Note: In this post, I discuss the process I went through to confirm that I’d incorrectly identified the sinister Nazi Reinhard Heydrich in a group photo taken in 1936/1937 at Castle Kamenz (Kamieniec Ząbkowicki, Poland). To prove this to my satisfaction, I made use of an AI-powered tool.
An astute reader recently informed me the person I had identified in Posts 133, Parts I & II, as Reinhard Heydrich (Figure 1), the Nazi’s notorious “Butcher of Prague,” in a group photo taken at Castle Kamenz in Silesia (today: Kamieniec Ząbkowicki, Poland) in 1936/37 (Figure 2) is not him. The picture in question was originally sent to me by a very reliable informant claiming a noted scholar had recognized Reinhard.
The German gentleman who questioned the identification is a physics teacher in Dresden with an avid interest in history, particularly German military history up to 1918. The man grew up in Gotha in the former German Democratic Republic or East Germany. According to the reader, Reinhard Heydrich’s doppelgänger is Wilhelm Prinz von Hessen-Philippsthal-Barchfeld (1905-1942), and he sent me a link to a photo of him in his military ensemble as well as his bio. (Figure 3) He claims that in the group picture Wilhelm von Hessen, who was head of a “Motor-Sturmbann” of the SS-Standarte 27, is seen wearing his military uniform with the collar tabs “M” for Motor-Sturmbann; even on the highest resolution picture of this gathering, I have difficulty distinguishing the collar tabs.
Since this is my blog the responsibility for fact checking the accuracy of the information I publish in my posts ultimately rests on my shoulders. Given the lengths I’ve gone to caution readers about cloning vital data from other people’s ancestral trees without sourcing the primary documents and verifying their accuracy, I decided I needed to take a similarly rigorous approach in determining whether the amateur historian is accurate.
Let me explain to readers who Wilhelm von Hessen was and whether it is even conceivable he could have been photographed at Castle Kamenz at the time the picture was taken. In 1936/37 Castle Kamenz was owned by Friedrich Heinrich von Preußen (1874-1940) (Figure 4) shown elegantly attired and seated in the front row of the group picture, second from the left. His younger brother was Friedrich Wilhelm von Preussen (1880-1925) (Figure 5) who obviously was not in attendance since he had died prematurely about a dozen years earlier.
Friedrich Wilhelm was a member of the House of Hohenzollern and a great-grandson of King Frederick William III of Prussia. He was married to Princess Agatha of Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst from Ratibor & Corvey (1888-1960) (Figure 6), seated as a widow in the center of the front row (Figure 7); together they had four daughters. (Figure 8) The third daughter, Princess Marianne von Preußen (1913-1983) was married to Wilhelm von Hessen. Thus, based on family connections, it is entirely plausible that he attended the family gathering at Castle Kamenz in 1936/37.
Obviously, the individuals in attendance at the gathering at Castle Kamenz are unidentified though some are familiar to the reader who furnished the group picture. I’m not entirely positive but think Princess Marianne von Preußen is standing in the second row, the third person from the left dressed in white. Though Friedrich Wilhelm and Princess Agatha’s four daughters were born between 1911 and 1919, as young women they are often difficult to tell apart.
The reader who shared the original photo included side-by-side photos of Reinhard Heydrich and the man purported to be him in the group picture. (Figure 9) Given that Heydrich’s identity had putatively been confirmed, I did not compare the images as carefully as I should have when writing Posts 133, Parts I & II. Had I done so initially, I might have observed a few things that later triggered some doubts. First, I noticed in the picture that is assuredly of Heydrich that he had a narrower face, longer nose, and bigger ears than the individual on the right. Second, and this is much more impressionistic, the person in the group picture is broadly smiling, an attribute I would hardly associate with as sadistic an individual as Heydrich.
Trained as an archaeologist steeped in the scientific method, I was still not convinced the person in the group picture was Wilhelm von Hessen. Because the link sent to me by the amateur historian depicting Wilhelm in his military uniform was not conclusive (see Figure 3), I went in search of other pictures of him. Because Wilhelm came from a royal family and married into another royal family, I had the good fortune to find several of them on the Internet and in my own collection of photos.
The first high quality picture I found of Wilhelm von Hessen was taken at the marriage of one of his wife’s sisters, Princess Luise von Preußen (1912-1973) to Moritz Richard Bruno Wilhelm Schmaltz (1901-1983) on the 30th of November 1936, possibly at Castle Kamenz. (Figure 10) It shows Princess Agatha, her four daughters, three sons-in-law, and one grandson. On the very far right in this picture can be seen Princess Marianne von Preußen (1913-1983) and her husband Wilhelm von Hessen. Regrettably, comparing this image of Wilhelm von Hessen to the group photo again yields no definitive answer to the naked eye as to whether it was Wilhelm.
My Internet search continued. I found an undated group photo of Wilhelm von Hessen including him and his four siblings. (Figure 11) He is pictured fourth from the left but once more the evidence is not clear cut that he is the person in the group picture.
Finally, I had the good fortune to find in Geni a high-quality picture of Marianne von Preußen and Wilhelm von Hessen, possibly from around the time they were married on the 30th of January 1933 (Figure 13); at the time, Marianne would have been 20 years old and Wilhelm 28 years, the approximate ages they appear to be in the picture. A simple visual comparison of this image of Wilhelm to the person in the group photo left me fairly convinced they were the same person. I asked several friends who I know from previous experience are adept with visual comparisons, and they agree. Unfortunately, the reader who originally sent me the group photo disagrees.
While I have no expertise in this area, both readers agree the man in the 1936/37 group picture is wearing a Schutzstaffel or SS uniform. However, the informant who sent the group photo claims that Wilhelm von Hessen did not switch from the Wehrmacht to the SS (i.e., German soldiers could not be members of both units simultaneously) until right before the Nazi invasion of France on the 10th of May 1940. Unfortunately, I can’t independently verify when von Hessen joined the SS. On his 30th of November 1936 photo, Wilhelm von Hessen is supposedly wearing a Wehrmacht uniform. (Figure 14) Based on this apparent discrepancy, I theorize the group photo was taken in late 1936 or in 1937 after the November 1936 marriage, by which time Wilhelm von Hessen was then a member of the SS.
Having convinced myself that the amateur historian is correct that the person in the 1936/37 group picture is not Reinhard Heydrich but Wilhelm von Hessen, as a lark I decided to see whether I could find an artificial intelligence (AI) application which could strengthen my case. I found an AI-powered tool which allows me to do precisely what I was looking to do, namely, compare two faces to measure similarity. It is called “FaceShape” and below is the link to this tool:
I’m admittedly not adept at using new technology, so the attraction of FaceShape is that it’s supremely easy to use.
Juxtaposing the images of Reinhard Heydrich and that of the person in the group photo originally sent by the first reader yields a low probability of only 27.04% that they are the same individual. (Figure 15) By comparison when I compare the known image of Wilhelm von Hessen from his sister-in-law Princess Luise’s 1936 marriage to the person in the group photo, FaceShape claims a 100% probability they are the same person. (Figure 16) Another comparison that yielded a 100% match was Wilhelm von Hessen’s photo from his sister-in-law’s marriage to one of him in his military uniform. (Figure 17) Readers can see the results of the various other images I contrasted. (Figures 18-20)
Comparing the photos I found of Wilhelm von Hessen to one another, then to the person in the group picture from 1936/37, sets my mind at ease that it is indeed Wilhelm von Hessen. However, I want to be very clear with readers that FaceShape is not perfect. Based on some of the images I juxtaposed, the application obviously does not work well with poor resolution images; where the person in question is partially blocked by another individual; where siblings are involved that resemble one another or are of similar age; when known pictures of the same person are from earlier in life vs. later in life; or in distinguishing gender.
In closing, I would merely say that I consider FaceShape or similar AI-powered applications to be one tool in an arsenal that genealogists can use to further one’s research and possibly resolve thorny identification questions. It clearly requires human interpretation after the tool is applied to consider the question of whether the results are logical and make sense. While I may not have convinced the original reader that Reinhard Heydrich is not in the group photo taken at Castle Kamenz, I have proven to my satisfaction the person in question is Wilhelm von Hessen, not Heydrich.
Note: In this post I provide a short historical overview and visual sketch of Schloss Kamenz [Kamieniec Ząbkowicki Palace], the estate in Silesia where my third cousin’s father, Dr. Hans Vogel, worked for the von Preußen family during the Nazi Era. I also briefly touch on geopolitical factors that make it improbable the family will ever be able to reclaim the castle.
The von Preußen and Bruck families are not related in any but an “Adam and Evish” sort of way though both have affiliations with Silesia, now mostly located in Poland. The filament of a familial connection passes through my third cousin Agnes Stieda née Vogel whose father Dr. Hans Vogel (Figure 1) was employed by Friedrich Heinrich von Preußen (1874-1940) (Figure 2) and his second cousin Waldemar von Preußen (1889-1945) (Figure 3) following Friedrich’s death in 1940. While employed by the von Preußen family, Dr. Vogel was tasked with archiving the vast collection of art and historical treasures stored at the castle in Kamenz. (Figure 4) Not only did the family employ Hans, but they also provided a measure of protection for his Jewish wife Suse and mischling half-Jewish daughter Agnes during the Nazi Era. For this reason, to this day the family is held in high esteem by the Stiedas.
After a series of blog posts dealing with Reinhard Heydrich, one of the evilest characters in a Nazi panoply full of them, I need to step away from this emotionally draining subject to tackle a lighthearted topic. Ergo, this pictorial essay and a brief history on Schloss Kamenz [Kamieniec Ząbkowicki Palace] that Peter Albrecht von Preußen’s ancestors once owned in Kamenz, Germany [today: Kamieniec Ząbkowicki, Poland].
