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.
EDITOR’S NOTE: For the first time on my Blog, I’m hosting a guest post by a gentleman named Mr. Uwe Sager, a longtime contributor to the German-language Forum.Danzig.de. Members in this Forum post articles about people, places, events, etc. associated with the former Free City of Danzig [German: Freie Stadt Danzig; Polish: Wolne Miasto Gdańsk] and investigate and try to answer queries posted by participants and fellow researchers. The Free City of Danzig was a city-state under the protection of the League of Nations between 1920 and 1939, consisting of the Baltic Sea port of Danzig [today: Gdańsk, Poland] and nearly 200 other small localities in the surrounding areas. Because my father, Dr. Otto Bruck, lived in Danzig and nearby Tiegenhof [today: Nowy Dwór Gdański, Poland] in the Free City of Danzig between roughly 1930 and 1937, several years ago I posted multiple queries on the Forum hoping members might help me determine the fate of several of my father’s friends from his time living there, to little avail. However, this is how Uwe and I became acquainted. At the time, Uwe was already researching the fate of the Jewish family “Lieb” or “Lib” from Stutthof [today: Sztutowo, Poland] that is the subject of this guest post, although he’d not yet worked out most of the details presented below. Uwe’s research into the Lieb’s was prompted by one of the Forum’s readers who’d formerly lived in Stutthof, a woman named Irmchen Krause, asking about them. What follows is what Uwe and a fellow Forum member, Rainer Mueller Glodde, have unearthed about the Lieb family’s fate. Since I’ve mentioned the notorious Stutthof Concentration Camp in previous posts, including my father’s encounter with Gerhard Epp who relied on Jewish inmates from there to produce munitions in his converted Stutthof machine factory, it seems appropriate to include a guest post discussing the fate of one Jewish family from Stutthof.
With Contributions by Rainer Mueller Glodde (Administrator of momente-im-werder.net)
April 2020
When I was informed at the end of 2016 by Irmchen, née Krause, former Stutthof resident, of a Jewish family that had once lived there, I wanted to learn more about their history and whereabouts. The family’s name was Lieb. I hope my findings may remind the town’s current inhabitants that Jews once lived there, even though the family itself may not have attached much importance to it. Yet, the family was part of the community at one time and represents a segment of the town’s dark past.
Irmchen recalls a Jewish family by the name of Lieb that lived in Stutthof in the 1930’s. They ran a clothing store located on the corner of Schulstraße and Poststraße. (Figure 1) The family had a young daughter named Antonia, affectionately called “Tania.” Only a few Stutthöfer dared to shop at Lieb’s. As Irmchen notes, “Whoever bought from the Lieb’s had fingers pointed at them.” Additionally, customers were threatened by telling them their names would be published on the “Stürmerkasten” (EDITOR’S NOTE: Stürmerkasten is a kind of wall newspaper, that was erected in every village during the Hitler era in Germany) (Figure 2), situated directly opposite the Lieb store.
The boycott measures against Jewish businesses and businesspeople are well known. Despite these measures, ironically, some Stutthöfer secretly shopped with the Lieb’s in the evening. According to Irmchen, the talk at the time was that Mr. Lieb was taken away with his wife and child in what is referred to as a “Nacht und Nebel aktion” (EDITOR’S NOTE: German for the “night and fog action” of abductions and disappearances decreed by Nazi Germany). Irmchen is not aware of any community support on behalf of the Lieb’s. According to another witness, some members of the community were still in contact with Mrs. Lieb who was supposedly then living in Danzig [today: Gdansk, Poland]. Mrs. Lieb is said to have warned comers against contacting her, saying it was too dangerous. Not unexpectedly,it was reported that she wore a Jewish star.
Following the Lieb family’s abduction or departure, their business was taken over by the Antony family who ran a grocery and dairy store next door. The textile portion of the Lieb business was assumed by Heinrich Thiessen, who ran his own textile store on Poststraße.
My own research, as well as that of colleagues from Forum Gdansk, led to several documents from which the life of the Lieb/Lib family can partially be reconstructed.
Zalman Lib (Salomon Lieb) was born on the 21st of December 1891. The difficult-to-read place of birth, combined with the possibility that the place name was incorrectly spelled by the registrar, is by appearances Dziewienszki (Polish), Dieveniškės (Lithuanian) (Figure 3), Divenishok (Lithuanian), or Jevenishok (Yiddish) (see Wikipedia and Jewish Gen KehilaLinks (English), including pictures of the town). Family surname listings for Divenishok show no Lieb or Lib; the closest is the surname “Leyb.”
Around 1928 Salomon Lieb opened his clothing store at the corner of Schulstraße and Poststraße. However, the “Adreßbuch Danzig-Land von 1927/28” does not have him listed in either Stutthof nor elsewhere in the Free City of Danzig. Presumably he was living in the region but without his own household.
The existence of the Lieb clothing store is documented in two places:
Günter Rehaag, “Ostseebad Stutthof” Band 2, Einwohnerverzeichnis Stutthof (Volume 2, Register of Residents Stutthof).
Other: Besitz Fr. Löwner, tenants Rathke and Antony (early merchant Liep)
Info: Hermann Rohde
Deutsches Reichs-Adressbuch für Industrie, Gewerbe und Handel, 1934, Stutthof, Manufakturwaren (German Reich Address Book for Industry, Trade and Commerce, 1934, Stutthof, Manufactured Goods)
Dau, G. – Gerber, Fritz – Glodde, Alfr. – Lieb, Sal., – Thiessen, Heinrich (Figure 4)
(EDITOR’S NOTE: Readers will notice that immediately below the list of manufactured goods merchants on Figure 4, there is a single “Maschinenfabrik,” Machine Factory, with the merchant “Epp & Co. GmbH” listed. This would refer to Gerhard Epp who was a middle brother of two of my father’s friends from Tiegenhof [today: Nowy Dwór Gdański, Poland]).
In 1929 Salomon Lieb got married in Danzig. (Figures 5a-c).
The marriage certificate records the following information:
Registry Office Danzig I, Certificate Number 528 dated 16th of July 1929
The merchant Salmon Lib, Jewish religion, born on the 21st of December 1891 in Dziewienszki, district Oszmiany, Lithuania, living in Stutthof, Danziger lowland.
The parents are the merchant David Lib and his already deceased wife Tony, née Katz, both residing in Dziewienszki.
Married to Sarra Wolowelski, accountant, Jewish religion, born on the 31st of August 1898/ 10th of September 1898 (Julian/Gregorian calendar) at Pinsk-Karolin, Belarus (Figure 6), living in Danzig.
The parents are the merchant Josef Wolowelski and his wife Lea, née Menzel, both living in Pinsk-Karolin, Belarus.
In 1932, presumably in Stutthof, Salomon and Sarra’s daughter Tania was born.
The exclusion, harassment, and persecution of the Jew Salomon Lieb in Stutthof, supporting what Irmchen previously noted, is confirmed in the following account:
“Kurt Gutowski, son of a local blacksmith and later poet, has given anecdotal evidence in his short memoirs of the growth of fascism and racist ideologies in his home village (Gutowski, Kurt: Aus meiner Stutthöfer Kinderzeit, p. 66). Gutowski attributes the everyday fascism to his school principal Reinhold Zube, who asked students to damage deliveries to the Jewish department store Lieb to make them unusable. Zube pulled out of the ordered district council elections in November 1934 as a firebrand in the Kreistag. . .” (Zimmermann, Rüdiger: Friedrich Rohde (1895-1970), Danziger Volkstagsabgeordneter, Fischer und Sozialist, Bonn 2020, S. 44)
In 1936, the Lieb family left Stutthof. Whether they were, as Irmchen postulated, picked up in a “Nacht und Nebel” action, or they left Stutthof quietly and secretly on their own remains unclear. The latter is supported by the above-mentioned meeting with Mrs. Lieb, who was apparently living in freedom in Danzig. (EDITOR’S NOTE: After all my father’s dental clients had abandoned him, he left nearby Tiegenhof in around fall 1937 in favor of Berlin where the anonymity of a larger city temporarily provided Jews like him more freedom of movement and economic opportunities. For the same reason, the Liebs may have felt that Danzig as a larger city might similarly and temporarily provide haven.)
The likelihood that the Liebs were living in Danzig is also supported by another written account: “. . . at the home of the Danzig merchant Salomon Lieb, officials of the Tax Investigation Office discovered 30,000 Danzig guilders in gold which they confiscated along with his savings account balance of 3,000 guilders, even though Lieb no longer ran a commercial business. Nonetheless, the Financial Authority claimed he had tax debts and seized the gold coins as an alleged tax liability and tax penalty.” (Sopade 1938, p. 770f.) (Banken, Ralf: “Hitlers Steuerstaat: Die Steuerpolitik im Dritten Reich”, 2018, S. 555, Fußnote 256)
These monetary assets suggest that Salomon Lieb had successfully sold his business and stock of goods in Stutthof to the merchants Walter Antony and Heinrich Thiessen.
Where the Lieb family then lived between 1936 and 1942 remains unclear, possibly Danzig? The Liebs are not listed in Danzig Address Books of 1937/38 and 1939, although this is not definitive proof that they did not stay in the city. Alternatively, they may have returned to Dziewienszki, Salomon’s place of birth. There is documentary evidence from a 1942 Ghetto List that Salomon Lieb and his daughter Tania, without the wife/mother Sarra, were in the Woronów Ghetto.
COLUMN 3: until 1941: Poland, Gebiet Nowogrodek; until 1944/1945: Reichskommissariat Ostland (White Ruthenia); today: Belarus, Gebiet Grodno (Hrodna) region
COLUMN 4: Opening 1st June 1941
COLUMN 5: Liquidation 30th September 1943
COLUMN 6: Deportations Lida
COLUMN 7: Remarks: on the 11th of May 1942, 1,291 persons were shot
COLUMN 8: Handbook of Detention Centers Belarus (1941-1944), 2001; Encyclopedia of Jewish Life, 2001 [EDITOR’s NOTE: The specific ghetto list with Salomon and Tania’s name on it appears in one of these publications.]
