until the 16th of August he trained with a Dr.  Heinrich Kruger from Allenstein, Germany [today: Olsztyn, Poland]. (Figures 9a-b) Neither of these dentists is included in Dr. Gross’s lexikon. Given the timing of the two brief stints my father served as a novitiate in 1930, and the opening of his own practice in Tiegenhof [today: Nowy Dwor Gdanski, Poland] in April 1932, I surmise that he worked as Dr. Herzberg’s assistant in the intervening period.

 

Figure 8a. Letter of recommendation from Dr. Franz Schulte of Königsbrück (Saxony) dated the 22nd of July 1930 after my father apprenticed with him from the 1st to the 15th of July

 

Figure 8b. Dr. Franz Schulte’s name listed as a dentist in Königsbrück (Freistaat Sachsen) in the 1929 Dental Address Book

 

 

Figure 9a. Letter of recommendation from Dr. Heinrich Kruger of Allenstein, Germany [today: Olsztyn, Poland] dated the 17th of August 1930 after my father apprenticed with him from the 17th of July to the 16th of August
Figure 9b. Dr. Heinrich Kruger’s name listed as a dentist in Allenstein in the 1929 Dental Address Book

 

In closing because I found a picture of a Dr. Fritz Bertram and other friends of my father sailing in the Bay of Danzig (Figure 10) and knew Fritz through Danzig address books to be a zahnarzt, in Post 6 I mistakenly concluded him to be the dentist with whom my father apprenticed; I now assume he was a professional colleague and friend.  With new evidence to the contrary, it seems my father apprenticed rather with Dr. Paul Herzberg when living in Danzig.

 

Figure 10. Dr. Franz Betram and other friends of my father sailing in the Bay of Danzig in April 1931; I mistook Dr. Bertram as the dentist in Danzig with whom my father apprenticed

 

REFERENCE

Gross, Dominik. (2022) Lexikon der Zahnärzte & Kieferchirugen im “Dritten Reich” und im Nachkriegsdeutschland: Täter, Mitläufer, Oppositionelle, Verfolgte, Unbeteiligte Band 1: Hochschullehrer und Forscher. Berlin: Hentrich & Hentrich.

POST 123 (GUEST POST): IN MEMORY OF THE JEWISH FAMILY LIEB-LIB FROM STUTTHOF [SZTUTOWO, POLAND]

 

EDITOR’S NOTE: For the first time on my Blog, I’m hosting a guest post by a gentleman named Mr. Uwe Sager, a longtime contributor to the German-language Forum.Danzig.de. Members in this Forum post articles about people, places, events, etc. associated with the former Free City of Danzig [German: Freie Stadt Danzig; Polish: Wolne Miasto Gdańsk] and investigate and try to answer queries posted by participants and fellow researchers. The Free City of Danzig was a city-state under the protection of the League of Nations between 1920 and 1939, consisting of the Baltic Sea port of Danzig [today: Gdańsk, Poland] and nearly 200 other small localities in the surrounding areas. Because my father, Dr. Otto Bruck, lived in Danzig and nearby Tiegenhof [today: Nowy Dwór Gdański, Poland] in the Free City of Danzig between roughly 1930 and 1937, several years ago I posted multiple queries on the Forum hoping members might help me determine the fate of several of my father’s friends from his time living there, to little avail. However, this is how Uwe and I became acquainted. At the time, Uwe was already researching the fate of the Jewish family “Lieb” or “Lib” from Stutthof [today: Sztutowo, Poland] that is the subject of this guest post, although he’d not yet worked out most of the details presented below. Uwe’s research into the Lieb’s was prompted by one of the Forum’s readers who’d formerly lived in Stutthof, a woman named Irmchen Krause, asking about them. What follows is what Uwe and a fellow Forum member, Rainer Mueller Glodde, have unearthed about the Lieb family’s fate. Since I’ve mentioned the notorious Stutthof Concentration Camp in previous posts, including my father’s encounter with Gerhard Epp who relied on Jewish inmates from there to produce munitions in his converted Stutthof machine factory, it seems appropriate to include a guest post discussing the fate of one Jewish family from Stutthof.

 

Stutthof-Sztutowo

In memory of the Jewish family Lieb/Lib in Stutthof

By Uwe Sager – Forum.Danzig.de

With Contributions by Rainer Mueller Glodde (Administrator of momente-im-werder.net)

April 2020

 

When I was informed at the end of 2016 by Irmchen, née Krause, former Stutthof resident, of a Jewish family that had once lived there, I wanted to learn more about their history and whereabouts. The family’s name was Lieb. I hope my findings may remind the town’s current inhabitants that Jews once lived there, even though the family itself may not have attached much importance to it. Yet, the family was part of the community at one time and represents a segment of the town’s dark past.

Irmchen recalls a Jewish family by the name of Lieb that lived in Stutthof in the 1930’s. They ran a clothing store located on the corner of Schulstraße and Poststraße. (Figure 1) The family had a young daughter named Antonia, affectionately called “Tania.” Only a few Stutthöfer dared to shop at Lieb’s. As Irmchen notes, “Whoever bought from the Lieb’s had fingers pointed at them.” Additionally, customers were threatened by telling them their names would be published on the “Stürmerkasten” (EDITOR’S NOTE: Stürmerkasten is a kind of wall newspaper, that was erected in every village during the Hitler era in Germany) (Figure 2), situated directly opposite the Lieb store.

 

Figure 1. The corner of Schulstraße and Poststraße in Stutthof where the Lieb family store was once located

 

Figure 2. Example of a “Stürmerkasten” or a wall newspaper where, among other things, the Nazis posted the names of people who continued to frequent Jewish businesses despite the ban against such interactions (Credit: Bundesarchiv_Bild_133-075, Worms,_Antisemitische_Presse,__Stürmerkasten_)

 

The boycott measures against Jewish businesses and businesspeople are well known. Despite these measures, ironically, some Stutthöfer secretly shopped with the Lieb’s in the evening. According to Irmchen, the talk at the time was that Mr. Lieb was taken away with his wife and child in what is referred to as a “Nacht und Nebel aktion” (EDITOR’S NOTE: German for the “night and fog action” of abductions and disappearances decreed by Nazi Germany). Irmchen is not aware of any community support on behalf of the Lieb’s. According to another witness, some members of the community were still in contact with Mrs. Lieb who was supposedly then living in Danzig [today: Gdansk, Poland]. Mrs. Lieb is said to have warned comers against contacting her, saying it was too dangerous. Not unexpectedly,it was reported that she wore a Jewish star.

Following the Lieb family’s abduction or departure, their business was taken over by the Antony family who ran a grocery and dairy store next door. The textile portion of the Lieb business was assumed by Heinrich Thiessen, who ran his own textile store on Poststraße.

My own research, as well as that of colleagues from Forum Gdansk, led to several documents from which the life of the Lieb/Lib family can partially be reconstructed.

Zalman Lib (Salomon Lieb) was born on the 21st of December 1891. The difficult-to-read place of birth, combined with the possibility that the place name was incorrectly spelled by the registrar, is by appearances Dziewienszki (Polish), Dieveniškės (Lithuanian) (Figure 3), Divenishok (Lithuanian), or Jevenishok (Yiddish) (see Wikipedia and Jewish Gen KehilaLinks (English), including pictures of the town). Family surname listings for Divenishok show no Lieb or Lib; the closest is the surname “Leyb.”

 

Figure 3. Location of Dieveniškės, Lithuania, presumed birthplace of Salomon Lieb

 

Around 1928 Salomon Lieb opened his clothing store at the corner of Schulstraße and Poststraße. However, the “Adreßbuch Danzig-Land von 1927/28” does not have him listed in either Stutthof nor elsewhere in the Free City of Danzig. Presumably he was living in the region but without his own household.

The existence of the Lieb clothing store is documented in two places:

Günter Rehaag, “Ostseebad Stutthof” Band 2, Einwohnerverzeichnis Stutthof (Volume 2, Register of Residents Stutthof).

Number 1445:

Name: Antony, Walter, born 1908

Place of Residence: Stutthof, Schulstraße 2

Occupation: Merchant, Milk Butter Groceries, Schulstraße/corner Poststraße

Other: Besitz Fr. Löwner, tenants Rathke and Antony (early merchant Liep)

Info: Hermann Rohde

 

Deutsches Reichs-Adressbuch für Industrie, Gewerbe und Handel, 1934, Stutthof, Manufakturwaren (German Reich Address Book for Industry, Trade and Commerce, 1934, Stutthof, Manufactured Goods)

Dau, G. – Gerber, Fritz – Glodde, Alfr. – Lieb, Sal., – Thiessen, Heinrich (Figure 4)

 

Figure 4. Listing in the “Deutsches Reichs-Adressbuch für Industrie, Gewerbe und Handel, 1934, Stutthof, Manufakturwaren” documenting Solomon Lieb’s manufactured goods store. Readers will also note below the listing of manufactured goods retailers, the machine factor of “Epp & Co. GmbH”

(EDITOR’S NOTE: Readers will notice that immediately below the list of manufactured goods merchants on Figure 4, there is a single “Maschinenfabrik,” Machine Factory, with the merchant “Epp & Co. GmbH” listed. This would refer to Gerhard Epp who was a middle brother of two of my father’s friends from Tiegenhof [today: Nowy Dwór Gdański, Poland]).

In 1929 Salomon Lieb got married in Danzig. (Figures 5a-c). 

 

Figure 5a. Cover page from ancestry.com of Sarra Woloweleski’s marriage to Salmon Lib on the 16th of July 1929 in Danzig, Free City of Danzig

 

Figure 5b. Page 1 of Sarra Wolowelski and Salmon Lib’s 16th of July 1929 marriage certificate
Figure 5c. Page 2 of Sarra Wolowelski and Salmon Lib’s 16th of July 1929 marriage certificate

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The marriage certificate records the following information:

Registry Office Danzig I, Certificate Number 528 dated 16th of July 1929

The merchant Salmon Lib, Jewish religion, born on the 21st of December 1891 in Dziewienszki, district Oszmiany, Lithuania, living in Stutthof, Danziger lowland.

The parents are the merchant David Lib and his already deceased wife Tony, née Katz, both residing in Dziewienszki.

Married to Sarra Wolowelski, accountant, Jewish religion, born on the 31st of August 1898/ 10th of September 1898 (Julian/Gregorian calendar) at Pinsk-Karolin, Belarus (Figure 6), living in Danzig.

The parents are the merchant Josef Wolowelski and his wife Lea, née Menzel, both living in Pinsk-Karolin, Belarus.

 

Figure 6. Location of Pinsk, Belarus, birthplace of Sarra Wolowelski

 

In 1932, presumably in Stutthof, Salomon and Sarra’s daughter Tania was born.

The exclusion, harassment, and persecution of the Jew Salomon Lieb in Stutthof, supporting what Irmchen previously noted, is confirmed in the following account:

“Kurt Gutowski, son of a local blacksmith and later poet, has given anecdotal evidence in his short memoirs of the growth of fascism and racist ideologies in his home village (Gutowski, Kurt: Aus meiner Stutthöfer Kinderzeit, p. 66). Gutowski attributes the everyday fascism to his school principal Reinhold Zube, who asked students to damage deliveries to the Jewish department store Lieb to make them unusable. Zube pulled out of the ordered district council elections in November 1934 as a firebrand in the Kreistag. . .” (Zimmermann, Rüdiger: Friedrich Rohde (1895-1970), Danziger Volkstagsabgeordneter, Fischer und Sozialist, Bonn 2020, S. 44)

In 1936, the Lieb family left Stutthof. Whether they were, as Irmchen postulated, picked up in a “Nacht und Nebel” action, or they left Stutthof quietly and secretly on their own remains unclear. The latter is supported by the above-mentioned meeting with Mrs. Lieb, who was apparently living in freedom in Danzig. (EDITOR’S NOTE: After all my father’s dental clients had abandoned him, he left nearby Tiegenhof in around fall 1937 in favor of Berlin where the anonymity of a larger city temporarily provided Jews like him more freedom of movement and economic opportunities. For the same reason, the Liebs may have felt that Danzig as a larger city might similarly and temporarily provide haven.)

The likelihood that the Liebs were living in Danzig is also supported by another written account: “. . . at the home of the Danzig merchant Salomon Lieb, officials of the Tax Investigation Office discovered 30,000 Danzig guilders in gold which they confiscated along with his savings account balance of 3,000 guilders, even though Lieb no longer ran a commercial business. Nonetheless, the Financial Authority claimed he had tax debts and seized the gold coins as an alleged tax liability and tax penalty.” (Sopade 1938, p. 770f.) (Banken, Ralf: “Hitlers Steuerstaat: Die Steuerpolitik im Dritten Reich”, 2018, S. 555, Fußnote 256)

These monetary assets suggest that Salomon Lieb had successfully sold his business and stock of goods in Stutthof to the merchants Walter Antony and Heinrich Thiessen.

Where the Lieb family then lived between 1936 and 1942 remains unclear, possibly Danzig? The Liebs are not listed in Danzig Address Books of 1937/38 and 1939, although this is not definitive proof that they did not stay in the city. Alternatively, they may have returned to Dziewienszki, Salomon’s place of birth. There is documentary evidence from a 1942 Ghetto List that Salomon Lieb and his daughter Tania, without the wife/mother Sarra, were in the Woronów Ghetto.

From a Ghetto-List – https://www.avivshoa.co.il/pdf/Ghetto-List-1.8.2014.pdf (Figure 7)

 

Figure 7. Link to source of 1942 Woronowo ghetto list

 

COLUMN 1: Nr. 5288

COLUMN 2: Woronowo (Voranava [Bel], (Voronovo [Rus], Woronów [Pol], Voronova [Yid], Voranova, Voronov, Voronove, Werenów, Woronowo)

COLUMN 3: until 1941: Poland, Gebiet Nowogrodek; until 1944/1945: Reichskommissariat Ostland (White Ruthenia); today: Belarus, Gebiet Grodno (Hrodna) region

COLUMN 4: Opening 1st June 1941

COLUMN 5: Liquidation 30th September 1943

COLUMN 6: Deportations Lida

COLUMN 7: Remarks: on the 11th of May 1942, 1,291 persons were shot

COLUMN 8: Handbook of Detention Centers Belarus (1941-1944), 2001; Encyclopedia of Jewish Life, 2001 [EDITOR’s NOTE: The specific ghetto list with Salomon and Tania’s name on it appears in one of these publications.]

COLUMN 9: Date of Addition: 1st of August 2014

The map shows that the distance from the Woronów Ghetto [today: Voronovo, Belarus] to Dziewienszki [today: Dieveniškės, Lithuania] is only about 15.4 miles or 25km. (Figure 8)

 

Figure 8. Map showing distance from Dieveniškės, Lithuania, where Salomon Lieb was born, to the Woronowo (Voronovo) ghetto in Belarus where he and his daughter Tania were murdered

 

Following a request to the “Arolsen Archives International Center on Nazi Persecution,” they sent a file about the Liebs. This file does not indicate when and from where the Lieb family was taken to the Woronów Ghetto. Salomon Lieb is arrested in the ghetto on the 19th of May 1942 and shot during an “action.” (Figures 9a-d) In the case of the 10-year-old daughter Tania the date of her arrest is given as the beginning of June 1942; she too is shot during an “action.” (Figures 10a-c)

 

Figure 9a. Page 1 of Salomon Lieb’s file from the Arolsen Archives

 

Figure 9b. Page 2 of Salomon Lieb’s file from the Arolsen Archives; circled question indicates he lived on Weidengasse in Danzig

 

Figure 9c. Page 3 of Salomon Lieb’s file from the Arolsen Archives

 

Figure 9d. Page 4 of Salomon Lieb’s file from the Arolsen Archives

 

Figure 10a. Page 1 of Tania Lieb’s file from the Arolsen Archives

 

Figure 10b. Page 2 of Tania Lieb’s file from the Arolsen Archives; circled question indicates she lived on Weidengasse in Danzig

 

Figure 10c. Page 3 of Tania Lieb’s file from the Arolsen Archives

 

[EDITOR’S NOTE: In Figure 9b of the questionnaire in Salomon Lieb’s Arolsen Archives file, under question 9, and on Figure 10b. of Tania Lieb’s file is written in German the following: “9. Letzte Anschrift vor der Inhaftierung: Stutthof bei Danzig bis etwa 1936, dann Danzig in der nähe der Weidengasse,” translated as “9. Last address before imprisonment: Stutthof near Danzig until about 1936, then Danzig near Weidengasse.” (Figure 11) This confirms that Salomon and Tania Lieb lived in Danzig after leaving Stutthof, although there is no indication for how long.]

 

Figure 11. Pre-WWII map of Danzig with arrows pointing to location of Weidengasse where the Liebs lived, and to Mäusegasse where the Jewish ghetto in Danzig was located

 

[UWE SAGER’S HISTORICAL NOTE: At today’s ulica Owsiana in Gdansk, Poland (formerly Mäusegasse pointed out on Figure 11) there was a granary (Figure 12) with the charming name “Red Mouse” at number 7. In 1939 it served as a Nazi gathering point for Jews imprisoned in Danzig and was thus a kind of Danzig ghetto. The Germans were able to gather in it about 600 people who, for one reason or another, had not left Danzig when the Jewish community emigrated before the outbreak of war. The ghetto existed until 1943, when the remaining Jews were taken to the Auschwitz and Theresienstadt concentration camps. The fact that Salomon and Tania Lieb were murdered in the Woronów Ghetto rather than in Auschwitz or Theresienstadt suggests that they returned to Dziewienszki, Salomon’s place of birth, before being deported and murdered.]

 

Figure 12. Photo of the “Rote Maus,” the “Red House,” a granary that served as a Nazi detention center for Jews in Danzig until 1943 when the remaining Jews were deported and murdered in either Auschwitz or Theresienstadt

 

Nothing is known about the whereabouts of the wife/mother Sarra, not even on the list of survivors of the Woronów Ghetto. It cannot be ruled out that Sarra died between 1936 and 1942.

In the unpublished English-language manuscript written by Moshe Berkowitz entitled “Woronow, Voronova (Voranava, Belarus) 54°09′ / 25°20′,” Chapter XIII describes how the Jewish inhabitants of Diveneshok and neighboring villages were taken to Voronovo. Before their deportation, a delegation from the villages tried to negotiate with the Germans: “The delegation was as follows: LIEB; Hirsh SCHMID; YUTAN; and KOTLIAR from Diveneshok. . .” (Figure 13) Unfortunately, the first name of LIEB is missing so it is not clear whether it refers to Salomon Lieb.

 

Figure 13. Chapter XIII of Moshe Berkowitz’s unpublished manuscript with the names of the Jewish residents from Divenoshok and surrounding towns who “negotiated” with the Nazis before being deported to the Voronovo ghetto, including a man with the surname of “LIEB”

Chapter XV of the manuscript describes the massacre in Woronow, which took place on the 11th of May 1942, shortly preceding Salomon Lieb’s own death.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank the subscribers from the Danzig Forum, as well as the Arolsen Archive for providing the file on the Lieb family. My goal was not to write a book but as mentioned at the outset, to give the Lieb family a place in our consciousness. Therefore, I ask for your understanding that I have kept my post short.

The following is the file from the Arolsen Archives.

Copy of 6.3.3.3/82889670 through 82889675

In conformity with IST Digital Archives

With kind permission of the publication by above mentioned archive.

REFERENCES

Banken, Ralf. Hitlers Steuerstaat: Die Steuerpolitik im Dritten Reich (Hitler’s Tax State: Tax Policy in the Third Reich). De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2018.

Berkowitz, Moshe. Woronow, Voronova (Voranava, Belarus) 54°09′ / 25°20′. https://www.jewishgen.org/Yizkor/voronovo1/voronovo1.html

Gutowski, Kurt. Aus meiner Stutthöfer Kinderzeit (From my Stutthöfer childhood). J. Pinnow, 1999.

Rehaag, Günter. Ostseebad Stutthof: Band 2, Einwohnerverzeichnis Stutthof (Volume 2, Register of Residents Stutthof).

Zimmerman, Rüdiger. Friedrich Rohde (1895-1970). Danziger Volkstagsabgeordneter, Fischer und Sozialist (Friedrich Rohde (1895-1970) Danziger Volkstag, fisherman and socialist). Bonn, 2020.

POST 121, POSTSCRIPT: MY FATHER’S ENCOUNTERS WITH HITLER’S MENNONITE SUPPORTERS—FURTHER HISTORICAL OBSERVATIONS

 

Note: This postscript to Post 121 stems from several comments I obtained from readers I think are worth further discussion.

