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.
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.
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.
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)
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)
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
Note: In this lengthy post, I provide further details about the life of my uncle’s friend, the German Baron Wolfram E. von Pannwitz, and the tangential role he played in the failed attempt on Hitler’s life on July 20, 1944. Much of this information is derived from Sieghard von Pannwitz, Wolfram’s first cousin once removed who stumbled on my Blog, and on sources he directed me to.
Students of WWII military history may recognize July 20, 1944, as the day that Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg and other military and civilian officials attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler, Führer of Nazi Germany, inside his Wolf’s Lair field headquarters near Rastenburg, East Prussia [today: Kętrzyn, Poland]. The plot’s apparent aim was to wrest political control of Germany and its armed forces from the Nazi Party (including the SS) and to make peace with the Western Allies as soon as possible. Unfortunately, the coup failed which resulted in the Gestapo arresting more than 7,000 people, of whom 4,980 were executed.
I recently discovered that my uncle’s friend, Wolfram E. von Pannwitz, subject of three previous Blog posts, played a secondary role in these events. While I was generally aware that Wolfram went into hiding following the July 20 Plot on Hitler, I was never entirely clear what role he played. Let me explain how I came to learn more details of Wolfram’s involvement in the failed attempt to eliminate Hitler, the facts of which were revealed mostly in his own words.
My family history Blog not only provides an opportunity to relate stories about my Jewish ancestors including the social milieu in which they lived, the political climate at the time, and the historical events they witnessed, but it has a side benefit of allowing the descendants of people who interacted with members of my family to occasionally find me. Invariably, when this happens, I find out more about the people my ancestors were connected to and come away with fodder for more Blog stories. Case in point.
In October 2022, I received an email through my Blog’s Webmail from a Mr. Sieghard von Pannwitz (Figure 1–REMOVED), Wolfram von Pannwitz’s first cousin once removed as it turns out. Prior to this message, I’d wondered after posting three articles about Wolfram whether any of his descendants might eventually stumble on my Blog. My patience was rewarded.
For intermittent readers of my Blog, let me briefly review how my uncle Dr. Fedor Bruck (Figure 2) and Wolfram von Pannwitz met. The full details can be found in Post 84. Following the Fall of Berlin in early May 1945, my uncle who had miraculously survived 30 months in hiding made to his way to the apartment of Käthe Heusermann, a friend of 20 years who had once been his dental assistant when he had his own practice in Liegnitz, Germany [today: Legnica, Poland]. (Figure 3) After Hitler came to power on the 30th of January 1933, and legislation passed in April 1933 that sharply curtailed “Jewish activity” in the medical and legal professions and resulted in the closure of my uncle’s practice, both he and Käthe made their way to Berlin. Käthe Heusermann landed a position as dental assistant to Dr. Hugo Blaschke, Hitler’s dentist. (Figure 4) Inasmuch as I can tell, my uncle would occasionally shelter in Käthe’s apartment during his time in hiding. In any case, after the end of the war, Käthe suggested that he apply to the Russians to take over Dr. Blaschke’s intact dental office (Figure 5); my uncle’s request was granted. Käthe and Blaschke’s dental technician, Fritz Echtmann (Figure 6), were eventually spirited away by the Russians because of their knowledge of Adolf Hitler’s fate, a fact the Russians sought to conceal. Warned by the Americans that a similar fate awaited him, he abandoned Berlin in early 1947 and made his way to America.
The precise date on which my uncle left is unknown to me. However, he wrote an affidavit in November 1966 in the matter of a probate hearing on behalf of the estate of Wolfram E. von Pannwitz, the German Baron he met in June 1947 in West Berlin, providing a general timeframe for when he departed Germany. My uncle and Mr. von Pannwitz befriended one another that month in a displaced persons camp where they had been assembled awaiting passage to the United States. Both left for America on the 8th of July 1947 aboard the “Marine Marlin” from Bremen, Germany, and arrived in New York City on the 17th of July 1947; the two remained friends until von Pannwitz passed away in New York City in January 1966.
My uncle, known in America as Theodore A. Brook, and my aunt Verena H. Dick were married in New York on the 4th of March 1958. (Figure 7) Pannwitz was invited, and prior to my contact with Sieghard, the only picture I had of Wolfram was a side view of him at the far end of the dining table. (Figure 8) Immediately after hearing from Sieghard, I asked whether he had any photos of Wolfram and he graciously shared a few. In the process Sieghard also passed along other information which partially rounds out my understanding of Wolfram’s life.
Long before connecting with Sieghard von Pannwitz, on ancestry.com I had found the certificate for Wolfram’s marriage to his first wife, Argentinian-born Clara Virginia Rhode, showing they were wed on the 18th of October 1920 in Berlin. (Figures 9a-c) A notation in the upper righthand corner of the certificate indicates the union lasted only briefly until the 28th of February 1922 when they were officially divorced.
In any case, one photo Sieghard shared was of Wolfram’s 1920 marriage to Virginia Rhode. (Figure 10) Seated second and third from the left in this picture are Wolfram’s parents, Gertrud Pannwitz née Scholz (1869-1957) and Eberhard von Pannwitz (1861-1923), in his military attire. Meanwhile, seated third and second from the right are Wolfram’s younger sister, Elsa Petrea and her husband Martin Reymann. More on Petrea later.
In 1931, Wolfram got remarried to a woman named Frida Mueller, who by the time his niece wed in 1934 had already died from cancer earlier that same year. Neither of Wolfram’s marriages produced any children.
Another picture sent to me by Sieghard is dated to 1934 and shows the wedding of Wolfram’s niece and Petrea and Martin Reymann’s daughter, Gabriele Reymann to Joachim von Harbou. (Figure 11) A slightly older Petrea is seated in the front row next to the groom, while Wolfram is seated to the far right next to his sister’s husband, Martin Reymann. Readers will note that in both the 1920 and 1934 pictures, as well as in the photo taken at my uncle’s 1958 wedding, Wolfram stands out because he is distinctly bald. Sieghard explained this was the result of being contaminated by poison gas during WWI. Wolfram was a decorated fighter pilot and Captain during the “great war.” (Figure 12)
Sieghard also sent me a photo of a gold ring that once belonged to Wolfram that he inherited and had restyled for his wife to wear. (Figure 13) A story accompanies how he came to possess this ring. Sieghard currently lives in Osnabrück, a city in the German state of Lower Saxony, and attended school in Göttingen, a nearby university city in the same state; following his studies he immigrated to South Africa in 1966 and lived there in two stints for about 20 years. Around the time he first immigrated there in 1966 one of his female cousins married a Jürgen von Berkholz in Singapore. The couple apparently planned to spend their honeymoon in New York at the invitation and expense of Wolfram. Unfortunately, upon docking in New York they learned that Wolfram had died on the 28th of January 1966, thus a few days earlier, so, lacking funds they immediately returned home. Sieghard’s South African cousin inherited Wolfram’s ring and bequeathed it to Sieghard upon her own death. The ring is solid gold and has the von Pannwitz family coat of arms etched on it.
During our very amiable conversations, Sieghard, who has written extensively about the 820-year history of his illustrious family, mentioned in passing that about 20 years ago he was in contact with a historian from the University of Hanover. At the time, this researcher sent Sieghard an article based on an interview with Wolfram discussing, among other things, his time in Paris until July 20, 1944, and his whereabouts in the immediate aftermath of the plot to assassinate Hitler, the failure of which forced him to go into hiding. Sieghard was unable to relocate the article though he thought it had been published in the New York Times. Eventually he remembered the historian’s name, Dr. Ines Katenhusen, retrieved her email, and we were able to obtain a copy of the article in question. As it turns out, the article appeared in “The Providence Sunday Journal” on the 28th of September 1947 and was titled “Underground Baron: Wolfram Von Pannwitz Was in Plot to Assassinate Hitler.” (Figure 14)
At the time Dr. Katenhusen originally contacted Sieghard she was researching the emigration to the United States of many of the famous people associated with Germany’s Bauhaus. According to Wikipedia, “The Staatliches Bauhaus, commonly known as the Bauhaus (German for ‘building house’), was a German art school operational from 1919 to 1933 that combined crafts and the fine arts. The school became famous for its approach to design, which attempted to unify individual artistic vision with the principles of mass production and emphasis on function.”
Dr. Katenhusen is specifically interested in Dr. Alexander Dorner, a German American art historian and museum reformer, ergo the connection to people associated with the Bauhaus. According to German Wikipedia, since 2013 Ines has been working on a monograph and a documentary film about him. As it so happens, Dr. Dorner and his wife Lydia sponsored Wolfram von Pannwitz’s immigration to the United States and are the couple in whose home Wolfram lived during his years in Providence, Rhode Island.
Dr. Dorner, for his part, immigrated to the United States in 1937 because of his opposition to National Socialism. In Rhode Island, he was museum director of the Rhode Island School of Design from 1937 to 1941. From 1941 to 1948 he was professor of art history and aesthetics at Brown University in Providence. Dorner became a United States citizen in 1943, and from 1948 he taught at Bennington College in Vermont.