COLUMN 9: Date of Addition: 1st of August 2014
The map shows that the distance from the Woronów Ghetto [today: Voronovo, Belarus] to Dziewienszki [today: Dieveniškės, Lithuania] is only about 15.4 miles or 25km. (Figure 8)
Following a request to the “Arolsen Archives International Center on Nazi Persecution,” they sent a file about the Liebs. This file does not indicate when and from where the Lieb family was taken to the Woronów Ghetto. Salomon Lieb is arrested in the ghetto on the 19th of May 1942 and shot during an “action.” (Figures 9a-d) In the case of the 10-year-old daughter Tania the date of her arrest is given as the beginning of June 1942; she too is shot during an “action.” (Figures 10a-c)
[EDITOR’S NOTE: In Figure 9b of the questionnaire in Salomon Lieb’s Arolsen Archives file, under question 9, and on Figure 10b. of Tania Lieb’s file is written in German the following: “9. Letzte Anschrift vor der Inhaftierung: Stutthof bei Danzig bis etwa 1936, dann Danzig in der nähe der Weidengasse,” translated as “9. Last address before imprisonment: Stutthof near Danzig until about 1936, then Danzig near Weidengasse.” (Figure 11) This confirms that Salomon and Tania Lieb lived in Danzig after leaving Stutthof, although there is no indication for how long.]
[UWE SAGER’S HISTORICAL NOTE: At today’s ulica Owsiana in Gdansk, Poland (formerly Mäusegasse pointed out on Figure 11) there was a granary (Figure 12) with the charming name “Red Mouse” at number 7. In 1939 it served as a Nazi gathering point for Jews imprisoned in Danzig and was thus a kind of Danzig ghetto. The Germans were able to gather in it about 600 people who, for one reason or another, had not left Danzig when the Jewish community emigrated before the outbreak of war. The ghetto existed until 1943, when the remaining Jews were taken to the Auschwitz and Theresienstadt concentration camps. The fact that Salomon and Tania Lieb were murdered in the Woronów Ghetto rather than in Auschwitz or Theresienstadt suggests that they returned to Dziewienszki, Salomon’s place of birth, before being deported and murdered.]
Nothing is known about the whereabouts of the wife/mother Sarra, not even on the list of survivors of the Woronów Ghetto. It cannot be ruled out that Sarra died between 1936 and 1942.
In the unpublished English-language manuscript written by Moshe Berkowitz entitled “Woronow, Voronova (Voranava, Belarus) 54°09′ / 25°20′,” Chapter XIII describes how the Jewish inhabitants of Diveneshok and neighboring villages were taken to Voronovo. Before their deportation, a delegation from the villages tried to negotiate with the Germans: “The delegation was as follows: LIEB; Hirsh SCHMID; YUTAN; and KOTLIAR from Diveneshok. . .” (Figure 13) Unfortunately, the first name of LIEB is missing so it is not clear whether it refers to Salomon Lieb.
Chapter XV of the manuscript describes the massacre in Woronow, which took place on the 11th of May 1942, shortly preceding Salomon Lieb’s own death.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank the subscribers from the Danzig Forum, as well as the Arolsen Archive for providing the file on the Lieb family. My goal was not to write a book but as mentioned at the outset, to give the Lieb family a place in our consciousness. Therefore, I ask for your understanding that I have kept my post short.
The following is the file from the Arolsen Archives.
Copy of 6.3.3.3/82889670 through 82889675
In conformity with IST Digital Archives
With kind permission of the publication by above mentioned archive.
REFERENCES
Banken, Ralf. Hitlers Steuerstaat: Die Steuerpolitik im Dritten Reich (Hitler’s Tax State: Tax Policy in the Third Reich). De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2018.
Several years ago, while doing research on Danzig [today: Gdansk, Poland] formerly located in the Free City of Danzig where my father Dr. Otto Bruck apprenticed as a dentist in the early 1930’s, I happened upon a discussion forum entitled “Forum.Danzig.de.” As I recall, at the time I was trying to learn about a close friend of my father from nearby Tiegenhof [today: Nowy Dwór Gdański, Poland], an enormous lady he had only ever referred to as the “Schlummermutter.” Through informants I would eventually learn her name was Margaretha “Grete” Gramatzki née Gleixner, and that she owned the building where my father lived and had his dental practice. I only fleetingly participated in the discussion forum because it is primarily oriented towards German speakers, a language I don’t speak. One forum member I briefly chatted with was Mr. Uwe Sager who put me in touch with my good German friend, the “Wizard of Wolfsburg,” Peter Hanke. Regular followers of my Blog may recall Peter has been enormously helpful tracking down and translating German ancestral documents for me, almost magically so, ergo his sobriquet.
In any case, following publication of Post 121, Uwe Sager recently sent me an email. He recognized Figure 8, the illustration I found in one of Ben Goossen’s articles showing Gerhard Epp and the leadership team of his business enterprise, the Firma Gerhard Epp Maschinenfabrik in Stutthof. (Figure 1) To remind readers Gerhard Epp was the middle sibling of two of my father’s closest friends from Tiegenhof, the Mennonite sisters Suse and Idschi Epp, who also lived in the same boarding house as my father. Among my father’s surviving pictures is one showing a social event my father attended in the early 1930’s at the home of their brother Gerhard Epp in Stutthof [today: Sztutowo, Poland]. Uwe graciously sent me a link to the complete German-language publication in which Figure 8 was originally printed, entitled “Ostseebad Stutthof,” translated as the “Baltic Seaside Resort of Stutthof,” by Günther Rehaag. Pages 114 and 115 of this publication, reprinted here, include additional images of the buildings and employees of the Firma Gerhard Epp. (Figures 2a-b)
The original picture of Gerhard Epp from Günther Rehaag’s publication identified the people in the photo, information not included in the picture reprinted in Ben Goossen’s article. To my surprise, seated to Gerhard’s left, to his right as the viewer is looking at the picture, was Gerhard’s daughter by his first marriage, Rita Schuetze née Epp (Figure 3), looking every bit as radiant as in the contemporaneous picture given to me in 2014 by her family (Figure 4); readers will recall I mentioned meeting Rita that year as an elderly woman who sadly was suffering from severe Alzheimer’s.
Another reader who contacted me was intrigued by my father’s photos from 1933, 1934, and 1935, respectively, of Nazis parading on the street below his dental office and asked whether I have additional pictures of Żuławy Wiślane, the alluvial delta area of the river Vistula, in the northern part of Poland; I shared my father’s photos from the Żuławy region with this gentleman. This reader contacted me because of our overlapping connection to Tiegenhof in the Free City of Danzig where my father had his dental practice between April 1932 and April 1937. It turns out this reader’s mother was born there in 1924, and his grandfather was a civil servant in Tiegenhof for 20+ years.
I was able to confirm this person’s association with Tiegenhof through the database of displaced Germans refugees from the former province of Danzig-Westpreußen, Germany, now Gdańsk and Bydgoszcz provinces in Poland, referred to as “Heimatortskartei, (HOK).” This database includes images of a civil register (handwritten and printed works) of more than 20 million displaced Germans arranged by their town of origin.
This supportive reader brought up that Tiegenhof had been named in League of Nations reports from the 1930’s as a “hotbed” of rising Nazism. This follower shared an article published on the 11th of January 1932 in the “Danziger VolksStimme” with the translation (Figures 5a-c) describing an incident involving an attack by Nazi supporters on workmen, providing an insight into the gathering storm. This article was not much different than the Nazi attack reported on in a local newspaper in 1935 or 1936 directed at my father’s Protestant anti-Nazi friend, Kurt Lau, discussed in Post 78.
Aware of this reader’s interest in Żuławy Wiślane and some of the places discussed in Günther Rehaag’s book on Stutthof, I forwarded him the PDF. While acknowledging the remarkable achievement of tracking so many Mennonite families and pictures connected to Stutthof, he noted the glaring omission of discussing the nearby Stutthof concentration camp on the edge of the town where it is estimated that between 63,000 and 65,000 prisoners died because of murder, starvation, epidemics, extreme labor conditions, brutal and forced evacuations, and a lack of medical attention.
This is reminiscent of the postwar observations by the Mennonite Heinrich Hamm I discussed at length in Post 121 who, according to Ben Goossen, sought to focus exclusively and falsely on a narrative that portrayed Mennonites as victims of Nazi brutality. Quoting from Goossen: “Hamm later expressed regret for the death and dying that pervaded the Epp factory in Stutthof. Yet he explicitly named only German victims of Soviet air raids, not Jewish concentration camp prisoners. ‘[M]uch, much blood of innocent women and children flowed on Epp’s land,’ Hamm told his sons. ‘Uncountable, nameless dead. . .No one asked who they were, where they came from, nothing was recorded.’ One wonders about the goal of this private postwar accounting. Was Hamm helping himself forget about Jews worked to the bone in Epp’s factory by recalling refugees he and Epp tried to save? His use of the word ‘gassing’ suggests this possibility, since bodies of refugees could have been cremated, whereas exhausted Jews would have been gassed.
What is clear is that the Mennonite-owned factory in Stutthof was a place of terror. For hundreds of prisoners enslaved there, the factory’s Mennonite managers were responsible for much of that terror. It is also clear that after the war, Hamm tried to distance himself from this responsibility. He instead emphasized the suffering of his own family, which fled Stutthof in April 1945. As they crossed the Baltic under the cover of night, a Soviet submarine torpedoed their ship. Hamm praised God for allowing the damaged vessel to make it to Denmark. The family remained in Denmark for eighteen months. Hamm emphasized his gratitude for the comfort he found during these lean times through worshipping with fellow Mennonite refugees and other Christians.”
As a brief aside, Suse and Idschi Epp, my father’s Mennonite friends from Tiegenhof, were among those who fled to Denmark from Danzig-Westpreußen in 1945 as the Red Army was approaching; Suse died there before she could be repatriated to Germany. In researching the flight of Germans to Denmark, it highlights how as the fortunes of wars change victimizers often become victims.
In a largely forgotten chapter of history, some 250,000 Germans were interned in Denmark following WWII. Beginning in February 1945, Denmark, which was then occupied by the Nazis, was forced to take in refugees from the East as the Soviets advanced towards Berlin. Mostly spared the fighting, Denmark was Berlin’s favored destination for exiles.