One side comment before I proceed. Peter Albrecht has been exceptionally gracious and helpful in tracking down and sending me an enormous amount of illustrative and research matter, related not only to his von Preußen ancestors but also to my Bruck family. For example, as it relates to my antecedents, Peter uncovered two wills archived in Opole, Poland that I ordered that may possibly be related to my great-great-grandfather, Samuel Bruck (1808-1863), the first-generation owner of the Bruck’s “Prinz von Preußen” Hotel in Ratibor [today: Raciborz, Poland]. Though I’ve had them translated and interpreted by my fourth cousin, they are challenging in the extreme to make sense of because they are handwritten in Fraktur calligraphy and never give a precise date of birth of the testator, a man named Samuel Bruck but likely not my ancestor. That said, Peter has uncovered other materials that are definitively related to “my” Samuel Bruck, and, though somewhat dry, will form the basis of a future blog post as I discuss recent intriguing findings about him.
As I proceed to give readers a pictorial sketch of Schloss Kamenz [Kamieniec Ząbkowicki Palace], let me start by providing an historical overview of the castle. The first owner was Princess Marianne of the Netherlands (1810-1883) (Figure 5) who in 1838 commissioned the most prominent German architect of the time, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, to design the structure. Noted for his neo-Classical and neo-Gothic buildings, most famously found in and around Berlin, Schinkel created a monumental palace in the form of a medieval castle.
Aware that he was dying of stomach cancer and having no surviving siblings and no children of his own, FH sold castle Kamenz along with the nearby “castle” in Seitenberg [today: Stronie Śląskie, Poland] (Figure 10), and all its belongings to his second cousin, Waldemar von Preußen (1889-1945), nephew of Germany’s last Emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II. (Figure 11) Upon FH’s death, Prince Waldemar transferred the cash to FH’s trust to be divided equally in five parts to FH’s nephew, Friedrich Karl Erich Albrecht (EA) von Preußen (1901-1976) (Figure 12), and four nieces, the daughters of FH’s youngest brother, Friedrich Wilhelm (FW) von Preußen (1880-1925). (Figure 13)
Prince Waldemar fled castle Kamenz as the Red Army was approaching in 1945, dying in Tutzing, Bavaria on May 2nd, six days before the official end of World War II in Europe. Obviously, the castle was abandoned along with all the artworks and belongings. Relocated Poles looted the castle and Russians burned and pillaged it. According to Peter Albrecht, however, Polish citizens report that 14 to 17 railroad cargo trains worth of movables were taken by the Russians and shipped to an unknown destination. The marble used for exterior construction was salvaged to construct the Congress Hall at the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw.
Following Prince Waldemar’s death, rights to the castle that he obviously no longer had physical control over passed to his younger brother, Sigismund von Preußen (1896-1978) (Figure 14), then in turn to his son Alfred Friedrich Ernst Heinrich Conrad von Preußen (1924–2013), “Uncle Alfred” (Figure 15) as he is known to Peter Albrecht. Shortly before Prince Alfred’s death in 2013, he transferred all rights to the estate to Peter including the contents of the 14 to 17 railroad cargo trains, should they materialize.
A brief word on an intriguing aside. Schloss Kamenz or Kamieniec Ząbkowicki Palace, as it is currently known, is situated within Poland. In a minor way, it figured into the negotiations leading to the eventual reunification of Germany in 1989. The “Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany,” or the “Two Plus Four Agreement,” is the international agreement that allowed for the reunification of Germany in the 1990s. The reference to “Two Plus Four” means that the agreement was negotiated between the Federal Republic of Germany and the Germany Democratic Republic (GDR), along with the Four Powers which had occupied Germany at the end of World War II, namely, France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States. This treaty replaced the Potsdam Agreement, and involved the Four Powers renouncing all rights they held in Germany, allowing Germany to become fully sovereign the following year.
As I discussed in Post 132, the “provisional border” between Poland and Germany following World War II was known as the Oder-Neisse line. This partition meant that most of Germany’s former eastern provinces, including East Prussia and most of Silesia as well as the eastern parts of Brandenburg and Pomerania, including Danzig, were awarded to Poland and the Soviet Union. (Figure 16) The German populations of these areas either fled, as in the case of Peter Albrecht’s ancestors, or were expelled. The GDR accepted the border in 1950, but the Federal Republic of Germany always demurred considering it as provisional, pending a finalized peace settlement. However, as a condition of the Final Settlement, East and West Germany agreed to the existing border with Poland, with the renunciation and exclusion of any other territorial claims, in other words Germany’s former eastern provinces.
The biggest issue for the Soviet Union at the time the “Two Plus Four Agreement” was being negotiated was Germany’s former territory of East Prussia, which today includes the Kaliningrad Oblast, the westernmost part of Russia. The other indirect issue for the Soviets was Poland which was regarded as a satellite state in the Soviet sphere of influence but was never part of the Soviet Union. Because the Oder-Neisse line was ultimately upheld as the border between the reunified Germany and Poland, any possibility that Peter’s family could make clams on Schloss Kamenz was obviated.
This was true at least until Poland joined the European Union (EU) in 2004. Peter’s family could now potentially make a claim for return of the castle. However, because of the exorbitant cost for the reconstruction of the castle, estimated at well north of $300 million, they have not yet done so. To date, the EU has already provided the city of Kamieniec Ząbkowicki €750,000 (more than $800,000) to restore the mausoleum and €5 million ($5,362,000) to fix the roof and the small copper clad spires atop the four corner towers. If the Polish government were to return the castle, they would do so in “as is” condition and the family would be compelled to reimburse the EU for all the work done to date.
The possibility exists, nonetheless, that Peter could make a claim for any of the castle’s goods secreted in the Soviet Union should they ever resurface.
Much of the information on castle Kamenz presented below is derived from personal communication with Peter. While there are multiple features that are part of the castle or grace the gardens surrounding Schloss Kamenz, I will discuss only two, the boiler house and the mausoleum. As previously mentioned, Nicholas Albrecht received the castle from his mother in 1873 upon his marriage, and in 1883 he started to build a large steam boiler house. (Figure 17) The conversion from coal to steam heat took place at this time, although the castle still had no sanitary installations.
Upon the arrival of relocated Poles to the area of Schloss Kamenz the bodies in the mausoleum were disinterred and defiled, and reportedly hung from trees. (Figure 22) Before they could be set ablaze, however, some virtuous Polish citizen calmed the rioters and reburied the bodies, carefully marking their locations on a map. Before this concerned citizen died, he gave his map to the President of the local historical society, and in 2017, the City of Kamenz and the Catholic Church of Poland exhumed the graves and held a funeral service at the reconsecrated mausoleum. (Figures 23-24)
According to what Peter reports, the European Union has provided funding for the eventual restoration of Castle Kamenz to its full glory. To date only the mausoleum and part of the main hall of the castle proper have been renovated. (Figures 25-32)
In closing, I understand if readers are overwhelmed by the von Preußen family tree. My personal interest is trying to understand how the Bruck’s Hotel in Ratibor [today: Racibórz. Poland] owned by three generations of my family, obtained a “franchise” to use the “Prinz von Preußen” surname. This entails nailing down exactly when the building that eventually became the Bruck’s Hotel was built, whether its construction preceded or coincided with my family’s acquisition of the establishment, and, if it preceded it, when exactly my family purchased it. I’m uncertain whether historic documents survive to answer these questions. And, finally, because of our collaboration, Peter (Figure 33) has now found some not-so-distant ancestors that hail from Ratibor, suggesting our families may have had business dealings long ago. So, while this post may be of limited interest to many readers, I am pursuing it to better understand my family’s deep-seated connection to Ratibor and Silesia.
Note: In this second part of Post 133, I highlight an extraordinary photograph sent to me by a reader, Peter Albrecht von Preußen, featuring high-level Nazis taken at his family’s von Preußen estate in Silesia in around 1936 or 1937 in Kamenz, Germany [today: Kamieniec Ząbkowicki, Poland]. The picture allows me to explore two issues, namely, support for the National Socialists among the aristocracy and noblemen and the so-called “Gay Nazis myth.” The von Preußens were distinguished members of the royal House of Hohenzollern, the family from which Germany’s last Emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II, came from.
In part I of Post 133, I introduced readers to Mr. Peter Albrecht von Preußen (Figure 1), a German living in the United States who is a descendant of the royal German House of Hohenzollern. Germany’s last Emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II, who abdicated the throne in 1918 following Germany’s defeat in World War I, hails from this family. In fact Kaiser Wilhelm II is Peter’s second cousin three times removed. (Figure 2)
Even more distantly, Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom is Peter’s second cousin five times removed. (Figure 3) As a further bit of trivia, Queen Victoria married her first cousin Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha in 1840, and together they had nine children. Their offspring married into royal and noble families across the European continent, earning Victoria the moniker “the grandmother of Europe” and spreading hemophilia in European royalty. Enough about sovereign relationships.
As I mentioned in part I of this post, Peter first contacted me on the 7th of March, sharing with me a unique group photo taken in 1936 or 1937 (Figure 4) at his family’s castle in Kamenz, Germany [today: Kamieniec Ząbkowicki, Poland]. (Figure 5) What makes this photo so unusual is that it shows the notorious Reinhard Heydrich (Figure 6), principal architect of the Holocaust, known as “The Butcher of Prague” and other frightful epithets, along with other high-ranking Nazis visiting the von Preußen estate in Silesia; seated in the front row of this photos is Peter’s great-great-uncle, Friedrich Heinrich von Preußen (Figure 7), the prince who protected my half-Jewish third cousin Agnes Stieda and her family during World War II.
As I explained in part I, Friedrich Heinrich was openly homosexual. Several of the high-ranking Nazis who visited Kamenz on the day the photo was taken were also bisexual or arguably bisexual. More on this below.