The article from “The Providence Sunday Journal” clarifies some episodes in Wolfram’s life. Regarding the events during WWI and how he came to be gassed, he tells the following:
“‘I learned aviation in 1912,’ he said, ‘I was among the first fliers, and when I was mobilized for the war, I was quickly promoted because there weren’t many fliers.’ Aviation was not secure then. I became a captain and a squadron commander. In 1916 I was shot down by French anti-aircraft fire. My observer was killed by the first fire, but I came down safely. However, I landed between the second and third French lines, and it happened that they withdrew the infantry and put out poison gas. Being an aviator I had no gas mask, of course, and I lay in a coma from 2 o’clock in the afternoon until 6 o’clock. How I am alive I do not know. But how I am alive several times I do not know.
They came with a stretcher and picked me up. I was nine months in a hospital in Lyons and two years a prisoner, finally exchanged through Switzerland as a badly wounded prisoner.’”
Regarding his life after the First World War until the Nazis came to power and how he knew the Dorners, Wolfram reveals the following:
“‘After the war I became an engineer, specializing in special fuels for automobiles, and for 25 years I was head of the biggest gasoline enterprise in western Berlin. When the Nazis came into power, I was not interested in joining them or their Arbeitsfront, an organization of workers and managers. I refused to join. Nothing happened for a while until the Gestapo found out that I was concealing anti-Nazis in my apartment; I had a cook who was a chatterbox. I helped some of my friends get to Switzerland and some to France. Finally the Nazis came and said I was either to join the party or give up my job. I had very good earning, but I gave up my job. That was in 1937. I went to Italy. I wrote to the Dorners ad asked them how to get to the United States, but I never got an answer. Perhaps the Italian Gestapo caught my letters. I knew the Dorners would answer. I was best man at their wedding. Mrs. Dorner was a close friend of my late wife.’”
Regarding how he wound up in Paris:
“‘I waited months and then I went to Berlin and then to Paris. I had passports and visas. There was no difficulty getting there. In Paris I imported gasoline pumps and compressors from Germany and had a wonderful time without much competition. I stayed until 1939. Several days before war broke out, France began to intern Germans. I went to the United States embassy to try and get a visa, but I was refused because I had no money there or anything else that would give an excuse. I didn’t want to go to Italy. Spain was full of troubles. So I went back to Berlin. I had kept a flat there all the time. My friends took care of it.’”
On how Wolfram wound up getting involved with the anti-Nazi opposition and assigned a role in the planned plot:
“‘I was walking one day when I happened to meet Field Marshall Erwin von Witzleben [EDITOR’S NOTE: Erwin von Witzleben was a German field marshal in the Wehrmacht during WWII. A leading conspirator in the 20 July plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, he was designated to become commander-in-chief of the Wehrmacht in a post-Nazi regime had the plot succeeded.] He was an old friend from the first war. He was captain of artillery then. We spoke of the Nazis, and finally he invited me to come to tea the next day. There were several men in his flat, and we developed ideas about eliminating Hitler and the Nazis. We knew we had a long way to go and would need help. They asked me whether I would go back to Paris. I said I would: They procured a passport, and everything all legitimatized. Of course von Witzleben was able to do such things. It was all secret. “Don’t do anything until you are summoned,” I was told.
I go back. I wait one year. I wait two years. There is no communication. Then General Otto von Stülpnagel [EDITOR’S NOTE: The author of the article or Wolfram von Pannwitz has erroneously identified Otto von Stülpnagel as the German general with whom he collaborated in the July 20 Plot. The correct Stülpnagel was Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel who served as the military commander of German-occupied France. Increasingly unable to reconcile his military duties and his moral objections to the regime’s ideology, Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel joined the resistance. He was a member of the 20 July Plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, overseeing the conspirators’ actions in France. After the failure of the plot, he was recalled to Berlin and attempted to commit suicide en route but failed. Tried on 30 August 1944, he was convicted of treason and executed on the same day.], commander in Paris, summoned me for the first time. That is in 1943. He directed me to take voyages about France. My work was to investigate the Gestapo! I was to find out what they were doing against the German army and French civilians. Everything was at cross purposes, you understand, the army opposing the Gestapo, the SS against both, and so on.
I had no official position. I always went as a civilian. Sometimes I even went into Gestapo headquarters to ask questions. I used my own name. I picked up information in restaurants and places like that. The Gestapo never suspected anybody would dare do things like that. . .
I moved about in France as I wanted to and nobody ever said anything. It was very dangerous, but if one has resolved to go against scoundrels for the sake of one’s country, one must risk his life. He must know it in advance.’”
“On July 15, 1944, Baron von Pannwitz was summoned to the office of General von Stülpnagel in Paris, and without preliminaries, was acquainted with the proposed attempt against the life of Hitler. ‘Stülpnagel developed the whole plan for me. My duty was to arrest SS General Oberg [EDITOR’S NOTE: General Carl Oberg was the senior SS and police leader (HSSPF) in occupied France, from May 1942 to November 1944, during the second world war, who came to be known as the “Butcher of Paris.”], the head of the Gestapo who was residing in the Gestapo palais on Avenue Foch. First, he showed me a plan of Oberg’s office. Then he said, “On the day—I will tell you what day later on—two companies of the army will be sent before the Gestapo building. The you go behind the right wing of the soldiers, and if the company commander lifts his arms and regards his wrist watch, go into the building and up to the second floor and go into Oberg’s office and arrest him.” He gave me a pair of manacles and a revolver. I went home and slept well. I was glad to think of the finish of the Nazis and the end of the war.
On July 18, Stülpnagel sent for me again. He said, “Tomorrow at 11 o’clock. You know everything, Good bye. Get out. Good luck.” That was all.
The next day I punctually was there. It was like a performance on a stage. The two companies of the army march up. I stand behind the right wing. I watch the commander. He looks at his watch, like this. At once I enter the building and go to the second floor. There are two SS guards at the door, but they are so interested in the troops in the yard that they do not notice me. I knock at the door.
“Come in.”
I go in. General Oberg is standing behind his desk. He comes towards me. He does not suspect anything. I put out my hand and say, “I come with the regards of General von Stülpnagel. Heil Hitler!” He puts out his hand. Suddenly I seize his wrist, take out the manacles, and snap them on. Everything goes perfectly. At that moment, in come the soldiers and I deliver Oberg to them.
Then I go to the offices of Stülpnagel to report. “Well done” he says. “Many thanks. Everything runs after the plans” He is rubbing his hands, like this.
Then he says, “You are to go to Cologne.”’”
According to Wolfram von Pannwitz, he was tasked by Stülpnagel with taking a letter to the commander of the German home troops in the Rhineland telling him to mobilize his troops and march against the front troops. Stülpnagel had cut off all communications with Germany to do what he wanted in France so failed to learn that Hitler was not killed. Upon his arrival in Luxembourg aboard the night train, Pannwitz overheard travelers talking about the failed attempt on Hitler’s life. He nonetheless continued to Cologne and headed to the house he was ordered to go to, but quickly realized the plot had unraveled when he saw two SS guards patrolling the premises. Instead, he headed back to the railroad station, and spent the next four days in Cologne, Bonn, and Aix-la-Chapelle [Aachen, Germany]. (Figure 15)
On the 25th of April, it eventually occurred to Pannwitz to turn to the Catholic Church for help, specifically Bishop Van Dar Valdan of Aix-la-Chapelle. The Bishop had him admitted to St. Johannes Hospital in Bonn where he was hidden for three months under the guise of having had a hernia operation. Pannwitz credited the Catholic Church for saving his life which is undoubtedly why he left the Catholic Church and Cardinal Spellman in New York half his wealth upon his death.
While no longer in the hospital at the time, Pannwitz was in Bonn when the Americans bombed the city on October 18th and destroyed half of it. He took advantage of the confusion to claim his apartment had been destroyed and requested that the magistrate allow him to travel to Potsdam, outside Berlin, where his sister could take him in. It took Pannwitz four days to reach Potsdam, the bombing of the railroads having made travel almost impossible. Pannwitz didn’t tell his sister anything about his adventures, apparently seeking to protect her in case the Gestapo came looking for him, which they never did. Pannwitz stayed hidden in his sister’s free room until the Russians arrived.
After things had quieted down some, Pannwitz returned to Berlin hoping to rebuild his life. He lived in his former five-room flat that had been reduced to two rooms on account of Allied bombing. After two months Pannwitz realized it would be impossible to make a living there because no raw materials and tools were then available. By April 1946, postal communication abroad had been restored, so he was able to liaise with the Dorners. Through them he reached the United States under a special program established by President Truman that placed Pannwitz in the class of the persecuted; his role in the July 20 Plot no doubt helped his cause.
By the end of his life, Wolfram von Pannwitz had amassed a fortune of $500,000 which he bequeathed in equal portions to Cardinal Spellman of the Catholic Church in New York and to the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. Pannwitz had made it explicitly clear in his will that none of his family members should inherit any part of his estate. Nonetheless, his sister Petrea contested the will, and apparently reached an out-of-court settlement with the Catholic Church awarding her some money. Inasmuch as my Uncle Fedor knew, Wolfram apparently had been cheated out of his share of his mother’s inheritance upon her death causing him to become estranged from his German family.