Related Posts:

POST 3: OTTO BRUCK & TIEGENHOF: THE “SCHLUMMERMUTTER”

POST 3, POSTSCRIPT: OTTO BRUCK & TIEGENHOF: THE “SCHLUMMERMUTTER”

POST 78: MY FATHER’S FRIEND, KURT LAU, JAILED FOR “INSULTING THE NAZI GOVERNMENT”

POST 121-MY FATHER’S ENCOUNTERS WITH HITLER’S MENNONITE SUPPORTERS

Several years ago, while doing research on Danzig [today: Gdansk, Poland] formerly located in the Free City of Danzig where my father Dr. Otto Bruck apprenticed as a dentist in the early 1930’s, I happened upon a discussion forum entitled “Forum.Danzig.de.” As I recall, at the time I was trying to learn about a close friend of my father from nearby Tiegenhof [today: Nowy Dwór Gdański, Poland], an enormous lady he had only ever referred to as the “Schlummermutter.” Through informants I would eventually learn her name was Margaretha “Grete” Gramatzki née Gleixner, and that she owned the building where my father lived and had his dental practice. I only fleetingly participated in the discussion forum because it is primarily oriented towards German speakers, a language I don’t speak. One forum member I briefly chatted with was Mr. Uwe Sager who put me in touch with my good German friend, the “Wizard of Wolfsburg,” Peter Hanke. Regular followers of my Blog may recall Peter has been enormously helpful tracking down and translating German ancestral documents for me, almost magically so, ergo his sobriquet.

In any case, following publication of Post 121, Uwe Sager recently sent me an email. He recognized Figure 8, the illustration I found in one of Ben Goossen’s articles showing Gerhard Epp and the leadership team of his business enterprise, the Firma Gerhard Epp Maschinenfabrik in Stutthof. (Figure 1) To remind readers Gerhard Epp was the middle sibling of two of my father’s closest friends from Tiegenhof, the Mennonite sisters Suse and Idschi Epp, who also lived in the same boarding house as my father. Among my father’s surviving pictures is one showing a social event my father attended in the early 1930’s at the home of their brother Gerhard Epp in Stutthof [today: Sztutowo, Poland]. Uwe graciously sent me a link to the complete German-language publication in which Figure 8 was originally printed, entitled “Ostseebad Stutthof,” translated as the “Baltic Seaside Resort of Stutthof,” by Günther Rehaag. Pages 114 and 115 of this publication, reprinted here, include additional images of the buildings and employees of the Firma Gerhard Epp. (Figures 2a-b)

 

Figure 1. Leadership of the Mennonite-owned Gerhard Epp firm in Stutthof (from Ben Goossen’s 2021 article)

 

Figure 2a. Page 114 from Günther Rehaag’s book “Ostseebad Stutthof” discussing and showing photos of the “Firma Gerhard Epp Maschinenfabrik in Stutthof”; this page includes Figure 1. with the names of employees captioned

 

Figure 2b. Page 115 from Günther Rehaag’s book “Ostseebad Stutthof” discussing and showing photos of the “Firma Gerhard Epp Maschinenfabrik in Stutthof”

 

The original picture of Gerhard Epp from Günther Rehaag’s publication identified the people in the photo, information not included in the picture reprinted in Ben Goossen’s article. To my surprise, seated to Gerhard’s left, to his right as the viewer is looking at the picture, was Gerhard’s daughter by his first marriage, Rita Schuetze née Epp (Figure 3), looking every bit as radiant as in the contemporaneous picture given to me in 2014 by her family (Figure 4); readers will recall I mentioned meeting Rita that year as an elderly woman who sadly was suffering from severe Alzheimer’s.

 

Figure 3. Closeup of photo from Günther Rehaag’s book showing Gerhard Epp seated next to his daughter, Rita Schuetze née Epp

 

 

Figure 4. Gerhard Epp’s daughter, Rita Schuetze née Epp, by his marriage to his first wife Margaretha Epp née Klaassen (photo provided to me by Rita Schuetze’s family)

 

Another reader who contacted me was intrigued by my father’s photos from 1933, 1934, and 1935, respectively, of Nazis parading on the street below his dental office and asked whether I have additional pictures of Żuławy Wiślane, the alluvial delta area of the river Vistula, in the northern part of Poland; I shared my father’s photos from the Żuławy region with this gentleman. This reader contacted me because of our overlapping connection to Tiegenhof in the Free City of Danzig where my father had his dental practice between April 1932 and April 1937. It turns out this reader’s mother was born there in 1924, and his grandfather was a civil servant in Tiegenhof for 20+ years.

I was able to confirm this person’s association with Tiegenhof through the database of displaced Germans refugees from the former province of Danzig-Westpreußen, Germany, now Gdańsk and Bydgoszcz provinces in Poland, referred to as “Heimatortskartei, (HOK).” This database includes images of a civil register (handwritten and printed works) of more than 20 million displaced Germans arranged by their town of origin.

This supportive reader brought up that Tiegenhof had been named in League of Nations reports from the 1930’s as a “hotbed” of rising Nazism. This follower shared an article published on the 11th of January 1932 in the “Danziger VolksStimme” with the translation (Figures 5a-c) describing an incident involving an attack by Nazi supporters on workmen, providing an insight into the gathering storm. This article was not much different than the Nazi attack reported on in a local newspaper in 1935 or 1936 directed at my father’s Protestant anti-Nazi friend, Kurt Lau, discussed in Post 78.

 

Figure 5a. Header of “Danziger VolksStimme” paper published on Monday, the 11th of January 1932, including an article describing a Nazi attack on workmen

 

Figure 5b. Article from the “Danziger VolksStimme” published on the 11th of January 1932 describing the Nazi attack on workmen

 

Figure 5c. Translation of the article from the “Danziger VolksStimme” from the 11th of January 1932

 

Aware of this reader’s interest in Żuławy Wiślane and some of the places discussed in Günther Rehaag’s book on Stutthof, I forwarded him the PDF. While acknowledging the remarkable achievement of tracking so many Mennonite families and pictures connected to Stutthof, he noted the glaring omission of discussing the nearby Stutthof concentration camp on the edge of the town where it is estimated that between 63,000 and 65,000 prisoners died because of murder, starvation, epidemics, extreme labor conditions, brutal and forced evacuations, and a lack of medical attention.

This is reminiscent of the postwar observations by the Mennonite Heinrich Hamm I discussed at length in Post 121 who, according to Ben Goossen, sought to focus exclusively and falsely on a narrative that portrayed Mennonites as victims of Nazi brutality. Quoting from Goossen: “Hamm later expressed regret for the death and dying that pervaded the Epp factory in Stutthof. Yet he explicitly named only German victims of Soviet air raids, not Jewish concentration camp prisoners. ‘[M]uch, much blood of innocent women and children flowed on Epp’s land,’ Hamm told his sons. ‘Uncountable, nameless dead. . .No one asked who they were, where they came from, nothing was recorded.’ One wonders about the goal of this private postwar accounting. Was Hamm helping himself forget about Jews worked to the bone in Epp’s factory by recalling refugees he and Epp tried to save? His use of the word ‘gassing’ suggests this possibility, since bodies of refugees could have been cremated, whereas exhausted Jews would have been gassed.

What is clear is that the Mennonite-owned factory in Stutthof was a place of terror. For hundreds of prisoners enslaved there, the factory’s Mennonite managers were responsible for much of that terror. It is also clear that after the war, Hamm tried to distance himself from this responsibility. He instead emphasized the suffering of his own family, which fled Stutthof in April 1945. As they crossed the Baltic under the cover of night, a Soviet submarine torpedoed their ship. Hamm praised God for allowing the damaged vessel to make it to Denmark. The family remained in Denmark for eighteen months. Hamm emphasized his gratitude for the comfort he found during these lean times through worshipping with fellow Mennonite refugees and other Christians.”

As a brief aside, Suse and Idschi Epp, my father’s Mennonite friends from Tiegenhof, were among those who fled to Denmark from Danzig-Westpreußen in 1945 as the Red Army was approaching; Suse died there before she could be repatriated to Germany. In researching the flight of Germans to Denmark, it highlights how as the fortunes of wars change victimizers often become victims.

In a largely forgotten chapter of history, some 250,000 Germans were interned in Denmark following WWII. Beginning in February 1945, Denmark, which was then occupied by the Nazis, was forced to take in refugees from the East as the Soviets advanced towards Berlin. Mostly spared the fighting, Denmark was Berlin’s favored destination for exiles.

At the time of Denmark’s liberation by the Allies on May 5th, more than 250,000 Germans were scattered around the country, accounting for roughly five percent of Denmark’s population. Fearing this German minority would eventually gain too much influence, they were rounded up and interned in large camps or re-purposed military camps; accommodations were primitive and unsanitary. Many of the refugees died shortly after arriving, already exhausted by the journey, and suffering from various illnesses. The Danish Medical Association explicitly refrained from treating refugees, arguing that helping them was indirectly assisting the German war machine. As a result, between 1945 and 1949, when the last refugees left the country, 17,000 of them died, 60 percent of whom were children under the age of five. Following the cessation of hostilities, the Danish authorities had always wanted to send the German refugees back to Germany as soon as possible but conditions there were so chaotic this was impossible. Complicating matters was that most of the refugees came from areas no longer part of Germany, now being in Russian or Polish controlled areas; for this reason, it took until 1949 before the last German refugees were repatriated.

This last paragraph quoted from Ben Goossen segues nicely into the last reader whom I want to reintroduce to readers, a Danish gentleman named Allan Grutt Hansen. (Figure 6) Allan has been featured in several earlier posts. Suffice it to say, that following publication of Post 121, he contacted me to remind me about the post-WWII history of the Slesvig part of the German state of Schleswig-Holstein; known to Danes as Southern Slesvig and formerly part of Denmark until the Second Schleswig War (1864), Allan has repeatedly spoken to me of this area, and I will briefly relate this area’s recent history.

 

Figure 6. Allan Grutt Hansen (b. 1962) from Denmark

 

After the end of WWI, the Treaty of Versailles provided for two plebiscites to determine the new border between Denmark and Germany. The two referendums were held in 1920, resulting in the partition of the region. Northern Schleswig voted by a majority of 75% to join Denmark, whereas Central Schleswig voted by a majority of 80% to remain part of Germany. The likelihood that what was then referred to as Southern Schleswig would vote to remain German meant that no referendum was held there. Today, Southern Schleswig is the name used for all German Schleswig.

An entry in Wikipedia succinctly describes the situation following the end of WWII:

“Following the Second World War, a substantial part of the German population in Southern Schleswig changed their nationality and declared themselves as Danish. This change was caused by several factors, most importantly the German defeat and an influx of many refugees from the former Prussian eastern provinces, whose culture and appearance differed from the local Germans, who were mostly descendants of Danish families who had changed their nationality in the 19th century.

The change in demographics created a temporary Danish majority in the region and a demand for a new referendum from the Danish population in South Schleswig and some Danish politicians, including prime minister Knud Kristensen. However, the majority in the Danish parliament refused to support a referendum in South Schleswig, fearing that the ‘new Danes’ were not genuine in their change of nationality. This proved to be the case and, from 1948 the Danish population began to shrink again.”

As Allan has remarked to me on several occasions, Denmark did not want to risk having Southern Schleswig incorporated into Denmark to avoid planting seeds for a possible future conflict with Germany over this region. Then-Czechoslovakia’s Sudeten crisis of 1938 provoked by the demands of Nazi Germany that the Sudetenland be annexed to Germany because of the large number of Sudeten Germans living there was not far from the minds of Danes when they decided to avoid a similar situation down the road that might result in a substantial number of Germans living within Denmark’s borders.

 

REFERENCES

Admin-Danish Immigration Museum. “German Refugees,” 15 October 2021, https://www.danishimmigrationmuseum.com/german-refugees/

“Denmark’s German refugees remember forgotten WWII chapter.” Digital Journal, https://www.digitaljournal.com/world/denmark-s-german-refugees-remember-forgotten-wwii-chapter/article/574780#:~:text=Denmark%E2%80%99s%20German%20refugees%20remember%20forgotten%20WWII%20chapter%20By,clearly%2075%20years%20on%20from%20World%20War%20II.

“Duchy of Schleswig.” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duchy_of_Schleswig.

Goossen, Ben. “Hitler’s Mennonite Voters.” Anabaptist Historians, 7 October 2021, https://anabaptisthistorians.org/2021/10/07/hitlers-mennonite-voters/

Rehaag, Günther. Ostseebad Stutthof: Grenzdorf B, Bodenwinkel, Ostseebad Steegen, Kreis Grosses Werder, Danzig-Westpreussen. Heimat-Dokumentation Stutthof, Danzig-Westpreussen, 1995.

“Southern Schleswig.” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Schleswig.

 

 

 

POST 121-MY FATHER’S ENCOUNTERS WITH HITLER’S MENNONITE SUPPORTERS

 

NOTE: In this post I examine the history of the Mennonites in the Vistula River delta in northern Poland, and my father’s interactions with them when he was a dentist in Tiegenhof which at the time was part of the Free City of Danzig. I also discuss why the historically pacifistic Mennonites went from fleeing the Netherlands, Flanders, and modern-day northern Germany in the mid-16th century to avoid religious persecution to becoming among Hitler’s staunchest supporters four centuries later.

RELATED POSTS:

POST 5: OTTO BRUCK & TIEGENHOF-IDSCHI & SUSE

POST 112, POSTSCRIPT: WOLFRAM E. VON PANNWITZ’S BEQUEST TO HIAS

The Dutch and Flemish Mennonites have lived in the Żuławy Wiślane, the alluvial delta area of the Vistula River in the northern part of Poland (Figure 1), for over 400 years. They came to Poland in the 16th century as refugees fleeing religious persecution in the Netherland, Flanders, and modern-day northern Germany.

 

Figure 1. Map of Poland showing Żuławy Wiślane, the alluvial delta area of the Vistula River in the northern part of the country

 

Mennonites are a branch of the Christian church, with roots in the radical wing of the 16th century Protestant Reformation. Mennonites are part of the group known as Anabaptists who took their name from Menno Simons, a Roman Catholic priest who left the Church in 1536 and became a leader within the Anabaptism movement. Anabaptism is the doctrine that baptism should only be administered to believing adults, held by a radical Protestant sect that emerged during the 1520s and 1530s.

The first Mennonites came mainly from Swiss and German roots, with many of the important martyrs of the early church coming from the area around Zurich. The Low Countries regions of Friesland (i.e., province of the Netherlands located in the country’s northern part) and Flanders (i.e., the Flemish-speaking northern portion of Belgium), as well as Eastern Frisia (i.e., a historic region in the northwest of Lower Saxony, Germany) and Holstein (i.e., the southern half of Schleswig-Holstein, the northernmost state of Germany) became the center of the Mennonites. Religious persecution in the Low Countries under Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, 3rd Duke of Alba (1507-1582) forced many Mennonites to leave in the 16th century.

Historically, Mennonites have been known as one of the peace churches due to their commitment to pacifism. The majority of the early Mennonite followers, rather than fighting, fled to neighboring states where the ruling families were tolerant of their beliefs. In the 16th century Poland was among the most tolerant kingdoms in Europe.

The Mennonites, like the Amish who separated from them in the late 1600’s, represent the strictest branches of Protestantism. The Amish are widely known for their plain dress and rejection of modern technology and conveniences. Unlike the Mennonites, they form an exclusive and tight-knit community. Mennonites generally are not culturally separatist.

Żuławy Wiślane, the region in now-northern Poland where the Mennonites settled, covers about 386 square miles or 1000 square km. Historically the area was an estuary of the Vistula (Figure 2), Poland’s longest river which empties into the Baltic Sea. The arduous process of reclaiming the land from the sea began in the 14th century. This involved building hundreds of canals, miles of dikes, and networks of pumps and locks which allowed for the removal of water and the gradual drainage of the Żuławy territory. A good deal of this work was accomplished by the Mennonites who then built thriving communities across the Vistula delta.

 

Figure 2. Photo taken by my father in July 1934 of flooding along the Vistula River

 

According to an article in Wikipedia, entitled the “Vistula delta Mennonites,” the first Anabaptist reported in the area was in 1526 in Marienburg [today: Malbork, Poland] (Figure 3), a mere 15.6 miles south of Tiegenhof [today: Nowy Dwor Gdanski, Poland]. The first Mennonites from the Netherlands and Flanders arrived in Danzig [today: Gdansk, Poland] in the 1530’s. (Figure 4) As Poland’s principal seaport, Danzig played an important role in the grain trade with the Low Countries.

 

Figure 3. Picture taken by my father in the mid-1930’s of the fortress Ordensburg Marienberg [today: Malbork, Poland], founded in 1274 on the east bank of the river Nogat by the Teutonic Knights

Figure 4. Langgasse, the main street of Danzig [today: Gdansk, Poland] as it looked during the 1930’s, known today as “Ulica Długa”
 

Menno Simons, founder of the Mennonites, is reported to have visited Danzig in 1549, and by 1569 the first Mennonite Church was founded in the city. Soon about 1,000 Mennonites lived in the city. While Mennonites were allowed to freely practice their faith, the Danzig city council refused to grant them the status of citizens; this situation remained unchanged until the city itself was annexed by the Kingdom of Prussia in 1793 in the Second Partition of Poland. The Vistula delta and the Danzig suburbs had already become part of the Kingdom of Prussia in 1772 after the First Partition of Poland, at which time more than 12,000 Mennonites lived in Prussian territory.

Only men who had served in the Prussian Army were allowed to purchase land; as conscientious objectors, Mennonites were subject to special charges, limiting their economic prospects. As a result, when Russian colonization agents sought to recruit settlers for the regions recently conquered from the Ottoman Empire following the Russo-Turkish War of 1768-1774, about 6,000 Mennonites, mostly from the Vistula delta, left for Russian Ukraine. These people formed the roots of the Russian Mennonites. The first Mennonite settlement in Russia, the Chortitza Colony, was founded by these emigrees in 1789; I touched on this topic in Post 112. The Mennonites who remained in the Vistula delta, however, became more and more assimilated, with some even willing to bear arms.

I will return briefly to the story of the Mennonites in the Vistula delta but let me provide some insight to readers for why I decided to go into such depth into this Protestant religion. I wrote in Post 5 that during the time that my father lived and worked in Tiegenhof he was friends with two women who lived in the same apartment building where he also rented an apartment and had his dental practice. The captions on his pictures identified the women as “Idschi” and “Suse” (Figure 5), and it was only when I found both their names in my father’s 1932 Day Planner with their surname and birthdays that I realized they were related and that their family name was “Epp.”  In 2013, I would eventually track down their niece and grandniece in Lubeck, Germany, and learn they were respectively the youngest and oldest sisters of a large Mennonite family who were originally from Żuławy. While the sisters had a passing resemblance to one another, their age difference made it difficult to determine whether they were related.

 

Figure 5. My father, Dr. Otto Bruck, in Tiegenhof during the 1930’s with three friends, Suse Epp, Frau Grete Gramatzki (the “Schlummermutter”), and Idschi Epp; I would learn that Suse and Idschi were respectively the oldest and youngest sisters of a large Mennonite family

 

Among my father’s pictures, there are multiple images of him shown socializing with Idschi and Suse Epp. A particularly interesting sequence of photographs (Figure 6) was taken in Stutthof, then part of the Free City of Danzig [today: Sztutowo, Poland], when my father had clearly been invited to an Epp family get-together. From Idschi and Suse’s grandniece, I learned that one of their brothers was also pictured. His name was Gerhard Epp. Much more on him later.

 

Figure 6. A sequence of photos taken by my father in Stutthof during a social get-together at Gerhard Epp’s home; Gerhard Epp was one of Suse and Idschi Epp’s middle siblings

 

In researching the history of the Mennonites in the Vistula delta for this Blog post, I happened upon a series of articles written by a Dr. Ben Goossen, a Harvard University professor who has written extensively about Hitler’s Mennonite supporters. I was particularly intrigued in learning why people who were traditionally pacifists would be attracted to Hitler. In an article from October 2021 entitled “Hitler’s Mennonite Voters,” Dr. Goossen explains:

“Two factors made Danzig’s Mennonites particularly susceptible to Hitler’s project. First, members saw themselves as part of a global religious denomination they viewed as vulnerable to atheist communism. Since the eighteenth century, thousands of Mennonites had emigrated from the Danzig area to Imperial Russia. Although nationalist pressure convinced Danzig’s Mennonites to abandon pacifist teachings, they retained ties to pacifist coreligionists abroad. After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Mennonites in the Soviet Union faced hardships. Their relatives in Danzig welcomed Hitler’s anti-Bolshevism and his antisemitism. The Führer blamed Soviet atrocities on a fictional cabal he labeled as ‘Judeo-Bolshevism.’”