At the time of Denmark’s liberation by the Allies on May 5th, more than 250,000 Germans were scattered around the country, accounting for roughly five percent of Denmark’s population. Fearing this German minority would eventually gain too much influence, they were rounded up and interned in large camps or re-purposed military camps; accommodations were primitive and unsanitary. Many of the refugees died shortly after arriving, already exhausted by the journey, and suffering from various illnesses. The Danish Medical Association explicitly refrained from treating refugees, arguing that helping them was indirectly assisting the German war machine. As a result, between 1945 and 1949, when the last refugees left the country, 17,000 of them died, 60 percent of whom were children under the age of five. Following the cessation of hostilities, the Danish authorities had always wanted to send the German refugees back to Germany as soon as possible but conditions there were so chaotic this was impossible. Complicating matters was that most of the refugees came from areas no longer part of Germany, now being in Russian or Polish controlled areas; for this reason, it took until 1949 before the last German refugees were repatriated.
This last paragraph quoted from Ben Goossen segues nicely into the last reader whom I want to reintroduce to readers, a Danish gentleman named Allan Grutt Hansen. (Figure 6) Allan has been featured in several earlier posts. Suffice it to say, that following publication of Post 121, he contacted me to remind me about the post-WWII history of the Slesvig part of the German state of Schleswig-Holstein; known to Danes as Southern Slesvig and formerly part of Denmark until the Second Schleswig War (1864), Allan has repeatedly spoken to me of this area, and I will briefly relate this area’s recent history.
After the end of WWI, the Treaty of Versailles provided for two plebiscites to determine the new border between Denmark and Germany. The two referendums were held in 1920, resulting in the partition of the region. Northern Schleswig voted by a majority of 75% to join Denmark, whereas Central Schleswig voted by a majority of 80% to remain part of Germany. The likelihood that what was then referred to as Southern Schleswig would vote to remain German meant that no referendum was held there. Today, Southern Schleswig is the name used for all German Schleswig.
An entry in Wikipedia succinctly describes the situation following the end of WWII:
“Following the Second World War, a substantial part of the German population in Southern Schleswig changed their nationality and declared themselves as Danish. This change was caused by several factors, most importantly the German defeat and an influx of many refugees from the former Prussian eastern provinces, whose culture and appearance differed from the local Germans, who were mostly descendants of Danish families who had changed their nationality in the 19th century.
The change in demographics created a temporary Danish majority in the region and a demand for a new referendum from the Danish population in South Schleswig and some Danish politicians, including prime minister Knud Kristensen. However, the majority in the Danish parliament refused to support a referendum in South Schleswig, fearing that the ‘new Danes’ were not genuine in their change of nationality. This proved to be the case and, from 1948 the Danish population began to shrink again.”
As Allan has remarked to me on several occasions, Denmark did not want to risk having Southern Schleswig incorporated into Denmark to avoid planting seeds for a possible future conflict with Germany over this region. Then-Czechoslovakia’s Sudeten crisis of 1938 provoked by the demands of Nazi Germany that the Sudetenland be annexed to Germany because of the large number of Sudeten Germans living there was not far from the minds of Danes when they decided to avoid a similar situation down the road that might result in a substantial number of Germans living within Denmark’s borders.
REFERENCES
Admin-Danish Immigration Museum. “German Refugees,” 15 October 2021, https://www.danishimmigrationmuseum.com/german-refugees/
“Denmark’s German refugees remember forgotten WWII chapter.” Digital Journal, https://www.digitaljournal.com/world/denmark-s-german-refugees-remember-forgotten-wwii-chapter/article/574780#:~:text=Denmark%E2%80%99s%20German%20refugees%20remember%20forgotten%20WWII%20chapter%20By,clearly%2075%20years%20on%20from%20World%20War%20II.
“Duchy of Schleswig.” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duchy_of_Schleswig.
NOTE: In this post I examine the history of the Mennonites in the Vistula River delta in northern Poland, and my father’s interactions with them when he was a dentist in Tiegenhof which at the time was part of the Free City of Danzig. I also discuss why the historically pacifistic Mennonites went from fleeing the Netherlands, Flanders, and modern-day northern Germany in the mid-16th century to avoid religious persecution to becoming among Hitler’s staunchest supporters four centuries later.
The Dutch and Flemish Mennonites have lived in the Żuławy Wiślane, the alluvial delta area of the Vistula River in the northern part of Poland (Figure 1), for over 400 years. They came to Poland in the 16th century as refugees fleeing religious persecution in the Netherland, Flanders, and modern-day northern Germany.
Mennonites are a branch of the Christian church, with roots in the radical wing of the 16th century Protestant Reformation. Mennonites are part of the group known as Anabaptists who took their name from Menno Simons, a Roman Catholic priest who left the Church in 1536 and became a leader within the Anabaptism movement. Anabaptism is the doctrine that baptism should only be administered to believing adults, held by a radical Protestant sect that emerged during the 1520s and 1530s.
The first Mennonites came mainly from Swiss and German roots, with many of the important martyrs of the early church coming from the area around Zurich. The Low Countries regions of Friesland (i.e., province of the Netherlands located in the country’s northern part) and Flanders (i.e., the Flemish-speaking northern portion of Belgium), as well as Eastern Frisia (i.e., a historic region in the northwest of Lower Saxony, Germany) and Holstein (i.e., the southern half of Schleswig-Holstein, the northernmost state of Germany) became the center of the Mennonites. Religious persecution in the Low Countries under Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, 3rd Duke of Alba (1507-1582) forced many Mennonites to leave in the 16th century.
Historically, Mennonites have been known as one of the peace churches due to their commitment to pacifism. The majority of the early Mennonite followers, rather than fighting, fled to neighboring states where the ruling families were tolerant of their beliefs. In the 16th century Poland was among the most tolerant kingdoms in Europe.
The Mennonites, like the Amish who separated from them in the late 1600’s, represent the strictest branches of Protestantism. The Amish are widely known for their plain dress and rejection of modern technology and conveniences. Unlike the Mennonites, they form an exclusive and tight-knit community. Mennonites generally are not culturally separatist.
Żuławy Wiślane, the region in now-northern Poland where the Mennonites settled, covers about 386 square miles or 1000 square km. Historically the area was an estuary of the Vistula (Figure 2), Poland’s longest river which empties into the Baltic Sea. The arduous process of reclaiming the land from the sea began in the 14th century. This involved building hundreds of canals, miles of dikes, and networks of pumps and locks which allowed for the removal of water and the gradual drainage of the Żuławy territory. A good deal of this work was accomplished by the Mennonites who then built thriving communities across the Vistula delta.
According to an article in Wikipedia, entitled the “Vistula delta Mennonites,” the first Anabaptist reported in the area was in 1526 in Marienburg [today: Malbork, Poland] (Figure 3), a mere 15.6 miles south of Tiegenhof [today: Nowy Dwor Gdanski, Poland]. The first Mennonites from the Netherlands and Flanders arrived in Danzig [today: Gdansk, Poland] in the 1530’s. (Figure 4) As Poland’s principal seaport, Danzig played an important role in the grain trade with the Low Countries.
Menno Simons, founder of the Mennonites, is reported to have visited Danzig in 1549, and by 1569 the first Mennonite Church was founded in the city. Soon about 1,000 Mennonites lived in the city. While Mennonites were allowed to freely practice their faith, the Danzig city council refused to grant them the status of citizens; this situation remained unchanged until the city itself was annexed by the Kingdom of Prussia in 1793 in the Second Partition of Poland. The Vistula delta and the Danzig suburbs had already become part of the Kingdom of Prussia in 1772 after the First Partition of Poland, at which time more than 12,000 Mennonites lived in Prussian territory.
Only men who had served in the Prussian Army were allowed to purchase land; as conscientious objectors, Mennonites were subject to special charges, limiting their economic prospects. As a result, when Russian colonization agents sought to recruit settlers for the regions recently conquered from the Ottoman Empire following the Russo-Turkish War of 1768-1774, about 6,000 Mennonites, mostly from the Vistula delta, left for Russian Ukraine. These people formed the roots of the Russian Mennonites. The first Mennonite settlement in Russia, the Chortitza Colony, was founded by these emigrees in 1789; I touched on this topic in Post 112. The Mennonites who remained in the Vistula delta, however, became more and more assimilated, with some even willing to bear arms.
I will return briefly to the story of the Mennonites in the Vistula delta but let me provide some insight to readers for why I decided to go into such depth into this Protestant religion. I wrote in Post 5 that during the time that my father lived and worked in Tiegenhof he was friends with two women who lived in the same apartment building where he also rented an apartment and had his dental practice. The captions on his pictures identified the women as “Idschi” and “Suse” (Figure 5), and it was only when I found both their names in my father’s 1932 Day Planner with their surname and birthdays that I realized they were related and that their family name was “Epp.” In 2013, I would eventually track down their niece and grandniece in Lubeck, Germany, and learn they were respectively the youngest and oldest sisters of a large Mennonite family who were originally from Żuławy. While the sisters had a passing resemblance to one another, their age difference made it difficult to determine whether they were related.
Among my father’s pictures, there are multiple images of him shown socializing with Idschi and Suse Epp. A particularly interesting sequence of photographs (Figure 6) was taken in Stutthof, then part of the Free City of Danzig [today: Sztutowo, Poland], when my father had clearly been invited to an Epp family get-together. From Idschi and Suse’s grandniece, I learned that one of their brothers was also pictured. His name was Gerhard Epp. Much more on him later.
In researching the history of the Mennonites in the Vistula delta for this Blog post, I happened upon a series of articles written by a Dr. Ben Goossen, a Harvard University professor who has written extensively about Hitler’s Mennonite supporters. I was particularly intrigued in learning why people who were traditionally pacifists would be attracted to Hitler. In an article from October 2021 entitled “Hitler’s Mennonite Voters,” Dr. Goossen explains:
“Two factors made Danzig’s Mennonites particularly susceptible to Hitler’s project. First, members saw themselves as part of a global religious denomination they viewed as vulnerable to atheist communism. Since the eighteenth century, thousands of Mennonites had emigrated from the Danzig area to Imperial Russia. Although nationalist pressure convinced Danzig’s Mennonites to abandon pacifist teachings, they retained ties to pacifist coreligionists abroad. After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Mennonites in the Soviet Union faced hardships. Their relatives in Danzig welcomed Hitler’s anti-Bolshevism and his antisemitism. The Führer blamed Soviet atrocities on a fictional cabal he labeled as ‘Judeo-Bolshevism.’”