Of particular personal interest in “The Providence Sunday Journal” article is the following written about my uncle, Dr. Fedor Bruck. I will quote the entire passage, then qualify and amend it based on my understanding of actual events:
“He [Pannwitz] said he was convinced that Hitler is now dead, and he related that a Jewish dentist, Fedor Bruck, had identified a skull as that of Hitler. Bruck and von Pannwitz were passengers on the same boat from Bremerhaven to New York.
‘Bruck took over the office and laboratory of Hitler’s dentist,’ Baron von Pannwitz said. ‘One day Bruck was summoned by the Russian military governor and told to bring the sketch of Hitler’s denture that his dentist had kept on file. In Bruck’s presence the sketch was checked with a dead body. There was something uncommon about Hitler’s teeth, cavities, or fillings in them. The sketch checked with the body. That is what Bruck said.’”
Dr. Hugo Blaschke was Hitler’s American-trained dentist. According to an account written by my uncle after the war and discussed at length in Post 31, the dental techniques Dr. Blaschke used on Hitler were “old fashioned,” ergo very distinctive. The knowledge that my uncle possessed as to Hitler’s fate and the identification of Hitler’s dental remains was derived exclusively from my uncle’s conversations with Käthe Heusermann, Blaschke’s dental assistant, immediately after the war. The sketch of the dental work done on Hitler was recreated from memory by Ms. Heusermann and the identifications of the remains hers; the original X-rays of Hitler’s teeth were either at the Reich Chancellery or had been taken by Blaschke when he fled to Obersalzberg. At no time did my uncle claim to have handled nor verified dental remains as belonging to Hitler, though it is true that he was visited by Russian authorities at Blaschke’s dental office looking for X-rays and people who could identify the dental work performed on Hitler. This ultimately led to Fritz Echtmann and Käthe Heusermann both being interrogated and detained in Russia for many years.
Finally, notwithstanding the coverage in “The Provience Sunday Journal” of Wolfram von Pannwitz’s self-described role in the July 20 Plot, according to Sieghard there is no mention in relevant literature of Wolfram’s involvement in the events. So, Sieghard is left to wonder whether this is an omission on the part of historians and/or what role, if any, Wolfram actually played in the leadup to the 20 July Plot? Also, curiously, Wolfram seems not to have told my uncle about his connection to the plot nor made him aware of the 1947 newspaper article describing his role. What to make of all this is unclear.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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 SASturmabteilung, the original paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party.
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.
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)
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.
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)
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.
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.
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)
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
Note: Inspired by a reader of my Blog, this post builds on a previous one about my uncle Dr. Fedor Bruck’s friend, German baron Wolfram von Pannwitz, who upon his death, bequeathed his $500,000 fortune in equal parts to the Catholic Church and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS). In this post, I explore some additional questions surrounding Wolfram.
Paraphrasing one of my English teachers, quoting a long-forgotten to me author, “the basis for a short story can be found on any street corner in the world.” This Blog post, short story if you will, is an example. The inspiration for this tale is a reader of my Blog, John Thiesen from Newton, Kansas, who stumbled on Post 84 where I discussed my uncle Dr. Fedor Bruck’s (Theodore Brook in America (Figure 1)) friend, Wolfram E. von Pannwitz, a German Baron.
While Mr. Thiesen and I are unrelated, and I would have had no reason to know of his family, John contacted me because his grandfather John Kroeker and Wolfram E. von Pannwitz came to America at the same time aboard a ship named the “Marine Marlin” departing from Bremen, Germany on the 8th of July 1947, making landfall in New York City on the 17th of July; my uncle Fedor also travelled on this ship at the same time, so would likely have met John Kroeker. Naturally, I already knew my uncle had met Wolfram in a Displaced Persons Camp in Germany, that they had traveled together to America, and had remained friends throughout the remainder of their lives. (Figure 2) I was completely unaware that Wolfram, and possibly my uncle, had befriended John Kroeker on their voyage to America.
Upon contacting me, John Thiesen told me a little about his grandfather as the basis for trying to understand why he had suddenly moved to Providence, Rhode Island from Kansas in about 1953. He thought that perhaps his grandfather’s acquaintance with Wolfram von Pannwitz might have had something to do with this and hoped I might know. John explained that upon his arrival in America his grandfather moved to Kansas; he apparently suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, and for whatever reason seemed unable to fit in there. So, he eventually relocated to Rhode Island though he had no friends or family there that Mr. Thiesen is aware of. His grandfather’s address book is in John’s possession, and amazingly includes Wolfram von Pannwitz’s name and Providence address, seemingly written in Wolfram’s own hand (Figure 3); more on this below. The question John asked me is whether von Pannwitz was still in Providence in 1953? As a related aside, given the likelihood that my uncle Fedor met John Kroeker aboard the Marlin Marlin on his trip across the Atlantic, I wondered whether my uncle’s name appears in his address book? It does not, according to John Thiesen.
A brief digression. In the 1947 Marine Marlin passenger manifest, John Kroeker’s nationality is given as “Stateless,” unlike Wolfram and my Uncle Fedor who are identified as German. (Figures 4-6) John Kröker, as his name is spelled on his 1894 Hamburg, Germany birth certificate (Figures 7a-b), is shown on this document to have been “evangelisch,” Protestant, though his grandson tells me he was a Mennonite. This is logical as the Mennonite church is a branch of the Protestant church having emerged from the Anabaptist movement of the 16th century. What is puzzling to me is why John Kroeker was Stateless. In the case of my own father who as a Jew was Stateless upon his arrival in America because the Nazis revoked the German nationality of all Jews, John Thiesen says that his grandfather was Stateless because he was a citizen/subject of the Russian Empire. Why or how he wound up in Russia remains unexplained.
Anyway, faced with John’s question as to where Wolfram lived in 1953, I started investigating this.
From almost immediately upon his arrival in America, available documents in ancestry.com find Wolfram associated with Providence, Rhode Island. Beyond the fact that his residence in John Kroeker’s undated address book places him on 10 Cooke Street in Providence, apparently boarding in the home of a Dr. Alexander Dorner, the “Rhode Island, U.S., Indexes to Naturalization Records, 1890-1992” for “Wolfram Von Pannwitz” shows this same address for him on the 15th of October 1947. (Figures 8a-b) Incidentally, this record is more aptly referred to as a “Declaration of Intention” to become an American citizen once the five-year waiting period was over. Presumably, Wolfram lived in Providence, R.I. after his arrival in New York on the 17th of July 1947.
As an aside, Wolfram’s October 1947 “Rhode Island Index to Naturalization,” as well as his 1889 birth certificate, gives his full name; like that of many aristocrats it was very lengthy, “Wolfram Ernst Hans Wilhelm Eberhard von Pannwitz.”
Absent any contemporary phone directories and address book listings for Wolfram von Pannwitz following his arrival in America, either for Providence or New York City, and the yet unavailable 1950 census, there is no clear evidence for how long Wolfram resided in Providence. However, when Wolfram departed New York City for Germany via Southampton, England on the 19th of February 1953 aboard the “Queen Elizabeth” his address was given as the Hotel Seville on East 29th Street (Figures 9a-b), his permanent residence throughout his life in New York City. (Figure 10)
This same February 1953 passenger manifest shows Wolfram was naturalized in New York City on the 8th of December 1952, logically, slightly more than five years after his arrival in America. The distance between Providence and New York City is only about 180 miles, so it is possible Wolfram was naturalized in New York City while still residing in Providence. Still, it is safe to conclude that by early 1953 Wolfram was permanently living in Manhattan at the Hotel Seville. The question of how long or whether his residency in Providence may have overlapped with John Kroeker’s is another unknown.
Let me move now to the question of why Wolfram may have taken up residency in Providence. Aware of Wolfram’s more permanent inhabitance there, I did a Google search of “Mr. von Pannwitz + Providence, Rhode Island.” Completely unexpectedly, I stumbled upon an article I’d previously overlooked when researching Wolfram written by Ms. Geraldine S. Foster, a past president of the Rhode Island Jewish Historical Association (RIJHA), entitled “Strands of history: HIAS and Rhode Island.” Embedded in this article is the explanation of why Wolfram von Pannwitz, upon his death, bequeathed half of his sizeable estate to the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS). (Figure 11)
“Almost since its founding, HIAS has not turned away non-Jews who needed its help. An undated new article in RIJHA archives tells us that in 1946, a Providence couple approached a Jewish organization, Rhode Island Refugee Service (later part of Jewish Family and Children’s Service), to ask for help in processing immigration papers for Wolfram von Pannewitz [sic], described as an anti-Nazi German Protestant and an aristocrat.
The couple had signed the proper forms, but then found they urgently needed a second affidavit. They also needed a conduit for the money to pay for von Pannewitz’ [sic] passage.