Another researcher, Alicia Good, in an article entitled “Unanswered Questions: Mennonite Participation in the Holocaust,” reinforces what Goossen tells us in this regard:

“Rempel makes the argument that the destruction of Mennonite church and community life in the Soviet Republic under Stalin was so destructive that not only did Mennonites abandon their peace theology, but they perceived Hitler’s invading forces as their liberators, thereby setting the stage for them to actively aid the Nazi agenda. Rempel describes the turbulence of the Russian Revolution: ‘Driven by fear and the predation of violent anarchists, many Mennonites in South Russia set aside their pacifist tradition and formed self-defense units to protect their homes and families against bandits and even the Red Army’ It was during this period that many Mennonites chose to leave behind their beliefs in nonviolence in order to fight a losing battle against the communists, who were perceived as a threat both because of their atheistic stance and their desire to abolish private ownership of property. Rempel infers that it was these initial violent actions which set a tragic precedent laying the foundations for the next generation of Mennonites to take up arms alongside the Nazis.”

According to Goossen, the second reason Danzig Mennonites were attracted to Nazism is that it appealed to their sense of aggrieved nationalism:

“Those who had given up pacifism and chosen not to emigrate adopted a strong German identity. They lamented Germany’s defeat in the First World War, and they reviled the 1919 Versailles Treaty, which became a nationalist punching bag. This treaty assigned guilt for World War I to Germany. It required steep reparations. And it split Danzig from Germany. The nineteen Mennonite congregations in eastern Germany, with 13,000 attendees, had once formed a united group. Versailles divided them between Germany, Poland, and the Free City (where 6,000 lived). Mennonite farmers further resented Danzig’s customs union with Poland.” (Goossen, 2021)

According to Dr. Goossen, during the 1930’s Mennonites became involved at every level of the Nazi Party in Danzig. For example, the second highest-ranking Nazi in Danzig, Otto Anders, was a Mennonite. Mennonite men joined the paramilitary Sturmabteilung (SA) and the Schutzstaffel (SS), while Mennonite women joined Nazi women’s organizations. While Mennonite men who became officers in the Nazi army typically left the church, rank-and-file members normally retained their church affiliation. Faith leaders in the church also became deeply Nazified, and according to Goossens, leaders from five of the seven Mennonite churches in the Free City of Danzig were party members.

Mennonites, who numbered only 1.5 percent of Danzig’s population, had an outsized effect in the Free City of Danzig. According to Dr. Goossen, in May 1933, Mennonites helped deliver Hitler the only country-wide majority he achieved in a free election; in the Free City of Danzig their ballots pushed the Nazis over the 50 percent threshold in the popular vote.

As Goossen further notes, “The historically pacifist Christian church disproportionately influenced Nazi rule in the Free City. During World War II, members became enmeshed in the Holocaust, staffing concentration camps, and using slave labor on their farms and in their factories. Prominent Nazis believed most Mennonites were ‘Aryan.’”

As to how Menno Simons, the founder of the Mennonites, might have felt about the alliance future generations of his followers made with Nazism, Goossen observes the following: “Four hundred years later, the Mennonites who helped to bring Nazism to Danzig were a theologically transformed group. Prior to the 1933 election, one preacher praised National Socialism to a ministerial assembly as ‘the only party which we as Mennonites can support.’ This viewpoint would have been anathema to this preacher’s own ancestors. Church historian C. Henry Smith, observing from across the Atlantic, rightly assessed that Danzig’s Mennonites strayed from their roots. ‘Menno Simons would find himself ill at ease, today, among his namesakes,’ Smith wrote, ‘were he to return to his familiar haunts around the Baltic.’ A time-travelling Menno Smith would soon be ‘in all likelihood, in a concentration camp.’”

Dr. Goossen has explained why Mennonites become Nazi collaborators. However, readers may wonder, as I did, what attracted or impressed the Nazis about Mennonites? It was certainly not the faith’s historic pacifism which the Nazis surely would not have emphasized. Turning again to Goossen, “The main strategy church officials deployed to ingratiate themselves with top Nazis involved claiming racial purity. Mennonites had supposedly kept their bloodlines ‘Aryan’ through centuries of intermarriage. German racial scientists had tested Mennonite populations in Danzig and agreed with this assessment. Faith leaders further sought to prove heritage by harvesting centuries-old data from church record books.” Simply put, the Nazis considered Mennonites to be unusually pure specimens of Aryanism.

Mennonites elevated racial status ultimately drew them into the Nazi’s orbit of crimes against humanity, as Goossen explains: “Hitler waged World War II as a race war. His soldiers conquered vast swaths of Eastern Europe to provide expanded ‘living space’ for the German people, whom the Nazis considered a ‘master race.’ The invaders and local collaborators seized property from Poles, Jews, and others. They distributed this plunder to members of the German racial elite and forced non-Germans into subservient positions. In Danzig, many Mennonites benefitted from robbery and slavery. For instance, SS officers at the Stutthof concentration camp, built in 1939, formed an entire labor commando with 500 inmates to serve a Mennonite arms manufacturer, Gerhard Epp.”

So, we come full circle to the first mention of Gerhard Epp (Figure 7), the brother of my father’s friends, the Mennonite sisters Suse and Idschi Epp. But it would not be the last as he was among the most prominent Mennonite collaborators.

 

Figure 7. Gerhard Epp with his first wife Margaretha Epp née Klaassen and their Great Dane “Ajax”

 

Let me digress and briefly tell readers a little about the Stutthof concentration camp, located 21 miles (34 km) east of Danzig in the German-annexed Free City of Danzig. Opened in September of 1939, it was under the command of Heinrich Himmler’s SS and was at the time situated near the world’s largest Mennonite population. Stutthof was the first German concentration camp set up outside German borders in World War II, and was the last camp liberated by the Allies on the 9th of May 1945. It was originally set up as a concentration camp but was later utilized as a death camp equipped with a gas chamber and crematoria. Initially it housed Polish and Russian political prisoners, but soon became the destination for thousands of deported Jews.  It is estimated that between 63,000 and 65,000 prisoners of Stutthof concentration camp and its subcamps died because of murder, starvation, epidemics, extreme labor conditions, brutal and forced evacuations, and a lack of medical attention. Some 28,000 of those who died were Jews. In total, as many as 110,000 people were deported to the camp during its existence, working under what were often brutal conditions.

Quoting again from Alicia Good as to how the Mennonites in the Żuławy region benefited from the proximity of the Stutthof concentration camp: “The Mennonite farmers and business owners in the Danzig region were not only aware of the existence of the concentration camp but they derived personal profit from its operations. Mennonite farms paid the camps to receive field laborers without payment for their labor and often for longer than the allotted 8-hour shifts to maximize profits. Mennonites who owned factories, such as Gerhard Epp (Figure 8), utilized the low-cost labor from concentration camps; Epp’s factory actually manufactured firearms for the Nazi war effort. Other Mennonite businesses profited by building and supplying the camps themselves. Since Mennonite attempts to show more sympathetic treatment of the workers was prohibited by the Nazis on the threat of the sympathizer being imprisoned in the camps, Mennonite arguments that their usage was to show mercy to the prisoners was unsustainable. Likewise, it cannot be reasonably claimed that the large Mennonite community did not know about the camps since they were actively profiting from this activity. Neither the presence of tens of thousands of people subjected to horrific conditions, nor the billowing smoke and ashes of the crematoria could have been denied by any Mennonites at Danzig or Stutthof who wanted to know the truth of what was happening in their backyard. Moreover, the presence of ethnically Mennonite names on the list of prison guards who were later convicted for their work at Stutthof demonstrates that at least some members of the Mennonite community themselves committed atrocities within the camp.”

 

Figure 8. Leadership of the Mennonite-owned Gerhard Epp firm

 

In another article written by Dr. Ben Goossen in 2020 entitled “The Real History of the Mennonites and the Holocaust,” there is further mention of Gerhard Epp. From this article, we learn more about him through Goossen’s story of Mennonite war refugee Heinrich Hamm’s antisemitic and anti-Bolshevik involvement with Nazism. Some background about Hamm provides the framework for a further discussion of Gerhard Epp.

Heinrich Hamm was born in czarist Russia in 1894. During WWI he was a medic, though abandoned pacifism and took up arms against the communists during the Russian Revolution. Following the Bolshevik victory, Hamm lost his farm near the Ukrainian city of Zaporozhe, famous these days for the site of fighting between the Russians and the Ukrainians around Europe’s largest nuclear power plant. Following Stalin’s rise to power, Hamm moved to Dnepropetrovsk, and remained there following the Nazi invasion of 1941. However, with Germany’s reversal of fortunes on the Eastern Front, by early 1944 Hamm and his family abandoned the Ukraine and eventually settled in Stutthof, which as previously mentioned had a large and long-standing Mennonite population. Hamm and his family were among the first Mennonite refugees relocated from the Ukraine to Nazi-occupied Poland.

As Goossen notes, it was in Stutthof that Hamm met Gerhard Epp: “In Stutthof, Hamm became friendly with a prominent Mennonite businessman named Gerhard Epp. Prior to the First World War, Epp had worked in Russia, and he remained greatly interested in Mennonite coreligionists from the Soviet Union. Epp offered Hamm a job in a large machine factory he owned and operated—the same establishment that Hamm would later mention in the memo he wrote for MCC [i.e., Mennonite Central Committee] (see below), claiming he was coerced into providing cheap labor for greedy German war profiteers.” (Figures 9a-b)

 

Figure 9a. The administrative office of Gerhard Epp’s factory in Stutthof where Heinrich Hamm worked from 1944 to early 1945; hundreds of inmates from the nearby Stutthof concentration camp performed slave labor for this Mennonite-owned establishment, which produced munitions for the war

 

Figure 9b. Gerhard Epp’s factory in Stutthof where munitions for the war effort were produced using hundreds of Jewish inmates form the nearby Stutthof concentration camp

 

Goossen later goes on to add, “Gerhard Epp served as a general contractor for camp [i.e., Stutthof], from which he leased hundreds of prisoners to produce armaments in his factory. Jews and other inmates were the true cheap labor. Hamm helped oversee their slavery and murder.”

Following the end of World War II, Mennonite leaders in Europe and North America sought to craft a narrative that emphasized how brutally and oppressively their denomination had been treated by the Nazis. The Mennonite Central Committee (MCC), the denomination’s premier aid organization of which Heinrich Hamm was an employee and spokesperson, reported in various memos to bodies like the United Nations that faith leaders were unaware of Nazi collaboration of refugees including the involvement of Heinrich Hamm. The following is drawn from a version of Hamm’s wartime experiences: “It is quite an erroneous idea to think that all Mennonites were brought to Poland to be settled on farms. I and my family came to a camp in Preussisch-Stargard in the Danzig area. Immediately representatives of various works and concerns came to fetch cheap labour. I had to work in a machine factory where I remained until the end of the war. Besides the four Mennonite families many Ukrainians, Frenchmen, and Poles worked there also. There was no difference in the way these various national groups were treated.” (Goossen 2020)

As Goossen goes on to note, “The efforts by Mennonite Central Committee to portray refugees like Heinrich Hamm as victims of Nazism were largely successful.”  Declarations by the MCC officers as well as by the migrants themselves convinced agents of the United Nations that most Mennonites had not wound up in Germany of their own accord. As a result, the MCC succeeded in relocating most of their refugees under its care with United Nations assistance to places in West Germany or overseas, mostly in Canada and Paraguay.

Goossen has laboriously sifted through thousands of pages of historic documents scattered across half a dozen archives in four countries to piece together Hamm’s past and debunk his story; readers are referred to Dr. Goossen’s article for more details but suffice it to say that Hamm as an MCC employee and spokesperson knew very well how and why Mennonites had collaborated with the Nazis and how complicit they were in the murder of Jewish concentration camp detainees. As Goossen notes: “What is clear is that the Mennonite-owned factory in Stutthof was a place of terror. For hundreds of prisoners enslaved there, the factory’s Mennonite managers were responsible for much of that terror. It is also clear that after the war, Hamm tried to distance himself from this responsibility. He instead emphasized the suffering of his own family, which fled Stutthof in April 1945. As they crossed the Baltic under cover of night, a Soviet submarine torpedoed their ship. Hamm praised God for allowing the damaged vessel to make it to Denmark. The family remained in Denmark for the next eighteen months. Hamm emphasized his gratitude for the comfort he found during these lean times through worshipping with fellow Mennonite refugees and other Christians.” (Goossen 2020)

As I related in Post 5, my father’s friends, Idschi and Suse Epp, also escaped to Denmark as the Russians were approaching Tiegenhof. According to Gerhard Epp’s descendants whom I met in 2013 in Lubeck, Germany, Suse Epp died in Denmark in 1941 at the age of 71. Gerhard Epp’s daughter by his first wife who died in 1939 at the age of 44 was Rita Schuetze née Epp (Figure 10); at the time I met her in 2013 she was already suffering from severe dementia. However, Rita’s half-brother and Gerhard Epp’s stepson, Hans Joachim “Hajo” Wiebe (Figures 11-12), is twelve years younger than his sister and has a splendid memory; he shared some compelling family stories.

 

Figure 10. Gerhard Epp’s daughter, Rita Schuetze née Epp, by his marriage to his first wife Margaretha Epp née Klaassen

 

Figure 11. Gerhard Epp’s stepson and Rite Schuetze’s half-brother, Hans Joachim “Hajo” Wiebe, in 2013, source of identifications and Epp family stories

 

Figure 12. Hajo Wiebe in 2013 surrounded from left to right by his great-niece Paula Schuetze, his partner Gunda Nickel, and his niece Angelika Schuetze

 

Of particular interest is the story Hajo Wiebe related of the role that Gerhard and Rita Epp played in helping Prussian citizens and German soldiers escape towards the end of WWII as the Russians were encircling Stutthof. Danzig to the west and Elbing [today: Elblag, Poland] to the south had already been captured by the Russians, so the only way Germans could still flee the area was to make their way across the frozen “Frisches Haff,” or Vistula Lagoon (Figure 13), to a narrow, sandy spit (Vistula Spit); here, they could be picked up by German boats cruising the Baltic Sea looking for fleeing Germans, then taken first to the Hel Peninsula and eventually to Germany. Using Gerhard’s mechanical expertise, he and Rita drove in his Mercedes all around the area south of Stutthof destroying the flood control dams previous generations of Mennonites had built and inundated the naturally marshy area to slow the advance of the Russians, allowing Germans an opportunity to take flight.  However, even with the area flooded, travel across the Vistula Lagoon was fraught with danger as Russian bombers were always strafing escaping Germans who stood out against the frozen landscape.  The exact date of Gerhard and Rita’s own get-away on one of the last German ships leaving from the Vistula Spit is recorded in family annals as May 6, 1945.

 

Figure 13. Photo taken by my father during the 1930’s of a sleigh ride party in Tolkemit, Prussia [today: Tolkmicko, Poland], located on the Vistula Lagoon
 

In closing I would merely say that thanks to the recent work of scholars like Ben Goossen revelations are finally coming to light of the role Mennonites played in the crimes of National Socialism. These crimes run counter to the common belief about this Christian denomination that they are historically pacifists. What led me to uncovering the truth was my father’s friendship with two of Gerhard Epp’s sisters and a casual encounter my father had with Gerhard prior to the war.

 

REFERENCES

 

Good, Alicia. “Unanswered Questions: Mennonite Participation in the Holocaust.”

Goossen, Ben. “How to Catch a Mennonite Nazi.” Anabaptist Historians, 29 October 2020, https://anabaptisthistorians.org/2020/10/29/how-to-catch-a-mennonite-nazi/.

Goossen, Ben. “The Real History of the Mennonites and the Holocaust.” Tablet, 16 November 2020, https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/history/articles/heinrich-hamm-mennonite-holocaust.

Goossen, Ben. “How A Nazi Death Squad Viewed Mennonites.” Anabaptist Historians, 16 January 2021, https://anabaptisthistorians.org/2021/01/16/how-a-nazi-death-squad-viewed-mennonites/

Goossen, Ben. “Hitler’s Mennonite Voters.” Anabaptist Historians, 7 October 2021, https://anabaptisthistorians.org/2021/10/07/hitlers-mennonite-voters/

“Mennonites.” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mennonites.

Neff, Christian and Richard D. Thiessen. “Wladyslaw IV Vasa, King of Poland (1595-1648).” Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. March 2015. Web. 11 Aug 2022. https://gameo.org/index.php?title=Wladyslaw_IV_Vasa,_King_of_Poland_(1595-1648)&oldid=140874.

“The History of Polish Mennonites.” Gdanski Trips, https://www.gdansktrips.com/the-history-of-polish-mennonites/.

“Vistula delta Mennonites.” Wikipedia, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vistula_delta_Mennonites.

 

 

POST 120: FAMILY PHOTOS, DISCOVERING & DECODING THEM

 

Note: In this post, I discuss “stashes” of family photos I’ve uncovered, and the efforts I’ve undertaken with the help of near and distant relatives to identify people in some of those images even absent captions. In a few instances the photos are significant because they illustrate individuals renowned or notorious in history. In other cases, a good deal of sleuthing was required, including comparing the pictures of people in captioned versus uncaptioned images. On other occasions, I recognized portrayals of family members I knew growing up. And, in rare instances, I was able to determine a photographed person based on an educated guess.

 

Related Posts:

POST 15: BERLIN & MY GREAT-AUNTS FRANZISKA & ELSBETH BRUCK

POST 17: SURVIVING IN BERLIN IN THE TIME OF HITLER: MY UNCLE FEDOR’S STORY

POST 31: WITNESS TO HISTORY, “PROOF” OF HITLER’S DEATH IN MY UNCLE FEDOR’S OWN WORDS

POST 33: FINDING GREAT-UNCLE WILLY’S GRANDCHILDREN

POST 34: MARGARETH BERLINER, WRAITH OR BEING?

POST 41: DR. OTTO BERGER & OTHER “SILENT HEROES” WHO HELPED MY UNCLE DR. FEDOR BRUCK SURVIVE THE NAZI REGIME

POST 45: HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE: RECALLING MY PAULY ANCESTORS

POST 56: REFLECTIONS ON LIFE AND FAMILY BY THE PATERFAMILIAS, DR. JOSEF PAULY

POST 65: GERMANY’S LAST EMPEROR, WILHELM II, PICTURED WITH UNKNOWN FAMILY MEMBER

POST 99: THE ASTONISHING DISCOVERY OF SOME OF DR. WALTER WOLFGANG BRUCK’S PERSONAL EFFECTS

POST 100: DR. WALTER WOLFGANG BRUCK, DENTIST TO GERMANY’S LAST IMPERIAL FAMILY

 

The antisemitic and racist laws enacted by the Nazis short-circuited my father’s career as a dentist. Pursuant to his formal training at the University of Berlin, followed by an apprenticeship in Danzig (today: Gdansk, Poland), my father, Dr. Otto Bruck (Figure 1), opened his own dental practice in Tiegenhof in the Free City of Danzig (today: Nowy Dwór Gdański, Poland) in April 1932; by April 1937, my father was forced to flee Tiegenhof, and by March 1938 he had left Germany altogether, clearly seeing the handwriting on the wall. As an unmarried man with few family ties, this was an option open to him. My father would never again legally practice dentistry.

 

Figure 1. My father Dr. Otto Bruck as a dental apprentice in Danzig in 1931

 

My father considered the five years he spent in Tiegenhof to be the halcyon days of his life. Judging from the numerous photos of his days spent there, including those illustrating his active social life, his professional acquaintances, and recreational pursuits, I would be hard-pressed to argue otherwise.

I originally intended in this post to briefly discuss with readers the history of Polish Mennonites because Tiegenhof, the town where my father had his dental practice, was largely Mennonite when my father lived there. The Mennonites arrived in the Żuławy Wiślane region (i.e. “the Vistula fens,” plural from “żuława”), the alluvial delta area of the Vistula in the northern part of Poland, in the 17th century. They came to escape religious persecution in the Netherlands and Flanders. I have instead decided to devote the subsequent Blog post to discussing the history of Polish Mennonites, and briefly explore how the Mennonites, who are committed to pacifism, inexplicably, became strong adherents of Hitler. I intend in the following post to use photos from my father’s collection to focus on one Mennonite family, the Epp family, with whom my father was acquainted and friends with. They have a dark history related to their connection to the Nazi regime.