Another researcher, Alicia Good, in an article entitled “Unanswered Questions: Mennonite Participation in the Holocaust,” reinforces what Goossen tells us in this regard:
“Rempel makes the argument that the destruction of Mennonite church and community life in the Soviet Republic under Stalin was so destructive that not only did Mennonites abandon their peace theology, but they perceived Hitler’s invading forces as their liberators, thereby setting the stage for them to actively aid the Nazi agenda. Rempel describes the turbulence of the Russian Revolution: ‘Driven by fear and the predation of violent anarchists, many Mennonites in South Russia set aside their pacifist tradition and formed self-defense units to protect their homes and families against bandits and even the Red Army’ It was during this period that many Mennonites chose to leave behind their beliefs in nonviolence in order to fight a losing battle against the communists, who were perceived as a threat both because of their atheistic stance and their desire to abolish private ownership of property. Rempel infers that it was these initial violent actions which set a tragic precedent laying the foundations for the next generation of Mennonites to take up arms alongside the Nazis.”
According to Goossen, the second reason Danzig Mennonites were attracted to Nazism is that it appealed to their sense of aggrieved nationalism:
“Those who had given up pacifism and chosen not to emigrate adopted a strong German identity. They lamented Germany’s defeat in the First World War, and they reviled the 1919 Versailles Treaty, which became a nationalist punching bag. This treaty assigned guilt for World War I to Germany. It required steep reparations. And it split Danzig from Germany. The nineteen Mennonite congregations in eastern Germany, with 13,000 attendees, had once formed a united group. Versailles divided them between Germany, Poland, and the Free City (where 6,000 lived). Mennonite farmers further resented Danzig’s customs union with Poland.” (Goossen, 2021)
According to Dr. Goossen, during the 1930’s Mennonites became involved at every level of the Nazi Party in Danzig. For example, the second highest-ranking Nazi in Danzig, Otto Anders, was a Mennonite. Mennonite men joined the paramilitary Sturmabteilung (SA) and the Schutzstaffel (SS), while Mennonite women joined Nazi women’s organizations. While Mennonite men who became officers in the Nazi army typically left the church, rank-and-file members normally retained their church affiliation. Faith leaders in the church also became deeply Nazified, and according to Goossens, leaders from five of the seven Mennonite churches in the Free City of Danzig were party members.
Mennonites, who numbered only 1.5 percent of Danzig’s population, had an outsized effect in the Free City of Danzig. According to Dr. Goossen, in May 1933, Mennonites helped deliver Hitler the only country-wide majority he achieved in a free election; in the Free City of Danzig their ballots pushed the Nazis over the 50 percent threshold in the popular vote.
As Goossen further notes, “The historically pacifist Christian church disproportionately influenced Nazi rule in the Free City. During World War II, members became enmeshed in the Holocaust, staffing concentration camps, and using slave labor on their farms and in their factories. Prominent Nazis believed most Mennonites were ‘Aryan.’”
As to how Menno Simons, the founder of the Mennonites, might have felt about the alliance future generations of his followers made with Nazism, Goossen observes the following: “Four hundred years later, the Mennonites who helped to bring Nazism to Danzig were a theologically transformed group. Prior to the 1933 election, one preacher praised National Socialism to a ministerial assembly as ‘the only party which we as Mennonites can support.’ This viewpoint would have been anathema to this preacher’s own ancestors. Church historian C. Henry Smith, observing from across the Atlantic, rightly assessed that Danzig’s Mennonites strayed from their roots. ‘Menno Simons would find himself ill at ease, today, among his namesakes,’ Smith wrote, ‘were he to return to his familiar haunts around the Baltic.’ A time-travelling Menno Smith would soon be ‘in all likelihood, in a concentration camp.’”
Dr. Goossen has explained why Mennonites become Nazi collaborators. However, readers may wonder, as I did, what attracted or impressed the Nazis about Mennonites? It was certainly not the faith’s historic pacifism which the Nazis surely would not have emphasized. Turning again to Goossen, “The main strategy church officials deployed to ingratiate themselves with top Nazis involved claiming racial purity. Mennonites had supposedly kept their bloodlines ‘Aryan’ through centuries of intermarriage. German racial scientists had tested Mennonite populations in Danzig and agreed with this assessment. Faith leaders further sought to prove heritage by harvesting centuries-old data from church record books.” Simply put, the Nazis considered Mennonites to be unusually pure specimens of Aryanism.
Mennonites elevated racial status ultimately drew them into the Nazi’s orbit of crimes against humanity, as Goossen explains: “Hitler waged World War II as a race war. His soldiers conquered vast swaths of Eastern Europe to provide expanded ‘living space’ for the German people, whom the Nazis considered a ‘master race.’ The invaders and local collaborators seized property from Poles, Jews, and others. They distributed this plunder to members of the German racial elite and forced non-Germans into subservient positions. In Danzig, many Mennonites benefitted from robbery and slavery. For instance, SS officers at the Stutthof concentration camp, built in 1939, formed an entire labor commando with 500 inmates to serve a Mennonite arms manufacturer, Gerhard Epp.”
So, we come full circle to the first mention of Gerhard Epp (Figure 7), the brother of my father’s friends, the Mennonite sisters Suse and Idschi Epp. But it would not be the last as he was among the most prominent Mennonite collaborators.
Let me digress and briefly tell readers a little about the Stutthof concentration camp, located 21 miles (34 km) east of Danzig in the German-annexed Free City of Danzig. Opened in September of 1939, it was under the command of Heinrich Himmler’s SS and was at the time situated near the world’s largest Mennonite population. Stutthof was the first German concentration camp set up outside German borders in World War II, and was the last camp liberated by the Allies on the 9th of May 1945. It was originally set up as a concentration camp but was later utilized as a death camp equipped with a gas chamber and crematoria. Initially it housed Polish and Russian political prisoners, but soon became the destination for thousands of deported Jews. It is estimated that between 63,000 and 65,000 prisoners of Stutthof concentration camp and its subcamps died because of murder, starvation, epidemics, extreme labor conditions, brutal and forced evacuations, and a lack of medical attention. Some 28,000 of those who died were Jews. In total, as many as 110,000 people were deported to the camp during its existence, working under what were often brutal conditions.
Quoting again from Alicia Good as to how the Mennonites in the Żuławy region benefited from the proximity of the Stutthof concentration camp: “The Mennonite farmers and business owners in the Danzig region were not only aware of the existence of the concentration camp but they derived personal profit from its operations. Mennonite farms paid the camps to receive field laborers without payment for their labor and often for longer than the allotted 8-hour shifts to maximize profits. Mennonites who owned factories, such as Gerhard Epp (Figure 8), utilized the low-cost labor from concentration camps; Epp’s factory actually manufactured firearms for the Nazi war effort. Other Mennonite businesses profited by building and supplying the camps themselves. Since Mennonite attempts to show more sympathetic treatment of the workers was prohibited by the Nazis on the threat of the sympathizer being imprisoned in the camps, Mennonite arguments that their usage was to show mercy to the prisoners was unsustainable. Likewise, it cannot be reasonably claimed that the large Mennonite community did not know about the camps since they were actively profiting from this activity. Neither the presence of tens of thousands of people subjected to horrific conditions, nor the billowing smoke and ashes of the crematoria could have been denied by any Mennonites at Danzig or Stutthof who wanted to know the truth of what was happening in their backyard. Moreover, the presence of ethnically Mennonite names on the list of prison guards who were later convicted for their work at Stutthof demonstrates that at least some members of the Mennonite community themselves committed atrocities within the camp.”
In another article written by Dr. Ben Goossen in 2020 entitled “The Real History of the Mennonites and the Holocaust,” there is further mention of Gerhard Epp. From this article, we learn more about him through Goossen’s story of Mennonite war refugee Heinrich Hamm’s antisemitic and anti-Bolshevik involvement with Nazism. Some background about Hamm provides the framework for a further discussion of Gerhard Epp.
Heinrich Hamm was born in czarist Russia in 1894. During WWI he was a medic, though abandoned pacifism and took up arms against the communists during the Russian Revolution. Following the Bolshevik victory, Hamm lost his farm near the Ukrainian city of Zaporozhe, famous these days for the site of fighting between the Russians and the Ukrainians around Europe’s largest nuclear power plant. Following Stalin’s rise to power, Hamm moved to Dnepropetrovsk, and remained there following the Nazi invasion of 1941. However, with Germany’s reversal of fortunes on the Eastern Front, by early 1944 Hamm and his family abandoned the Ukraine and eventually settled in Stutthof, which as previously mentioned had a large and long-standing Mennonite population. Hamm and his family were among the first Mennonite refugees relocated from the Ukraine to Nazi-occupied Poland.
As Goossen notes, it was in Stutthof that Hamm met Gerhard Epp: “In Stutthof, Hamm became friendly with a prominent Mennonite businessman named Gerhard Epp. Prior to the First World War, Epp had worked in Russia, and he remained greatly interested in Mennonite coreligionists from the Soviet Union. Epp offered Hamm a job in a large machine factory he owned and operated—the same establishment that Hamm would later mention in the memo he wrote for MCC [i.e., Mennonite Central Committee] (see below), claiming he was coerced into providing cheap labor for greedy German war profiteers.” (Figures 9a-b)
Goossen later goes on to add, “Gerhard Epp served as a general contractor for camp [i.e., Stutthof], from which he leased hundreds of prisoners to produce armaments in his factory. Jews and other inmates were the true cheap labor. Hamm helped oversee their slavery and murder.”
Following the end of World War II, Mennonite leaders in Europe and North America sought to craft a narrative that emphasized how brutally and oppressively their denomination had been treated by the Nazis. The Mennonite Central Committee (MCC), the denomination’s premier aid organization of which Heinrich Hamm was an employee and spokesperson, reported in various memos to bodies like the United Nations that faith leaders were unaware of Nazi collaboration of refugees including the involvement of Heinrich Hamm. The following is drawn from a version of Hamm’s wartime experiences: “It is quite an erroneous idea to think that all Mennonites were brought to Poland to be settled on farms. I and my family came to a camp in Preussisch-Stargard in the Danzig area. Immediately representatives of various works and concerns came to fetch cheap labour. I had to work in a machine factory where I remained until the end of the war. Besides the four Mennonite families many Ukrainians, Frenchmen, and Poles worked there also. There was no difference in the way these various national groups were treated.” (Goossen 2020)
As Goossen goes on to note, “The efforts by Mennonite Central Committee to portray refugees like Heinrich Hamm as victims of Nazism were largely successful.” Declarations by the MCC officers as well as by the migrants themselves convinced agents of the United Nations that most Mennonites had not wound up in Germany of their own accord. As a result, the MCC succeeded in relocating most of their refugees under its care with United Nations assistance to places in West Germany or overseas, mostly in Canada and Paraguay.