The R.I. agency, an affiliate of HIAS, helped them find someone to provide the affidavit and fulfill their other needs. We do not know how large a role HIAS played in von Pannewitz’ [sic] rescue. What we do know is that in 1966, he left his entire fortune of $500,000, in equal parts, to Cardinal Francis Joseph Spellman and HIAS.”
According to the Museum of Family History, HIAS is described as follows: “HIAS, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, is America’s oldest international migration and refugee resettlement agency. Dedicated to assisting persecuted and oppressed people worldwide and delivering them to countries of safe haven. HIAS has rescued more than 4.5 million people since 1881. Growing from organizations founded in the 1870s and 1880s to assist Jewish migrants arriving in America, HIAS is responsible for the rescue and resettlement into the United States of noted academics, artists, athletes, entertainers, scientists, mayors, governors, and members of the United States Congress, as well as everyday people. Its operational goals are based on Jewish religious teachings.”
As the above article states, it’s unclear how large a role HIAS played in bringing Wolfram to America, but we do know from a contemporary document that the cost of his passage aboard the Marine Marlin was $134 plus $8 fee. (Figures 12a-b) Possibly, obtaining a second affidavit may have been as important as paying for the trip?
Which brings us to the final question of why, upon landing in America, did Wolfram decide to settle in Providence, Rhode Island? From the above article, we know a Providence couple approached the Rhode Island Refugee Service asking for their help in processing Wolfram’s immigration papers. Was this the Dr. Alexander Dorner and his wife with whom Wolfram boarded when he lived in Providence? This seems likely. As I discussed in Post 84, Wolfram’s wife died young in Germany, and he was estranged from his German family because they had cheated him out of his inheritance. It appears Wolfram had no family in America and lived a rather reclusive and modest lifestyle, accruing a large fortune through stock investments. Possibly, moving to Providence upon his arrival here may initially have been his best option until he settled in, which he did most admirably.
REFERENCE
Foster, Geraldine S. “Strands of history: HIAS and Rhode Island. Jewish Rhode Island, November 8, 2018,
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.
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.
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.”
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)
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.
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)
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.
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)
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)
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.
Note: In this Blog post, I discuss Renate Bruck’s two prominent godmothers, images of whom exist among Dr. Walter Bruck’s surviving papers and photographs.
The Nuremberg Laws consisted of two race-based measures which deprived Jews of their rights. They were designed by Adolf Hitler and approved by the Nazi Party at a convention in Nuremberg on September 15, 1935. The first of these measures, termed the “Reichsbürgergesetz,” the “Reich Citizenship Law,” declared that only those of “German or kindred blood” were eligible to be Reich citizens; the remainder were designated as “subjects of the state” without any citizenship rights. The second provision, the “Gesetz zum Schutze des Deutschen Blutes und der Deutschen Ehre,” the “Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour,” usually simply called the “Blutschutzgesetz” or “Blood Protection Law,” forbade marriage or extramarital intercourse between Jews and Germans. These measures were among the first of the racist Nazi laws that culminated in the Holocaust.
Under the Nuremberg laws, Jews could not fly the German flag and were forbidden to employ in domestic service female subjects of German or kindred blood who were under the age of 45 years.
The first supplementary decree elaborating upon the Nuremberg Laws was passed on November 14, 1935. It defined Jews as persons with at least one Jewish grandparent and explicitly declared they could not be citizens of the Reich; it further decreed that Jews could not exercise the right to vote nor occupy public office. This was ultimately one of 13 ordinances that completed the process of Jewish segregation.
One enactment, passed on November 26, 1935, expanded the provisions of the law to include Roma (Gypsies) and Black people. While exact figures cannot be ascertained, historians estimate that the Germans and their allies killed between 250,000 and 500,000 European Roma during World War II. Although the Nazis did not have an organized program to exterminate African Germans, many of them were persecuted, as were other people of African descent. Black people in Germany and German-occupied territories were often isolated, and an unknown number were sterilized, incarcerated, or murdered.
It is important to emphasize that the racial definition of Jews under the Nuremberg Laws meant that Jews were persecuted NOT for their religious beliefs but for their so-called racial identity that was irrevocably transmitted through the blood of their ancestors.
Because the Nuremberg Laws did not define a “Jew” nor the phrase “German or kindred blood,” the critical task of defining their meaning fell to bureaucrats because of the criminal provisions for noncompliance contained within the law. Two basic categories of Jews were recognized. A full Jew referred to anyone with three Jewish grandparents, a rather straight-forward definition. Defining part-Jews, who were referred to as “Mischlinge,” a pejorative term meaning “hybrids, mongrels, or half-breeds,” was more challenging. Eventually they were divided into two classes. First-degree Mischlinge were defined as people who had two Jewish grandparents but did not practice Judaism and did not have a Jewish spouse. Second-degree Mischlinge were those who had only one Jewish grandparent.
Students of history may find it interesting to learn that out of foreign policy concerns, persecutions under the Nuremberg Laws did not begin until after the conclusion of the 1936 Summer Olympics, held in Berlin that year.
Also worth noting is one of the effects of the Nuremberg Laws. It gave rise to a horde of purportedly “licensed family researchers” who offered their services to concerned Germans afraid the Nazis would discover Jewish relatives among their ancestors. The Health Ministry as well as church offices were involved in providing birth and baptismal certificates as proof of Aryan origin.
I introduce the Nuremberg Laws in the context of talking about Dr. Walter Wolfgang Bruck and his wife Johanna Bruck née Gräbsch’s daughter, Renate Bruck. (Figure 1) While Renate’s mother was Protestant, Dr. Bruck’s parents were Jewish, so according to the Nuremberg Laws, Renate was considered a first-degree Mischling. Evidence suggests Walter converted to Protestantism around 1917, confirmation of which I am still trying to track down. The timing of his conversion may have corresponded with the death of Walter’s mother, Bertha Bruck née Vogelsdorf (1843-1917), in 1917 (Figure 2); Walter may have been reluctant to convert from Judaism until his mother passed away. Unlike his parents and paternal grandparents who are buried in the Old Jewish Cemetery in Breslau [today: Wrocław, Poland], the place of Walter’s burial or cremation is unknown. (Figure 3) What is clear is that Walter was not interred in a Jewish cemetery.
As for Renate Bruck, there is no indication she ever set foot in a synagogue or was taught about the Jewish religion, which makes sense if her father converted from Judaism nine years before Renate was even born. On the contrary, a preliminary examination of the five-year Tagebuch, diary, belonging to Renate and her mother covering a critical period from January 1940 through December 1944, makes it clear Renate was attending Confirmation classes throughout 1940 and early 1941, and was confirmed at age 14 in Breslau on the 17th of March 1941. (Figure 4) As far as the Nazis were concerned, however, this would not have altered Renate’s status as a first-degree Mischling. And, in fact, Renate’s lifelong friend Ina Schaesberg (Figure 5) confirms that Renate and the other Jews and half-Jews were expelled from the private school they all attended in Breslau. More will be said in a future Blog post about the contents of Johanna and Renate Bruck’s diary including their attitude towards the Nazis.
Among the pictures in Walter Bruck’s photo album are two showing people Renate identified as her godmothers. I was curious that Renate had two godmothers but learned that traditionally Christian children can have three godparents in total, though they can have as many as the parents want. Usually, girls have two godmothers and one godfather while boys gave two godfathers and one godmother, although there is no hard and fast rule about this. Without access to Renate’s baptismal record, it is unclear whether both godmothers were listed on it at the time of her baptism. There is no indication as to who Renate’s godfather may have been.
Renate provided information on the captions about each of her godmothers which allowed me to make some interesting connections.
Renate’s first godmother was named “Tante ‘Steffa’ Stephanie” (Figure 6); as readers can make out from the caption, her father was identified as “Geheimrat Prof. Erhlich,” and her husband was the “Commerzienrat Schwerin.” There was also a cryptic parenthetical notation after Stephanie’s father’s name, “Salvasan,” the significance of which only become apparent to me later. (Figure 7)
A “Geheimrat” is a Privy Counselor, a member of the government or cabinet minister; in the current context, however, “Geheimrat” refers to an honorary title used in Prussia that was bestowed upon Dr. Erhlich as an accomplished doctor (see below). A “Kommerzienrat,” a Commercial Counselor, also called a commercial attaché, is a commercial expert on the diplomatic staff of a country´s embassy or large consulate.
Based on Renate’s captions, I correctly concluded that Tante Steffa was Stephanie Schwerin née Erhlich. I discovered a substantial amount of information about her on ancestry.com, including her birth certificate. Her birth name was August Josephine Stephanie Erhlich, and she was born on the 19th of October 1884 in Berlin. Her parents’ names are listed on her birth certificate as Paul Simon Erhlich and Hedwig Erhlich née Pinkus. (Figures 8a-b)
I very quickly realized that Tante Steffa’s father was none other than Dr. Paul Erhlich (1854-1915) (Figure 9), the Nobel Prize-winning German Jewish physician and scientist who worked in the fields of hematology, immunology, and antimicrobial chemotherapy. In 1908, Dr. Paul Erhlich was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his contributions to immunology. His foremost achievements were discovering a cure for syphilis in 1909 (The First Syphilis Cure Was the First ‘Magic Bullet’ | Smart News | Smithsonian Magazine) and inventing the precursor to Gram staining bacteria. The techniques Dr. Erhlich developed for staining tissues made it possible to distinguish between different types of blood cells, which in turn made it possible to diagnose various blood disorders.