Beyond discussing the high-level Nazis who visited Castle Kamenz, the photo allows me to explore two topics of broader interest, namely, the question of support or resistance among the nobles and aristocrats to National Socialism and the issue of gays in the ranks of the National Socialists. As a lead-in, I would note that if I was exploring these subjects as an academic endeavor rather than simply providing context for my ancestral research, I would take a much more rigorous intellectual approach. For my purposes, however, I simply want to provide some basic background.
Before I discuss the senior Nazis photographed at Castle Kamenz, let me first attempt to answer a question I initially asked Peter after he sent me the picture, namely, what occasioned the visit by the Nazis to the von Preußen estate.
Readers will recall that in the first part of Post 133, I discussed the relationship that Prinz Friedrich Heinrich von Preußen had with members of the “Organization Consul” during the 1920s. The Consul was a right-wing organization opposed to the harsh terms imposed on Germany by the Versailles Treaty and dedicated to regime change by violent means. It was formed by members of the disbanded Freikorps group Marine Brigade Ehrhardt and operated in the Weimar Republic between 1920 and 1922, when it was banned. Following the ban, Prince Friedrich Heinrich, also opposed to the “repressive measures” of the Versailles Treaty, allowed its former adherents to conduct live fire exercises at Kamenz. Many supporters of the banned Organization Consul went on to join the National Socialist Party.
While never a member of the Nazi Party, Friedrich Heinrich’s relationship with future Nazi party elite no doubt stems from the friendships he established during the 1920s. Given his sexuality, it makes sense that he would have associated with other gays. Regardless of his sexual and political leanings, however, it seems highly unlikely that Friedrich Heinrich would have been in any position to reject an overture by Reinhard Heydrich to visit Castle Kamenz for a few days. It’s safe to assume that Reinhard Heydrich and his entourage invited themselves to the von Preußen estate.
Charles Edward, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (1884-1954) (Figure 8) was the last sovereign duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha until 1918 when the Prussian monarchy and Germany’s 22 constituent monarchies were abolished following the German Empire’s defeat in World War I. Apropos of what I mentioned earlier about Queen Victoria, Charles Edward was a male-line grandson of her and Prince Albert. Though he spent his childhood years in the United Kingdom he was sent to Germany in his mid-teens. His support for his adopted country during World War I led to him being viewed with increased hostility in the United Kingdom, where he was eventually stripped of his British titles. After this, he drifted towards far-right politics, and later became involved in the Nazi regime. After World War II, he was fined by a Denazification court and lost ownership of land in what later became East Germany.
Reinhard Heydrich (1904-1942) (Figure 10) was talked about in part I of Post 133, so I refer readers to my earlier discussion for more details. I will only add the following quote from Wikipedia about Heydrich’s assassination because it explains why Kurt Daluege, another visitor at Castle Kamenz in 1936 or 1937, succeeded Heydrich as the Deputy/Acting Protector of Bohemia and Moravia: “Heydrich was mortally wounded in Prague on 27 May 1942 as a result of Operation Anthropoid. He was ambushed by a team of Czech and Slovak soldiers who had been sent by the Czechoslovak government-in-exile to kill the Reich-Protector; the team was trained by the British Special Operations Executive. Heydrich died from his injuries a week later. Nazi intelligence falsely linked the Czech and Slovak soldiers and resistance partisans to the villages of Lidice and Ležáky. Both villages were razed; the men and boys aged 14 and above were shot and most of the women and children were deported and murdered in Nazi concentration camps.”
Kurt Daluege (1897-1946) (Figure 11) was chief of the national uniformed Ordnungspolizei (Order Police) of Nazi Germany. Following Reinhard Heydrich’s assassination in 1942, he served as Deputy Protector for the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Daluege directed the German measures of retribution for Heydrich’s assassination, including the Lidice massacre. Wikipedia notes other war crimes of which Daluege was guilty: “During the war in 1941, he attended a mass shooting of 4,435 Jews by Police Battalion 307 near Brest-Litowsk and a mass shooting of Jews in Minsk. Furthermore, in October 1941 Daluege signed deportation orders for Jews from Germany, Austria and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, to Riga and Minsk. On 7 July 1942, he attended a conference led by Himmler which discussed the ‘enlargement’ of Operation Reinhard, the secretive Nazi plan to mass-murder Polish Jews in the General Government district of occupied Poland, and other matters involving SS and police policies in the east.” After the end of World War II, he was extradited to Czechoslovakia, tried, convicted, and executed in 1946.
Gottfried Graf von Bismarck-Schönhausen (1901-1949) (Figure 12) was a grandson of the 19th century Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, well-known to readers. He was a member of the Nazi Party and in 1933 he was elected to the Reichstag as a Nazi member. In 1935 he became chairman of the regional council (Regierungspräsident) for Stettin [today: Szczecin, Poland], and later also for Potsdam. By 1942, presumably disillusioned by the course of the war and Germany’s worsening prospects, he reached out to other members of the German aristocracy who were working against the Nazi regime with the aim of beginning negotiations with the Allies; some of these aristocrats were involved in the 20th of July 1944 Plot to assassinate Hitler. Despite being aware of these plans and having connections to the plotters, after the failed attempt, von Bismarck merely lost his position in the Reichstag and was expelled from the SS but was not tortured. His powerful connections and name recognition saved him, though he was nonetheless incarcerated in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp until the camp was liberated by the Red Army in April 1945. In September 1949 Bismarck and his wife were killed in a car accident near Bremen in the American Occupation Zone.
The presence of the aristocrats and Nazi Party members including Charles Edward, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha and Gottfried von Bismarck-Schönhausen at Prinz Friedrich Heinrich von Preußen’s Silesian estate in 1936 or 1937 attests to an ongoing relationship between former members of the monarchy and the National Socialists.
In layman’s terms, below I will attempt to succinctly explain what may initially have attracted noblemen and monarchists to National Socialism and some events that took place during the 1930s when Hitler consolidated power often at the expense of the aristocrats. To understand the extent of their resistance to the Nazi regime in this period, I asked my fourth cousin, Dr. Frank Thomas Koch (Figure 13), for some background on this question, so some of the following discussion is a synopsis of what he explained.
The National Socialists were adherents of the so-called Völkisch movement, a German ethno-nationalist movement active from the late 19th century through to the Nazi era and beyond. The principal belief of ethno-nationalists is that nations are defined based on a shared heritage, such as common language, common faith, and a common ethnic ancestry. Individuals who don’t share this common heritage are deemed to be second-class citizens. Völkisch nationalists generally considered Jews to be from a different Volk (“race” or “folk”) than Germans and deemed them to be inferior. This was the central tenet which led to the Holocaust. Many noblemen also adhered to Völkisch nationalism, thus drew common cause with the National Socialists in this regard. Other aristocrats and monarchists, however, kept a critical distance from National Socialism, viewing Hitler as an “upstart” and the Sturmabteilung (SA, literally “Storm Detachment” or Stormtroopers) as “uneducated thugs.”
Very quickly after his ascension to power in 1933, Hitler eliminated critics within his administration from the noble classes and the Wehrmacht, the German Army. During the so-called Röhm Putsch in 1934, Hitler had Ernst Röhm, leader of the SA, who had been an early ally but whom he saw as a growing threat, executed by the SS during the “Night of the Long Knives.” In the Blomberg-Fritsch affair of 1938, Hitler succeeded, in the context of partly contrived stories, in deposing Werner von Fritsch, Commander-in-Chief of the Army, and Werner von Blomberg, Minister of War, who had dared to object to his aggressive foreign policy. Then, during the September Conspiracy in 1938, the so-called “Valkyrie Conspiracy,” Hitler faced the first attempt by Germans to bring down his regime; headed by the Chief of the German General Staff at the time, Franz Halder, it was supported by many senior army generals. Halder lost his nerve and the coup attempt was ultimately undermined because of the Munich Agreement when France and Great Britain accepted Hitler’s word that signing away the Sudetenland was Hitler’s “last” territorial ambition, and they called the agreement “Peace in our Time.”
The attitude of the Hohenzollerns was one of opportunism. By nurturing the hope that the monarchy would be restored, the Nazis hoped to enlist the support of Germany’s last Emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II. (Figure 14) Support for the Nazis among the Hohenzollerns and the constituent monarchies was a mixed bag, so to speak. So, for example in the case of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s eldest son, Crown Prince Wilhelm, who had initially promoted the rise of the Nazis later promised in July 1941 to make himself available to the resistance, only to reverse course again shortly thereafter. More clearly aligned against the Nazis, by contrast, was the House of Wittelsbach from Bavaria, notably Crown Prince Rupprecht.
As World War II ground on and Germany’s fortunes changed and their atrocities came to light, an increasing number of initially enthusiastic and moderately supportive grandees distanced themselves from National Socialism and became opponents of the regime. Aristocrats often played a leading role within resistance circles, and military officers from noble families also played a central role in a series of specific attempts to assassinate Hitler. This was particularly in evidence during the 20th of July Plot.
One curious side note. Peter Albrecht shared with me a series of news articles he discovered related to a purported “purge of princes” by Hitler in 1939, including from his royal House of Hohenzollern. The story was printed in London’s “Daily Herald” (Figures 15a-b); New York’s “Daily News” (Figures 16a-b); and the “Cleveland Plain Dealer” (Figure 17) on the 14th of November 1939. As it turns out, several weeks prior, Peter’s great-grandfather, Joachim Albrecht von Preußen (b. 27 September 1876-d. 24 October 1939) (Figure 18) had passed away of natural causes. Since Joachim Albrecht had been friends with the head of Germany’s Foreign Office, the story was shared with correspondents in London. While no foul play was ever suspected, the foreign press, intentionally or unintentionally, mischaracterized Joachim’s death as part of a “monarchist putsch” by Hitler, possibly for propaganda purposes. Regardless, contrary to what western papers reported at the time, there was no monarchist purge in 1939.