Getting back on track. Curious whether the office building where my father had both his dental practice and residence still existed (Figure 2), in 2013 my wife Ann Finan and I visited Nowy Dwór Gdański. We quickly oriented ourselves to the layout of the town, and promptly determined that his office and residential building no longer stands. I would later learn that the structure had been destroyed by Russian bombers when Nazi partisans shot at them from this location.

 

Figure 2. The office building in Tiegenhof in the Free City of Danzig in October 1934 where my father had his dental practice and residence, which no longer exists. Note the swastikas festooning the building

 

During our initial visit to Nowy Dwór Gdański, we were directed to the local museum, the Muzeum Żuławskie. The museum docent the day we visited spoke English, so I was able to communicate to her that my Jewish father had once been a dentist in the town and had taken many pictures when living there of Tiegenhof and the Żuławy Wiślane region. I offered to make the photos available, which I in fact did upon my return to the States.

In 2014, my wife Ann and I were invited to Nowy Dwór Gdański for an in-depth tour and a translated talk. Naturally, during my presentation, I used many of my father’s photos. There was a question-and-answer period following my talk, and one Polish gentleman of Jewish descent commented on how fortunate I am to have so many photographs of my father, family, and friends. I agreed. In the case of this gentleman, he remarked he has only seven family pictures, which I think is often true for descendants of Holocaust survivors. In my instance, my father’s seven albums of surviving photos, covering from the 1910’s until 1948 when my father came to America, are the reason I started researching and writing about my family.

Given the importance pictures have played in the stories I research and write about, and the development of this Blog, I thought I would highlight a few of the more interesting and historically significant pictures in my father’s collection, as well as discuss other “stashes” of photos I’ve uncovered. Obviously, it’s impossible and would be of scant interest to readers to discuss all the photos.

My father was a witness to the rise of National Socialism from the window of his dental office in Tiegenhof. On May 1, 1933, my father photographed a regiment of “SA Sturmabteilung,” literally “Storm Detachment,” known also as “Brownshirts” or “Storm Troopers,” marching down the nearby Schlosserstrasse, carrying Nazi flags, framed by the “Kreishaus” (courthouse) on one side. (Figure 3)

 

Figure 3. Father’s photograph of Nazis marching down Schlosserstrasse in Tiegenhof on May 1, 1933, taken from his dental office

 

Again, a year later to the day, on May 1, 1934, my father documented a parade of veterans and Brownshirts following the same path down Schlosserstrasse led by members of the Stahlhelm (“Steel Helmet”), a veterans’ organization that arose after the German defeat of WWI.  (Figures 4a-b) In 1934, the Stahlhelme were incorporated into the SA Sturmabteilung, the original paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party.

 

Figure 4a. A year later May 1, 1934, Nazi Storm Troopers and WWI veterans again marching down Schlosserstrasse in Tiegenhof

 

Figure 4b. WWI veterans, “Stahlhelme,” at the head of the Nazi parade on May 1, 1934, in Tiegenhof

 

Then again, the following year, on April 5, 1935, there was another Nazi parade. On this occasion Field Marshall Hermann Göring visited and participated in the march through Tiegenhof. The day prior, on April 4, 1935, Hermann Göring had visited the Free City of Danzig to influence the upcoming April 7th parliamentary elections in favor of Nazi candidates.  The visit to Tiegenhof the next day was merely an extension of this campaign to influence the Free City’s parliamentary elections.  In the photos that my father took on April 5th there can be seen a banner which in German reads “Danzig ist Deutsch wenn es nationalsozialistisch ist,” translated as “Danzig is German when it is National Socialist.”  (Figures 5a-b) It appears that along with everyday citizens of Tiegenhof and surrounding communities, members of the Hitler Youth, known in German as Hitlerjugend, also lined the street in large number.

 

Figure 5a. Nazi Field Marshall Hermann Göring standing in his open-air limousine on March 5, 1935, as he parades through Tiegenhof

 

Figure 5b. A Nazi banner reading “Danzig ist Deutsch wenn es nationalsozialistisch ist” (translated as “Danzig is German when it is National Socialist”) hung across the street that Field Marshall Hermann Göring traveled down on March 5, 1935, as he paraded through Tiegenhof

 

Students of history know about Hermann Göring but for those who are unfamiliar with him, let me say a few words. He would evolve to become the second-highest ranking Nazi after the Führer. Unlike many of Hitler’s sycophants and lieutenants, Göring was a veteran of WWI, having been an ace fighter pilot, a recipient of the prestigious Blue Max award, and a commander of the Jagdgeschwader a fighter group that had previously been led by the renowned Red Baron, Manfred von Richthofen. Göring was drawn to Hitler for his oratorical skills and became an early member of the Nazi Party. He participated with Hitler in the failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, during which he was wounded in the groin. During his recovery he was regularly given morphine to which he became addicted for the remainder of his life.

Göring oversaw the creation of the Gestapo, an organization he later let Heinrich Himmler run. He was best known as the commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe, although after the Nazi victory over France, he was made Reichsmarschall, head of all the German armed forces. He amassed great wealth for himself by stealing paintings, sculptures, jewelry, cash, and valuable artifacts not only from Jews and people whom Nazis had murdered but also by looting museums of defeated nations.

Towards the end of the war, following an awkward attempt to have Hitler appoint him head of the Third Reich and thereby drawing Hitler’s ire, he turned himself in to the Americans rather than risk being captured by the Russians. He eventually was indicted and stood trial at Nuremberg. The once obese Göring, who’d once weighed more than three hundred pounds, was a shadow of his former self at his trial. Expectedly, he was convicted on all counts, and sentenced to death by hanging. His request to be executed by firing squad was denied, but he was able to avoid the hangman’s noose by committing suicide using a potassium cyanide pill that had inexplicably been smuggled to him by an American soldier.

My uncle, Dr. Fedor Bruck, has been the subject of multiple previous posts (i.e., Post 17, Post 31, Post 41). My uncle, like my father was a dentist. He was educated at the University of Breslau (today: Wrocław, Poland) and had his dental practice in Liegnitz, Germany (today: Legnica, Poland) until around 1933 when he was forced to give it up due to the “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service” passed by the Nazi regime on the 7th April 1933, two months after Adolf Hitler had attained power.  My uncle’s life is of interest because he miraculously survived the entire war hidden in Berlin by friends and non-Jewish family members. His story has also been of interest because he counted among his friends a woman named Käthe Heusermann-Reiss, who had been his dental assistant in Liegnitz.

Following the loss of his business my uncle relocated to Berlin hoping the anonymity of the larger city would afford him the possibility to continue working under the auspices of another dentist, which it did for a time. Käthe Heusermann also moved to Berlin and opportunistically landed herself a job as a dental assistant to Hitler’s American-trained dentist, Dr. Hugo Blaschke. In this capacity, she was always present when Dr. Blaschke treated Hitler. Following the end of the war, she was interrogated by the Russians and asked to identify dental remains which had been recovered in a burn pit outside the Reichstag. The bridgework performed by Dr. Blaschke on Hitler was outmoded so Käthe was easily able to recognize Blaschke’s work and Hitler’s teeth, a fact Stalin kept hidden from the world. Following Russia’s capture of Berlin at the end of the war, my uncle who’d temporarily been hiding in Käthe’s apartment learned from her that Hitler had committed suicide. This dangerous information resulted in Käthe being imprisoned in the USSR for many years, and my uncle barely escaping the same fate. Surviving among my father’s photographs is a noteworthy picture taken in Liegnitz of my uncle and Käthe Heusermann. Though uncaptioned, I have been able to compare it to known pictures of Käthe to confirm it is her. (Figure 6)

 

Figure 6. My uncle Dr. Fedor Bruck in his dental office in Liegnitz, Germany with his dental assistant Käthe Heusermann-Reiss who would later go on to become the dental assistant for Dr. Hugo Blaschke, Hitler’s dentist. Following the war, she would identify Hitler’s dental remains, a fact the Russians hid for many years

 

As I have told readers in multiple earlier posts my father was an active sportsman, and an excellent amateur tennis player. Among my father’s belongings I retain multiple of the prizes he was awarded for his achievements, including many newspaper clippings documenting his results. In August 1936, my father attended an International Tennis Tournament in Zoppot, Germany (today: Sopot, Poland), located a mere 32 miles from Tiegenhof. During his attendance there, he photographed the great German tennis player, Heinrich Ernst Otto “Henner” Henkel (Figure 7), whose biggest success was his singles title at the 1937 French Championships. Interestingly, Henkel learned to play tennis at the “Rot-Weiss” Tennis Club in Berlin. My father was a member of the “Schwarz-Weiss” Tennis Club in Berlin, so perhaps my father and Henner played one another and were acquainted. Henner Henkel was killed in action during WWII on the Eastern Front at Voronezh during the Battle of Stalingrad while serving in the Wehrmacht, the German Army.

 

Figure 7. The famous German tennis player, Henner Henkel, in August 1936 at the International Tennis Tournament in Zoppot, Germany

 

As I mentioned above, my father left Germany for good in March 1938. He was headed to stay with his sister Susanne and brother-in-law, then living in Fiesole, a small Tuscan town outside Florence, Italy. During his sojourn in Italy, before eventually joining the French Foreign Legion later in 1938, my father visited some of the tourist attractions in Italy, including the Colosseum in Rome. One of the images that my father took there has always stood out to me because of the paucity of people around what is today a very crowded and visited venue. (Figure 8)

 

Figure 8. The Colosseum in Rome in August 1938

 

My father’s collection of photos number in the hundreds but I’ve chosen to highlight only certain ones because they illustrate a few personages or places that may be known to readers. My father’s collection is merely one among several caches of images I was able to track down through family and acquaintances. I want to call attention to a few pictures of family members that grabbed my attention from these other hoards.

In Post 33, I explained to readers how I tracked down the grandchildren of my grandfather’s brother, Wilhelm “Willy” Bruck (1872-1952). Based on family correspondence, I knew my great-uncle Willy wound up in Barcelona after escaping Germany in the 1930’s and theorized his children and grandchildren may have continued to live there. Official vital documents I procured during a visit there convinced me otherwise, that at least his son returned to Germany after WWII. I was eventually able to track down both of my great-uncle’s grandchildren, that’s to say my second cousins Margarita and Antonio Bruck, to outside of Munich, Germany. (Figure 9) I have met both, and they’ve shared their family pictures, which again number in the hundreds.

 

Figure 9. My second cousins Margarita and Antonio Bruck from near Munich, Germany in May 2022, source of many family photos

 

The cache included many images of family members, but there are two pictures I was particularly thrilled to obtain copies of. My uncle Dr. Fedor Bruck (1895-1982), previously discussed, fought in WWI on the Eastern Front. (Figure 10) Among the family memorabilia I retain is a postcard he sent to his aunt Franziska Bruck on the 3rd of September 1916 coincidentally from the Ukraine announcing his promotion to Sergeant. (Figures 11a-b) The ongoing conflict between the Ukraine and Russia makes me realize how long the Ukraine has been a staging area for wars.

 

Figure 10. My uncle Dr. Fedor Bruck in his WWI uniform

 

Figure 11a. The front side of a postcard my uncle Fedor mailed to his aunt Franziska Bruck during WWI from the Eastern Front in Ukraine on the 3rd of September 1916

 

Figure 11b. The backside of the postcard my uncle mailed from the Ukraine on the 3rd of September 1916

 

Regular readers may recall that my father was born in Ratibor, Germany (today: Racibórz, Poland), in Upper Silesia. The family hotel there, owned through three generations between roughly 1850 and the early 1920’s, was known as the Bruck’s “Prinz von Preußen” Hotel. Among my second cousins’ photos is a rare image of the entrance to this hotel, which no longer stands. (Figure 12)

 

Figure 12. The entrance to the family hotel in Ratibor, Germany (today: Racibórz, Poland), Bruck’s “Prinz von Preußen” Hotel circa. 1914. The hotel is no longer standing

 

I introduced readers to two of my grandfather’s renowned sisters, my great-aunts Franziska and Elsbeth Bruck, way back in Post 15. Their surviving personal papers are archived at the Stadtmuseum in Spandau, the westernmost of the twelve boroughs of Berlin; these files have been another source of family photographs. Franziska Bruck was an eminent florist, and it is reputed that one of her clients was the last German Kaiser, Wilhelm II (1859-1941). One undated photograph taken in my great-aunt’s flower shop shows Duchess Cecilie Auguste Marie of Mecklenburg-Schwerin (1886-1954), the last Crown Princess of Germany and Prussia, who was married to Kaiser Wilhelm II’s son, Wilhelm, the German Crown Prince. (Figure 13)

 

Figure 13. Duchess Cecilie Auguste Marie of Mecklenburg-Schwerin (1886-1954), the last Crown Princess of Germany and Prussia, married to Kaiser Wilhelm II’s son, visiting my great-aunt Franziska Bruck’s flower school in Berlin

 

My second cousins Margarita and Antonio Bruck introduced me to one of my third cousins, Andreas “Andi” Pauly, also living part-time in Munich, Germany. (Figure 14) The Pauly branch of my extended family, which originally hailed from Posen, Germany (today: Poznan, Poland) has been the subject of multiple blog posts, including Post 45 on Pauly family Holocaust victims and reflections in Post 56 by the paterfamilias, Dr. Josef Pauly (1843-1916), Andi Pauly’s great-grandfather. Josef Pauly and his wife Rosalie Pauly née Mockrauer (1844-1927) had eight daughters and one son born between 1870 and 1885; thanks to photos provided by Andi Pauly, not only was I able to obtain images of all nine children but also some of Pauly cousins I knew of by name.

 

Figure 14. My third cousin Andreas “Andi” Pauly, source of many family photos

 

Again, it is not my intention to boggle readers’ minds by showing all these photos but I want to focus on one particular picture I originally obtained from Andi Pauly that was the subject of Post 65. The photo was taken in Doorn, Netherlands on the 28th of May 1926, and shows a then-unknown Bruck family member standing amidst a group that includes the last German Kaiser, Wilhelm II, his second wife, Princess Hermine Reuss of Greiz (1887-1947), and her youngest daughter by her first marriage, Princess Henriette of Schönaich-Carolath (1918-1972), and the Royal Family’s entourage. (Figure 15) At the time I wrote Post 65, I was unable to determine who the Bruck family member was, nor whom the initials “W.B.” stood for.

 

Figure 15. Postcard of the last German Emperor Wilhelm II, his second wife Princess Hermine Reuss of Greiz (1887-1947), and her youngest daughter by her first marriage, Princess Henriette of Schönaich-Carolath (1918-1972), taken in 1926 in Doorn, the Netherlands. A then-unknown member of the Bruck family is surrounded by the Royal Family’s entourage

 

Fast forward. In early 2021, I was astonished to receive an email from a Dr. Tilo Wahl, a doctor from Köpenick in Berlin, who stumbled upon my Blog and contacted me. He shared copies of the extensive collection of personal papers and photographs he had copied from the grandson of one of my esteemed ancestors, Dr. Walter Bruck (1872-1937), from Breslau, Germany (today: Wrocław, Poland) Again, this relative and my findings related to Dr. Walter Bruck have been chronicled in multiple earlier posts. The very same image discussed in the previous paragraph I had obtained from Andi Pauly was included among Dr. Bruck’s images. It was then I realized the unidentified Bruck family member standing with Kaiser Wilhelm II, his family, and his entourage was none other than Dr. Bruck’s second wife, Johanna Elisabeth Margarethe Gräbsch (1884-1963). (Figure 16) I discussed these findings in Post 100.

 

Figure 16. Same photograph as Figure 15 that Dr. Walter Bruck took of his wife Johanna and the Kaiser’s entourage in September 1925 with identifications (photo courtesy of Dr. Tilo Wahl)

 

Dr. Walter Bruck’s collection of papers and photos yielded images of multiple family members about whom I was aware, including one of Dr. Walter Bruck’s three siblings. However, one that stands out amongst all these photos was the one of Dr. Walter Bruck’s grandfather Dr. Jonas Julius Bruck (1813-1883). (Figure 17) Dr. Jonas Bruck is buried along with his son, Dr. Julius Bruck, in the restored tombs at the Old Jewish Cemetery in Wrocław, Poland. (Figure 18) Dr. Jonas Bruck was a brother of my great-great-grandfather Samuel Bruck (1808-1863), the original owner of the Bruck’s “Prinz von Preußen” Hotel in Ratibor, Germany (today: Racibórz, Poland) I previously discussed.

 

Figure 17. Dr. Walter Bruck’s grandfather, Dr. Jonas Julius Bruck (1813-1883)

 

Figure 18. The restored gravestones of Dr. Jonas Julius Bruck, his son Dr. Julius Bruck, and their respective wives interred in the Old Jewish Cemetery in Wrocław, Poland

 

In various places, I found fleeting references that Dr. Walter Bruck and Johanna Elisabeth Margarethe Gräbsch had both previously been married. I eventually found historic documents, my gold standard, confirming this. Using educating guesses based on incomplete captions and estimating the timeframe a few pictures in Dr. Walter Bruck’s collection were taken, that’s to say during WWI and before, I was even able to find pictures of both of their previous spouses among his photos.

Dr. Walter Bruck’s album also contain multiple pictures of his daughter, Renate Bruck (1926-2013). She was married three times, with images of two of her husbands included. Thanks to Post 99 Renate’s twin daughters, whom I knew about but had no expectation of ever finding since they’d left England years ago, instead found me. From this, I learned that Walter Bruck’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren live in Sydney, Australia.

I suspect the story I’m about to relate may resonate with some readers, the topic of missing or incomplete captions on pictures of one’s ancestors. Let me provide some context. During the time that my uncle Dr. Fedor Bruck was a dentist in Liegnitz, Germany he carried on an illicit affair with a married non-Jewish woman, Irmgard Lutze (Figure 19), with whom he had two children, my first cousins Wolfgang (Figure 20) and Wera Lutze. During the Nazi era time when it was prohibited and dangerous for an Aryan to have an affair with a Jew, the cuckolded husband nonetheless raised the children as his own. Therefore, they had the Lutze rather than the Bruck surname.

I knew both first cousins well, though both are now deceased. In any case, included among my cousin’s photographs was one that left me perplexed. It showed three generations, the eldest of whom was identified as “Tante Grete Brauer (mother’s sister).” (Figures 21a-b) The “Brauer” surname reverberated only because when perusing my great-aunt Elsbeth Bruck’s papers at the Stadtmuseum I discovered multiple letters written by Brauers. At the time I had no idea this represented another branch of my extended family.

 

Figure 19. My uncle Dr. Fedor Bruck standing next to Irmgard Lutze, the married Aryan woman with whom he fathered two children

 

Figure 20. My uncle Dr. Fedor Bruck’s now-deceased son and my first cousin, Wolfgang Lutze (1928-2014), in Hurghada, Egypt in October 2005

 

Figure 21a. Photo found among my first cousin’s pictures of my grandmother’s sister, Margarethe Brauer née Berliner (1872-1942) who was murdered in the Holocaust

 

Figure 21b. Caption on backside of Figure 21a.

 

As I discussed in Post 34, I would eventually work out that “Tante Grete Brauer” was my grandmother Else Bruck née Berliner’s sister, Margarethe Brauer née Berliner (1872-1942) who was murdered in the Holocaust. Prior to finding this isolated picture of my great-aunt, I was completely unaware of her existence. I’ve repeatedly told readers that my father had scant interest in family and rarely spoke of them to me growing up, so I was not surprised by this discovery.

I will give readers one last example of caches of family photos I’ve been able to recover by mentioning my third cousin once-removed, Larry Leyser (Figure 22), who very sadly passed away in 2021 due to complications from Covid. Over the years, Larry and I often shared family documents and photos. Several years ago, he borrowed and scanned a large collection of photos from one of his cousins named Michael Maleckar which he shared with me. As with any such trove, I found a few gems, including one of my own parents at a party they attended in Manhattan the early 1950’s. My father literally “robbed the cradle” when he married my mother as she was 22 years younger than him. This age difference is particularly pronounced in the one picture I show here. (Figure 23)

 

Figure 22. My third cousin once-removed, Larry Leyser, another source of many family photos

 

Figure 23. From left to right, my father (Dr. Otto Bruck), my mother (Paulette Bruck), my uncle (Dr. Fedor Bruck), and one of father’s cousins (Franz Kayser) at a party in Manhattan in the early 1950’s

 

I will merely say, in closing, that I am aware of other caches of family photos that unfortunately I have been unable to lay my hands on. I completely understand that some of my cousins are busy leading their lives and don’t share my passion for family history, so they are excused. One other thought. The longer I work on my family’s history, the more I realize how much I regret not talking with my relatives when they were alive about some of our ancestors as my stories would be broader and would then be grounded in truths rather veiled in so much conjecture.