Dr. Erhlich’s laboratory discovered Arsphenamine, the drug introduced in the early 1910s as the first effective treatment against syphilis and African sleeping sickness. Renate Bruck’s cryptic parenthetical reference to “Salvasan” was the mistakenly spelled name for “Salvarsan,” the name under which Arsphenamine was marketed, also known as “compound 606.”
A biographical sketch on Dr. Erhlich to which I link here (Paul Ehrlich – Biographical – NobelPrize.org) makes mention of his two daughters, including Stephanie (Mrs. Ernst Schwerin) and Marianne (Mrs. Edmund Landau). Both were the result of his marriage in 1883 to Hedwig Pinkus (1864-1948). According to their marriage certificate, Stephanie and Ernst Schwerin got married in Frankfurt, Germany on the 20th of February 1904.
Along with the picture of Stephanie Schwerin née Erhlich among Dr. Walter Bruck’s papers are two showing the elegant homes she and her husband, Ernst Schwerin, owned, a large estate in Breslau, as well as a mountain retreat probably located in the Riesengebirge [today: Krkonoše, Karkonosze, or Giant Mountains in northern Czech Republic and south-west Poland]. (see Figure 7) There can be little doubt Stephanie and Ernst were wealthy, and, likely, lost much of their fortune when they fled Germany after the ascendancy of the Nazis. Primary source documents prove that in accordance with the Nuremberg Laws, both Ernst and Stephanie Schwerin had their German nationalities annulled sometime between 1935 and 1944. (Figures 10-11) Other primary source documents show that Stephanie and her husband made their way to New York City via Switzerland. They emigrated from Switzerland in October 1938. (Figures 12-13)
The Social Security Death Index indicated Stephanie died in New York in June 1966 (Figure 14) and her husband Ernst passed away on the 25th of November 1946. (Figure 15) I asked a friend with a subscription to Newspapers.com and GenealogyBank if he could track down their obituaries, hoping I might find a living descendant. My friend was unable to locate an obituary for Ernst Schwerin, but his wife’s obituary shows she died a most gruesome death on the 7th of June 1966 at the age of 81 by plunging from her 10th floor apartment at the Hotel Croydon. (Figure 16) According to the obituary, she left two notes in German, confirming she committed suicide. Likely, these notes were intended for her two sons, Hans Wolfgang Schwerin (1906-1987) and Guenther Karl-Joseph Schwerin (1910-1997), neither of whom ever appears to have ever been married. Hans Schwerin, who was an author, lawyer, and psychoanalyst, was a regular fixture on the Society pages during the 1950s. (Figure 17)
The second of Renate Bruck’s godmothers, Elfriede Reichelt, turns out to have been another prominent personage. As readers can make out for themselves, Renate Bruck identified her second godmother as a photographer. (Figure 18) Operating under the assumption she was well-known, a Google query confirmed this. She was born Elfriede Klara Emma Reichelt on the 30th of January 1883 in Breslau, and died of bladder cancer on the 22nd of August 1953 in Grünwald , outside Munich. She was a German art photographer, who in her time was one of the best-known professional photographers in Germany.
The photograph of Elfriede Reichelt appears to have been taken in April 1927 in Brioni, Yugoslavia [today: Brijuni, Croatia], when Elfriede and her unidentified husband were vacationing there with Walter and Johanna Bruck. Her unnamed husband I was later able to determine was Hans Wieland, an industrialist from Ulm, Germany, whom Elfriede married in 1927 and separated from in 1936.
In the Deutsche Fotothek 743 of Elfriede Reichelt’s portrait photos are inventoried (Deutsche Fotothek), including multiple self-portraits. Because of copyright issues, I cannot illustrate these images here, but readers are encouraged to peruse them. Allow me to make a few observations about her photos. Reichelt had unprecedented access to Germany’s last Kaiser, Wilhelm II, and his family while they lived in exile in Doorn, Netherlands following WWI, and often photographed them. It is possible that Elfriede also photographed the Kaiser’s wife, Hermine Reuß, when she visited Dr. Walter Bruck in Breslau for dental treatments. It is even conceivable Dr. Bruck introduced the Kaiserin to Elfriede. Not surprisingly, given the friendship that existed between Walter Bruck and Elfriede Reichelt, her images include one of my renowned ancestor. Oddly, the photograph is incorrectly captioned. It is most curious that Walter Bruck’s picture is labeled as Dr. Fedor Bruck, which happens to have been my uncle’s name who was also a Breslau-trained dentist. Could Elfriede have known my uncle? The period my Uncle Fedor Bruck (1895-1982) spent in Breslau following WWI suggests this is possible. (Figure 19)
Regular readers may remember I have written multiple Blog posts about the Neisser branch of my extended family. Among Elfriede’s pictures are a few she took of Dr. Albert Neisser (1855-1916) (Figure 20) and his wife, Toni Neisser, a patron of the arts. Dr. Neisser was a German physician who discovered the pathogen that caused gonorrhea, a strain of bacteria that was named in his honor (Neisseria gonorrhoeae).
Part of the pleasure I derive in doing forensic genealogy are finding connections among the people I research and write about even when the people are not blood relatives. Often these connections are trivial but nonetheless interesting. Case in point. After elementary school, Dr. Paul Erhlich attended the secondary school Maria-Magdalenen-Gymnasium (high school) in Breslau where he became friends with Dr. Alfred Neisser, who would later become a professional colleague. Coincidentally, Dr. Albert Neisser is a remote “link” between both of Renate Bruck’s two godmothers, though there is no evidence to suggest either knew Dr. Neisser. Since Elfriede Reichelt and Stephanie Erhlich were born, respectively, in 1883 and 1884, and Renate’s mother was born in 1884, it seems more likely all were schoolmates and friends growing up.
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.
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.
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.
[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.
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)
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.
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)
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.
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)
Note: In this post, I discuss a German Baron my uncle Dr. Fedor Bruck befriended in a displaced persons camp in West Berlin while awaiting passage to America in 1947, a gentleman with whom my uncle had much in common and who went on to parlay a small investment in the stock market into more than $500,000 by the time he died. I also review the circumstances that led my uncle to immigrate to the United States after spending 30 months in hiding in Berlin eluding the Nazis, then being permitted to take over Hitler’s dentist’s office following WWII.
My uncle Dr. Fedor Bruck has been the subject of multiple earlier posts which are among my most popular chronicles. I encourage interested readers to peruse these earlier written accounts to familiarize themselves with the broad outlines of my uncle’s life. For the purposes of this post, however, let me provide a brief review.
My uncle owned his own dental practice in Liegnitz, Germany [today: Legnica, Poland] (Figure 1), in the Prussian province of Silesia, until April 1936, when he was forced to shutter his business by the Nazis. He relocated to Berlin, where he was able to resume work for a time, initially working for himself (Figures 2a-b), then later working under the auspices of a non-Jewish dentist. In October 1942, my uncle was ordered by the Nazi authorities to report to an age transport; realizing this meant deportation to a concentration camp and eventual death, he went into hiding. With the help of non-Jewish relatives and acquaintances, “silent heroes,” my uncle survived underground for 30 months until the fall of Berlin in early May 1945. It is estimated that fewer than 5,000 Jews survived concealment in Germany during WWII.