Goossen has laboriously sifted through thousands of pages of historic documents scattered across half a dozen archives in four countries to piece together Hamm’s past and debunk his story; readers are referred to Dr. Goossen’s article for more details but suffice it to say that Hamm as an MCC employee and spokesperson knew very well how and why Mennonites had collaborated with the Nazis and how complicit they were in the murder of Jewish concentration camp detainees. As Goossen notes: “What is clear is that the Mennonite-owned factory in Stutthof was a place of terror. For hundreds of prisoners enslaved there, the factory’s Mennonite managers were responsible for much of that terror. It is also clear that after the war, Hamm tried to distance himself from this responsibility. He instead emphasized the suffering of his own family, which fled Stutthof in April 1945. As they crossed the Baltic under cover of night, a Soviet submarine torpedoed their ship. Hamm praised God for allowing the damaged vessel to make it to Denmark. The family remained in Denmark for the next eighteen months. Hamm emphasized his gratitude for the comfort he found during these lean times through worshipping with fellow Mennonite refugees and other Christians.” (Goossen 2020)
As I related in Post 5, my father’s friends, Idschi and Suse Epp, also escaped to Denmark as the Russians were approaching Tiegenhof. According to Gerhard Epp’s descendants whom I met in 2013 in Lubeck, Germany, Suse Epp died in Denmark in 1941 at the age of 71. Gerhard Epp’s daughter by his first wife who died in 1939 at the age of 44 was Rita Schuetze née Epp (Figure 10); at the time I met her in 2013 she was already suffering from severe dementia. However, Rita’s half-brother and Gerhard Epp’s stepson, Hans Joachim “Hajo” Wiebe (Figures 11-12), is twelve years younger than his sister and has a splendid memory; he shared some compelling family stories.
Of particular interest is the story Hajo Wiebe related of the role that Gerhard and Rita Epp played in helping Prussian citizens and German soldiers escape towards the end of WWII as the Russians were encircling Stutthof. Danzig to the west and Elbing [today: Elblag, Poland] to the south had already been captured by the Russians, so the only way Germans could still flee the area was to make their way across the frozen “Frisches Haff,” or Vistula Lagoon (Figure 13), to a narrow, sandy spit (Vistula Spit); here, they could be picked up by German boats cruising the Baltic Sea looking for fleeing Germans, then taken first to the Hel Peninsula and eventually to Germany. Using Gerhard’s mechanical expertise, he and Rita drove in his Mercedes all around the area south of Stutthof destroying the flood control dams previous generations of Mennonites had built and inundated the naturally marshy area to slow the advance of the Russians, allowing Germans an opportunity to take flight. However, even with the area flooded, travel across the Vistula Lagoon was fraught with danger as Russian bombers were always strafing escaping Germans who stood out against the frozen landscape. The exact date of Gerhard and Rita’s own get-away on one of the last German ships leaving from the Vistula Spit is recorded in family annals as May 6, 1945.
In closing I would merely say that thanks to the recent work of scholars like Ben Goossen revelations are finally coming to light of the role Mennonites played in the crimes of National Socialism. These crimes run counter to the common belief about this Christian denomination that they are historically pacifists. What led me to uncovering the truth was my father’s friendship with two of Gerhard Epp’s sisters and a casual encounter my father had with Gerhard prior to the war.
REFERENCES
Good, Alicia. “Unanswered Questions: Mennonite Participation in the Holocaust.”
Goossen, Ben. “How to Catch a Mennonite Nazi.” Anabaptist Historians, 29 October 2020, https://anabaptisthistorians.org/2020/10/29/how-to-catch-a-mennonite-nazi/.
Goossen, Ben. “The Real History of the Mennonites and the Holocaust.” Tablet, 16 November 2020, https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/history/articles/heinrich-hamm-mennonite-holocaust.
Goossen, Ben. “How A Nazi Death Squad Viewed Mennonites.” Anabaptist Historians, 16 January 2021, https://anabaptisthistorians.org/2021/01/16/how-a-nazi-death-squad-viewed-mennonites/
Neff, Christian and Richard D. Thiessen. “Wladyslaw IV Vasa, King of Poland (1595-1648).” Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. March 2015. Web. 11 Aug 2022. https://gameo.org/index.php?title=Wladyslaw_IV_Vasa,_King_of_Poland_(1595-1648)&oldid=140874.
“The History of Polish Mennonites.” Gdanski Trips, https://www.gdansktrips.com/the-history-of-polish-mennonites/.
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: In this postscript to Post 112, I address the question of why Wolfram E. von Pannwitz’s friend, John Kroeker, may have arrived in America as a Stateless citizen, based on a reference sent to me by one of my German friends.
As a reminder to readers, the inspiration for Post 112 came from Mr. John Thiesen, a gentleman from Newton, Kansas. Among his family papers, he discovered that his grandfather John Kroeker arrived in America in July 1947 aboard the “Marine Marlin,” the same ship my uncle Dr. Fedor Bruck and his friend Wolfram E. von Pannwitz took to come here; it is clear from these ancestral documents that Wolfram and Mr. Kroeker befriended one another on their voyage to America.
Mr. Thiesen contacted me through my Blog hoping I might shed some light on why his grandfather suddenly moved from Kansas to Providence, Rhode Island in 1953. Providence is the city where Mr. von Pannwitz lived for several years following his arrival in this country, a place he likely called home until around 1952. Based on passenger manifests I located for Mr. von Pannwitz on ancestry.com, by late 1952 or early 1953, he’d permanently relocated to New York City. I have been unable to determine whether John Kroeker’s move to Providence was related to his friendship with Wolfram.
Another question I’d previously been unable to answer was why John Kroeker arrived in America as a “Stateless” citizen. Since he was a Mennonite, it was clearly not related to the revocation of his German citizenry by the Nazis because of his Jewish ancestry. Possibly, it is connected to one of the multiple reasons for “statelessness” enumerated in the link above (e.g., lack of birth certificate; birth to stateless parents).
By chance, my German friend Peter Hanke stumbled on an article in German Wikipedia about John Kroeker’s father and John Thiesen’s great-grandfather, Jakob Kroeker, which may provide a clue as to why John Kroeker was Stateless.
According to German Wikipedia, Jakob Kroeker was born on the 12th of November 1872 in Gnadental in the Odessa Oblast of the former Soviet Union [today: Dolynivka, Ukraine]. An “oblast” is an administrative division or region in Russia and the former Soviet Union, and in some of its former constituent republics; readers are reminded that Ukraine was formerly part of the Soviet Union. Given the ongoing war between Russia and the Ukraine, this post coincidentally provides an opportunity to discuss a little history and geography. (Figure 1)
Jakob Kroeker was born in a Mennonite colony in Gnadental in the Odessa Oblast, but by 1881 he and his parents had moved to the Crimean Peninsula to the Mennonite village of Spat [today: Havardiiske or Gvardeskoye, Simferopol Raion, Republic of Crimea, Ukraine] near Simferopol. (Figure 2) The Crimean Peninsula, on which the Republic of Crimea is located, became a part of post-Soviet Ukraine in 1991, upon the latter’s independence, by virtue of Ukraine’s inheritance of the territory from the Ukrainian SSR, of which Crimea was a part since 1954. In 2014, Russia annexed the peninsula and established two federal subjects there, the Republic of Crimea and the federal city of Sevastopol, but the territories are still internationally recognized as being part of Ukraine.
The land for the Mennonite village where Spat was established and where Jakob Kroeker’s parents moved to was purchased in 1881 from Mennonites living in the Molotschna Mennonite Settlement [today: Molochansk, Ukraine] (Figure 3); Spat was located near the train station of Sarabus [Sarabuz] (Figure 4), which is about 11 miles or 18 km from Simferopol. Molochansk is approximately 185 miles or 297 km NNE of Simferopol.
Let me briefly digress and provide an instructive history of how and why Mennonites came to be in this part of the former Soviet Union.
The Molotschna Mennonite Settlement, located in the province of Taurida, Russia [today: Zaporizhia Oblast in Ukraine], on the Molochnaya River, was the second and largest Mennonite settlement of Russia. Chortitza [today: Khortytsia Island], founded in 1789, was the oldest and next in size, located about 71 miles or 114 km NW of Molochansk. (Figure 5) Chortitza was established by Mennonites from Danzig [today: Gdansk, Poland] (Figure 6) and Prussia who had accepted the invitation of Catherine the Great. The basis for this invitation was the fact that the Russian government needed good farmers in the Ukraine on land they had just acquired through a war with Turkey.
Mennonite families, which tended to be large, were traditionally farmers but had been forced to seek other occupations as land along the Vistula River near Danzig and in Prussia had become scarce. Further complicating matters were Prussian edicts issued between 1786 and 1801 during and following the reign of Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia making it difficult for Mennonites to acquire land, because of their refusal to serve in the military due to their pacifist religious beliefs. Thus, the invitation by the Russian Empress Catherine the Great to relocate from Prussia was attractive because Mennonites could purchase all the land they wanted on the vast steppes of the Tsar’s Russian empire.
From a personal point of view, the fact that the Mennonites who founded Chortitza in 1789 came from Danzig is fascinating. Readers who have followed my Blog since its inception in 2017 may recall that my father Dr. Otto Bruck apprenticed as a dentist in Danzig, and later had his own dental practice between 1932 and 1937 in a Mennonite village to the east called Tiegenhof in the Free City of Danzig [today: Nowy Dwor Gdanski, Poland].