 

 

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

Sussman, Jeffrey. Holocaust Fighters: Boxers, Resisters, and Avengers. Roman & Littlefield, 2021.

 

 

POST 106: EVIDENCE OF CONVERSION FROM JUDAISM IN MY FAMILY

 

Note: In this post, I discuss the proof I have found for conversions from Judaism for German family members, some of which unavoidably consists of indirect evidence. This topic naturally involves touching on the political, economic, and social context under which such conversions took place.

Related Posts:

POST 38: THE EVIDENCE OF MY FATHER’S CONVERSION TO CHRISTIANITY

POST 56: REFLECTIONS ON LIFE AND FAMILY BY THE PATERFAMILIAS, DR. JOSEF PAULY

 

 

There is a long history of Jewish conversion to Christianity, both voluntary and forced conversion. Forced conversions of Jews go back to Late Antiquity, the boundaries of which are a continuing matter of debate, but the period between roughly the 3rd and 8th centuries A.D. Royal persecutions of Jews from the 11th century onward typically took the form of expulsions with exceptions. Jews were forced to convert to Christianity before and during the First Crusade (1096-1099) including in parts of what are today France, Germany, and the Czech Republic.

The mass conversion event which took place on the Iberian Peninsula in A.D. 1391 when tens of thousands of Spain’s Jews converted to Christianity because of pogroms is the one readers will be most familiar with. Practicing Jews who refused to convert were expelled by the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella in the Alhambra Decree of 1492, following the Christian Reconquest of Spain. The net effect of the Alhambra Decree and persecutions carried out in earlier periods is that over 200,000 Jews converted to Catholicism and between 40,000 and 100,000 were expelled. In adjoining Portugal, by contrast, where an edict for Jewish expulsions was also ordered four years later in A.D. 1496, most Jews were not allowed to leave but were forced to convert.

Though conversions continued over time across many other parts of Eastern, Central, and Western Europe, forced conversions were apparently less common in the 20th century and were later more often the result of Jews choosing to convert to integrate into secular society. In Germany, which is the focus of this Blog post as it relates to my family, conversions occurred in three main periods. The first began during the Mendelssohnian era, named after Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786), the German Jewish philosopher to whose ideas the Haskalah, the “Jewish Enlightenment” of the 18th and 19th centuries, is attributed. A second wave occurred during the first half of the 19th century. And the third and longest period of conversions was a result of antisemitism and began roughly in 1880.

Conversion among German Jews was not an uncommon phenomenon in the 19th century owing to the myriad restrictions and myths that confronted them, and stymied their hopes, ambitions, dreams, and careers. In a sense, conversion to Christianity was the easy way out. Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), the noted German poet, writer, and literary critic, who himself converted, was reputed to have said conversion was his “ticket of admission into European culture.” Across most of the German states that united to create “modern” Germany in 1871, dominated by the state of Prussia, Jews were often rewarded for renouncing Judaism by being given influential positions and financial incentives. Whereas, during the 17th century, most converts were poor, by the middle of the 18th century, the converts were richer. The departure of the wealthier converts deprived the Jewish community of part of its operating budget. In any event, it is estimated that by the 20th century, close to one million Christians in Germany were of Jewish origin. According to Deborah Hertz’s book, “How Jews Became Germans: The History of Conversion and Assimilation in Berlin,” the majority of converts were infants whose parents wanted to spare them “conflicts” as adults. She notes that 60 percent of converts between 1800 and 1874 were under five years of age.

Adolf Hitler came to power in January 1933.  The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service (Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums), which excluded Jews and other political opponents of the Nazis from all civil service positions, was one of the first anti-Semitic and racist laws to be passed by the Third Reich, enacted on the 7th of April 1933. The law initially exempted those who had worked in the civil service since August 1, 1914, those who were veterans of World War I, or those with a father or son killed in action in World War I. The Civil Service immediately impacted the education system because university professors, for example, were classified as civil servants.

With the seizure of power by the Nazis, the new government enacted laws that required all citizens to document their genealogy in full. The regime sought to identify Jews who had converted to Christianity over the preceding centuries. With the help of church officials, a vast system of conversion and intermarriage records was created in Berlin, the country’s foremost Jewish city. These records, the Judenkartei, the Jewish Register or File, begin in 1645. Work on creating this file had started before the Nazis even came to power under a private initiative which sought to uncover proof of the Jewish ancestry of university and college professors and judges. By 1932, this file had already collected 400,000 genealogical records of Jews in Germany. The constantly expanding file was taken over and expanded in 1933 by the Reichsstelle für Sippenforschung (RfS), renamed Reichssippenamt on the 12th of November 1940, the Reich Office for Clan Research.

Readers who have accessed ancestral records for their German Jewish relatives may have noticed notations in the upper left- or right-hand corners or along the margins of vital documents. Beginning August 17, 1938, Jews had to add “Israel” (males) (Figure 1) or “Sara” (females) (Figure 2) as their middle name. Similarly, on passports, which allowed German Jews to leave Germany, when they still could, but not return, a large “J” was imprinted. (Figure 3) These and other measures instituted by the Nazis were intended to officially separate Jews from the German populace. While German Jews still converted after the Nazis seized power, as I will illustrate in the case of my uncle Dr. Fedor Bruck, readers can easily surmise this was futile.

 

Figure 1. Birth certificate for my uncle Dr. Fedor Bruck showing he was born on the 17th of August 1895 in Leobschutz, Germany [today: Głubczyce, Poland], with a notation added by the Nazis on the 31st of January 1939 in the upper righthand corner adding the middle name “Israel” to identify him as Jewish
Figure 2. Birth certificate for my second cousin once removed Susanne Dorothea Neisser showing she was born in Stettin, Germany [today: Szczecin, Poland] on the 30th of July 1899, with a notation dated the 10th of January 1939 adding “Sara” to her name to identify her as Jewish
Figure 3. 1939 passport for one of my distant relatives Fritz Hirsch with a big red “J” and “Israel” added to his name, both indicating he was Jewish (photo courtesy of Roberto Hirsch)

 

As I contemplated the question of conversion from Judaism among my immediate and extended ancestors, I began to wonder what evidence I could find in the ancestral records proving my relatives’ “alienation” from their Jewish roots. In my limited experience, finding such documents is not easy. In the case of some of my ancestors but not all of them, conversion was a “pragmatic” decision, as I’ve alluded to. Again, citing the poet Heinrich Heine, he declared that he was “merely baptized, not converted.” Quoting from a letter he once wrote: 

From my way of thinking you can well imagine that baptism is an indifferent affair. I do not regard it as important even symbolically, and I shall devote myself all the more to the emancipation of the unhappy members of our race. Still I hold it as a disgrace and a stain upon my honor that in order to obtain an office in Prussia—in beloved Prussia—I should allow myself to be baptized.”

 

Figure 4. My great-great-uncle Dr. Josef Pauly (1843-1916)

 

In re-reading the memoirs of Dr. Josef Pauly (Figure 4), husband of my great-great-aunt, who had likely been baptized Catholic as a child and whose recollections I discussed in Post 56, I wonder whether he may not have been implying the same sentiment when he wrote:

I believe in God as the creative force of the universe, to an immanent [NOTE: (of God) permanently pervading or sustaining the universe] consciousness, to a moral world order, to the invisible God of the world as the Jewish religion has revealed it first, whose goodness is identical with the eternal laws.”

As I began to search through my files and recollect what evidence for conversion I had found for my ancestors, I initially concluded that most of the “proof” was indirect, such as in the case of my father which I discussed in Post 38. However, upon further consideration, I realize I have found considerably more direct validation than I initially thought. Beyond the obvious instances where the graves or burial records of my forefathers interred in existing and destroyed Jewish cemeteries survive, proving they did not convert, I found corroboration for several ancestors confirming they were baptized.

The earliest instance is the case of my great-great-aunt Amalie Mockrauer (1834-1918). (Figure 5) On ancestry, I uncovered a record showing she was baptized in Dresden, Germany, 21 years after her birth, on the 13th of April 1855. (Figure 6) This was undoubtedly in anticipation of her marriage to Leopold Julius Wolf von Koschembahr (Figure 7) later that year on the 26th of September 1855 in Saint Clement Danes, Westminster, London, England, an Anglican church. (Figure 8)

 

Figure 5. My great-great-aunt Amalie Mockrauer (1834-1918) in 1904, the earliest of my ancestors for whom I could find evidence of conversion from Judaism

 

Figure 6. My great-great-aunt Amalie Mockrauer’s baptismal record showing she was born on the 9th of September 1834 in Leschnitz, Germany [today: Leśnica, Poland] and was baptized on the 13th of April 1855 in Dresden, Germany
Figure 7. My great-great-aunt Amalie Mockrauer’s husband Leopold von Koschembahr (1829-1874) in Halberstadt, Germany in approximately 1860

 

 

Figure 8. Cover page from ancestry.com proving my great-great-aunt Amalie Mockrauer married her husband Leopold von Koschembahr on the 26th of September 1855 in Saint Clements Danes, Westminister, London, England, several months after she was baptized in Dresden

 

Initially, I thought Leopold von Koschembahr was also of Jewish origin because his grandson, Gerhard Bruck von Koschembahr (i.e., Gerhard’s father, Wilhelm Bruck, took his baroness wife’s surname) (Figure 9), departed Germany for the United States via Switzerland in 1938 with his 12 children. However, I learned from a New York Times article dated the 2nd of October 1938 that Gerhard departed Germany NOT on account of his grandfather’s Jewish roots but because his great-grandmother, on his mother’s side, was non-Aryan. (Figure 10) This gives credence to the concern descendants of Jews whose ancestors had long ago converted or had never converted felt when the Nazis started tracing their ancestral origins. In the case of Leopold von Koschembahr, I found his baptismal record showing he was baptized on the 5th of December 1829 (Figures 11a-b), proving he was not Jewish at birth. As readers can discern from this example, confirming or refuting the Jewish origins of one’s ancestors can be like solving a complex puzzle.

 

Figure 9. Amalie and Leopold von Koschembahr’s grandson, Gerhard Bruck-von Koschembahr (1885-1961), who I initially thought was a converted Jew
Figure 10. New York Times article dated the 2nd of October 1938 confirming that Gerhard von Koschembahr left Germany because his great-grandmother on his mother’s side, Therese Graetzer (1809-1883), was non-Aryan

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 11a. Cover page from ancestry.com of Leopold von Koschembahr’s baptismal record, showing he was baptized on the 5th of December 1829 in Magdeburg, Germany

 

 

Figure 11b. Leopold von Koschembahr’s baptismal record, showing he was baptized on the 5th of December 1829 in Magdeburg, Germany

 

Moving on to other family members, let me briefly discuss the evidence for conversion for my uncle by marriage Dr. Franz Müller, my uncle by blood Dr. Fedor Bruck, my father Dr. Otto Bruck, and Dr. Adalbert Bruck, the great-grandfather of a fourth cousin.

The Centrum Judaicum Foundation is housed in the New Synagogue Berlin which was consecrated on the Jewish New Year in 1866, at which time it became the largest Jewish house of worship with its 3,200 seats. While the synagogue was spared major damage on “Kristallnacht,” it was severely damaged by Allied bombing during WWII. In 1958, the main room of the synagogue was demolished, so that today only the parts of the building closest to the street remain structurally intact.

Documents addressing the history of Jews in and around Berlin are archived there, including surviving records on conversions that took place in the city. In the case of my uncle by marriage Dr. Franz Müller, married to my aunt Susanne Müller née Bruck murdered in Auschwitz, the Centrum Judaicum has an index card on file indicating he converted on the 25th of November 1901. This did not prevent him being dismissed from his position as Humboldt University professor when the Nazis came to power in 1933 in accordance with their Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service.

In the instance of my fourth cousin’s great-grandfather, Dr. Adalbert Bruck, the Centrum Judaicum could find nothing in their archives about him, so referred my cousin to the Evangelische Zentralarchiv in Berlin, the Protestant Central Archive in Berlin. In principle records of all Jewish conversions to Christianity in Berlin are kept here, though many did not survive WWII. According to a letter sent to my cousin, Dr. Adalabert Bruck’s record survives indicating he converted on the 27th of November 1890; however, his wife Anna Bruck née Flatow’s information survives only indirectly in the form of a 1930 document showing she supposedly converted on the 17th of February 1900. (Figures 12a-b)

 

Figure 12a. Letter to my fourth cousin from the Protestant Central Archive confirming the conversion information they have in their archives on his ancestor, Dr. Adalbert Bruck and his wife, Anna Bruck née Flatow

 

 

Figure 12b. Translation of letter from the Protestant Central Archive

 

 

The conversion of my uncle Dr. Fedor Bruck, who has been the subject of several Blog posts because of his incredible tale of survival in Berlin during the entirety of WWII thanks to family and “silent heroes,” adds another element to my uncle’s compelling story. The register documenting his conversion survives and indicates he was baptized in Berlin on the 11th of June 1939 at the Messias Kapelle, a Lutheran Church. (Figures 13a-b, 14) Two godparents are named in the register, a “Herr Engelbert Helwig” and a “Herr Roderich von Roy.” Ancestry shows Englebert Helwig to have been a Holocaust survivor, and Roderich von Roy to have been born on the 3rd of August 1895, exactly two weeks before my uncle. Did my uncle know these people beforehand, or were they just random parishioners who attended the Messias Kappelle selected to be his godparents? We may never know.

 

Figure 13a. Left page of my uncle Dr. Fedor Bruck’s record showing he was baptized on the 11th of June 1939 in the Messias Kapelle

 

Figure 13b. Right page of my uncle Dr. Fedor Bruck’s baptismal record

 

 

Figure 14. Entrance to the Messias Kapelle today

 

Lutheran is a denomination among the Protestant, in fact it is the oldest of the denominations to break away from Catholicism and is traced to the founder of the movement, Martin Luther of Germany. (Figure 15)

 

Figure 15. Visual depiction of the denominations of Christianity

 

Hoping to find a picture of the Messias Kapelle, I did a Google query and stumbled upon a fascinating article written by Christiane Jurik, Editor-in-Chief of Ariel Ministries, discussing the origins of the Messias Kapelle and its role in German Jewish baptisms. I quote:

 

Historically, most baptized Jews in Germany joined the Lutheran Church. There, even those who were true believers in Yeshua were mostly met with indifference; sometimes with suspicion; or worst, with anti-Semitism. In order to avoid this treatment, some Jewish believers started looking for places of worship where they could stay among themselves. In 1901, the Berlin Society purchased a property in one of the most urban boroughs of the city, called Prenzlauer Berg. The ministry not only moved its headquarters to the building but soon started construction work of what became known as the Messias Kapelle (‘Messiah Chapel’). Three days before Christmas of 1902, the chapel opened its doors to the Jewish believers of Berlin.

While the goal of the Berlin Society had been to offer a haven for Jewish believers, its work was closely affiliated with the Lutheran Church. In fact, the chapel officially belonged to the union of Protestant churches that also included the Confessing Church, whose most famous member was Dietrich Bonhoeffer. However, in 1930, the Lutheran Church revoked its support of the work of the Berlin Society and withdrew its pastors from the chapel. From then on, the Messias Kapelle was run by laymen.

In 1935, the Lutheran Synod forbade the baptizing of Jewish people. One of the pastors in Berlin expressed the general sentiment: ‘I am convinced that the family who told me it would be a horrible thought for them that the hand that baptized a Jew would touch their child is not alone.’

Yet not everyone obeyed the new directives of the Synod. The Messias Kapelle at this point separated itself completely from any state-run institution and in turn became the most important place of Messianic baptism in Berlin. According to the baptismal records of the time, over 700 German Jews got baptized there in the years between 1933 and 1940.

On November 11, 1938, during the Kristallnacht, the Messias Kapelle and the seat of the Berlin Society were trashed by the Nazis. Still, it would take until January of 1941 for the ministry and the chapel to be officially closed permanently. Ten months later, the first deportation of Jewish people began in Berlin. Records prove that of the 700 Jewish believers who had been baptized in the Messias Kapelle after 1933, 86 were hauled off to the ghettos of Lodz, Riga, Minsk, and Warsaw. Only two of them survived the Holocaust. It is unknown what happened to the rest of the congregation.”

A few observations. Among the survivors baptized in the Messias Kapelle was my uncle who lived until 1982. Beyond the obvious interest in self-preservation for the 700 or so Jews who got baptized in the Messias Kapelle during the Nazi era, the fact they could be baptized here as late as 1939, worship among other Jewish converts, and be told about the Jewish Messiah may have had appeal. While it’s unclear whether the chapel has been deconsecrated, the author of the above quote tells us that a marketing and public relations firm now owns it and that the worship hall, altar, and a marble relief resembling a Temple survive. It’s sad this is not a recognized historic monument.

Growing up my father never spoke about religion and religion was never part of my upbringing. In fact, I was baptized as a Catholic by my grandparents at six years of age in Lyon, France, at the request of my parents almost as an afterthought, hoping it might protect me in the event of another Holocaust. However, as most readers will surmise, as a half-Jew, I would have been considered a mischlinge of the first degree according to the Nuremberg Laws. Not good enough to survive being murdered.

Aware my father had attended dental school in Berlin, I checked with the Centrum Judaicum in Berlin to ascertain whether they might have a record of my father’s conversion, but they do not. Knowing my father’s penchant for procrastinating, I have always suspected my father never placed a high priority on getting baptized and converting until it became an absolute necessity. And, in my opinion, that only became necessary after he moved to the town of Tiegenhof [today: Nowy Dwór Gdański, Poland] in the Free State of Danzig where he opened his dental practice in 1932. As I discussed in Post 38, the evidence for my father’s conversion comes in the form of a receipt for payment of quarterly church taxes to the Evangelische Kirche in Tiegenhof. (Figure 16)

 

Figure 16. Document found among my father’s papers initially thought to be a dental invoice later determined to be a receipt for payment in 1936 of Church Tax to the Evangelische Kirche in Tiegenhof

 

Figure 17. My second cousin twice removed, Dr. Walter Wolfgang Bruck (1872-1937), in his WWI military dress uniform

 

My second cousin twice-removed, Dr. Walter Wolfgang Bruck (1872-1937) (Figure 17), subject of several recent Blog posts is thought to have converted in Breslau [today: Wrocław, Poland]. Dr. Barbara Bruziewicz-Mikłaszewska, professor of dentistry at the University of Wrocław, who has written about Dr. Bruck, cites a file from the University’s archives saying he converted in 1916 (i.e., University file: sygn. S99, s. 62, nr sprawy AU – 481/46/2001). As we speak, I am working with one of Dr. Bruziewicz-Mikłaszewska’s colleagues to obtain verification of the date of Dr. Bruck’s baptism. Unlike his father and grandfather, who are buried in the Old Jewish Cemetery in Wrocław, Walter’s place of internment in Wrocław is unknown but was undoubtedly in a Christian cemetery that likely no longer exists.

As I mentioned above, in principle all surviving records of Jewish conversions to Christianity in Berlin are archived at the Evangelische Zentralarchiv. For conversions that took place outside of Berlin, however, there is no central repository of this information that I am aware of. Thus, the only possibility of tracking down comparable information for one’s Jewish ancestors is to know the town and parish church where the baptism occurred, and then hope the registers have survived.

 

REFERENCES

Bruziewicz Mikłaszewska, Barbara. Outline of the history of university dentistry in Breslau/Wrocław. [Polish: Zarys dziejów uniwersyteckiej stomatologii we Wrocławiu]. 2010, University of Wrocław, PhD.

Hertz, Deborah. How Jews Became Germans: The History of Conversion and Assimilation in Berlin. Yale University Press, 2009.

Jurik, Christiane. “In the Eye of the Storm: Messianic Believers in Nazi Germany.” Ariel Magazine, Winter 2019, www.ariel.org/magazine/a/in-the-eye-of-the-storm-messianic-believers-in-nazi-germany

Kirshner, Sheldon. “Historian Studies Phenomenon of Conversion in Germany.” Canadian Jewish News, 17 January 2008.