The above is all I will say about aristocratic support for and opposition to National Socialism. Next, I want to move on to a discussion of the question of homosexuality within the ranks of the Nazi Party.
There is a widespread and pervasive myth claiming that homosexuals were prevalent and prominent as a group within the Nazi Party, a falsity referred to as the “Gay Nazis myth.” As the German cultural historian Andreas Pretzel has written in his article “Schwule Nazis (Homosexual Nazis),” “The legend of the homosexual Nazi has been used for decades after the Nazi era to deny or marginalize the extent and intensity of homosexual persecution, as well as to deny the memory of, discredit or prevent the memory of persecuted homosexual men.”
The impression that homosexuality was ubiquitous in Nazi organizations was created by antifascist leftists, including the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). The clause in the German Criminal Code that criminalized homosexuality was adopted in 1871 and was referred to as Paragraph 175. While both the SPD and the KPD were supporters of repealing this provision, both parties opportunistically used accusations of homosexuality against opponents. For example, in what is referred to as the Röhm affair of 1931 and 1932, anti-Nazis including the SPD, publicly disclosed Ernst Röhm’s homosexuality in an apparent bid to delay the Nazi seizure of power when supporters of the democratic Weimar Republic justifiably sensed their time was running out.
According to a footnote in the Wikipedia entry on “Gay Nazis myth,” there are three events which firmly established the stereotype that homosexuality was a characteristic of the Nazi system: (1) the just mentioned Röhm scandal of 1931 and 1932; (2) the Reichstag fire in 1933 when the parliament building was destroyed and a clique of homosexual stormtroopers was blamed; and (3) the previously discussed Night of the Long Knives or the Röhm Putsch in 1934 when a large number of leaders of the SA, many allegedly gay chieftains promoted by Röhm, were liquidated for political reasons. While leftists have largely been blamed for spreading the idea that homosexuals were prominent in the Nazi Party, it benefited Hitler to exaggerate the extent of homosexuality within the SA to justify his 1934 purge. Thus, it can be argued that the avowedly homophobic Nazis themselves contributed to the notion that gays were widespread in their ranks.
According to Andreas Pretzel, “What role homosexuality actually played in the Nazi movement, however, is largely unanswered, because important sources, such as those on the murdered homosexual SA leaders, are missing, because they were destroyed after the murder campaigns of the summer of 1934. Therefore, there have been various attempts to explain the significance of homosexuality for the Nazi movement through gender-historical perspectives and to find explanations as to why the avowedly homophobic Nazi movement attracted homosexuals, tolerated them for a while and even allowed some to rise to leadership and executive positions.” What is clear though is that while some gay men joined the Nazi Party, there is no evidence they were overrepresented.
In closing, let me return to the high-level Nazis that visited Castle Kamenz and Friedrich Heinrich von Preußen in 1936 or 1937. Friedrich Heinrich is clearly known to have been gay. His Wikipedia entry confirms this, as does a 1959 article in Der Spiegel magazine entitled “Die Insel der Wachteln” speaking of the time Friedrich spent on Italy’s Isle of Capri where gays often congregated. By contrast, the Wikipedia entries for the other attendees make no mention of their sexuality, and in fact state all were married with children. This is not surprising given that the Nazi movement was admittedly homophobic; it’s likely gays would have stayed “in the closet” and been married to mask their sexual proclivities.
According to Peter Albrecht, however, both Karl Daluege and Gottfried Graf Bismarck-Schönhausen were bisexual, and Reinhard Heydrich was also arguably bisexual. The source of this information is one of Peter’s friends, Warren Allen Smith, who wrote a book entitled “Who’s Who in Hell: A Handbook and International Directory for Humanists, Freethinkers, Naturalist, Rationalists and Non-theists”; while researching this book Mr. Smith came across information confirming these Nazis’ sexuality. Fundamentally, however, the war crimes these individuals committed is not a reflection of their sexuality, merely evidence they were inherently evil.
REFERENCES
Anti-monarchist purge by Gestapo rumored. (1939, November 14). Cleveland Plain Dealer.
“Die Insel der Wachteln” (1959 May 5). Der Spiegel, (19/1959).
Name ex-Kaiser in bomb plot: Report royalist, army purge. (1939, November 14). Daily News.
New purge of princes. (1939, November 14). Daily Herald.
Pretzel, Andreas (2014). Schwule Nazis: Narrative und Desiderate. In Michael Schwartz (Ed.) Homosexuelle im Nationalsozialismus (pp. 69-76). Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg.
Smith, Warren Allen. Who’s Who in Hell: A Handbook and International Directory for Humanists, Freethinkers, Naturalist, Rationalists and Non-theists. Barricade Books, 2000.
“I am terribly afraid, but nevertheless I will go with them. Possibly God actually needs me now for the first time in my life.”—an elderly Jewish lady on the eve of her deportation to a concentration camp
(The above was said to Martin Niemöller (1892-1984), a German theologian and Lutheran Pastor, one of the founders of the Confessing Church, which opposed the Nazification of German Protestant churches. For his opposition to the Nazis’ state control of the churches, Niemöller was imprisoned in Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps from 1938 to 1945. He is best known for his opposition to the Nazi regime during the late 1930s and for his widely quoted poem “First they came …” The poem has many different versions, one of which begins “First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Communist,” and concludes, “Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”)
Note: In this post I discuss first-hand wartime accounts written by my distant cousin Susanne “Suse” Vogel née Neisser (Figure 1), mother of my third cousin Agnes Stieda née Vogel, that I unveiled in earlier chronicles. I detail how I was able to get these German narratives transcribed and translated, and further elaborate on some of Suse’s tragic narrative.
Following publication of Post 64 on Dr. Hans Martin Erasmus Vogel (1897-1973) (Figure 2), my third cousin Agnes Stieda née Vogel’s father, my friend Ms. Madeleine Isenberg, affiliated with the Jewish Genealogical Society of Los Angeles, forwarded the post to Ms. Julie Drinnenberg from Hofgeismar, Germany. Julie is the educational director of the Jewish department at the museum there which, as it so happens, is 45 minutes away from Kassel, Germany, where Dr. Vogel was the director of the art museum from 1946 to 1961. Prior to reading my article, Julie was unaware of Dr. Vogel’s importance to the Kasseler Museumlandschaft and conceded in an email that his contributions to the museum have not been appropriately acknowledged and promised to research this.
This was the beginning of a very lively and productive email exchange. At the time Julie first contacted me in October 2019, my wife and I had just returned from a cruise to Alaska that originated in Vancouver, Canada, where we had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Vogel’s daughter and granddaughter, Agnes (Figure 3) and Nicki Stieda. (Figure 4) Agnes’s personal papers and family photographs are in Nicki’s possession, who organized and graciously allowed me to peruse and take pictures of all of them. Among Agnes’s family documents is her mother, Suse Vogel née Neisser’s diary (Figure 5), which I would later learn was written roughly between the start of 1944 and April 20, 1945. The handwriting is crabbed in German, and for this reason I only photographed the first few pages of what amounts to perhaps 35 full-length sheets of paper, never anticipating I could get it transcribed and translated.
Prior to connecting with Julie Drinnenberg, and ever meeting Agnes and Nicki Stieda, I had stumbled upon a 34-page letter archived in the “John Henry Richter Collection” at the Leo Baeck Institute written by Agnes’s mother. This letter was written as a tribute to her father, Dr. Ernst Neisser, who committed suicide in 1942 after being told by the Nazis to report to an “old age transport,” a euphemism for being deported to a concentration camp, tantamount to being murdered. The letter, typed in German on the 28th of March 1947 (Figures 6a-b), was sent from Kassel, Germany to Suse Vogel’s first cousin in St. Louis, Missouri, Liselotte “Lilo” Dieckmann née Neisser. (Figure 7)
Fast forward. After establishing contact with Julie Drinnenberg, I mentioned Suse Vogel’s 1947 letter, telling her she might be interested in it to obtain more background on Dr. Vogel’s family. It was at this moment that Julie offered to translate the letter into English for me, an offer I immediately and unabashedly accepted. Below, I will quote some of the more poignant passages from this letter, so readers can get a sense of what a dreadful and horrific time people of Jewish background experienced during WWII.
As an afterthought, after Julie had translated Suse Vogel’s letter, I mentioned I had photographed the first few pages of her diary and sent her the images. Julie passed them along to one of her colleagues, Gabriele Hafermaas, who astonishingly reported she could decipher much of the crabbed handwriting. Julie again offered to help, by having her workmate transcribe Suse’s journal. I forwarded this proposal to Agnes and Nicki, who accepted it and soon sent Julie a PDF of the entire memoir. Gabriele provided a remarkable transcription. Inevitably, some words and sentences in the diary are illegible. Often, when specific people were mentioned, Suse used nicknames or letter abbreviations in the event her diary fell into the wrong hands; thus, not all people are identified by name. Using an online application, entitled “DeepL,” I translated the text; this sometimes resulted in awkward sentences that were nonetheless generally comprehendible. I highlight some passages below having taken some liberties in rewording phrases to capture what I think Suse may have been trying to say, while fully conceding I may be off the mark.
While Suse Vogel’s 1947 letter to her first cousin postdates her 1944-1945 diary, chronologically, it deals with events that took place in September-October 1942, so I begin with the more recent document.