The region where Tiegenhof is located is called Żuławy Wiślane (i.e. “the Vistula fens”), which refers to the alluvial delta area of the Vistula, in the northern part of Poland. Much of the farmland was reclaimed artificially by means of dykes, pumps, channels, and an extensive drainage system. The arduous process of retaking the land from the sea started in the 14th century and was in large part undertaken by the hardworking Puritan community of Mennonites, who originally came from the Netherlands and Flanders to escape religious persecution.
In any case, the land on the Crimean Peninsula where the town of Spat was established and where Jakob Kroeker grew up was sold to his ancestors by Mennonites who lived in Chortitza but originally came from Danzig and Prussia.
Returning to Jakob Kroeker. Even as a teenager he found comfort in the Christian faith, which eventually drew him to a theological training. He got married to Anna Langemann in 1894, and moved to Hamburg, Germany where he began studying at the Baptist seminary which he completed in four years. John Kroeker’s birth in Hamburg is thus explained.
Jakob’s wife could not obtain the necessary health certificate to work abroad, so he became a traveling preacher for the German Mennonites throughout Russia. In around 1906, he moved to Molotschna, where the cultural center of the Mennonites of Russia was located, although by 1910 he emigrated with his wife and children to Germany, to Wernigerode am Harz. Until the outbreak of WWI, he made numerous trips to St. Petersburg and southern Russia, although with the onset of the war he was no longer allowed to leave Wernigerode without permission because of his Russian nationality. The fact that he was never interned by the Germans during the war was probably because he was an ordained minister of the Mennonites.
Following the end of the war, until a peace agreement was signed in 1921, Jakob Kroeker held Bible courses for Russian POWs; this is deemed by scholars to have provided the impetus for the great religious movement in Russia after the First World War. This prompted him to cofound the mission union Light in the East in 1920 with the aim of spreading Christian literature among the Russian population. In connection with this, he continued to travel extensively throughout the 1920’s and the early 1930’s until the Nazis came to power, which severely restricted his mission’s work opportunities.
Jakob Kroeker and his wife wound up having eleven children, including Wolfram E. von Pannwitz’s friend, John Kroeker. Jakob died in 1948 inMühlhausen (Stuttgart) in the German State of Baden-Württemberg.
We know that Jakob Kroeker was born in what was formerly part of the Soviet Union, lived as a child and young man on the Crimean Peninsula, and that he eventually emigrated to Wernigerode am Harz in Germany in around 1910. During WWI he was generally prevented from traveling to Russia on account of his Russian nationality. While he traveled extensively following WWI, he seems to have lived continuously in Wernigerode until around 1945-46 when he moved near Stuttgart. There is no indication that he ever relinquished his Russian nationality in favor of German citizenship, so while he was never interned during the Nazi era, the Nazis may have considered him to be Stateless. Following WWII, most Germans, including Mennonites, still living in the Soviet Union left or were deported; since Jakob had once religiously tended to these expelled German Mennonites, he would have had no reason to return to Russia once his flock was gone. As a Russian citizen, this may explain why Jakob was classified as Stateless, and why his son John Kroeker arrived in America as such.
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: Beginning with this post, I shift to the timing and chain of events that led to my father’s enlistment in the French Foreign Legion in November 1938, followed in an upcoming post by a discussion of my father’s time in this French military unit.
My father received his dental accreditation from the University of Berlin’s Zahnheilkunde Institut, Dentistry Institute, on the 31st of May 1930. Soon thereafter, he moved to the Free City of Danzig, Freie Stadt Danzig in German, where he apprenticed with a Dr. Fritz Bertram. I think his relocation to Danzig may have been related to the fact that he was very close to his aunt and uncle, Rudolf Löwenstein and Hedwig Löwenstein née Bruck, and two of their three children, Jeanne (Figures 1-2) and Heinz Löwenstein, who all lived there. In Post 71, I described the tragic circumstances of Rudolf Löwenstein’s death in a plane crash in then-Czechoslovakia on the 22nd of August 1930, when my father resided with him and his family.
By April 1932, my father had gained enough technical expertise to strike out independently, and open his own dental practice in the nearby town of Tiegenhof [today: Nowy Dwór Gdański, Poland]. While this was undoubtedly a signature achievement in my father’s life, slightly more than eight months later, on the 30th of January 1933, Hitler was appointed Germany’s Chancellor by the President Paul von Hindenburg, and then became Führer in 1934. An October 1934 picture of the office building in Tiegenhof where my father lived and had his practice was festooned with Nazi flags (Figure 3), clearly demonstrating the predictable impact of political developments in Germany on the Free City of Danzig and the looming danger. By April 1937, my father was devoid of clients, so he shuttered his practice. Judging from the dates on his photos, he appears to have stayed in Tiegenhof until fall of that year.
I think my father then briefly went to Berlin to “lose” himself in the relative anonymity of a larger city. His adored sister Susanne and her husband, Dr. Franz Müller, had already fled Berlin in favor of Italy by March 1936. However, his older brother, Dr. Fedor Bruck, who would ride out the entire war in Berlin hidden by friends and family, was still practicing dentistry in Berlin in 1937 under the auspices of a non-Jewish dentist when this was still feasible. Perhaps, my father stayed briefly with his brother, but, regardless, by March 1938, his dated pictures place him in Vienna, Austria between the 5th and 9th of March. (Figure 4) His ultimate destination though was Fiesole, Italy, where his sister and brother-in-law were then living. His entered Italy on the 10th of March 1938 but arrived in Fiesole only on the 26th of March (Figure 5), spending the intervening period skiing in the Dolomites.
During Italy’s Fascist era, all out-of-town visitors were required to appear with their hosts at the Municipio, City Hall, provide their names, show their identity papers, indicate their anticipated length of stay, and complete what was called a “Soggiorno degli Stranieri in Italia,” or “Stay of Foreigners in Italy.” The surviving records for Fiesole are today kept at a branch of the Municipio called the “Archivio Storico Comunale,” the “Municipal Historic Archive.” (Figure 6) These registration logs and forms, while highly intrusive, are enormously informative for doing genealogical research, uncovering names of visitors, and establishing timelines for these guests. (Figure 7)
While 1938 was hardly a serene time, by June or July, my father nonetheless decided to tour parts of Italy and adjoining Switzerland, including Florence, Rome (Figure 8), Pompeii (Figure 9), Naples, Sorrento, the Island of Ischia, and Ascona; his travels lasted until September. By the 15th of September 1938, he was back in Fiesole according to a surviving immigration register on file at Fiesole’s “Archivio Storico Comunale.” This record indicates an anticipated two-week visit, though it’s not clear how long my dad actually stayed. (Figure 10)
Let me briefly digress and provide some historical context for what was happening in Italy at the time. On the 9th of May 1938, Adolph Hitler had visited Florence escorted by Italian Duce Benito Mussolini, and toured some historic sites. Soon after, on July 14, 1938, Mussolini embraced the “Manifesto of the Racial Scientists.” Basically, this Manifesto declared the Italian civilization to be of Aryan origin and claimed the existence of a “pure” Italian race of which Jews were no part. Between September 2, 1938 and November 17, 1938, Italy enacted a series of racial laws, including one forbidding foreign Jews from settling in Italy.
It quickly became apparent to my father, his sister, her husband, and my grandmother, Else Bruck née Berliner, also living in Fiesole, that remaining in Italy was no longer possible. Again, according to records on file at Fiesole’s “Archivio Storico Comunale,” my aunt and uncle are deleted from the population records of the city, in Italian “Data dalle quale decorre la cancellazione dal Registro di popolazione,” beginning on the 16th of September 1938. (Figures 11-12) Thus, my father’s arrival and registration in Fiesole the day before was likely timed to help his relatives pack up and leave, though he may have stayed longer.
The next stop along my family’s odyssey was Fayence, France, roughly 42 miles west of Nice, France; Fayence is one of the “perched villages” overlooking the plain between the southern Alps and the Esterel massif. My uncle Dr. Franz Müller’s daughter by his first marriage, Margit Mombert née Müller, lived there with her husband, brother-in-law, and mother-in-law on a fruit farm the family owned. I discussed this in Post 22 so refer readers to that publication. I place my aunt, uncle and grandmother’s arrival in Fayence towards the end of September 1938. While the collaborationist government of Vichy France would not be established in the southern part of metropolitan France until July of 1940, my ancestors’ recent displacements and the reach of the Nazis would have made them extremely nervous. Clearly, in the case of my father, riding out the impending storm in France or elsewhere in Europe was not a viable option at the age of only 31.
Coincidentally, by 1938, but likely years before, his widowed aunt Hedwig Löwenstein née Bruck and her two children, discussed above, with whom my father had lived in Danzig between 1930 and 1932, had relocated to Nice, France. (Figure 13) Hedwig’s daughter, Jeanne “Hansi” Goff née Löwenstein (1902-1986), was close to my father throughout his life. Realizing the danger he was in, she advised him to enlist in the French Foreign Legion, which is precisely what my father, Dr. Otto Bruck, did.
In one of my father’s surviving post-WWII letters, dated the 7th of January 1946, he requested a Carte d’identité, an identify card, from the Department of Alpes-Maritimes in southeast France, where Nice is located. In this letter, my father provides some dates that help establish where he was at various times before and during the war. According to this correspondence, by October 21, 1938, my father had arrived in Paris, France, where he applied for admittance to the French Foreign Legion, to which he was conscripted on the 9th of November 1938 for a five-year hitch. So far, I’ve been unable to determine my father’s whereabouts between September 16, 1938, when he was in Fiesole, Italy, and October 21, 1938, when he arrived in Paris.
The French Foreign Legion is a military service branch of the French Army established in 1831. The Legion is unique in that it is open to foreign recruits willing to serve in the French Armed Forces. My father was given a French nom de guerre, an alias, “Marcel Berger.” (Figures 14a-b) From the French Foreign Legion, I was able to obtain my father’s “Livret Matricule,” military file, which states that Marcel Berger was born on the 6th of January 1907 in Strasbourg in the French Department of Bas-Rhin, and that his profession was “Chirurgien dentist,” dental surgeon. (Figure 15) While my father’s profession is correctly indicated, he was in fact born on the 16th of April 1907 in Ratibor, Germany [today: Racibórz, Poland]. My father’s fluency in French would have afforded him a measure of protection had he been taken prisoner.