 

POST 105: FEDOR LÖWENSTEIN’S NAZI-CONFISCATED ART: RESTITUTION DENIED

Note: In this post, I discuss my own attempt to obtain compensation and damages from the French government on behalf of my family for works of art seized by the Nazis in December 1940 from my father’s first cousin, Fedor Löwenstein, a noted painter. I also touch on the multiple occasions France has wronged my family during WWII, following WWII, and continuing to the present.

Related Posts:

POST 15: BERLIN & MY GREAT-AUNTS FRANZISKA & ELSBETH BRUCK

POST 16: TRACKING MY GREAT-AUNT HEDWIG LÖWENSTEIN, NÉE BRUCK, & HER FAMILY THROUGH FIVE COUNTRIES

POST 71: A DAY IN THE LIFE OF MY FATHER, DR. OTTO BRUCK–22ND OF AUGUST 1930

 

Figure 1. My great-aunt Franziska Bruck (1866-1942)
Figure 2. My great-aunt Elsbeth Bruck (1874-1970)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This story begins in 2014. This is the year my wife and I took a 13-week trip to Europe traveling from northeastern Poland to southeastern Spain following the path of my Jewish family’s diaspora. It included a stop at the Stadtmuseum in Spandau, on the outskirts of Berlin, where the personal papers of two of my accomplished and unmarried great-aunts, Franziska Bruck (Figure 1) and Elsbeth Bruck (Figure 2), are archived. The family items at the Statdtmuseum include academic papers, diaries, numerous professional and personal letters, family photographs, awards, and miscellaneous belongings. (Figures 3a-b) During my visit, I photographed all the articles and artifacts for later study.

 

Figure 3a. Entrance to the Stadtmuseum in Spandau, Berlin, Germany where my great-aunts’ personal papers are archived
Figure 3b. Archival boxes at the Stadtmuseum containing my great-aunts’ personal papers

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The letters and photographs turned out to be most informative. The letters were written in four forms, Old German Script (known as die Kurrentschrift or Kurrent for short in German); an updated version of Kurrent called Sütterlin developed in the early 20th Century; normal German script (deutsche Normalschrift); and typed normal German. Suffice it to say, that the three forms of German script are completely indecipherable to me, so I depended on German-speaking friends and relatives to translate these letters. However, in the case of letters typed in German, using a good on-line translator, called DeepL, I was able to make sense of the content of some of these missives.

One letter I translated provides the basis of much of this Blog post. (Figures 4a-c) It contains astonishing information that led to the seven-year odyssey I embarked upon to obtain redress from the French government for an injustice perpetrated upon my father’s first cousin, Fedor Löwenstein, by the Nazis. The letter was written by Fedor’s younger sister, Jeanne “Hansi” Goff née Löwenstein, to her aunt, my great-aunt, Elsbeth Bruck. It is dated the 30th of October 1946, and was sent from Nice, France to Berlin, Germany. What makes the letter so astounding is not that it mentions both my paternal grandmother ELSE Bruck and my father OTTO Bruck, since both had connections to Nice and France in 1946, but rather to Hansi’s declaration that one of her brother Fedya’s (named Fedor but also called “Fidel”) paintings had sold posthumously in 1946 for 90,000 French Francs. Using a Historic Currency Converter, I determined this would be worth more than $16,000 as of 2015, obviously even more today. Given the enormous amount that one of Fedor Lowenstein’s paintings had fetched in 1946 convinced me that he was no run-of-the-mill painter and that I needed to learn more about him.

 

Figure 4a. First page of typed letter dated the 30th of October 1946 sent by my father’s first cousin, Jeanne “Hansi” Goff née Löwenstein, to her aunt, my great-aunt, Elsbeth Bruck
Figure 4b. Second page of typed letter dated the 30th of October 1946 sent by my father’s first cousin, Jeanne “Hansi” Goff née Löwenstein, to her aunt, my great-aunt, Elsbeth Bruck

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 4c. Translation of letter

 

One place my wife and I visited in 2014 attempting to obtain copies of original death certificates for ancestors who had died in Nice was la Mairie de Nice, City Hall. There, I was able to obtain death certificates not only for Fedor Lowenstein (Figure 5) and his mother, Hedwig Löwenstein née Bruck (Figure 6), but also for his sister, Jeanne Goff née Löwenstein. (Figure 7) I was fortunate to even find Fedor Lowenstein’s name in the death register. In German, his surname was spelled “Löwenstein,” with the “ö,” that’s to say with an umlaugh over the “o,” transcribed in English as “oe”; in the French death register, Fedor’s surname was spelled simply as “Lowenstein” (Figure 8), so I nearly missed finding his name among the 1946 deaths. I would later discover that Fedor’s surname was variously spelled “Lowenstein,” “Löwenstein,” and even “Loevenstein.”

 

Figure 5. Fedor Lowenstein’s death certificate from Nice, France indicating he died there on the 4th of August 1946
Figure 6. Fedor Löwenstein’s mother’s death certificate from Nice, France showing Hedwig Löwenstein née Bruck died there on the 15th of January 1949; the name on her death certificate is “Edwige Bruck”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 7. Fedor Löwenstein’s sister’s death certificate from Nice, France showing Jeanne “Hansi” Goff née Löwenstein died there on the 5th of May 1986; the name on her death certificate is “Jeanne Loewenstein”
Figure 8. Death register listing dated the 5th of August 1946 for Fedor Löwenstein listing his name as “Fedor Lowenstein”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Having obtained the death certificates, I was dispatched to a different administrative office in Nice, le Service Administration Funéraire, the Funeral Administration Office, to locate their tombs. While Fedor’s sister I learned had been cremated, the Funeral Administration Office directed me to the Cimetière Caucade, the Caucade Communal Cemetery (Figure 9), on the outskirts of Nice to find Fedor and Hedwig’s tombstones. (Figures 10-11) It was providential that I was assisted at the Funeral Administration Office by a Mme. Jöelle Saramito (Figure 12), who would later render me a great service.

 

Figure 9. Reception Bureau at Cimitiere Caucade where Fedor Löwenstein and his mother were once interred

 

Figure 10. Hedwig Löwenstein née Bruck’s surviving headstone though her bones were removed to a charnel house
Figure 11. Fedor Loewenstein’s headstone correctly transcribing the “ö” as “oe”; the headstone survives though his bones were also removed to a charnel house

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 12. In 2015, me standing alongside Mme. Jöelle Saramito from Nice’s Funeral Administration Office, who helped track down valuable information about Fedor Löwenstein

 

 

Jeanne Goff née Löwenstein’s translated 1946 letter convinced me her brother was no ordinary painter. Knowing this, I became curious whether I could obtain an obituary from a contemporary newspaper that might lead me to living descendants. Hoping Mme. Saramito might be able to track it down for me, or at least point me in the right direction, I contacted her. What she provided surpassed my expectations.

In what can only be characterized as a fortunate occurrence of serendipity, Mme. Saramito sent me links to several articles about an exposition featuring three of Fedor Löwenstein’s paintings seized by the Nazis that had been displayed at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux. Unbeknownst to my wife and me, this exhibit had taken place there between the 16th of May and the 24th of August 2014, overlapping our extended stay in Europe that year; needless to say, had we known about this exposition, we would have detoured there.

Among the links Mme. Saramito sent me was an article naming the art curator for the exhibition held at the Musée des Beaux-Arts, a lady named Florence Saragoza; the article also mentioned the French government was looking for legitimate family members to whom Fedor Loewenstein’s artworks could be returned.

 

Figure 13. March 1946 photo of Fedor Loewenstein (seated) with his sister Hansi, his brother Heinz, and his mother Hedwig in Nice, France, taken several months before his death in August 1946
Figure 14. Photo of Fedor Loewenstein with his brother Heinz in military uniform taken in Nice, France on the 24th of October 1945

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

While I had several photographs of Fedor Löwenstein with his family in Nice (Figurse 13-14) found at the Stadtmuseum in Spandau, and a copy of his acte de décès, death certificate, obtained from la Mairie de Nice, there was much I did not know about my father’s first cousin. Hoping to learn more, I tried to contact Mme. Saragoza, and quickly discovered she was affiliated with the Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication as a conservatrice du patrimoine, curator of heritage. My initial email to her at the Ministère de la Culture “bounced.” I eventually learned that she was also the then-Director of the Musée Crozatier in le Puy-en-Velay, France (Figure 15), where my subsequent email reached her. I will always remember her response dated the 16th of September 2014, “What a surprise to read your e-mail! (To be honest I cried) . . .I’m so glad to read about someone from Lowenstein’s family!” Logically, Mme. Saragoza had assumed that Fedor’s family had been murdered in the Holocaust, emigrated, or would be unlikely to learn about the exhibition in Bordeaux and the resurfaced paintings. More on this later.

 

Figure 15. Mme. Florence Saragoza, former Director of Musée Crozatier in le Puy-en-Velay, France

 

 

Almost immediately after connecting with Mme. Saragoza, she sent me the Journal d’exposition, the exhibition catalog, for the Fédor Löwenstein (1901-1946) trois œuvres martyres exposition. (Figure 16) Most of Fedor Löwenstein’s biography and the history behind the works of art confiscated by the Nazis is drawn from this reference.

 

Figure 16. Cover page of the 2014 exhibition catalog from the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux that featured Fedor Löwenstein’s three orphaned paintings

 

 

Wilhelm Fédor Löwenstein was born in Munich, Germany on the 13th of April 1901, and is often characterized as a Czech painter because this was his family’s country of origin. He first studied at the School of Decorative Arts in Berlin and then at the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden. In 1923, Fédor Löwenstein settled in Paris (Figures 17a-b), attracted by the artistic influence of the capital. An artistic movement dominated there, designated in 1925 as the École de Paris, the School of Paris; in reality, this name does not refer to any school that really existed, but rather to the École de Paris, which brought together artists who contributed to making Paris the focus of artistic creation between the two world wars. It was in this rich artistic context that Löwenstein painted and drew.

 

Figure 17a. Undated photo of Fedor Löwenstein as a young man
Figure 17b. Back of undated photo of Fedor Löwenstein indicating he was the first cousin of my aunt Susanne Müller-Bruck, my uncle Fedor Bruck, and my father Otto Bruck

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In Paris he mixed with and became a student of the painter André Lhote from Bordeaux and joined the “Groupe des Surindépendants” in 1936. Löwenstein’s early works were marked by the influence of cubism, whose main representatives worked in Paris, although his subsequent productions evolved towards abstraction, probably under the influence of André Lhote. In 1938, he painted “La Chute” (The Fall), inspired by the signing of the Munich Agreement that dismantled the Czechoslovakia that had been created in 1918. As is noted in the 2014 Bordeaux retrospective exhibition catalog, “The composition and iconographic vocabulary of the work are reminiscent of the convulsed and screaming silhouettes of Picasso’s Guernica, exhibited a year earlier in the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris World’s Fair.” The comparison to Picasso’s famed work speaks volumes about Löwenstein’s remarkable talent. 

When France entered the war in September 1939, Löwenstein, like many artists, had to leave the capital. As a foreigner, he had to hide to escape France’s exclusion laws. He went to Mirmande (Drôme) on the advice of Marcelle Rivier, a friend and another of André Lhote’s students. The two artists probably met in Paris shortly before France entered the war. At that time, Mirmande, a village in ruins, welcomed a few painters who lived there. But most of them came there to work alongside André Lhote during his summer academy. The village became a place of refuge for many Parisian artists of foreign origin, all of whom led a relatively peaceful life, free from military operations and repression, contending mostly with the difficulty of obtaining art supplies.

This ended abruptly when the Germans occupied the whole of Metropolitan France in November 1942. Until then, the French Demarcation line marked the boundary between the occupied part of France administered by the German Army in the northern and western part of France and the Zone libre in the south. The suppression of the Demarcation line marked by the invasion of the southern zone by the Germans put an end to the peaceful life the artists in Miramande had enjoyed.  This caused the group gathered there to break up.

From then on, it was the French Resistance network that worked to protect the refugees of Mirmande, thus allowing many Jewish painters to flee. Marcelle Rivier, Fedor Löwenstein’s friend who had enticed him to move there, somewhat amusingly described her involvement in his evacuation in 1943 from Miramande: “That night I put on Lowenstein one of these vast peasant skirts that we wore then and by a night of full moon in this month of February 1943, we left for Cliousclat. . .With his skirt, Lowenstein had the air of a horse disguised and the ground left no other means than to take the traced road. There I entrusted him to Ména Loopuyt, a Dutch painter living in Cliousclat. Charles Caillet had gone by bicycle to the abbey of Aiguebelle to get along with the abbot and gave us an appointment at his house. The next day at midnight, Doctor Debanne disguised the Jews as wounded, and they were taken to Aiguebelle.”

As the exposition catalog goes on to describe, “They [the Jews] were in possession of false identity cards made by Maurice Caillet, the curator of the Valence Museum. In agreement with the bishopric and the superior of the community, the monks of the abbey of Aiguebelle in the Drôme welcomed refugees at the end of 1942 and sheltered Jews whom they employed in the various works of the abbey. Löwenstein decorated tiles without enthusiasm.”

In the fall of 1943, ill, Fedor went to Paris, under the pseudonym of Lauriston, to consult at the Curie Institute and at the Broussais Hospital in the south of Paris, where Dr. Paul Chevallier, a French pioneer in hematology, was practicing. However, his disease was not diagnosed, and he continued to deteriorate. Löwenstein would eventually return to his family in Nice, where he was hospitalized and would die on the 4th of August 1946. It was determined he died of Hodgkins Lymphoma.

Fedor’s association with the “Groupe des Surindépendants” from 1936 onward resulted in him exhibiting regularly with them until the outbreak of WWII. The group even organized a personal exhibition for him in 1939. At some point in 1940 during his stay in Miramande, Fedor returned to Paris where he selected small format works as well as six watercolors that he brought to be shipped to New York City. There is little information about the circumstances surrounding this project, but the paintings were sent to a harbor warehouse in Bordeaux for shipment to an American gallery. Unfortunately, the crates never left Bordeaux but were instead “requisitioned” by German military authorities on the 5th of December 1940, the date of a major seizure operation.

A special commando unit affiliated with the “Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR)” (Reichsleiter Rosenberg Taskforce) raided the warehouse where Fedor’s crates were stored, seized them, and had them shipped to Paris where they were stored at the “Jeu de Paume.” The ERR was a Nazi Party organization dedicated to appropriating cultural property during WWII and was led by the chief ideologue of the Nazi Party, Alfred Rosenberg, ergo its name. The Jeu de Paume was the seat of ERR’s processing of looted art objects confiscated from Jewish-owned collections.

Owing to the abstract cubist nature of Löwenstein’s works, the ERR staff at the Jeu de Paume deemed them as “degenerate” and consigned them to the store room for condemned art, the “Salles des Martyrs,” Martyrs’ Hall. They were marked for destruction, in German “vernichet.” In total, 25 paintings by Fedor were seized and brought to the Jeu de Paume to be disposed of for ideological reasons.

Almost seventy years after the Liberation of Paris in August 1944 three of the purportedly destroyed Löwenstein paintings resurfaced in French museum collections. French Ministry of Culture officials were able to match the resurrected paintings with information contained in the ERR database for three works labeled by the Germans as Löwenstein 4 (“Paysage” or Landscape), Löwenstein 15 (“Peupliers” or Poplars), and Löwenstein 19 (“Les Arbes” or The Trees). In the official catalogue of unclaimed works and objects of art known as “Musée Nationaux Récupération (MNR),” the works are assigned MNR numbers R26, R27, and R28. These three paintings correspond to Löwenstein’s works of art that were displayed at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Bordeaux in 2014 for which I would later file a claim for restitution. As an aside, all three paintings were signed “Fedor Loevenstein.” I would later learn from a French reader of my Blog, who purchased several of his works at auction, that Löwenstein also signed some with his initials in reverse, “LF.”

In connection with researching and writing the catalog for the 2014 exhibit of Fedor Löwenstein’s three resurrected paintings, Florence Saragoza and her colleagues uncovered the notes of the curator at the Jeu de Paume, Rose Valland. Her notes from July 20, 1943, confirm the fate of artworks destined for destruction: “Scholz and his team continue to choose from among the paintings in the Louvre’s escrow and stab the paintings they do not want to keep. This is how they destroyed almost all of Masson’s works, all of Dalí’s. The paintings in the Loewenstein, Esmont (sic), M[ichel]-G[eorges] Michel collections are almost all shredded. . .” On July 23rd, she added “The paintings massacred in the Louvre’s sequestration were brought back to the Jeu de Paume. Five or six hundred were burned under German surveillance in the museum garden from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. . . . The paintings that remained in the Louvre were classified by category. . .”. It appears that Löwenstein’s three works that escaped destruction had been classified by the Louvre as “paintings of lesser importance,” while the remaining works were likely stabbed, shredded and/or incinerated.

As a side note, since virtually all the images of Fedor Löwenstein’s paintings as well as the historic images of the Martyrs’ Hall at the Jeu de Paume are copyrighted, I refer readers to the hyperlinks to view photos.

As a mildly interesting aside, Florence Saragoza and her colleagues, using the notes left behind by Rose Valland, then curatorial attaché at the Jeu de Paume, were able to attribute most of the paintings exhibited there. They did this using a detailed digitization of the negatives, work by work, accompanied by anamorphosis. This was a new term to me and is defined as: “. . .a distorted projection requiring the viewer to occupy a specific vantage point, use special devices, or both to view a recognizable image. It is used in painting, photography, sculpture and installation, toys, and film special effects. The word is derived from the Greek prefix ana-, meaning ‘back’ or ‘again’, and the word morphe, meaning ‘shape’ or ‘form.’ Extreme anamorphosis has been used by artists to disguise caricatures, erotic and scatological scenes, and other furtive images from a casual spectator, while revealing an undistorted image to the knowledgeable viewer.” In the case of the historic photos on display in the Martyrs’ Hall, I take this to mean that since the paintings in the photos look somewhat distorted, some digital manipulation was required to identify and attribute the works of art.

As previously mentioned, Fedor Löwenstein’s 25 paintings were seized from État-major administratif du port, hangar H, Bordeaux, the “Port Administration Headquarters, Hanger H, Bordeaux.” They were seized at the same time as a set of Dali’s works were taken from another collector, which were described under the acronym “unbekannt,” “unknown.” This was intended to indicate that the history of the works had been lost during the various transfers from their seizure in Bordeaux to their shipment to Paris, the inventories being drawn up only belatedly by the historians of the ERR. Again quoting from the exhibition catalog, “But the fact that these collections were made anonymous was also part of the ideological policy of the Third Reich, which aimed at cultural appropriation, an affirmation of superiority inscribed in a historical connection and a rewriting of art history.” As in the case of Dali’s works, the provenance of the three orphan paintings by Löwenstein was lost and they were described as having been donated anonymously in 1973. Only in 2011 were they were reclassified as stolen works. This brings me to where things stood when I learned all the above.

Soon after connecting with Florence Saragoza, she asked me whether I wanted to file a claim with the Commission pour l’indemnisation des victimes de spoliations (CIVS) for the return of Fedor Löwenstein’s three orphan paintings, as well as payment of damages. CIVS is the commission established in 1999 under the French Prime Minister to implement the policy of the State regarding the reparation of the damages suffered by the Jews of France whose property was looted during the Occupation, because of the anti-Semitic measures taken by the German occupier or by the Vichy regime. This seemed like a logical next step. Given my intimate familiarity with my father and his first cousins’ family tree, I immediately realized that I am Fedor’s closest living relative. (Figure 18) That’s to say, because neither Fedor nor either of his two siblings had any children or surviving spouses, as a first cousin once removed, I am their closest surviving blood relative.

 

Figure 18. My father Dr. Otto Bruck (1907-1994) standing alongside his first cousin and the sister of Fedor Löwenstein, Jeanne “Hansi” Goff née Löwenstein, on the 2nd of March 1947 in Fayence, France, the town from where my aunt Susanne Müller-Bruck was deported to Auschwitz

 

 

With Mme. Saragoza’s gracious assistance, I filed a claim with CIVS in October 2014. CIVS acknowledged receipt of my claim in November 2014, assigning it a case number, “Requête 24005 BROOK,” noting that considering the numerous claims pending before their office and the multiple archives and offices that would need to be consulted, it could take some time to render a decision. In fact, it took more than 6 ½ years.