COMMENTS ON SECTION BELOW: Suse Vogel’s parents were Dr. Ernst Neisser (1863-1942) and Margarethe Neisser née Pauly (1876-1941). (Figure 8) Margarethe was institutionalized in a sanatorium for the last few years of her life and committed suicide there in 1941. Prior to her father’s suicide in 1942, Suse Vogel was attempting to obtain exit visas for her father and aunt, ergo the reference to Sweden.
“My father who would never give up in his life, whose whole character was insistence and steadfastness, who loathed any kind of running away, who perceived life anyhow as good as he was good himself – he did not throw it away, although he was consumed by the longing for my mother. But the old doctor who of course assessed his fast progressing heart disease, knew that should he be ripped out of tender and loving care, he would not survive in the hangmen’s hands. He saw clearly that it would not only be an agonizing and awkward death for himself but would be also for me a poisoned memory forever if I had been forced to let him die in the hands of those murderers. Indeed, I accepted it, as I was under no illusion. Also, I had far too much respect for his decision. Still, deep inside, I did not accept anything at all, did not think seriously of such a terrible option. I believed in Sweden, his rescue, and his recovery there. Discussions about suicide—what a horrible word for the forced act in desperate misery—had been the daily fare in those times.”
_________________________________________
COMMENTS ON SECTION BELOW: “Aunt Lise” was Dr. Ernst Neisser’s cousin, although to date I have been unable to determine how many degrees of separation existed between them. At the time of their suicide, they resided together. Dr. Ernst Neisser had multiple nicknames, including “Ernstle.”
“In a confidential talk Aunt Lise had advised me of her resolution. ‘I am going with Ernstle,’ she told me in a determined and conclusive tone. And, almost off-handedly, she had added, ‘I should like to be buried in German soil. Berlin is my home.’ And once Aunt Lise who always had disliked heroics told me unexpectedly: ‘Whatever will happen, you can always say to yourself one thing, that you did everything possible that a human being can do for another, remember that!’ At that moment I was almost embarrassed by those exaggerated words—but how much I was comforted by these loving words later, when second thoughts and misgivings, which never abandons survivors, tortured me.”
COMMENTS ON SECTION BELOW: Dr. Ernst Neisser and his cousin Luise “Lise” Neisser lived together at Eichenallee 25 in the Charlottenburg District of Berlin. (Figure 9) Suse and her husband Hans Vogel lived in the Berlin suburb of Potsdam. Two other nicknames for Dr. Ernst Neisser were “Väterchen,” affectionate term for father, and “Bärchen,” or “little bear.” The “honorable privy councilor” referred to below was a principled lawyer, Mr. Karl von Lewinsky (1872-1951), who worked tirelessly on behalf of his Jewish clients to help them obtain exit visas to leave Germany before and during WWII. As followers can read, Ernst and Lise Neisser were ordered to report for deportation at 8 a.m. on the 1st of October 1942, and both likely attempted suicide in the early morning hours on that day. “Mundi” is Ernst Neisser’s granddaughter (Figure 10) and Suse Vogel’s daughter, Agnes Stieda née Vogel, my 93-year old third cousin.
Suse alludes to what can only be referred to as “mob or herd mentality,” when otherwise “rational” Germans spotted Jews on the street during Nazi rallies and heaped abuse or worse on them.
“I told myself, I would go home [the 30th of September 1942] and only the following day go to Eichenallee. The unrest surely was an understandable reaction of my nerves. But I heard this voice – not any voice, but ‘that’ voice, the mysterious companion of my life. I heard it very rarely, but if I heard it, it was distinct, irresistible—’I had to obey!’ I jumped off the tram and went to Eichenallee.
Despite the inner instruction I was in a good mood, full of hope, like I hadn’t been for a long time. Now everything had to go well. The honorable privy councilor surely was the sign from heaven that everything would go well. My beloved Väterchen would be happy, too. Oh, I was looking forward to finding him working at his writing table, to seeing his meaningful dark eyes shining towards me. The usual thoughts of worries touched me only hazily. . . I walked through the cellar entrance, passed the flat of the friendly caretaker-family, and went upstairs to the flat. No need to ring the bell, the good deaf aunt never heard it anyway. Strange, she was not in the kitchen—though it was time for the evening meal. And, there was no light in the living room—though it was already dusk.
I knocked at the door and entered. In the room was silence, the two old ones were sitting next to the window, their silver-white heads leaned towards each other. My heart grew frozen—something had happened. ‘What happened?’ I whispered. Only then did they notice me. Quickly my father came towards me, serious, changed and without the tenderness that had connected us our entire lives. ‘You, my child, where are you coming from at this time? I have no use for you now!’ he said firmly, with the authority that he surely had used with other people often enough but never with me. I didn’t answer but only said startled: ‘Aunt Lise, what’s the matter?’ Silently she pointed to the table. There was laying the order of deportation. I don’t know what was written on it, I never read it. Only the words were burnt into my mind. . . transport to Terezín tomorrow October 1st, 1942. Tomorrow at 8 o’clock in the morning, not in three weeks or eight days, or at least three days, like it used to be with other people. No, tomorrow morning at 8 o’clock. This could only be a mistake. It had never happened before, only perhaps as revenge—I was thinking ‘it must, it had to be a mistake!’ It was the only moment that I remember when I implored my father not to act immediately. Indeed, I knew why he was so serious, so determined. We did not talk much, ‘Please. Please, wait! For your sake, yes!’
I hastened away. The phone box was empty. It was like in a nightmare, only much worse. I said to myself, ‘Lord help me that I get the connection to Potsdam, hope that Hans is at home, hope that he hears the ringing.’ He answered, terrified—we had always anticipated something bad happening. We had a conversation most taciturn: ‘You have to come immediately!’ ‘Something bad?’ he asked. ‘Yes!’ ‘I am coming!’ ‘But please eat something first!’ ‘Yes!’ Reading these words, you might think, ‘How can someone think of eating in a situation like this?’ I thought like this in former times, but by now I know. You can think of eating even in the hour of death, you can think about drinking, a warm blanket, a piece of bread during a bitter farewell.
By now I know that simple people were way ahead in this regard and in many other respects. They are connected to the simple truths of life in a deep and confident way, without those superficial feelings, the over-refined sensibilities, the cluttered idealisms that the sophisticated citizen dwells on for a long time. All this, the daily bread, a shroud, money to pay with, a roof above one’s head and a warm room. . .if it is also blessed with love, it is enough.
After my call to Potsdam I wanted to call the director of the sanatorium where my mother had been for many years and died. My father, too, had been living there, where we believed him to be secure and safe. And now the number—I could’t remember the telephone number! I had used it a thousand times, believed it to be etched in my mind – and now I’d forgotten it! The phone box was in darkness—I have no matches, and time was racing, racing—I had to get hold of the professor on the phone—’help heavenly host!’ And on its own my hand dialed the right number. ‘Herr Professor, it is life-endangering! Do you think, you could help once again?’ He understood at once. Paused. In a suppressed voice he said, ‘Please come immediately, I am waiting here for you!’
I returned to my father. ‘Poor beloved Bärchen—please wait!’ He was nodding: ‘But child—tomorrow morning at 8:00—there’s not much time—look, what’s the use of it?!’
At the sanatorium, there was the professor and his employee. It was the same one who went to bat for us exactly one year and a day before. It was when they even wanted to tear my mother out of the coffin for testing to see if a suicide ‘was in doubt.’ The professor and his employee—they also had been angels in the valley of the shadow of death. When at that time my mother should have been buried without a pastor in an unknown grave, they offered us their morgue cellar where we were able to celebrate a small catacomb obsequy with some friends. Of course, this was absolutely forbidden. The staff was believed to be reliable, but of course, you never knew. What if someone had denounced us? But nobody did so. People toddled into the cellar and wanted to have a look at my mother. She had been in a psychiatric sanatorium where there was so much anguish and awfulness. A beautiful dead like a Gothic image of saints. They all stood in front of her in silence and whispered to each other, shook our hands shyly. If there had been need for proof of immortality, looking at this beautiful, consummate face it became clear: such a conversion after three years of an awful soul-wrecking illness and bitter end—God was creating something new where we saw only death and destruction.
The professor and Ms. Sch. were talking to me, but I only heard their voices from afar. I thought to myself, ‘Does it make any sense to take my father back to the sanatorium? The henchmen will come tomorrow at 8:00—they will not find my father—then what? And what will become of Aunt Lise?’ Also, in former times she did not go outside with us: ‘It’s impossible, I look too Jewish’—and we kept silent or said in a dry manner, ‘you are right.’ The consequences for looking Jewish were the usual hysteric inferno, typically when many people congregated officially. Privately, the same people were helpful and attentive, be it on the street or in a shop. The ‘fission of the souls’ was incredible and scary. But that also belonged to the dreadful humiliation, the vulgar unworthy grotesque dissimulating. Only the superior and dignified smile of the Jewish-looking ones, their smiles of subtle irony, comforted the less Jewish-looking ones or even the Aryan-looking ones for their shameful and pitiful misery.
Everybody in our house and in the neighborhood knew where the trail would lead; everybody knew the nearby sanatorium as well as our address in Potsdam. Therefore, a flight to there or to us made no sense. And, it made no sense and could not be, to rob my father’s time—his only freedom—to dissipate it by powerless rescue attempts for the hundredth time.
I thought to myself, ‘Why not call the Jewish community again one last time? All the orders of the Gestapo were going through it. Possibly my young friend [Hanni] would know what to do?’ The professor agreed—just this was a courageous act. Hanni herself was on the phone. ‘Hanni, what can be done?!’ I understood how she was feeling. ‘What is it?’—I kept silent as an answer. She said, ‘When?’ ‘Tomorrow morning at 8 o’clock.’ ‘What is he about to do?’ ‘Go.’—She paused, then in a stifled whisper said, ‘I can do nothing more. Please let him!’ ‘Hanni. . .’ Loudly and coldly and nearly threateningly a voice repeated: ‘I beg you, let him. It will be better for him!’ Then, a pleading helpless voice whispered my name, ‘Please let him—it will be better—do you understand?!’ And the receiver was put down. This had been my last hope.