When my uncle had his own dental practice in Liegnitz, one of his dental assistants was Käthe Heusermann née Reiss (Figure 3), a woman of some later recognition; after my uncle Fedor was forced to close his business, she too relocated to Berlin and wound up obtaining a similar position as dental assistant for Adolf Hitler’s American-trained dentist, Dr. Hugo Blaschke (Figure 4), an early member of the National Socialist party. As Dr. Blaschke’s assistant, Käthe Heusermann was always in attendance when der Führer had very distinctive yet outdated dental work performed on him at a special private office Dr. Blaschke was assigned in the Reich Chancellery; Dr. Blaschke’s private business office was located at Kurfürstendamm 213 in the district of Charlottenburg, the boulevard considered the Champs-Élysées of Berlin; this building still stands today. (Figure 5)
As I explained to readers in Post 31, there is very clear evidence that because of their previous relationship and friendship Käthe Heusermann sheltered and hid my uncle for brief periods during his 30 months underground during WWII; she also gave him special rations and extra food vouchers she received as a member of the Führer’s extended staff, at great personal danger. Thus, throughout my uncle’s time in hiding during the war, he was periodically in touch with Käthe. This becomes relevant after the Russians occupied Berlin, and, by my uncle’s own account, he made his way to her apartment at Pariserstrasse 39-40 (Figures 6a-b):
“On April 26, 1945, Steglitz, in the southwestern part of the city [Berlin], was occupied by the Russians. Behind the advancing troops, I arrived, on May 4th, in the apartment of my former assistant Käthe Heusermann. This apartment was situated at Pariserstrasse 39-40 near Kurfürstendamm. A friendship of twenty years tied my person and the family of Käthe Heusermann. Käthe was alone in the bomb-damaged apartment and was very upset and confused. She had only returned to her apartment the day before, May 3rd, having spent the time before that in the Air Shelter in the Reich Chancellery.“
Käthe Heusermann related the events to my uncle of what had occurred at the Reich Chancellery as the Allies encircled Berlin in the waning days of the war, and how Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun had committed suicide (see Post 31 for the complete account in my uncle’s words). Following the fall of Berlin, Käthe Heusermann advised my uncle to obtain permission from the pertinent authorities to take over Dr. Blaschke’s dental practice. His dental office was intact, and Dr. Blaschke had already fled to Obersalzburg, so was unlikely to return. As a person persecuted by the Nazis, my uncle had a right to make this claim. The authorities did in fact grant my uncle permission to take over Dr. Blaschke’s apartment and practice at Kurfürstendamm 213 in Charlottenburg; as discussed in Post 17, post-WWII Address Directories from 1946 (Figure 7), 1947, and 1948 locate my uncle at this address. My uncle’s knowledge of the events surrounding Hitler’s fate stem primarily from his friendship with Käthe Heusermann, but also from his occupancy of Dr. Blaschke’s dental office following WWII.
According to my uncle’s account, following his tenancy of Dr. Blaschke’s dental premises, he was visited on a few occasions by Russian counter-intelligence agents:
“. . .On Wednesday, May 9th, 1945, I met a Russian Lieutenant Colonel in the building, as well as woman in uniform and a gentleman in mufti, as they inquired from the Superintendent as to the whereabouts of Blaschke. As I learned later, they were the deputy military governor of Berlin, a female agent of the Russian secret police, and a certain Doctor Arnaudow, who had been assistant at the Berlin Charité with “Geheimrat Sauerbruch” [“Geheimrat Sauerbruch” is a successful and respected physician]. The latter was a Bulgarian and had brought the Russians who were looking for Hitler’s dentist . . .; furthermore, he acted as interpreter, although the agent of the Russian Secret Police, who called herself “Lola,” spoke a little German.”
As I eventually learned, “Lola,” was a 26-year-old Jewish woman named Yelena Rzhevskaya (Figure 8), born Elena Moiseyevna Kagan in Belarus in 1919, who was travelling with the Soviet vanguard when they entered the center of Berlin on April 29, 1945. She was a military interpreter for SMERSH, the Soviet counter-intelligence agency. Like my uncle, she was a witness to events and findings about Hitler’s fate, corroborating much of what my uncle knew and later reported. As the Soviet forces advanced through Berlin, Rzhevskaya’s unit was tasked with finding people who could provide information on Hitler’s whereabouts. It is only in 2018 that an English version of Yelena Rzhevskaya’s memoir, “Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter: From the Battle for Moscow to Hitler’s Bunker,” was published and that mention of her role in helping identify Hitler’s teeth was made.
Thus, in 1945, what led “Lola,” Yelena Rzhevskaya, to visit my uncle Fedor at Dr. Blaschke’s former dental offices was her search for information about Hitler’s fate. While questioning my uncle, Elena and the Russian authorities would learn about and eventually interrogate Käthe Heusermann and Fritz Echtmann, Blaschke’s dental technician, about their respective roles during Hitler’s dental procedures and their knowledge of his whereabouts; Käthe identified Hitler’s dental bridge for the Russians confirming his death, a fact the Soviets kept hidden for many years. Käthe and Fritz’s familiarity with Hitler’s fate would eventually result in both being abducted by the Russians and imprisoned in Russia until around 1955, a few years after Stalin died in March 1953. It served Stalin’s expansionist goals to have the world believe that Hitler had survived WWII and was an existential danger to the world, thus the need to remove from the scene anyone who could refute his narrative. It is precisely for this same reason that my uncle was in danger of being spirited away by the Russians, namely, because of his indirect knowledge of Hitler’s fate.
My uncle was alerted by the American post-war occupation forces who now controlled Charlottenburg, the Berlin district where Dr. Blaschke had once had his dental practice and where my uncle now lived and worked, that he was in danger of being snatched by the Russian intelligence services. Realizing they would eventually track him down wherever he hid and having already received a visa for the United States, my uncle abandoned his profession. Like my father, he would never again practice dentistry. Thus, began the next phase in my uncle’s life.
The precise date on which my uncle left Berlin is unknown to me. However, he wrote an affidavit in November 1966 in the matter of a probate hearing on behalf of the estate of Wolfram E. von Pannwitz, a German Baron he met in June 1947 in West Berlin, providing a general timeframe for when he departed Germany. My uncle and Mr. von Pannwitz befriended one another that month in a displaced persons camp where they had been assembled awaiting passage to the United States. Both left for America on the 8th of July 1947 aboard the “Marine Marlin” from Bremen, Germany, and arrived in New York City on the 17th of July 1947 (Figures 9-10a-b); the two would remain friends until von Pannwitz died in New York City in 1966. (Figure 11)
Wolfram E. von Pannwitz was born on the 7th of July 1889 in Botzanowitz, Prussia [today: Bodzanowice, Poland], approximately 84 miles northeast of Leobschutz, Prussia [today:Głubczyce, Poland], where my uncle was born in 1895. Beyond both having been born in Upper Silesia, my uncle and von Pannwitz shared other things in common; they were close in age, only six years separated them; both were from the upper class; both were veterans of WW; both were victims of the Nazis; and both were anti-fascist.
Von Pannwitz was a Lutheran member of the Prussian nobility, who had been a captain in the German Army during WWI. In the early 1930’s, von Pannwitz operated a large garage business and dealt in fuel in Berlin. Not wishing to join the Nazi party, he went to Paris to live between 1937 and 1939. He was forced to return to Berlin, having been declared an “enemy alien” by the French, although he was able to use family influence to return to Paris. Once returned, he became involved with the movement that attempted to assassinate Hitler on July 20, 1944, an ultimately unsuccessful effort that forced him to go into hiding.
Wolfram von Pannwitz had a younger sister, “Else Petrea, Magda, Ernestine, Ottilie, Leonie, Gertrud,” born on the 19th of February 1893, also in Botzanowitz, Prussia. (Figure 12) He married Clara Virginia Rohde on the 18th of October 1920 in Berlin, a short-lived marriage that ended on the 28th of February 1922 and produced no children. (Figures 13a-b) He remarried Frida Mueller in 1931, who died of cancer in 1934, another childless marriage.
Let me briefly digress. During this Covid-19 pandemic we are currently living through that requires most of us to self-quarantine, I have spent countless hours listening to webinars on an investment service to which I am subscribed. In this context, an interesting fact about Mr. von Pannwitz caught my attention. Investing largely in aircraft stocks, he parlayed $15,000 he saved in 1948 and 1949 into $500,000 by the time he died in 1966. I find this interesting on multiple levels. He was heavily invested in the stock market long before this was commonplace, and seemingly followed a path to building his wealth by buying and holding stocks, a strategy the investment service I follow also subscribes to. He was also invested in a segment of the market, airlines, which have largely fallen out of favor, for obvious reasons, during the current pandemic.
Wolfram von Pannwitz died on the 28th of January 1966 in St. Vincent’s Hospital. At the time he lived modestly in a $23-a-week 9-by 12-foot room in the Hotel Seville on Madison Avenue (Figure 14), known today as the “James New York-NoMad.” His death made the news (Figure 15), including the New York Times, because he left his $500,000 estate equally to Cardinal Spellman of St. Patrick’s Cathedral and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, “HIAS.” While Mr. Pannwitz was not Jewish, his bestowal to HIAS was his way of showing gratitude to his Jewish friends for their professional and personal help during his life. His bequest to the St. Patrick’s Cathedral was, in his own words, to thank them for the “. . .strength and power [they gave him] to accomplish the hard struggle for this life.”
Interestingly, Mr. von Pannwitz typed his will, dated the 4th of September 1958, on a conventional printed form. In the will, he stated “all my relatives, near or remote, shall be excluded from my inheritance, there being special reasons for this direction.” While none of the contemporary newspaper accounts discuss these “special reasons,” I know from my uncle’s November 1966 affidavit that upon Mr. von Pannwitz’s mother’s death, Gertrud von Pannwitz née Scholz in 1957, he was cheated out of his inheritance by his younger sister.
Based on surviving correspondence in my possession, sadly, Cardinal Spellman and the Catholic Church reached an out-of-court settlement with Wolfram’s sister, Elsa Petrea Reymann née von Pannwitz, after she contested the will. In the back-and-forth correspondence between my uncle Fedor and one of Mr. von Pannwitz’s friends in California, both expressed outrage that she managed to obtain any part of her brother’s estate.