In June 2015, my wife and I met with the staff at the CIVS in Paris (Figure 19) to discuss my claim, whereupon I provided them with a written account of the chronology detailed above and my ancestral connection to Fedor Löwenstein. In February 2017, I was eventually contacted by a genealogist contracted by CIVS to investigate my claim. I shared an updated written account of what I had sent to CIVS in 2015, and included an extensive array of historic documents, photos, and exhibits, along with a detailed family tree. In essence, I did the genealogist’s work for him.

 

Figure 19. In June 2015, meeting in Paris with Mme. Muriel De Bastier and Mlle. Eleonore Claret from CIVS, the Premier Ministre’s office handling my restitution claim

 

Between February 2017 and June 2021, when CIVS rendered their written decision, I was never contacted by the Premier Ministre’s office. The decision letter from the Premier Ministre along with the attached report by Le Rapporteur Generale arrived on the 17th of June 2021. It included much of the same information discussed above. The final decision is that my claim was rejected.

Beyond the disappointment and anger I feel about this determination, I was curious about the merits and legal basis of this ruling. Inasmuch as I can ascertain, it appears that because France is governed by principles of civil law rather than common law, my rights have been supplanted. Civil law has its features compiled and codified into a collection for ready reference. It is inspired by the Roman law. Common law, on the other hand, has its rules and regulations administered by judges and vary on a case-to-case basis. Civil law was framed in France. Common law was started in England. Common law varies from case to case depending upon the customs of the society whereas civil law has a predefined written set of statutes and codes for reference. Judgment in common law varies whereas in civil law, the judges must strictly follow the codification written in the book.

In the case of my claim for restitution, CIVS concluded there are what are called “universal legatees,” an element of civil law, whose claim to Löwenstein’s property and damages supersede my own. France considers property left in a will a “universal legacy,” so the person who inherits the rights, obligations, possession, and debts of an ancestor’s title in property through a testamentary disposition is called a “universal legatee.”

These universal legatees in the case of Fedor Löwenstein’s estate are descendants of individuals, merely friends, who inherited from his brother and sister. They and their descendants were not and are not related by blood to Fedor Löwenstein, as I am. Were it not for my efforts to uncover information about Fedor’s orphaned works and file a claim for repatriation and damages, these individuals would have no knowledge of their existence. Furthermore, had it not been for my own extensive genealogical research into Fedor Löwenstein’s spoliated works and ancestry, the CIVS genealogist contracted to undertake the forensic investigation into my claim likely would not have uncovered all the information I provided in 2017. Notwithstanding the stated wishes of CIVS and the Musée National d’Art Moderne housed in the Centre Pompidou in Paris to restore Fedor Löwenstein’s to his family, this is emphatically not happening.

Figure 20. My father Dr. Otto Bruck standing on la Promenade des Anglais in Nice, France in 1946

In retrospect, I would say I should not be surprised by this outcome. France has a long-standing tradition of having wronged my family going back to when the French were complicit in helping the Germans deport my aunt Susanne Müller née Bruck in August 1942, from Fayence, France to Auschwitz, where she was ultimately murdered. Then, following the war, in 1948, they arrested my father, Dr. Otto Bruck (Figure 20), in Nice, France for allegedly practicing dentistry illegally, simply for managing the practice of a dentist who had no interest in her business. My father was arrested only because he was “apatride,” stateless. Rather than offer French citizenry to a man who spoke fluent French and who offered a service much-in-need following WWII, they detained and intended to prosecute him had he not decamped for America. And this although my father served France nobly and honorably for five years during the war as a soldier in the French Foreign Legion. Arguably, France may have met its legal obligation with its decision regarding my claim, but they most assuredly have not fulfilled their moral obligation by handing over my ancestor’s paintings and awarding damages to so-called “universal legatees.” Family of Fedor Löwenstein they are decidedly NOT!!

 

 

REFERENCE

 

Fédor Löwenstein (1901-1946) trois œuvres martyres. 16 May-24 Aug. 2014. Musée des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux, Bordeaux.

 

 

VITAL STATISTICS OF WILHELM FÉDOR LÖWENSTEIN & HIS IMMEDIATE FAMILY

 

NAME EVENT DATE PLACE SOURCE
         
Wilhelm Fédor Löwenstein (self) Birth 13 April 1901 Munich, Germany Munich Birth Certificate
  Death 4 August 1946 Nice, France Nice Death Certificate
Rudolf Löwenstein (father) Birth 17 January 1872 Kuttenplan, Czechoslovakia [today: Chodová Planá, Czech Republic] Kuttenplan, Czechoslovakia Birth Register Listing
  Marriage (to Hedwig Bruck) 17 September 1899 Ratibor, Germany [today: Racibórz, Poland] LDS Family History Center Microfilm Roll 1184449 (Ratibor)
  Death 22 August 1930 Iglau, Czechoslovakia [today: Jihlava, Czech Republic] LDS Family History Center Microfilm Roll 1184408 (Danzig)
Hedwig Löwenstein Bruck (mother) Birth 22 March 1870 Ratibor, Germany [today: Racibórz, Poland] LDS Family History Center Microfilm Roll 1184449 (Ratibor)
  Marriage (to Rudolf Löwenstein) 17 September 1899 Ratibor, Germany [today: Racibórz, Poland] Ratibor Marriage Certificate
  Death 15 January 1949 Nice, France Nice Death Certificate
Elsbeth Bruck (aunt) Birth 17 November 1874 Ratibor, Germany [today: Racibórz, Poland German Democratic Republic Passport
  Death 20 February 1970 East Berlin, German Democratic Republic  
Jeanne “Hansi” Goff née Löwenstein (sister) Birth 9 September 1902 Danzig, Free State [today: Gdansk, Poland] Danzig Birth Certificate
  Marriage (to Georges Goff) UNKNOWN    
  Death 5 May 1986 Nice, France Nice Death Certificate
Heinz Löwenstein (brother) (died as “Hanoch Avneri”) Birth 8 March 1905 Danzig, Free State [today: Gdansk, Poland] LDS Family History Center Microfilm Roll 1184407 (Danzig)
  Marriage (to Rose Bloch) 22 October 1931 Danzig, Free State [today: Gdansk, Poland] Danzig Marriage Certificate
  Death 10 August 1979 Haifa, Israel Haifa Burial Certificate
Otto Bruck (first cousin) (died as Gary Otto Brook) Birth 16 April 1907 Ratibor, Germany [today: Racibórz, Poland] Ratibor Birth Certificate
  Marriage 22 October 1949 Manhattan, New York  
  Death 14 September 1994 Queens, New York New York City Death Certificate
Richard Alan Brook (first cousin once removed) Birth 27 December 1950 Manhattan, New York  

 

 

 

POST 89: EVIDENCE OF MY 18th & 19th CENTURIES MARLE ANCESTORS

Note: In this post, I discuss evidence of the Marle branch of my extended family from the late 18th Century-early 19th Century, which survives in the “Archiwum Panstwowe Oddzial Pszczyna,” State Archives Pszczyna [Poland] Branch, as well as in the Jewish cemetery that still exists there.

Related Posts:

Post 88: De-Stigmatizing Illegitimate Births Among the Upper Classes, The Case of My Third Great-Aunt, Antonie Pauly née Marle

 

Figure 1. My father, Dr. Otto Bruck, and uncle, Dr. Fedor Bruck, winter 1934-35 in the Riesengebirge (Karkonosze), in southwestern Poland

 

My father, Dr. Otto Bruck (1907-1994) (Figure 1), had an indifferent if not dismissive attitude towards his ancestors and next of kin apart from his beloved sister Susanne Müller née Bruck (1904-1942), murdered in Auschwitz. By contrast, my uncle Dr. Fedor Bruck (1895-1982) (Figure 1), the oldest of my father’s siblings, was deeply interested in his forefathers. Upon my uncle’s death in 1982, my aunt gave me a copy of an abbreviated family “tree” my uncle had developed. (Figure 2) This includes the earliest mention I can recollect of the Marle branch of my family, specifically, “Wilhelm MARLE” who was married to “Reisel G. (=GRAETZER).” My uncle’s schematic tree provided no vital dates for the Marles.

 

Figure 2. A schematized family tree developed by my uncle Dr. Fedor Bruck with the earliest mention of the Marle branch of my extended family

 

In time, I would learn from a German cousin that Wilhelm and Rosalie Marle’s headstones survive in the extant Jewish Cemetery in Pszczyna, Poland, formerly Pless, Prussia. During my and my wife’s 2014 visit to Ratibor [today: Racibórz, Poland], our English-speaking Polish friend, Malgosia Ploszaj, took us the to their graves, approximately 35 miles distant. (Figure 3) Malgosia, who hails from nearby Rybnik, Poland, formerly Rybnick, Prussia, is ardently interested in the history of Jews in Silesia and works with local volunteers to restore and raise fallen Jewish headstones throughout the area. In 2014, only Wilhelm Marle’s headstone had been restored and reset, but subsequently, his wife’s headstone has also been raised. I include pictures here of their beautifully rehabilitated tombstones.

 

Figure 3. May 2014 photo of me standing by the raised headstone of Wilhelm Marle in the surviving Jewish Cemetery in Pszczyna, Poland

 

[Just a quick footnote. I have variously found Wilhelm Marle’s wife’s forename spelled as “Reisel,” “Roesel,” “Rosel,” “Raizel,” and “Rosalie.” I will primarily use “Rosalie” as this name appears on her tombstone.]

Let me very briefly digress to provide some context. The subject of Post 88 was my third great-aunt, Antonie Pauly née Marle, an illegitimate daughter of the Rosalie Marle née Graetzer buried in Pszczyna; as previously discussed, Antonie was humorously if not sarcastically referred to as the “Queen of Tost,” even though she was born in Pszczyna not Toszek, Poland as Tost is today known.

Because Wilhelm and Rosalie Marle’s headstones are the very earliest known to me of any ancestors and relate to individuals born in the late 18th Century, I was particularly interested in learning more about them. Thus, I recently asked my friend, Ms. Madeleine Isenberg, affiliated as a volunteer with the Jewish Genealogical Society of Los Angeles, whether she could translate the Hebraic text on Wilhelm (Figures 4-6) and Rosalie Marle’s (Figures 7-9) headstones. Madeleine is fluent in Hebrew and is ardently interested in deciphering and interpreting Hebrew texts on headstones. Madeleine provided a beautiful translation and interpretation of the text on both tombstones.

 

Figure 4. Wilhelm Marle’s (1772-1846) tombstone

 

 

Figure 5. Transcription of text on Wilhelm Marle’s headstone
Figure 6. Translation of text on Wilhelm Marle’s headstone [courtesy of Madeleine Isenberg]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 7. Rosalie Marle née Graetzer’s (1779 or 1780-1849) tombstone

 

 

Figure 8. Transcription of text on Rosalie Marle née Graetzer’s headstone
Figure 9. Translation of text on Rosalie Marle née Graetzer’s headstone [courtesy of Madeleine Isenberg]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A few points of clarification. “Kohen” is the Hebrew word for “priest,” thus, a member of the priestly class having certain rights and duties in the synagogue.

As to the reference that Wilhelm Marle’s father was a “chaver,” Madeleine explained that in today’s Hebrew, it would simply mean “friend,” but that at one time it was a sort of title. If a person studied at a yeshiva to gain the certification of a rabbi, it was with the intention he might serve a community as a rabbi or teacher. However, Madeleine found another “classification” of chaver in a paper entitled “Regulations of The Synagogue ‘Altneuschule’ In Prague In Their Historic Context” which I quote: 

In 18th Century Germany, there were two degrees of rabbinical ordination: the higher degree, using the title ‘moreinu’—our teacher or guide—given to scholars who devoted all their time to Torah study even after marriage and intended to serve the Rabbinate or as a Yeshiva teacher. The lower degree—chaver—was given to students before marriage who intended to take up a trade other than the Rabbinate.” (Gevaryahu & Sicherman 2010)

The German translation of “chaver” on Wilhelm Marle’s headstone is “Kaufmann,” merchant or businessman, indicating that he did not intend to become a rabbi or teacher.

As mentioned, the translation of Wilhelm and Rosalie Marle’s headstones was recently obtained. However, in December 2017, I was contacted through my family tree on ancestry.com by Professor Sławomir Pastuszka from Jagiellonian University in Kraków looking for information on the Marle family. While I was able to provide Professor Pastuszka with some new material, I was the primary beneficiary of our exchanges.

Professor Pastuszka’s data comes from the Archiwum Panstwowe Oddzial Pszczyna, State Archives Pszczyna Branch, located in Pszczyna proper, which is unavailable online. I will briefly summarize and provide some historic context for the information about Wilhelm and Rosalie Marle. Wilhelm Wolf Marle was born on the 14th of November 1772 in Pless to Isaac (Figure 10) and Magdalena (Figure 11), both of whom died before 1811 and are buried in the Mikołów Jewish Cemetery in Mikołów, Poland [formerly Nikolai, Prussia], a well-preserved Jewish cemetery; Mikołów is located about 19 miles or 30km north of Pszczyna. (Figure 12) The texts on most of the headstones in Mikołów are in Hebrew so without an interpreter it would be difficult for the average visitor to locate Wilhelm Marle’s parents’ headstones. (Figure 13)

 

Figure 10. Wilhelm Wolf Marle’s father, Isaac Marle, listed in a 1780 census of Pless [photo courtesy of Sławomir Pastuszka]
Figure 11. Wilhelm Wolf Marle’s parents, Isaac Marle and Magdalena, listed in a 1784 census of Pless [photo courtesy of Sławomir Pastuszka]
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 12. 1893 map of Silesia with Pless [today: Pszczyna, Poland], Nikolai [today: Mikołów, Poland], Ratibor [today: Racibórz, Poland] and Rybnick [today: Rybnik, Poland] circled
Figure 13. Headstone of unknown individual from the Mikołów Jewish Cemetery in Mikołów, Poland [photo courtesy of K. Bielawski] in Hebrew text

 

The Marle families was one of the oldest Jewish families in Pless. According to censuses in the Pszczyna Archive, respectively from 1811 (Figure 14) and the 24th of March 1812 (Figure 15), Wilhelm Wolf Marle was also referred to as “Wolf Marle Schlesinger.” According to Sławomir, “Schlesinger” is a word in Schläsisch, or Silesian German, referring to “the Silesian.” Silesian German or Lower Silesian is a nearly extinct German dialect spoken in Silesia. It is part of the East Central German language area with some West Slavic and Lechitic influences. In German, Schläsisch is Schlesisch.

Figure 14. Wilhelm Marle listed in an 1811 Pless census as “Wolff Marle Schlesinger” [photo courtesy of Sławomir Pastuszka]
Figure 15. Wilhelm Marle again registered in a Pless census dated the 24th of March 1812 as “Wolff Marle Schlesinger”; this same entry also gives his date of birth (14 November 1772); his wife “Roesel’s” date of birth (19 March 1780); their date of marriage (15 August 1799); and the names & dates of birth of their four children at the time [photo courtesy of Sławomir Pastuszka]

Wilhelm Marle married Rosalie Graetzer on the 15th of August 1799. Records show Rosalie was born in Tost, Prussia [today: Toszek, Poland] on the 19th of March 1780, daughter of Meyer and Goldine, both from Tost, Prussia. Her headstone states she was 70 years old when she died in October 1849, suggesting she may actually have been born in 1779 rather than 1780.

Other census records indicate Wilhelm Marle was variously a trader [1813], a shopkeeper [1814], and a merchant [1817,1820, 1821, 1822, 1823, 1839, 1842], and that in 1841, he owned a spice shop, an iron shop, and a money exchange.

On January 28, 1802, Wilhelm Marle took over a plot of land from his father with a tenement house located at Deutsche Vorstadt 4, worth 266 Thalers and 20 silver pennies. He sold the property on November 23, 1833. The house still stands today. (Figure 16) In 1814, Wilhelm bought a house at No. 18 on Market Square for 2500 Thalers from Heinrich Theiner, which his son Isaak Marle inherited upon his death. This house also still stands today. (Figure 17)

 

Figure 16. Tenement house once owned by Wilhelm Marle at Deutsche Vorstadt 4, today at ul. Wojska Polskiego 9, in Pszczyna, as it looked in 2015

 

Figure 17. House once owned by Wilhelm Marle at No. 18 Market Square, today at Rynek 18, in Pszczyna, as it looked in 2019

 

The cause of Wilhelm Marle’s death in 1846 was pulmonary edema.

Let me briefly digress to provide some historic context to enable readers to understand when and under what conditions Jews were provided with some civil equality in Prussia. On March 11, 1812, the Prussian King Frederick William III issued an edict that under the first article declared all legally resident Jews of Prussia to be citizens. Article 2 considered Jews to be natives [Einländer] and state citizens of Prussia provided they adopt strictly fixed surnames; that they use German or another living language not only in keeping their commercial records but also in the drawing of contracts and legal declarations of intention; and that they use only German or Latin script for their signatures. Articles 7 and 8 provided that all occupations were open to Jews including academic positions. Article 9, however, postponed the question of Jewish eligibility to state offices. In sum, the Edict provided some civil equality for Jews in exchange for their assumption of fixed surnames, their adoption of German “or another living language” in their professional activities and compliance with other civil duties, including military conscription.

Wilhelm and Rosalie’s dates of birth come from the census record of Pless Jews dated the 24th of March 1812, who, after the emancipation edict, became full citizens of Prussia. Professor Pastuszka emphasized these records contain many errors and dates are not always correct, but this is the only source where complete dates appear.

It was only after the issuance of the Edict of 1812 that Wilhelm Marle could run for office and be elected as one of the first two councilors of the Jewish confession in Pless.

Officially, as implied, Jews in the Kingdom of Prussia had to adopt surnames in 1812, before which they used “nicknames.” The last name “Marle” was originally a nickname used by Wilhelm’s father Isaac. In some documents Sławomir found Wilhelm listed as “Wolf Isaac,” meaning he was “Wolf son of Isaac.” Wilhelm’s mother “Magdalena,” did not have a maiden name. The only Pless census in which her name appears is the one from 1784 at which time she is shown to be 48 years old. (Figure 11)

After the Edict of 1812, women without maiden names typically adopted their father’s first name as a surname. For example, in Pless, a widow listed in the 1811 census named “Pessel Ephraim,” Pessel daughter of Ephraim, was known after her marriage in 1812 to “Abraham Grunthal” as “Pessel Grunthal née Ephraim.” On other occasions women used as their nicknames the nicknames of their fathers, as in the case of Rosalie Marle née Graetzer. Rosalie Graetzer’s mother, “Goldine,” does not appear to have had a surname. While not likely, if I can obtain a picture of her tombstone from the Mikołów Jewish Cemetery, I may be able to confirm this.

Let me move on to the subject of Wilhelm and Rosalie Marle’s children, and the evidence Professor Pastuszka was able to muster about them. Naturally, a few caveats are in order. As previously mentioned, Wilhelm and Rosalie married in 1799. The census of the 24th of March 1812 lists four of their children, namely, Goldine (b. 2nd April 1804), Moritz (b. 12th May 1806), Charlotte (b. 2nd October 1809, and Handel (b. 28th August 1812). (Figure 15) However, because no registers of births and deaths of Jews in Pless exist from before 1813, predating the Edict of 1812, we do not know how many additional children Wilhelm and Rosalie may have had between 1799 and 1812 who died at birth or in infancy.

In Pless censuses postdating the one of 1812, Professor Pastuszka found evidence of five additional children, specifically, Isaac Marle (b. 14th October 1814), Rosel Marle (b. 12th July 1817), Antonie Therese Marle (b. 1st February 1820), Fanny Marle (b. 14th March 1821) and Ernestine Marle (26th October 1822). A family tree archived in the Pinkus Family Collection at the Leo Baeck Institute (Figure 18), available online, coincides almost exactly with the names and number of Wilhelm and Rosalie’s children from the census data, with one exception, Handel Marle, born in 1812 who died a little more than a year later. Not surprisingly, there are notable differences in the years of birth of Wilhelm and Rosalie and their eight surviving children.

 

Figure 18. Family tree for Wilhelm Marle & Rosalie Graetzer from the Pinkus Family Collection at the Leo Baeck Institute identifying 8 of their 9 children Professor Sławomir Pastuszka found in Pless censuses from the 18th-19th centuries

 

The compiled vital data for Wilhelm, his wife, and their nine known children is summarized in the table below, along with the source of the information. Whereas I consider the census records Professor Pastuszka retrieved from the Archiwum Panstwowe Oddzial Pszczyna to be primary source documents, I do not deem the vital data in the family tree from the Pinkus Family Collection to be such. Clearly, the more reliable vital data comes from the Pszczyna Archive. 