I came to myself when the professor called me. There was no time to lose. It was the time to have my wits about me. ‘I’ll take you along in my car. Has your father everything he needs?’ ‘Not enough for both of them.’ ‘I’ll take everything with me. May I come with you?’ A short silent ride. I don’t remember anything about it. But I remember the professor taking my hands firmly in his good warm hands—a doctor’s hands—like those of Bärchen.
My father came up to meet us, earnest and somehow disconnected from reality, but calm and friendly, as always. The room was full of people. My husband pale and perturbed, my beloved heart. I didn’t dare touch him—I didn’t want to lose my composure then. Hildegard v. W. was present, the young doctor, she had been in my father’s home as a child. She had wished to visit my father. She was crying in silence. Another friend from the house was there. Accidentally? No, not accidentally. She too had felt anxious for him. She was Otto Hahn’s wife, the world-famous nuclear scientist. She and her husband always had belonged to the ‘good angels’—fearless, faithful, loving. Aunt Lise was scurrying about, whipping away her tears furtively. She smiled, prepared some food, packed things up for us, ‘You have to save these things, you may need them!’ We were not able to deter her from it.
I drew Hans aside. ‘I am going to the Gestapo now. I am aware that everything could be bungled—even for us—you know it!’ He didn’t need a second to think about it, ‘That’s nothing to think about at a moment like this!’ Suddenly Bärchen was standing by our side, ‘What are you going to do? How can you do such a thing to me at the end of my life—to ruin yourselves? Susel, Susel I forbid it!’ Beloved Bärchen. He never in my whole life had forbidden me something in such a severe tone. And I obeyed. And for years I blamed myself for having done so, that I did not go trusting in God’s help. I know, I know it would have been madness—yet still it was and remains against my conscience and against God’s commandment!
Bärchen said almost gaily, ‘Dear children, we don’t want to mope about. I am happy that so many dear friends are here just now. Let’s drink a good bottle of wine as a farewell.’ A ‘harmless’ drop [i.e., an ordinary wine] was standing in the corner ‘illegally’ [i.e., during the Nazi era, Jews were prohibited from buying alcohol, which was moot since they were not issued ration cards for purchases of liquor]. We all drank. We were all in a state of lethargy and paralysis, but my father was stronger than us. He thanked the professor for bringing along the poison. ‘This was a friendly turn, dear colleague. You are taking a huge risk for me.’ We were talking in our normal voices; the women were smiling with tear-stained eyes. I, too, was smiling, holding Bärchen’s hand all the time. ‘I have had a good life, I heard him say. Only my husband was silent and deathly pale. He reached for my free hand. ‘Do not move, do not loose lose self-control!’ ‘I had it good—undeservedly,’ my father says, ‘at first my mother cared for me, then I had my Gretel and, in the end, my faithful children and you, dear Lise. Come and sit with us!’ But she didn’t want to, she was writing a couple of letters. She gave this and that to me, contemplating everything, though tears were running down her face relentlessly. Oh, don’t believe that such a voluntary dying was easy! Perhaps, for someone who does not love anything in this world anymore. Maybe for my mother’s darkened heart, especially as she did it under the delusion of sheltering my father from the Nazis, because she believed he would follow her at once. Such a dying is possibly—I don’t know—easy. But for someone, though being old and sick, who was full of life and love, it remained hard to die voluntarily—without the Grim Reaper present.
Whoever has stood next to a deathbed knows that death really ‘enters the room.’ I saw how my young brother sank towards him from one second to the other. But here death was not among us—nothing in this room, in our being together had been touched by him! Yes, my father was right. It was against nature. And woe to anyone who brings to his fellow men such terrible hardship to be forced to die! But in my father’s heart there was nothing like woe or bitterness, hate or malediction. Later when we three were alone and the friends were gone, Aunt Lise was writing next door, he answered to my cry: ‘I don’t believe it! It is impossible! It is really unbelievable’—and for a moment the fire of youth flashed in his eyes. And immediately he added, ‘You must see it like this. I kind of succumb to the enemy.’ And when I was going to lose my composure, he said tenderly but firmly, ‘Susel, don’t begrudge me going to my Gretel—I want so much to do so, I am so sick, sicker than you may know.’ From then on, his will was stronger than my pain. It was like him holding us all with his strong will. Once we even joked and laughed all three of us. Then my father talked about Mundi full of love and care, ‘Take your time with her. She is developing slowly but safely.’ We could not overload her small heart with the manner of his death. Not before she was old enough to understand and accept his motivations would she know about it.
Then, he said I should not worry about his funeral. As nice as my mother’s funeral was last year it wouldn’t be possible this time. He pleaded with me not to worry about his funeral. My husband later freed me from my promise. Bärchen himself would have allowed me to find my peace by looking at his wonderful and glorified expression.
We sensed that we had to go now. There were no more words, no tears—a short farewell from Aunt Lise—she smiled, stroked my hair, I kissed her hand, and we departed the residence. And at the front door in darkness only one embrace, a kiss on his hand. And I went away, left him. . . I never will forgive myself for it! Though it was him who compelled us to do so, his will was above ours that night, but not God’s will, I felt it. That must be said. God left me alone. And perhaps I did not call out loudly enough for Christ who had performed so many miracles within my life.”
__________________________________________
COMMENTS ON SECTION BELOW: Ernst Neisser and Lise Neisser poisoned themselves, likely in the early morning hours of October 1, 1942. Lise Neisser died immediately, but Ernst Neisser lingered for several days. He was taken to the Jewish Hospital in the Wedding District of Berlin where he succumbed on October 4, 1942. Suse Vogel’s worry was that he would be resuscitated.
“. . .when Hans and I came to the Jewish hospital to hear how my father was doing, my only prayer was, ‘Dear God don’t let him come back to life again.’ But the young and tender nurse did not give me a terrified look when I said objectively that hopefully no attempt at resuscitation would be made, and hopefully there was no danger of a return to consciousness. In response, she comforted us by saying ‘he would sleep towards death.’ She spoke briefly and soberly like me, but her eyes told me something entirely different. This is what I experienced many times. . .a dry harshness of conversation without any obligation in the tone, but a glance in the eyes and a pressing of the hand, this had a deeper meaning. And, from this sign I drew comfort. After Hans had looked in on my father where he lay with other sleeping persons, we had to leave quickly. At that time, each night old and sick people who had gotten the order for deportation took their own lives. The number of them was frighteningly high.”
_________________________________________
COMMENTS ON SECTION BELOW: “Kafkaesque” is suggestive of Franz Kafka, or his writings, and is defined as “having a nightmarishly complex, bizarre, or illogical quality.” In reading Suse Vogel’s description of meeting the Nazi inspector at her father’s apartment in Eichenallee following his suicide, the unreal characterization of events reminded me of Kafka’s writings. I’ll let the readers draw their own conclusions, but the narrow-minded, vulturous and rapacious nature of the Nazi overlords boggles the mind.
“Now I had to go to the detective squad. For my husband it was awful to await again without being able to help and stand by me. We separated in a Café. There everything was business as usual. It was not advisable to catch somebody’s attention by perturbed behavior or whispering. We even did not even shake hands. ‘Farewell! I will pick you up here.’ The short way to the police station seemed endless. I felt petrified from complete exhaustion. At the same time, I felt that anxious wakefulness and cold determination that had helped me time and again. An officer received my report. ‘Oh. I see, it’s because of the Jew in the Eichenallee?’ he said leisurely. I did not answer. He looked at me and suddenly nodded to me. ‘A good sign.’ Then he came nearer and said in a low voice: ‘Just go to the Eichenallee, Madame, the inspector will be there too,’ and again he nodded to me encouragingly and alarmingly all at once—oh, I understood. I nodded back in silence and disappeared as shadowy as I had come. Thank God, no interrogation before a Nazi-commissar. They sent an inspector to the Eichenallee, possibly well-intentioned, ‘perhaps everything would go well.’
I waited in front of the sealed door of my father’s apartment until the inspector came. A small blond man, middle-aged, a vacuous face, sharp and wary light blue eyes. A pinched hard ass, not quite likeable. I stepped towards him without offering my hand (Jews were not allowed to shake hands). And I came to the point immediately, ‘Mr. Inspector, I am so grateful that you came here. You know how hard the situation is for me.’ He looked at me wonderingly. A shadow of condolence flashed over his unreadable face. ‘The concierge shall come.’ He questioned her in my presence. She behaved gorgeously, told him without timidity how much she had loved and admired the ‘Herr Professor’ (I was thinking, ‘How could she say, “Herr Professor!” That was strictly forbidden!’) and how she had loved ‘Fräulein Lise.’
The inspector unlocked the door. I entered the room that I had left last night—not 24 hours ago. No time for feelings, he was observing me sharply. A broken off morphine syringe was on the table. ‘Why was it broken off?’ My heart was tensing up. Very quickly he turned to me, ‘With what did your father poison himself?’ My answer came calmly, ‘I don’t know.’ ‘When were you here last?’ ‘The day before yesterday in the evening.’ ‘There it was the lie!’ And now I anticipated he would ask me who else had been here and I would have to mention Hans. I looked at him and he looked at me. I was sure he did not believe me, but he wanted to help me. Therefore, he was no Nazi, I was skilled at that! He was only a ‘dog in service’ (expression for somebody who only pretended to be a Nazi).