Readers may think the title of this post somewhat odd, as though to imply that my father’s enlistment in the French Foreign Legion was somehow preordained. While my father was very much inclined to believe in kismet, fate, I am a strong believer that you control your own destiny. That said, realistically, without an exit visa to a “sanctuary” country a Jewish person’s options would have been extremely limited in the lead-up to WWII, so my father was fortunate the French Foreign Legion was open to him and that he was unmarried and had no children to look after.
In the following post, I will provide substantially more background on the history of the French Foreign Legion during WWII to account for the Legion’s “conflicted” role at the time and explain how my father was able to travel to France in 1941 “across enemy lines” to visit his beloved sister Susanne one final time.
Note: In this post, I discuss an article published in the Nazi Party’s newspaper in May 1935 describing a run-in my father’s friend from Tiegenhof, Kurt Lau, had with the Nazis that resulted in him being incarcerated for 30 days for “insulting the National Socialist government.”
My father met Kurt Lau, the Managing Director of the “Tieghenhofer Oelmühle,” the rapeseed oil mill, in 1932 after he moved to Tiegenhof [today: Nowy Dwór Gdański, Poland] (Figure 1); unlike other people whom he befriended there they remained lifelong friends. (Figure 2) By the time my father left the area in 1937, Kurt and his wife Käthe were among the few people who still spoke to him, despite the pressure Germans were under to dissociate themselves from and isolate Jews. When I first started my forensic investigations into my family, reminded that Kurt and Käthe’s son and daughter-in-law are still alive, I reached out to Juergen “Peter” (b. 1923) and Hannelore “Lolo” Lau (b. 1925) (Figure 3) for help identifying some of the people in my father’s photos. They were helpful and gracious beyond all measure. Connecting with Kurt and Käthe’s descendants has allowed our families to continue a friendship that now spans four generations, really five, taking the youngest great-great-grandchildren into account.
Among the items Peter shared with me when we first connected in 2012 was a poor-quality xerox of a newspaper article he thought dated to 1935 or 1936 about his father running afoul of the National Socialist government (Figure 4); written in elaborate German Gothic font, the text was naturally indecipherable, but according to Peter the article describes judicial proceedings the Nazi authorities launched against his father for “defaming the government.” At the time, I was not so interested in the specifics of the case.
Fast forward. Readers will recall that Mr. Peter Hanke, affiliated with “forum.danzig.de,” recently found newspaper clippings in old Danzig [today: Gdansk, Poland] dailies of people I’ve lately written about. This includes my great-uncle Rudolf Löwenstein, subject of Post 71, and, Dr. Franz Schimanski, subject of Post 76. Thinking Peter Hanke might be interested and able to read the article Peter Lau had once given me, I sent it to him, asking if he could transcribe it. He not only did that, but he also translated it. The article gives a glimpse into the mindset of the Nazi overlords and describes Kurt Lau’s arrest and trial. Below is a transcription and translation of the article (a few words are illegible), followed by a discussion of the historical context of the events described.
TRANSCRIPTION:
“Freistadtgebiet
Unerlaubte Kritik
Drei Monate Gefängnis wegen Beleidigung der Regierung
Der Direktor der Tiegenhöfer Ölmühle, Kaufmann Kurt L., hatte am Dienstag eine eilige Reise nach Danzig vor und wollte sich noch schnell rasieren lassen. Als er um 8 Uhr früh das Friseurgeschäft F. in Tiegenhof betrat, war nur der Lehrling da. Im angrenzenden Damensalon saß jedoch eine Kundin, Frau B. aus Tiegenhof, was jedoch Direktor L. nicht wusste. Als nach kurzer Zeit der Kaufmann Gustav Kr. den Herrenraum betrat, knüpfte er mit dem ihm bekannten Direktor L. ein Gespräch an, das fortgesetzt wurde, während der Gehilfe K. Direktor L. rasierte.
L. und Kr. kamen in ein Gespräch über die Guldenabwertung. Aus der Unterhaltung war zu entnehmen, dass L. wie Kr. durch den Guldensturz erhebliche Verluste beim Warenverkauf erlitten hatten, die durch den Zuschlag von 20 Prozent nach Ansicht der Geschäftsleute nicht ausgeglichen werden könnte. Hierauf wandte sich dei Unterhaltung zwei Strafprozessen gegen zwei Kaufleute in Tiegenhof und Neuteich zu. L. war der Meinung, dass der Jude ??? in Neuteich zu Unrecht verurteilt worden wäre und erging sich dabei in einer unpassenden Kritik über die Regierung. Er bemängelte zunächst, dass abgeblich keine Wirtschaftler gehört worden seien, es es könne auch mit Aufrufen allein nichts geschafft werden. Hierbei fielen von ihm die Worte ‘Das grenzt an Betrug.’! Als sich Direktor L. verabschiedete, machte er eine drastische Bemerkung, in der das bekannte Wort vom Grundeis vorkam.
Die Kundin im Damensalon war namentlich über die letzten Worte empört und erkundigte sich nach dem Namen des Sprechers; sie erstattete dann Strafanzeige gegen L. Dieser wurde noch am selben Tage in einem Danziger Café festgenommen und in Schutzhaft überführt. Er hatte sich am Mittwoch vor dem Tiegenhofer Amtsgericht wegen Verleumdung der Regierung zu verantworten. Insbesondere wurden ihm der Ausdruck “Das grenzt an Betrug!” und der letzte Satz seines Gesprächs zur Last gelegt.
Bei der Beweisaufnahme bestritt der Angeklagte, sich irgendwie schuldig gemacht zu haben. Er habe nicht das Gespräch angefangen, sondern der Kaufmann Kr. Ferner habe er es eilig gehabt und könne bei einer Rasur sich philosophische Reden gehalten haben.
Als Belastungszeugen waren Frau B., die Friseuse R. und der Gehilfe K. geladen worden. Ihre eidlichen Aussagen ergaben, dass die Unterhaltung in der eingangs beschriebenen Form statt gefunden haben musste und die inkriminierten Worte gefallen waren. Auch der Kaufmann Kr. musste die Möglichkeit der Ausdrücke zugeben.
Der Verteidiger, Rechtsanwalt M., glaubte zunächst an Hand von Presseberichten feststellen zu können, dass ‘überall geschimpft’ worden sei. Ferner war er der Ansicht, dass auch der Wert der Zeugenaussagen problematisch sei. Es könne in der heutigen Zeit von keinem Kaufmann Begeisterung über die schwierigen Wirtschaftslage verlangt werden.
Der Angeklagte habe ‘nicht die Absicht gehabt, zu provozieren,’ sondern sich nur im Rahmen der Allgemeinheit verhalten. Die Vorsätzlichkeit einer Beleidigung sei zu verneinen, der letzte Satz ist als zulässiger Herrenwitz zu werten.
Der Vertreter der Anklagebehörde sah dagegen einen Verstoß gegen die Strafparagraphen ??? und 105a als gegeben an. Eine Kritik über die Abwertung des Guldens dürfe nicht zur Beleidigung der Regierung ausarten. Der Beschuldigte als gebildeter Mensch und Parteigenosse hätte vielmehr die Pflicht gehabt, beruhigend zu wirken und als Wirtschaftler seine Bedenken an geeigneter Stelle vortragen können.
Desgleichen legte das Gericht dar, dass der Angeklagte als Wirtschaftsführer sich über die Folgen seiner Handlungen hätte bewusst sein müssen.
Die Provokation verlange schwere Sühne, strafmildernd sei nur, dass der Angeklagte sich bisher einwandfrei geführt hatte. Das Urteil lautete auf drei Monate Gefängnis.
Der Strafprozess,hatte in Tiegenhof verständlicherweise großes Aufsehen erregte, der überfüllte Zuhörerraum musste schon vor der Verhandlung ??????????”
TRANSLATION:
“Free city area
Unauthorized criticism
Three months in prison for insulting the government
The director of the Tiegenhöfer Oelmühle, businessman Kurt L., was planning an urgent trip to Danzig on Tuesday and wanted to have a quick shave. When he entered the F. hairdresser’s shop in Tiegenhof at 8 a.m., only the apprentice was there. However, a customer, Mrs. B. from Tiegenhof, was sitting in the adjacent ladies’ salon, but Director L. did not know this. When the merchant Gustav Kr. entered the gentlemen’s room after a short time, he started a conversation with director L., whom he knew, which was continued while the assistant K. was shaving director L.
L. and Kr. got into a conversation about the devaluation of the Gulden. From the conversation, it could be gathered that L. and Kr. had suffered considerable losses in the sale of goods as a result of the fall of the Gulden, which in the opinion of the businessmen could not be compensated by the surcharge of 20 percent. The conversation then turned to two criminal proceedings against two merchants in Tiegenhof and Neuteich. L. believed the Jew ??? had been wrongly convicted in Neuteich, and in doing so he made an inappropriate criticism of the government. First, he criticized that no economists had been heard, and that nothing could be achieved even with appeals alone. Here he used the words ‘This borders on fraud!’ When director L. said goodbye, he made a drastic remark in which the well-known f***-word was mentioned.
The customer in the ladies’ salon was outraged by the last words and inquired about the name of the speaker; she then filed charges against L. He was arrested in a café in Danzig and transferred to protective custody the same day. On Wednesday he had to appear at the Tiegenhof District Court for defamation of the government. In particular, he was charged with the expression ‘That borders on fraud!’ and the last sentence of his conversation.
At the hearing of evidence, the accused denied having been guilty in any way. He had not started the conversation, but the businessman Kr. Furthermore, he had been in a hurry and couldn’t have made any philosophical speeches while being shaved.
Ms. B., the hairdresser R. and the assistant K. had been summoned as witnesses for the prosecution. Their sworn statements showed that the conversation must have taken place in the form described at the beginning and that the incriminating words had been spoken. The merchant Kr. also had to admit the possibility of the expressions.
The defense counsel, attorney M., initially believed that he could establish from press reports that ‘everyone bitches.’ Furthermore, he believed the value of the witness statements was also problematic. Nowadays, no businessman can be expected to be enthusiastic about the difficult economic situation.
The accused had ‘not intended to provoke’ but had only behaved in the context of the general public. The willfulness of an insult was to be denied, the last sentence was to be regarded as a permissible joke.