This would likely have been particularly galling to Mr. von Pannwitz given that he was estranged from his sister and because of his family’s connections to the Nazi regime. A certain Helmuth von Pannwitz (14th October 1898-16th January 1947) (Figure 16), also born in Botzwanowitz, Prussia and likely one of Wolfram’s cousins, was a German general; he fought in both world wars. In WWII, he was in command of a battle group assigned to cover the southern flank in the battle of Stalingrad, where he wiped out a Soviet cavalry brigade, a Soviet cavalry division, and an enemy infantry division. Later, Helmuth von Pannwitz established a Cossack volunteer force, the 1st Cossack Division, which fought against freedom fighters in the Ukraine and Belorussia, before eventually fighting partisans commanded by Tito in Yugoslavia. During punitive operations in Serbia and Croatia, the Cossack regiments under Pannwitz’s command committed several atrocities against the civilian population, including mass rapes and routine summary executions. In 1947, the same year that Wolfram immigrated to America, Helmuth was executed by the Russians for these war crimes.
REFERENCE
Rzhevskaya, Yelena. “Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter: From the Battle for Moscow to Hitler’s Bunker.” 2018. Greenhill Books. London.
Note: In this short post, I take a whimsical look at the cars my uncle Dr. Fedor Bruck, Theodore Brook in America, owned in Germany and later in New York. The opportunity for whimsy rarely presents itself when telling stories about my father’s Jewish family, so I’m relieved to take a brief pause from these to relate a lighthearted tale.
One of my English teachers once cited a writer, whose name is lost to me, talking about coming up with short story ideas who’d quipped these can be found on every street corner. As I near the three-year anniversary of writing stories on my father’s Jewish family, this is a sentiment with which I most heartily concur. The inspiration for this current post came from a gentleman, Raymond “Ray” Fellows, who contacted me through my blog after discovering several posts I’ve written on my uncle Dr. Fedor Bruck (1895-1982), known in America as Theodore “Teddy” Brook. (Figures 1-2)
It turns out Ray’s mother rented a room with kitchen privileges to my uncle in Yonkers, New York before he got married in 1958, a period in my uncle’s life I’m unfamiliar with. Ray, born in 1941, met my uncle when he was a teenager and my uncle was working as a toll collector on the New York State Thruway; at the time, he commuted to work in an AMC Rambler, manufactured by the American Motors Corporation between 1958 and 1969. Ray clearly remembers this car. He also has fond memories of my charismatic uncle because he treated him as a member of his family, vividly remembers my uncle effusively complimenting him on how nicely he’d decorated his “Charlie Brown” Christmas tree, and even amusingly recalls my uncle making him one of his “delicacies,” cow brains, something Ray has never again eaten! Years later, Ray visited my aunt and uncle in Yonkers, at which time my uncle drove a sporty Plymouth Barracuda, manufactured by Plymouth from 1964 to 1974.
In any case, in my photo archive, I discovered photos of my uncle standing by his AMC Rambler as well as his Barracuda. I also found images of him standing as an obviously much younger man by two cars he owned when he was a dentist in Liegnitz, Germany [today: Legnica, Poland] before the war. One of these cars even has a brief anecdote attached to it from a story my two, now-deceased, German first cousins once shared.
Clearly, having his picture taken alongside his latest set of wheels was a tradition my uncle shared with many other car owners. Following his tour of duty in WWI, my uncle obtained his dental license from the University of Breslau in 1921; then, between November 1924 and April 1936, he had his own practice in Liegnitz until he was forced to shutter it by the Nazis. Likely, my uncle’s first car purchase was a DKW (Dampf-Kraft-Wagen), judging from the picture, the DKW “Typ P” convertible model (Figures 3a-b), also referred to as a “DKW P15” (Figure 4), which rolled off the production lines beginning in May 1928. This was the first motor car made by DKW. It was a light-weight design with a unit body made of wood and imitation leather, that was powered by a two-stroke inline twin engine. DKW was one of the four companies that formed Auto Union in 1932 and is hence an ancestor of the modern-day Audi company. (Figure 5)
Subsequently, my uncle appears to have owned another DKW, the slightly larger DKW Cabrio. (Figures 6-7) While this is mere conjecture on my part, my uncle’s acquisition of a larger car may have been prompted by his “inadvertent” family. In earlier posts, I told readers my uncle carried on a long-term affair with a married woman, Irmgard Lutze (Figure 8), by whom he had two children, my first cousins Wera Thilo née Lutze (1927-2017) and Wolfgang Lutze (1928-2014) (Figure 9); Irmgard never divorced her husband, with whom she raised the children, which afforded my half-Jewish cousins considerable protection when the Nazis later ascended to power; for this reason, my cousins retained the Lutze surname, though my uncle had ardently hoped they would adopt the Bruck surname.
My two first cousins, Wera and Wolfgang, whom I initially met in the mid-1990’s, clearly remember riding in the DKW Cabrio with my uncle and his paramour on Sunday drives through the Silesian countryside, although it would be years later before my uncle announced himself as their “real” father. What made these drives so memorable to my cousins as children was being seated in the rumble seat in the rear of the DKW in the freezing cold. (Figure 10)
Next, one must fast-forward to see my uncle standing by his first American car, the AMC Rambler (Figure 11), which Ray Fellows so clearly remembers. And, judging from my photo archive, my uncle Fedor’s last American car was his Plymouth Barracuda. (Figure 12) However, there is one other car alongside which my uncle can be seen, a Plymouth Savoy, produced between 1951 and 1964. It’s an advertisement for a 1964 Savoy, and, as readers can see for themselves, my uncle is standing in a toll-collection booth, dressed in his work uniform, reaching towards the driver to collect the toll; this photograph was likely staged on the Tappan Zee Bridge where my uncle in fact worked as a toll-collector. (Figure 13) How my uncle came to be featured in a magazine advertisement for Plymouth is unknown, but perhaps when buying his Barracuda, the dealer decided my uncle fit an older demographic towards which the Savoy was targeted, even though he ultimately wound up buying the sportier car?
Note: This post is about a handful of righteous Germans who provided life-saving support to my Uncle Dr. Fedor Bruck during the 30 months he lived “underground” in Berlin during WWII, hiding from the Nazis. I relate the little I’ve been able to uncover about these “silent heroes.”
There exists in Berlin a museum, the “Silent Heroes Memorial Center,” dedicated to the resistance to persecution of the Jews between 1933 and 1945. A catalog developed by the Memorial Center describes the heroic role played by some people who resisted Nazi persecution of the Jews and provides some statistics about German Jews worth citing. At the time the Nazis assumed power on January 30, 1933, there were roughly 500,000 German Jews. This date marked the beginning of the ostracism, defamation and disenfranchisement of these Jews, key stages of which were the boycott of Jewish-owned businesses beginning on April 1, 1933; the Nuremberg race-laws of September 1935; and the pogroms of November 9, 1938. More than 30,000 Jewish men were imprisoned in concentration camps following the pogroms in 1938.
Of the 500,000 Jews in Germany when the Nazis assumed power, roughly 300,000 of them were able to flee Germany before the war began in the fall of 1939. Of the 6 million Jews murdered during the Nazi genocide, more than 160,000 of them were German Jews. Between 10,000 and 12,000 German Jews tried to escape deportation to extermination camps and other killing sites by fleeing underground, since emigration by 1942 was prohibited and virtually impossible even through illegal means. About half this number did so in Berlin, including my Uncle Dr. Fedor Bruck, subject of multiple earlier Blog posts. Fleeing underground required that hiding places be found and frequently changed because of the danger of being denounced or discovered. Of the Jews who went “into hiding” in Germany, about 5,000 of them survived, more than 1,700 of them in Berlin. The chances of survival were indeed small, yet my uncle managed it with the help of multiple silent heroes. An interesting quote from the Memorial Center’s publication speaks to the network of non-Jewish supporters required to protect a solitary Jewish fugitive: “In the course of attempts to save Jews, networks of helpers often developed. For every Jew who went underground, up to ten, and sometimes even more, non-Jewish supporters were involved . . .” Clearly, multiple non-Jews placed themselves at risk to try and shelter a single Jew.
Figure 1b. Translation of affidavit written by Lisa Pauly
In the previous post, Blog Post 40, I discussed Elisabeth “Lisa” Pauly née Krüger and how I discovered she was the wife of my Uncle Fedor’s second cousin, Franz Pincus/Pauly. In a declaration, pledged under oath on February 3, 1947 (Figures 1a-b), Lisa provided a chronology of the timeframes and enumerated the network of helpers who enabled my uncle to survive in Berlin during his odyssey underground:
October 1942 Hidden by Dr. Wolfgang Sieber & Frau von Werner
February 1943 Dr. Wolfgang Sieber arrested by the Gestapo; my uncle hidden by Lisa Pauly
July 1943 My uncle finds refuge with Dr. Otto Berger
March 24, 1944 Dr. Otto Berger’s building bombed; my uncle again hidden by Lisa Pauly
May 1944 Dr. Otto Berger again provided accommodation to my uncle in his new home
December 1944 Dr. Otto Berger found yet another home, and hid my uncle until the capture of Berlin by the Red Army
My uncle’s trying ordeal began in October 1942 when friends warned him the Gestapo was preparing to pick him up for “questioning.” In a letter dated October 12, 1942, he was informed he should present himself to a so-called “age-transport.” (Figure 2) Interestingly, this letter was sent to my uncle by the “Jüdische Kultusvereinigung zu Berlin e.V.,” Berlin’s Jewish Cultural Association, and signed by a “Philipp Israel Kozower,” who two years later to the day, October 12, 1944, would himself be murdered in Auschwitz.