It looked desolate in my father’s room. The henchmen had rioted here—not a stone was left unturned. The bed was rumpled, the books were pulled out, the desk’s content spread all over the ground. Thank God they could not find any addresses of friends and acquaintances, nothing that would have incriminated others. We had destroyed everything. In a strained voice the inspector said, ‘Where is your father’s identity card? We were not able to find it. The relevant department was upset. He must have an identity card. Otherwise you will not get the corpse for burial. And there will be endless trouble for you and me. You must have it!’ ‘I don’t have it. I don’t know what my father has done with it.’ ‘Why have all the papers disappeared? I cannot understand. I do not understand your father! Unfortunately, I must deal with things like this every day. One at least leaves behind his papers in an orderly state. Nothing was to be found. He did not even have a watch with him—strange!!’
‘Aha, that was the reason for the rage of the relevant department.’ My father wanted so much that my husband got back his watch. It was Hans’ watch, a gift from his confirmation. Years ago, he had given it to my father because we did not want to leave his golden watch to the robbers—a gift from his grandfather. So, we hid it. None of us had thought of the covetousness and rapacity of the pursuers. But despite the threatening ‘strange!’ the inspector did not continue asking. I felt he didn’t want to know, didn’t want to be the hangman. Yet still he had protocols to follow. ‘You seem to be rather harassed by the occurrences,’ he grunted and looked at me meaningfully. And I seized the rescuing hint. And he wrote on his paper confused, impossible, stupid answers of a flustered wife. ‘How smart of him!’ I was aware of the Nazi’s obstinacy—if they ever got something official, a document, they were often content with it.
The concierge, a silent shadow and witness, was looking at me stunned, so well was I ‘playing’ my role. Oh, if she only knew what this was all about! He did not even ask for my address. The watch and the identity card that was all he was harping on about. ‘Could you at least procure the identity card?’ ‘No, I am sure I don’t know.’ I never confessed that my father gave it to us. That would have been the greatest foolishness! My father had hoped that the card, this ‘piece of evidence,’ could be useful. That perhaps this could save his small residual assets for Mundi. This meant a lot to him.
Before me I saw several photographs showing my parents, my late brother, pictures of our voyages. My father’s favorite books were still there. ‘Oh, if I only could take some with me.’ I begged the inspector. He refused. I tried once again. He clasped his hands together. ‘Please don’t!’ he said harshly, ‘I cannot allow it, do you understand! People ask me daily to do this. I am not allowed!’ And he looked at me angrily. Then suddenly he became rude, snapped at the concierge and me, finally laughed and sent the concierge away, snapped at me once again and said, ‘You will accompany me!’ My heart sank. ‘Was it all comedy?’ But as soon as we were alone, he took his bicycle, and shouted loudly, ‘As soon as your father is dead, you will report!’ And simultaneously his left hand reached for mine, pressing it firmly as he muttered, ‘Don’t worry. We’ll get you father under the soil even without his identity card.’ And, with that he departed, leaving me feeling released.
I thought, ‘Oh, it had come to that! Anxiety and every day’s horrors had become so commonplace that stupid and falsely contrived situations got weight and importance. On the other side hand, wasn’t this like reality, when this narrow-minded clerk who combined Prussian blind obedience with his personal honor, who had at least freedom of choice, chose lies and foolishness rather than word-for-word-accuracy?’ He himself knew better than me what would have happened if he had had examined everything exactly and if he had found the identity card and the watch. Only the connivance of a ‘forbidden’ suicide would have been to blame. There would have been interrogations about the origin of the poison, our statements would have been scrutinized for deviations from each other, possibly under the Nazis’ infamous interrogation methods. Once again, the ‘moral inferiority of the Jews and their comrades’ would have been affirmed. It would have resulted in deportation to a labor camp in Poland as a natural consequence. Moreover, friends and enemies would have shaken their heads about our incomprehensible stupidity and our lack of consideration, and that’s what the inspector knew definitively, and I knew it as well. Now you possibly understand why I met the grey face of my husband with a beaming smile. You understand that we went home by tram arm-in-arm and became human beings for a short while.”
_________________________________________
SECTIONS FROM SUSE VOGEL’S 1944-1945 DIARY
Suse Vogel’s diary includes numerous literary and religious references. I quote a few of these along with short passages from Suse’s diary to round out what I related above or in earlier posts.
COMMENTS ON SECTION BELOW: Suse Vogel had multiple nicknames for her relatives. She alternately referred to her husband, Dr. Hans Vogel, as “Hase” (=rabbit), Fiddie, Eukuku, Schieperle, Kuchenmännchen (= “cake mate”), Hanschen. Among their daughter Agnes’s surviving papers are numerous pencil drawings Hans did. He typically depicted himself as a rabbit, Suse as a dachshund, and Agnes as a bunny. (Figure 11)
“On Christmas I got a pencil drawing from Fiddie showing his little castle room in Seitenberg; in the background sits ‘Hase.’ Hanschen, smoking his pipe. The expression of his somewhat sublime, clever bunny face is collected, serious and as ‘bright’ as I had hoped ever to see again after those infernal years.”
____________________________________________
COMMENTS ON SECTION BELOW: Suse Vogel had multiple nicknames for her father, Dr. Ernst Neisser, including Bär, Bärchen and Igilchen (=hedgehog). Among her father’s personal items she had salvaged was his armchair, which retained his contour, enveloped her when she sat in it, and gave her a sense of comfort and well-being.
4th January 1944
“In Igelchen’s armchair I believed I felt it like a gentle closeness.”
____________________________________________
COMMENT ON SECTION BELOW: In multiple passages in her diary, Suse recalls visits with her father and aunt in Berlin before they were summoned for deportation and opted to commit suicide together.
12th January 1944.
“Often, I am attacked by images of the past when Hans and I lived in Potsdam, outside Berlin—up early around 6am, breakfast heated, tidied up, dinner pre-cooked, everything prepared, nothing forgotten—11am already! Getting out of the Westend, rushing up the stairs, is the 54 and 154 coming straight (train numbers)? Of course not straight. Waited. Rushed up Kastanienallee, Branitzer Platz, around the corner from Eichenallee—is everything still standing? Is there nobody in front of the door—can I still find everything? Waited outside the door for hours, no one hears–then finally Aunt Lise’s touching but exhausting welcoming speech past the door; there he sits at his desk, so small and wilted, old, angry, with signs of pain, but the black eyes shine towards me, oh, what I would give to see his old hedgehog face shining like that again!—‘Hush, my soul, it’s over.’- And the walks, small and grey by my side—and always fear—and always fear—but that sat only in the innermost depths of his heart and in his eternally watchful gaze—but only loving and benevolent eyes looked from father to daughter and back, and we smiled so clearly at the resemblance, and we had so much to tell each other—never did we run out of material to tell one another.”
___________________________________________
COMMENT ON SECTION BELOW: As previously mentioned, “Mundi” was an affectionate name for Suse and Hans Vogel’s daughter, Agnes Stieda née Vogel. In 1944, when Suse humorously remarked the following, Agnes was 17 years old and already had strong opinions about what type of a husband she wanted.
“Mundi says she’d rather marry a pussy, ‘I want the upper hand with my husband!’”
___________________________________________
COMMENTS ON SECTION BELOW: In her writings, Suse made frequent exaltations to God, alternating between feeling He had answered her prayers and forsaken her. Clearly, while Suse and both her parents were of Jewish descent, in the past, their ancestors had converted to Protestantism; nonetheless, in the eyes of the Nazis, they were Jewish. In the later stages of the WWII, Hans Vogel was hounded by the Gestapo for his “mixed marriage” status to a Jew.
Regarding the Prince’s palace in Seitenberg [today: Stronie Śląskie, Poland], for a time castles were deemed “off-limits” to bombing by the Allies.
6th January 1944
“Fiddie writes [he received] news from Berlin that the castle is now secured as a place to stay! Thank God.”
31st August 1944
“Tomorrow begins the 6th year of the war. ‘Keeper, is the night almost over?’”
30th November 1944
“‘My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken us!’. . . at the moment I don’t even have a longing to die—just fear and pain and fear and need and fear, fear, fear—and God is silent!”
____________________________________________
COMMENTS ON SECTION BELOW: “Schieperle,” as mentioned above, was another affectionate name Suse had for her husband. Suse, Hans and Agnes lived in a small town in Silesia called Baitzen, which was just outside of Kamenz [today: Kamieniec, Poland]. Hans worked for Friedrich Heinrich Prinz von Preußen at his estate in Seitenberg [today: Stronie Śląskie, Poland]. While Kamenz and Seitenberg are only 22 miles or 35km apart (Figures 13a-b), Hans had his own room at the castle where he lived during the work week.
Hans Vogel had been seriously injured during WWI, making him unfit for service during WWII. The term in German for badly wounded is “schwer verwundet.” His status as a seriously injured veteran of WWI afforded his Jewish wife Suse and his “mischling“ daughter Agnes a measure of protection, at least until the later stages of the war, when the Nazi noose began to tighten around any people of Jewish descent. For Suse and Agnes, it never came down to a decision to take their own lives as it had with Suse’s parents and Aunt. While Agnes was no longer permitted to attend school within a year of her grandfather’s death, ironically, she was for a time a member of the “Bund Deutscher Mädel (B.D.M.),” the female section of the Hitler Youth.
In the passage below, Suse is voicing her consternation at the fact that her husband was shanghaied into shoveling snow for Kamenz.
18th September 1944
“My Schieperle is gone! They took him for snow shoveling—oh, it’s like a bad dream—oh, he will come back—he can’t shovel at all! And in the Seitenberg employment office they had promised him that he would work in an office. But Kamenz took him.”
____________________________________________
COMMENT ON SECTION BELOW: Suse Vogel made frequent mention of her debilitating menstrual periods, referring to them by the initials “EW”; interestingly, this stands for “das Ewig-Weibliche,” the concept of the “eternal feminine” from Goethe’s “Faust.” For Goethe, “women” symbolized pure contemplation, in contrast to masculine action, parallel to the eastern Daoist descriptions of Yin and Yang.