The representative of the prosecuting authority, however, considered it a violation of the penal clauses ??? and 105a as given. A criticism about the devaluation of the Gulden should not be allowed to degenerate into an insult to the government. The accused, as an educated person and party comrade, should rather have had the duty of have a calming effect and, as an economist, should have voiced his concerns in a suitable place.
Similarly, the court stated that as an economic leader, the accused should have been aware of the consequences of his actions.
The provocation demanded severe atonement, the only mitigating factor being that the defendant had previously conducted himself impeccably. The sentence was three months in prison.
The criminal trial understandably caused a great stir in Tiegenhof, and the crowded auditorium had to be ????? before the hearing.”
One thing to note about the original article is that only the forename and first one or two letters of the surname appear; there can be no doubt locals would have known who was being discussed, although it’s unclear to me why the need to partially mask identities. Even so, with access to Tiegenhof Address Books and a list of local businesses of the time, I have been able to identify some of the parties. The defendant is obviously “Kurt Lau.” “Gustav Kr.,” I was able to determine referred to the businessman Gustav Kretschmann, Manufaktur und Kurzwaren, manufacturing and haberdashery. (Figure 5) Similarly, the friseur, hairdresser, initial “F.” refers to Sally Folchert (Figure 6), and the defense attorney, initial “M.,” can only be the Rechtsanwalt und Notar, lawyer and notary, “Markfeldt,” as he’s the only lawyer in Tiegenhof at the time whose surname begins with an “M.” (Figure 5)
Before describing the historical context leading to Kurt Lau’s legal troubles, let me say a few words about the Free City of Danzig, in German, Freie Stadt Danzig. It was a semi-autonomous city-state created according to the terms of the Treaty of Versailles following WWI, that existed between 1920 and 1939. It consisted of the Baltic seaport of Danzig along with nearly 200 towns in the surrounding area, including Tiegenhof where my father briefly had his dental practice; Tiegenhof was about 25 miles SE of Danzig. The Free City was not an independent state, but rather was under the protection of the League of Nations. The Free City’s population was 98% German, and by 1936 a majority of the Senate, the Free City’s governing body, was composed of Nazis who agitated for reunification with Germany.
In Post 8, I described Nazi parades my father documented that took place, respectively, in 1933, 1934 and 1935, along the street that fronted the building where he lived and had his dental practice. (Figure 7) On the 5th of April 1935, Hermann Göring (Figure 8), a German political and military leader as well as one of the most powerful figures in the Nazi Party, participated in that parade in support of the slate of Nazi candidates running for parliament in the Free City. Göring’s appearance would have occurred just before these elections on the 7th of April 1935, cited above. These were assuredly very scary times for my father.
Returning now to Kurt Lau’s run-in with the law. Based on events reported in the New York Times on the 3rd of May 1935 (Figure 9), on May 2nd the Free City’s Senate devalued the Danzig Gulden by 42.37 percent. However, according to Peter Hanke, the Nazi government judiciously avoided use of the term “devaluation,” and instead referred to it euphemistically as a “revaluation.” The local populace did not react as the Nazis had expected and wanted. Most people immediately withdrew their savings and purchased any available goods before prices were increased. Less than a week after the devaluation of the Gulden, prices for almost all goods were increased. This is the context in which Kurt Lau and Gustav Kretschmann complained about the considerable losses they’d suffered and caused Kurt Lau to “insult the Nazi government.” Rich indeed. As to the victims of Nazi “insults,” they never received retributive justice.
Note: In this post, I discuss a man with whom my father was once friends, Dr. Herbert Holst, a teacher by profession, and Vice-President of Tiegenhof’s Club Ruschau.
In the previous post, I discussed what I learned about my father’s erstwhile friend Dr. Franz Schimanski. He was a lawyer and notary by profession, and the President of the Club Ruschau, the sports organization my father was a member of in Tiegenhof [today: Nowy Dwór Gdański, Poland]. This is the town in Freistaat Danzig (Free State of Danzig) where my father had his dental practice between 1932 and 1937. In this post, I turn my attention to Dr. Schimanski’s deputy in the Club Ruschau, Dr. Herbert Holst (Figure 1), another former friend, to relate the little I know about him. As with the previous post, I owe a debt of gratitude to Mr. Peter Hanke from “danzig.forum.de,” who uncovered much of the information I relate below.
Around 2012, I began my forensic investigations into my father and his family prompted by seven albums of photos my dad bequeathed me covering from the late 1910’s until his departure for America in 1948. Two of these albums include photos exclusively from the five years my father spent in Tiegenhof and the Free State of Danzig. While many of the images are labelled, often they include only the people’s forenames or nicknames, making it difficult to figure out who they were, how they were connected to my father, and what might have happened to them.
Around the time I was trying to make sense of my father’s collection of portraits, my mother reminded me about two aged friends of his both born in Danzig [today: Gdańsk, Poland], Peter (b. 1923) and Lolo Lau (b. 1925). I wrote about this couple in Post 2, and my visit to see them in Germany in 2012. (Figures 2-3) Peter Lau lived in Tiegenhof from around age 5 to 15, when his father, Kurt Lau (Figure 4), was the Managing Director of the “Tieghenhofer Oelmühle,” the rapeseed oil mill there. For this reason, he recognized many of the people in my father’s pictures and told me the fates of some of them. Interestingly, though Lolo Lau never lived in Tiegenhof, one person she recognized among my father’s photos was Dr. H. Holst, the Vice President of Tiegenhof’s Club Ruschau; she recognized him because he’d seemingly moved to Danzig and been a teacher at the Gymnasium, high school, she attended there. Lolo could not remember what subject he taught, nor, for that matter, his first name, which Peter Hanke recently discovered.
I was able to confirm Dr. Herbert Holst indeed relocated from Tiegenhof based on listings for him in Danzig Address Books for 1940-41 (Figure 5) and 1942 (Figure 6), indicating he’d lived at Adolf Hitlerstraße 97. In these directories, his profession is listed as “Studienrat,” which is an obsolete term for high school professor or teacher.
Astonishingly, Peter Hanke found a book written by a gentleman named Hubert Hundrieser, entitled “Es begann in Masuren:Meinen Kindern erzählt (It Began in Masuria: I Told My Children)” (Figures 7-8), who was a student of Dr. Herbert Holst in the early 1930’s for about 18 months in Tiegenhof and wrote kind words about him (1989: p. 98-99). Peter graciously translated these lines for me (I’ve added footnotes to clarify a few things):
“My mathematics teacher was a bachelor, Dr. Holst, who always gave himself up to being distinguished. I was truly sorry that I had to disappoint him in his subject. It seemed almost embarrassing to him to have to return my mathematics work to me with the grade ‘unsatisfactory’ (a) that I was used to and undoubtedly deserved.
After a teachers’ conference he took me aside, as he had done several times before. He couldn’t make any sense of the fact that I, who would have achieved the grades ‘good’ in the main subjects German, Latin and English, failed so completely in his subject. He offered private tutoring (b). There he wanted to find out, outside the scholarly setting, when and where my mathematical knowledge stopped or began
After the most recent comprehensive examination he could not help but let his arms sink helplessly. . .because with the latest ‘Tertian’ (c) material my mathematical knowledge was lost in impenetrable fog wafts. But Dr. Holst did not dismiss me with a devastating verdict or with the prophecy that I would amount to nothing. Instead, he had his landlady bring us coffee. With the remark that as a future Obersekundaner (d), this once he offered me a cigar (e), and we talked for an hour about things that had nothing to do with school.
Before I said goodbye, he encouraged me. If I could only keep my good grades in languages, I could also have a grade with bad results in his subject, and certainly there would be an angle in my later life where mathematical ignorance would not be decisive.”
(a) At the time grades ranged from 1 (best) to 6 (worst). The “unsatisfactory (ungenügend)” corresponded to “6.”
(b) These lessons were not held in the school building but in the teacher’s apartment. Essentially, Dr. Holst was offering a “school psychological evaluation” to understand the reasons for Hubert Hundrieser’s failure in the mathematical field.
(c) “Tertia” corresponded with mathematical knowledge of grades 8-9 which was inadequate for the 10th or 11th grades, “Sekunda.”
(d) The next-to-last year of high school before the “Oberprima.”
(e) This was a one-time thing, because at that time it was strictly forbidden for “Tertia” students to smoke, ergo the reference to the student’s soon-to-be status as a “Sekunda” student, when smoking would be permitted.
From these few lines, we learn that Dr. Holst was a mathematics teacher.
Peter Hanke uncovered what’s called a “Beamten-Jahrbuch 1939,” that’s to say, a “Civil Servant Yearbook” (Figure 9) for all the civil servants working in Danzig in 1939, including Dr. Holst. Figure 10a includes a partial list of teachers who taught there at the time, the schools where they taught, their birthdays, and their Service Date.
Below is a table transcribing and translating the column headers, and detailing the information specifically for Dr. Holst (Figure 10b):
Column 1 (German), Translation & Information for Dr. Holst
Column 2 (German), Translation & Information for Dr. Holst
Column 3 (German), Translation & Information for Dr. Holst
Column 4 (German), Translation & Information for Dr. Holst
Column 5 (German), Translation & Information for Dr. Holst
Column 6 (German), Translation & Information for Dr. Holst
Amtsbezeichnung
Name
Dienstort, Behörde (Amt, Schule)
Wohnort, Wohnung
Geburtstag
Dienstalter
Official title
Name
Place of employment, authority (office, school)
Place of residence, apartment
Birthday
Seniority (i.e., Service Date)
StudRat (Studienrat)=teacher, professor
Dr. Herbert Holst
Lfr GudrS (Langfuhr Gudrun-Schule)
Ad. Hitlerstr. 97 (Adolf-Hitlerstraße 97)
25th August 1894
1st May 1928
From the above we learn that Dr. Holst was born on the 25th of August 1894, that he began teaching on the 1st of May 1928, and that he taught at the Gudrun-Schule (i.e., Helene Lange School) (Figures 11a-c) located in the Danzig borough of Langfuhr. Peter found one additional item, a roster of teachers from the Gudrun-Schule listing Dr. Holst as one of its professors. (Figure 12)
As I discussed in the previous post, on account of the removal of all Germans following WWII from much of what is today again Poland, it’s been impossible to learn what may have happened to Dr. Holst. Possibly, someone with knowledge of his fate will stumble upon this post and contact me with information.