 

VITAL STATISTICS FOR WILHELM WOLF MARLE, HIS WIFE & AND THEIR NINE KNOWN CHILDREN

 

 

NAME

(relationship)

VITAL EVENT DATE PLACE SOURCE OF DATA
         
Wilhelm Wolf Marle (self)

[In Pless censuses from 1811 and 24th of March 1812, he was named Wolf Marle Schlesinger]

Birth 14 November 1772 Pless, Prussia [today: Pszczyna, Poland] Pless Census of 24th of March 1812 (Pszczyna Archives)
Marriage to Rosalie Grätzer 15 August 1799 Tost, Germany [today: Toszek, Poland]  
Death 31 October 1846 Pless, Prussia [today: Pszczyna, Poland] Headstone in the Jewish cemetery in Pszczyna, Poland
Rosalie Graetzer (wife)

(Figure 19)

Birth 19 March 1780 Tost, Germany [today: Toszek, Poland] Headstone in the Jewish cemetery in Pszczyna, Poland
Marriage to Wilhelm Marle 15 August 1799 Tost, Germany [today: Toszek, Poland]  
Death 26 October 1849 Pless, Prussia [today: Pszczyna, Poland] Headstone in the Jewish cemetery in Pszczyna, Poland
Goldine Marle (daughter) Birth 2 April 1804 Pless, Prussia [today: Pszczyna, Poland] Pless Census of 24th of March 1812 (Pszczyna Archives)
Marriage to Simon Pincus Oppler 10 December 1823 Rosenberg, Germany [today: Olesno, Poland] Jewish Records Indexing-Poland (LDS Microfilm 1184449)
Death 1853 Kreuzburg, Germany [today: Kluczbork, Poland] Pinkus Family Collection, Marle Family Tree
Moritz (Moses) Marle (son) Birth 12 May 1806 Pless, Prussia [today: Pszczyna, Poland] Pless Census of 24th of March 1812 (Pszczyna Archives)
Death 1866 Breslau, Germany [today: Wrocław, Poland] Pinkus Family Collection, Marle Family Tree
Charlotte Marle (daughter)

(Figure 20)

Birth 2 October 1809 Pless, Prussia [today: Pszczyna, Poland] Pless Census of 24th of March 1812 (Pszczyna Archives)
Marriage to Samuel Bruck 18 January 1831 Pless, Prussia [today: Pszczyna, Poland]  
Death 17 August 1861 Ratibor, Germany [today: Racibórz, Poland]  
Handel Marle (son) Birth 28 August 1812 Pless, Prussia [today: Pszczyna, Poland]  
Death 29 November 1813 Pless, Prussia [today: Pszczyna, Poland]  
Isaak Marle (son) Birth 15 October 1814 Pless, Prussia [today: Pszczyna, Poland] Headstone in the former Jewish cemetery in Ratibor, Germany; Pinkus Family Collection, Marle Family Tree
Marriage to Friederike Traube 11 April 1842 Ratibor, Germany [today: Racibórz, Poland] LDS Microfilm 1184449
Death 14 May 1884 Ratibor, Germany [today: Racibórz, Poland] Headstone in the former Jewish cemetery in Ratibor, Germany; Pinkus Family Collection, Marle Family Tree
Rosalie Marle (illegitimate daughter of Rosalie Graetzer) (married to Jonas Bruck) Birth 12 July 1817 Pless, Prussia [today: Pszczyna, Poland] Headstone in the Old Jewish Cemetery in Wrocław
Death 6 June 1890 Breslau, Germany [today: Wrocław, Poland] Headstone in the Old Jewish Cemetery in Wrocław
Antonie Marle (daughter) (married to Zadig Pauly) (Figures 21a-b) Birth 1 February 1820 Pless, Prussia [today: Pszczyna, Poland] Pinkus Family Collection, Marle Family Tree
Death 17 September 1893 Posen, Germany [today: Poznan, Poland] Pinkus Family Collection, Marle Family Tree
Fanny Marle (daughter) (married to Salomon Mühsam) Birth 14 March 1821 Pless, Prussia [today: Pszczyna, Poland]  
Death 17 November 1909 Berlin, Germany Schlesische Jüdische Familien ancestry tree
Ernestine Marle (daughter) Birth 25 October 1822 Pless, Prussia [today: Pszczyna, Poland]  
Marriage Registration to Gustav Graeffner 30 June 1851 Ratibor, Germany [today: Racibórz, Poland] LDS Microfilm 1184449
Marriage to Gustav Graeffner 13 July 1851 Breslau, Germany [today: Wrocław, Poland] Pinkus Family Collection, Marle Family Tree
Death 7 June 1898 Obernigk, Germany [today: Oborniki Śląskie, Poland] Pinkus Family Collection, Marle Family Tree

 

Figure 19. Painting of Rosalie Marle née Graetzer (1780-1849)
Figure 20. My great-great-grandmother Charlotte Bruck née Marle (1809-1861)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 21a. Painting of Antonie Pauly née Marle (1820-1893)
Figure 21b. Photo of Antonie Pauly née Marle (1820-1893)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 22. Wilhelm Marle & Rosalie Marle née Graetzer’s tombstones [photo courtesy of Sławomir Pastuszka]

REFERENCE

Gevaryahu, Gilad J. J. & Dr. Harvey Sicherman. “Regulations of The Synagogue “Altneuschule’ In Prague In Their Historic Context.” January 20, 2010

POST 82: DR. OTTO BRUCK IN THE BRITISH ARMY

 

Figure 1. My father, Dr. Otto Bruck, in his British Army uniform in Sétif, Algeria in the Summer of 1944

 

Note: In this post, I discuss the limited amount I know about my father’s 2 years and 224 days in the British Army as a member of the 338th Royal Pioneer Corps. (Figure 1) Like his five-years in the French Foreign Legion, his tour of duty in the British Army began in Algeria, though it ended in Italy. I also talk about his reason for enlisting in the English Army, and, as in previous posts, provide some historical context.

Related Posts:

Post 79: Dr. Otto Bruck’s Path to the French Foreign Legion

Post 80: Dr. Otto Bruck in the French Foreign Legion

Post 81: Photo Essay of Dr. Otto Bruck’s Time in the French Foreign Legion

Between January 30, 1933 and May 8, 1945, there were two main laws pertaining to the loss of German citizenship. This not only affected Jews, but also Communists, Socialists, members of the Social Democratic party, conscientious objectors, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Quakers. The “Law on the Revocation of Naturalizations and the Deprivation of the German Citizenship” of July 14, 1933, deprived some persons of their German citizenship individually. Their names were listed in the “Reichsgesetzblatt” (Reich Law Gazette), and with publication of the particular “Reichsgesetzblatt” they lost their German citizenship.

The main group of former German citizens, however, lost their citizenship with the “Eleventh Decree to the Law on the Citizenship of the Reich” of November 25, 1941. This decree stripped Jews of their remaining rights, and stipulated that Jews living outside Germany were no longer German citizens. Deprived of their citizenship and their passports nullified, this effectively stranded in place Jews who had left Germany in the years before or shortly after the beginning of WWII.

As a related aside, ancestry.com has a searchable database entitled “Germany, Index of Jews Whose German Nationality was Annulled by Nazi Regime, 1935-1944,” where the names of individuals whose nationality was rescinded can be entered.

I previously explained to readers that my father left Germany in March 1938 and enlisted in the French Foreign Legion in November 1938. Enlistment in the Legion did not convey French citizenship unless one served at least three tours of duty or was seriously wounded during a military operation. Thus, the Nazi decree of November 25, 1941 stripping Jews living outside Germany of their citizenship effectively rendered Jews, including my father, “stateless.” While he was still a member of the Legion in November 1941 with two additional years of service to fulfill, my father no doubt began to consider what options might be available when his tour of duty ended.

Figure 2. My father’s demobilization document from the French Foreign Legion

 

My father’s five-year enlistment in the Legion ended on the 13th of November 1943 when he was demobilized in Colomb-Béchar, Algeria (Figure 2); two days later, on the 15th of November 1943, he joined the British Pioneer Corps in Algers, Algeria, and reported to Sétif, in northeastern Algeria. (Figure 3) The Pioneer Corps was apparently the only British military unit in which “enemy aliens” could serve (Figure 4); an enemy alien is a citizen of one country living in another country with which it is at war and technically viewed as suspect as a result. According to what my father told me, he switched to the English Army in the hope that after WWII was over, he would be admitted to England and could resume his dental career there. While my father never fully explained the circumstances, it seems a fellow soldier stole his identity and committed a misdeed for which my father was blamed making his entry into England impossible.

 

Figure 3. Political map of Algeria with Colomb-Béchar and Sétif, Algeria circled; Béchar is where my father was demobilized from the French Foreign Legion, and Sétif is where he was garrisoned with the English Army

 

Figure 4. English Army Recruitment Poster calling on men 30 to 50 years of age to join the Pioneer Corps

 

Thousands of German nationals joined the Pioneer Corps to assist Allied war efforts and the liberation of their home country. (Figure 5-6) Typically, they were Jews and political dissidents who’d fled. Unlike the French Foreign Legion, German refugees were not given anonymous names. Obviously, serving as a German national in the British forces was especially dangerous because, in case they were captured, there was a high probability of being executed, either for being a traitor or for being Jewish. Nonetheless, the number of German-born Jews joining the British forces was exceptionally high; by the end of the war, one in seven Jewish refugees from Germany had joined the British forces. Their knowledge of the German language and customs proved particularly useful; many served in the administration of the British occupation army in Germany and Austria following the war.

 

Figure 5. My father on leave from the English Army visiting one of his French Foreign Legion buddies in Ouargla on July 15, 1944
Figure 6. My father in his British Army uniform in Sétif in August 1944

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 7a. Side 1 of my dad’s “Certificate of Demobilization” from the English Army dated June 30, 1946, translated into French
Figure 7a. Side 2 of my dad’s “Certificate of Demobilization” from the English Army dated June 30, 1946, translated into French

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 8. My father’s English Army “Star of Italy” and ribbon (consisting of five vertical stripes of equal width, one in red at either edge and one in green at the center, with two intervening stripes in white)

Among my father’s surviving papers is his “Certificate of Demobilization” (Figures 7a-b) from the English Army, translated into French, as my father was then living and working illegally as a dentist in Nice, France. The certificate indicates my father served in North Africa and Italy from the 19th of November 1943 until the 5th of May 1946, obviously as part of the occupation army after the war ended. He was awarded the Star of Italy (Figure 8) for his involvement in the military campaign there. At the time of his demobilization on the 30th of June 1946, either in Naples or Rome, my father was a private receiving the pay of a corporal. My father served a combined 2 years 224 days in the English Army. (Figures 9a-b, 10) Unlike with the French Foreign Legion, I was unsuccessful obtaining a copy of my father’s military dossier from the United Kingdom’s “Army Personnel Centre” in Glasgow. This is conjecture on my part, but possibly because my father enlisted in Algeria rather than the United Kingdom, the military dossiers for enlistees in North Africa are archived elsewhere. My primary interest in retrieving this file would be obtaining clues on why my father was unable to immigrate to England, an event that would have been transformative.

 

Figure 9a. Frontside of my father’s “War Medal 1939-45” and ribbon (consisting of a narrow central red stripe with a narrow white stripe on either edge, along with a broad red stripe at either edge with two intervening stripes in blue)
Figure 9b. Backside of my father’s “War Medal 1939-45” and ribbon

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 10. My father and his English Army buddies in Rome, Italy in September 1945 with St. Peter’s Basilica in the background

 

 

 

POST 81: PHOTO ESSAY OF DR. OTTO BRUCK’S TIME IN THE FRENCH FOREIGN LEGION

Note: In this post, I talk briefly about the origins of the French Foreign Legion’s romanticized reputation and its depiction in popular culture, followed by a presentation of a few of my father’s photos showing his time in the Legion in Algeria between November 1938 and November 1943.

Related Posts:

Post 79: Dr. Otto Bruck’s Path to the French Foreign Legion

Post 80: Dr. Otto Bruck in the French Foreign Legion

 

Figure 1. Cover page of the book “Memento du Soldat de la Légion Etrangère” my father was given upon his enlistment in Paris on November 9, 1938

 

My father, Dr. Otto Bruck, signed up for the French Foreign Legion on the 9th of November 1938 in Paris (Figure 1), and reported for duty in Sidi Bel Abbès, Algeria (Figure 2) on the 18th of November 1938. As discussed in the previous post, as a Jewish refugee in the lead-up to WWII without a visa to a safe haven, his options were limited, so he heeded the advice of one of his first cousins and enlisted in the Legion.

 

Figure 2. Political map of Algeria with the names of towns and cities mentioned in the text and photos circled

 

Before embarking on a presentation of some of my father’s visual images of his time in la Légion, I want to tell readers a little more about the Legion’s history to supplement what I discussed in the previous post, focusing primarily on the origins of the Legion’s romanticized reputation and its depiction in popular culture. There is no intent on my part to be comprehensive, so interested readers are encouraged to research the Legion’s history to obtain a more broad-based understanding.

The Legion was established on March 9, 1831 by King Louis-Philippe as a military unit to support France’s conquest of Algeria, which they had invaded the previous year. The Legion’s debut was inauspicious because of mismanagement in Algeria, nationally homogeneous battalions, resistance to military discipline among recruits, widespread desertion, and an unqualified officer corps. In 1835, the Legion was transferred into Spanish service to help Queen Regent María Cristina de Borbón put down a Carlist rebellion, though was resurrected in December 1835 by Louis-Philippe once he realized the continuing need for legionnaires in Algeria. The latter became known as the nouvelle légion (“new legion”), which staked out a reputation for military valor during the 1837 storming of Constantine, Algeria.

At the time, legionnaires were often used for labor rather than combat, a situation which began to change only with the arrival in 1840 of Thomas-Robert Bugeaud as commander in chief in Algeria. Recognizing the vulnerability of static legionnaire units in isolated locations that could be overwhelmed by Algerian resisters, Bugeaud instituted a counterinsurgency strategy that took the battle to the enemy and demanded incessant marching; the campaigns, while grueling, improved the Legion’s morale and performance. The Legion’s officers also then began to understand “. . .that leadership of foreign mercenaries requires finesse, appeals to the men’s sense of honor, and nonjudgmental, non-xenophobic attitudes.” Around this time, the Legion began to be more accepted as a full-fledged branch of the French army. The prior practice of nationally homogeneous military units was abandoned, discipline improved, and an ameliorated esprit de corps began to develop.

While historically the Legion had many cutthroats, political refugees, outlaws and others who required strict, often merciless, discipline, by the mid-19th century the Legion had established its reputation as a formidable fighting unit. French imperial expansion that took place between 1871 and 1914 corresponded with the Legion’s “golden age.” The corps, which numbered about 10,000 legionnaires at the time, participated in campaigns in southeastern Algeria and in the conquest of Morocco. The campaigns were then spear-headed by mule-mounted units, the old Montées, as I explained to readers in the previous post. These units became a permanent fixture of Legion operations in North Africa into the 1930’s. The “Batterie Saharienne Portée de Légion,” of which my father was a member, originated as a mule-mounted unit, though by the time he joined it was a motorized infantry company.

The Legion’s reputation as a band of romantic misfits began to capture the public’s imagination during the Legion’s golden age, augmented by what is referred to as the anonymat, the requirement to enlist under an assumed name. This anonymity allowed legionnaires to invent fabulist pasts, unconstrained by reality. What also appealed to many recruits was the possibility of starting life anew with a clean slate, in an environment of macho hardships and challenges.

Readers will recall from my previous post that the Legion had always had a large complement of Germans in its rank. Ironically, German propaganda contributed to the allure of the Legion by depicting it as a band of criminals commanded by sadistic NCOs which, counter-intuitively, seduced the naïve and innocent. Literary works, such as Ouida’s Under Two Flags (1867) and Percival Christopher Wren’s well-known Beau Geste (1924), further kindled the public’s idealized view of the Legion.

By 1933 the Legion numbered more than 30,000 soldiers that were based in Sidi Bel Abbès under the oversight of an inspector general. The Legion’s first inspector general was Paul Rollet who was responsible for creating many of the Legion’s current traditions. Among other things, he sought to secure the Legion’s place in the public’s imagination by reviving the uniform legionnaires had worn during the 19th century consisting of white uniforms and white kepis, and commissioning a glamorized history of the legion, Le Livre d’or de la Légion étrangère (“The Golden Book of the Foreign Legion”); he even had artistic battle scenes painted showing legionnaires in white kepis to reinforce his belief that they were members of an elite and exclusive military unit.

Rollet’s efforts were partly intended to counter what he perceived as an orchestrated attempt to vilify the Legion and thinly veiled attacks on France. Hollywood productions of novels about the Legion, including Under Two Flags (1936) and Beau Geste (1939), as well as the French film Le Grand Jeu (1934; “The Full Deck”) were also responsible for promoting the romanticism, adventure, and the opportunity for atonement through hardship; these possibilities were at the heart of the Legion’s appeal.

In the case of my father, the Legion offered a much simpler option, a lifeline. Still, there is a paradoxical intersection between the draw the Legion’s idealized view in popular culture may have had upon my father and the name he assumed upon his arrival in America in 1948, “Gary Otto Brook.” Recently, I asked my still-living mother why he adopted the name “Gary,” and she thought it was because he liked the actor Gary Cooper. This seems like a reasonable proposition, and the fact that Gary Cooper was one of the featured actors in Beau Geste, the 1939 movie about the French Foreign Legion, is not lost on me and does not seem coincidental.

With this rather lengthy prologue, let me turn now to a presentation and brief discussion of a few of my father’s photos of his time in the Legion.

 

Figure 3. Camel from a méhariste camel company (Compagnies Méharistes Sahariennes) France created as part of the Armée d’Afrique in the Sahara in 1902. Méhariste is a French word that roughly translates to camel cavalry

 

Figure 4. My barely visible father, marked by the “X,” marching with his company in Ouargla, Algeria on Bastille Day, July 14, 1939

 

Figure 5. General Maxime Weygand conducting a troop review of French Foreign Legion soldiers on Bastille Day, July 14, 1939, in Ouargla, Algeria

Maxime Weygand (Figure 5) was a French military commander in World War I and World War II. Weygand initially fought against the Germans during the invasion of France in 1940, but then signed the armistice with and partially collaborated with the Germans as part of the Vichy France regime before being arrested by the Germans for not fully collaborating with them.

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 6. Butcher at the market in Ouargla, Algeria, March 1941

 

Figure 7. Indigenous Algerian man
Figure 8. Palm grove in Ouargla, Algeria

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 9. Blindfolded donkey drawing water from a well

 

Figure 10. My father playing cards with two compatriots. Circled is my father’s cigarette case, given to him by his own father, and passed down to me
Figure 11. The cigarette case depicted in Figure 10

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 12. The dormitory of the “Batterie Saharienne Portée de Légion,” of which my father was a member, in Ouargla, 1942
Figure 13. My father at a bar in Ouargla, Algeria, summer 1942

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 14. Two convoy trucks in Amguid, Algeria

 

Figure 15a. Truck accident in Djebel Djerrine, located between In-Salah and Amguid
Figure 15b. Truck accident in Djebel Djerrine, located between In-Salah and Amguid

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 16. Legionnaires gathered for a group photo after a successful gazelle hunt

 

 

Figure 17. Indigenous Algerian man from Ouargla
Figure 18. Legionnaire in Fort Miribel, located between In-Salah and El Goléa

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 19. Two members of the Italian Armistice Commission in Ouargla

The Commissione Italiana d’Armistizio con la Francia (“Italian Armistice Commission with France”) or CIAF (Figure 19) was a temporary civil and military body charged with implementing the Franco-Italian armistice of 24th June 1940 and coordinating it with the Franco-German armistice of 22nd June. It had broad authority over the military, economic, diplomatic and financial relations between France and Italy until the Italo-German occupation of France on the 11th November 1942. It liaised with the German Armistice Commission, which I discussed in Post 80, which likely accounts for their presence in Ouargla, Algeria.

 

Figure 20. Constantine, Algeria in December 1941

 

Figure 21. My father’s French Foreign Legion “Certificat de Bonne Conduite” (Certificate of Good Conduct), dated the 12th of August 1944, issued nine months after his deployment in the Legion ended