“But I am also particularly disparaged by EW.”
____________________________________________
COMMENT ON SECTION BELOW: “Wafi” is a reference to Suse Vogel’s mother, Margarethe Neisser née Pauly, who was confined to a sanatorium for the last several years of her life and eventually committed suicide there in 1941, a year before Ernst and Luise Neisser took their lives. At moments, Suse Vogel felt she too was slipping away like her mother had.
“I think I’m already mentally ill like Wafi!”
____________________________________________
COMMENTS ON SECTION BELOW: Suse and Agnes Vogel left Silesia as the Russians were approaching and made their way to Potsdam, bordering Berlin, arriving there around the 11th of April 1945. In February, possibly earlier, Hans Vogel, while handicapped from an injury he sustained during WWI, was nonetheless conscripted to a military unit and assigned responsibility for taking the unit’s mail to the train. When he noticed one train was headed to Berlin, he jumped aboard and went AWOL, making his way to Potsdam, where he miraculously reunited with Suse and Agnes. The family barely survived a massive bombing of Berlin in the waning days of the war in an underground bunker.
20th April 1945, written in a basement in Potsdam under the terrible thunder of gunfire
“. . .the eve of the battle, after the horrible attack on Berlin two days after our arrival here[Potsdam]. I cannot write much, only that we decided to go to him very quickly on the 11th of April. Everything worked out. After a 26-hour drive, we managed to arrive behind the Front. The longed-for, longed-for reunion was given to us! So wonderfully sweet, so wonderfully lovely, but amid rising hell and fear. . .”
____________________________________________
In conclusion, while I fail to do justice and adequately capture the depth and nuance of Suse Vogel’s words, I hope I have conveyed at least a small part of her wrenching story and the constant misgivings and survivors’ guilt she felt for not having saved her father from the Nazis.
Note: This is a post about Dr. Hans Vogel, father of my Canadian third cousin Agnes Stieda née Vogel who was the subject of Posts 46 and 63. In this post, I briefly relate a few aspects of Dr. Vogel’s life and highlight one of his major accomplishments.
In the course of doing forensic investigations into my Jewish ancestors, I often learn they were renowned and very accomplished people. Where the forebears are unknown to me, I typically begin by searching their names on the Internet. Since all my father’s immediate ancestors were German, I also search for them on German Wikipedia. This post is the tale of one such individual, Dr. Hans Martin Erasmus Vogel, my third cousin Agnes Stieda née Vogel’s father. (Figures 1-2) Regular readers will recall that Agnes has been the subject of two earlier posts, and that her father has been mentioned in both. It is not my intention to present Dr. Vogel’s biography here, but merely to highlight a few relevant facts that reflect the era in which he lived and one of his major achievements.
I’ve previously told readers of my father’s family ties to Ratibor [today: Racibórz, Poland] in Upper Silesia, but there are other larger Prussian cities to which my extended family was connected, notably, Posen [today: Poznan, Poland], where my Pauly relatives were from, Breslau [today: Wrocław, Poland], and Stettin [today: Szczecin, Poland]. Dr. Hans Vogel was born in Stettin on the 28th of July 1897, and graduated from the Gymnasium, high school, there in 1916. Following his graduation until 1918, he was a Sergeant Major during WWI, and was badly wounded during the war. Upon his recuperation in 1919, he studied political science and in 1923 received his Dr. rer. pol. (Doctor rerum politicarum), Doctor of Political Science. Then, from 1923 to 1925, he studied art history in Marburg and Leipzig, and graduated with his Dr. phil. (Doctor philosophiae), Doctor of Philosophy.
From 1925 until 1932, Dr. Vogel worked as an art historian. He was a volunteer at the Kunstgewerbemuseum (Museum of Applied Arts) in Leipzig; established an art and local history museum in Zeulenroda in the state of Thuringia; was an assistant at the Städtisches Museum in Moritzburg; and was a lecturer for art history and a librarian at the Staatliche Kunstakademie in Kassel; after the Kunstakademie closed in 1932, he worked as a “wissenschaftlicher Hilfsarbeiter,” an unpaid scientific assistant, at the Gemäldegalerie and Landesmuseum in Kassel. In 1934, Dr. Vogel’s continued employment at the museum in Kassel was no longer possible because of his so-called “mixed marriage” to Agnes’s Jewish or “non-Aryan” mother, Susanne Vogel née Neisser. Between 1934 and 1935, while trying in vain to emigrate, he managed to secure a grant to inventory the building content and art collection of the Hohenzollern in Sigmaringen in southwestern Germany. This work caught the attention of Friedrich Heinrich Prinz von Preußen (Figure 3), who was a Prussian officer and member of the House of Hohenzollern, and led to a project in 1936 cataloging the Prince’s library and copperplate collection; by 1937 though Dr. Vogel was relegated to a clerical position in the property of the Prince.
Dr. Vogel’s daughter Agnes has fond memories of Friedrich Heinrich Prinz von Preußen (1874-1940) (Figures 4-5), not the least because he protected her family and provided work for her father during the war. Friedrich Heinrich was an interesting character. He studied law at Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Bonn; upon graduation he joined the military under a position of à la suite, which was a military title given to those who were assigned to the army or a particular unit for honor’s sake, and entitled to wear a regimental uniform, but otherwise had no official position. However, in early 1907 he was relieved from his position à la suite as a regimental commander because of his homosexuality. He was excluded from the Prussian army for this reason, but at the beginning of WWI he was once again allowed to become a soldier, but only at the rank of Gefreiter, basically a Private First Class, with no opportunity for promotion.
In late 1906, Friedrich Heinrich was nominated by Kaiser Wilhelm II as Lord Master of the Order of St. John as the successor to his late father who’d died earlier that year. The poorly kept secret of Friedrich Wilhelm’s homosexuality, however, caused him to ask the Kaiser to withdraw his nomination, which he did. Eventually, the press learned and published the motive for the change in leadership for the Knights of St. John, “because he [Friedrich Heinrich] suffers from the inherited perversion of the sex instinct.” Having been “outed,” he was urgently advised to leave Berlin. After stays in southern France and Egypt, Friedrich Heinrich lived from then on withdrawn on his Silesian estates where Dr. Vogel worked for him. According to published accounts, Friedrich Heinrich contributed greatly to the economic development of the southeastern part of the county of Glatz [today: Kłodzko, Poland] where his estate was located and was popular among his subjects because of his concern for their well-being.
Dr. Vogel remarked that living in the countryside in a state of complete social isolation left him with much time to continue his private art history studies, which served him well after the war. As the war progressed, Dr. Vogel was increasingly at risk from the Gestapo, on account of his “mixed marriage.” Forewarned in time, he fled to Potsdam, a suburb of Berlin. In Post 46, Agnes described it as such:
My father was responsible for bringing his Unit’s mail to the train, and when he noticed the train was headed to Berlin, he took that opportunity to jump onboard and defect, hoping to find us when he arrived in Potsdam; we had always found shelter there in the apartment of the mother of one my mother’s good friends. By defecting, my father had taken a huge risk since defectors were shot on sight. But he was not discovered and entered Berlin which was aflame.
Following the end of WWII, Dr. Vogel was unable to immediately find employment in a museum, so for a time worked at the local Municipal School Office in Potsdam retraining former teachers and training new ones. Then, in 1946, he was hired as the Director of the Staatlichen Kunstsammlungen Kassel (Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel). When Dr. Vogel arrived, he found a bomb-destroyed gallery, so the reconstruction of the Kassel Museum after the war was largely his doing. Many of the museum’s monuments and paintings had been moved elsewhere during the war for safekeeping. One of the most important events during Dr. Vogels’s tenure as Director was the return of the so-called “Viennese Pictures” in 1955; this involved the repatriation of 64 very precious paintings including Rembrandt’s “Jacob Blessing the Sons of Joseph,” as well as artworks by Albrecht Dürer, Titian, Rubens and von Dyck. (Figures 6a-b) Given the legitimate hostility countries felt towards Germany after WWII and the prevailing “cold war,” it was certainly not a given all countries would return art work that had been squirrelled away inside their borders; a few might reasonably have viewed retention of these valuable masterpieces as reparations. Regardless, the fact that Dr. Vogel, on behalf of the Museumslandschaft Hessen (Museum of Hessian History (MHK)) (Figures 7a-b), was able to recover the Viennese Pictures certainly stands as one of his most significant achievements, almost a “monuments men” moment.
Dr. Vogel’s professional career, even circumscribed as it was by the Nazi era, was certainly more multi-faceted than the narrow description I’ve provided. MHK houses a diverse collection, carefully organized under Dr. Vogel’s tutelage, including the library and copper cabinet, picture gallery, pre- and early-historical collections, collections of folk art and costumes, the astronomical and physics cabinet, the collection of urban costumes, furniture and ceramics, as well as items from the former landgrave art chamber. On behalf of the museum, Dr. Vogel enriched the Old Masters Picture Gallery by acquiring 20 works by Jacob Jordaens, Thomas de Kayser, and an anonymous student of Rubens, as well as a series of paintings from the Tischbein Circle. He also purchased 14 Rembrandt etchings to form as a counterpart to the Rembrandt paintings hanging in Kassel retrieved from Vienna.
Having little to do with Dr. Vogel’s professional work, among his daughter Agnes’s papers, survives a very touching and simple hand-drawn picture by Dr. Vogel. It shows Dr. Vogel and his wife standing on the shore, depicted as a rabbit and a dog, watching sadly as Agnes, shown as a rabbit, sails aboard an ocean liner headed to Canada from Germany. (Figure 8)