Knowing that an “age-transport” meant deportation to a concentration camp, my Uncle Fedor immediately fled to a good friend in Berlin-Dahlem, Dr. Wolfgang Sieber. He, along with a Frau von Werner, provided refuge for a time. However, on February 15, 1943, Dr. Sieber was arrested by the Gestapo in the very presence of my uncle; miraculously, my uncle escaped. In the ensuing months, Lisa Pauly and other friends sheltered him, in-between periods spent hiding in greenways, coal cellars, and in secluded areas around Berlin.
During my uncle’s underground odyssey, the dentist Dr. Otto Berger (b. 4/15/1900-d. 5/22/1985) (Figure 3), was especially helpful. Among all the righteous Germans who aided my uncle, Dr. Berger placed himself at risk for the longest time. In a letter my Uncle Fedor wrote in 1964, he described his initial contact with Dr. Berger:
“I met Mr. Otto Berger in the spring of 1943. When he learned on this occasion that I lead an illegal life as a persecuted Jew, he provided me with food at that first meeting and offered to take me in. This happened a short time later and I moved in early July 1943 into the apartment of Otto Berger.”
Not only did Dr. Berger provide food and shelter to my uncle, but, perhaps most critically, he obtained illegal papers for him under the false identity of Dr. Friedrich Burkhardt, matching my uncle’s own initials. (Figures 4a-b, 5a-b) The identity cards for “Dr. Burkhardt” show he was born on July 18, 1890 in Jägerndorf, Upper Silesia, today Krnov, an Upper Silesian city in the northeastern Czech Republic. Why my uncle selected this alias and location are unknown.
In July 1943, Dr. Berger lived at Händelplatz 1 in Berlin-Lichterfelde (Figure 6), in southwestern Berlin, but on March 24, 1944, aerial bombardment by the Allies resulted in destruction of the building where Dr. Berger and my uncle lived. Both barely managed to escape; of the 44 people cloistered in the bomb shelter, only nine survived. Following this close call, my uncle temporarily again found refuge with his second cousin’s wife, Lisa Pauly, until Dr. Berger was able to secure new lodgings, a house with a garden in Berlin-Zehlendorf. Here he spent the summer of 1944. By this time, my uncle had lost all his personal property, given to friends for safe-keeping but incinerated, as well as his dental equipment, placed in a dental depot but likewise destroyed during aerial bombing; all he had left were a few items of clothing and a portfolio with his most important papers. In December 1944, Dr. Berger was assigned new living quarters in Berlin-Steglitz, to which he and my uncle moved, a place fire-bombed on April 25, 1945, a day before Steglitz was conquered by the advancing Russians.
Dr. Otto Berger received various awards for his courageous commitment to helping those persecuted by the Nazi regime. In 1964, he was honored by Berlin’s mayor Willi Brandt for his outstanding human commitment, followed in 1974 (Figure 7) by an invitation from the Federal President to the Bellevue Palace in order, as the President of the Confederation wrote, “. . .to get acquainted with Otto Berger, the man who gave unselfish help to the persecuted during the Nazi era.”
Posthumously, in 2008, Dr. Otto Berger was awarded the “Ewald-Harndt Medal” by the Dental Association of Berlin, a medal to “. . .honor colleagues who have made outstanding contributions to the dental profession.” In bestowing this award, the Dental Association recognized “. . . Otto Berger, who in a selfless and exemplary manner, courageously and at the risk of his own life in the time of National Socialism. . .” actively helped my uncle and others persecuted by the Nazi regime.
Then, again posthumously, in 2009 Dr. Berger was recognized by Yad Vashem as “Righteous Among the Nations” (Figure 8), an honor the State of Israel gives to non-Jewish individuals and organizations who opposed the Nazi regime to save Jews.
With the assistance of one of my German cousins, I was able to establish contact with Dr. Otto Berger’s grandson, Dr. Oliver Speyer, like his grandfather also a dentist. Ostensibly, my reason for contacting him was to obtain a few photos of Dr. Berger for use in this post. Much to my delight, Dr. Speyer sent me photos of the Ewald-Harndt and Yad Vashem awards given to his grandfather, awards prominently on display in Dr. Speyer’s dental office. (Figures 9a-b, 10)
Briefly, let me say a few words about some other silent heroes who played a role in my uncle’s survival, limited only because I’ve uncovered very little about them. My uncle’s friend, Dr. Wolfgang Sieber, with whom my uncle straightaway sought safety in October 1942, was, as previously mentioned, arrested by the Gestapo in February 1943. His name appears in Berlin Address Books only in 1940 and 1941 (Figure 11); what to make of this is not entirely clear but depending on the extent of Dr. Sieber’s involvement in sheltering other persecuted persons, he may have been incarcerated and not have survived the war.
In the case of two other known silent heroes, specifically, Lisa Pauly and Frau von Werner, both survived into the late 1970’s, at least. Because both Lisa and Frau von Werner’s addresses are provided in Lisa’s 1947 affidavit, I was able to track them through Berlin Address Books. Frau von Werner’s full name was Lisa Lotte von Werner. She is first found in a 1928 Berlin Phone Directory (Figure 12), then, again between 1951 and 1978 listed in Berlin Phone Directories at Petzower Straße 7 (Figure 13), the address in Lisa Pauly’s affidavit. Similarly, Lisa Pauly is living at Massmannstraße 11 in Steglitz between 1966 and 1977, the address shown in her affidavit of 1947. It is safe to assume both died of natural causes sometime after 1977-1978.
Let me briefly pick up the narrative as to where my uncle went following the capture of Berlin by the Russians, in his own words, cited only because it provides the identity of another, entirely unexpected, person who assisted my uncle during his underground odyssey:
“On April 26, 1945, Steglitz, in the southwestern part of the city, was occupied by the Russians. Behind the advancing troops, I arrived, on May 4th, in the apartment of my former assistant Käthe Heusermann. This apartment was situated at Pariserstraße 39-40 near Kurfürstendamm [in Berlin-Charlottenburg]. A friendship of twenty years tied my person and the family of Käthe Heusermann. . .”
To remind readers what I wrote in Blog Post 31, Käthe Heusermann (Figure 14), who’d once been my Uncle Fedor’s dental assistant in Liegnitz in Silesia [today: Legnica, Poland], eventually became Dr. Hugo Blaschke’s dental assistant; Dr. Blaschke was Hitler’s dentist. Almost immediately after the end of WWII, Käthe Heusermann, who’d known Hitler had killed himself, a fact Stalin sought to conceal from the world, was arrested by the Russians and detained for many years. Käthe Heusermann told her captors she’d occasionally supported my uncle during his time underground. Quoting from Yelena Rzhevskaya’s book, “Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter: From the Battle for Moscow to Hitler’s Bunker”:
“I liked everything about her [Käthe]: the lightness with which she walked on high heels, her voice, her womanly stoicism even in her present unclear situation. Käthe was just somebody people liked, I sensed; she was a splendid person. For many years she had supported Dr. Bruck. Käthe got food vouchers for him in the Reich Chancellery, in Berchtesgaden, and at the Führer’s headquarters in East Prussia, it could, as Dr. Bruck pointed out to me, have been fatal. Käthe herself never once spoke about that.” (p. 265)
This is difficult to wrap one’s head around that the dental assistant to Hitler’s dentist provided aid to my Jewish uncle during the war, a most unlikely ally.
There may have been other individuals, whose names are lost to us, who played lesser roles in keeping my uncle from being deported. Perhaps, they were former dental patients of his who recognized him or army veterans with whom he fought during WWI who passed him on the street? We will never know. We only know the names of the people who provided most active support.
The motivations for people to help persecuted Jews were obviously varied. A few felt an obligation as family or friends, some probably did it out of human compassion, and others for religious or political reasons, but whatever their rationale, they placed themselves at risk and for this reason alone should be recognized.
REFERENCES
Lutze, Kay
2006 Die Lebensgeschichte des jüdischen Zahnarztes Fedor Bruck (1895-1982) Von Liegnitz nach New York. Zahnärzttliche Mitteilungen 96, Nr. 10, 16.5 (p. 124-127)
Rzhevskaya, Yelena
2018 Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter: From the Battle for Moscow to Hitler’s Bunker. Greenhill Books. London.
Silent Heroes Memorial Center
N.D. Catalog: Resistance to Persecution of the Jews 1933-1945. For detailed bibliographic data online, go to http://dnb.d-nb.de
