Category: Gerhard Epp

POST 142: “STOLPERSTEINE” COMMEMORATING THREE HOLOCAUST VICTIMS FROM RACIBORZ

FOOTNOTE ADDED ON 10/17/2023 

Note: Three “Stolpersteine” or commemorative brass plaques commemorating Holocaust victims were recently installed in Racibórz, Poland, my father’s birth place when it was part of Germany; these are the town’s first-ever “stumbling stones.” In this post, I look briefly into the Kochen family whom these Stolpersteine memorialize and discuss a surprising discovery I made on my journey.

Related Posts:

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

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

 

On May 26, 2023, a coaster-sized brass plaque commemorating a victim of Nazi persecution in Nuremberg, Germany became the 100,000th “Stolperstein” installed. Literally meaning “stumbling stone,” Stolpersteine commemorate all victims of Nazi oppression, including Jews but also Roma, Sinti, the physically or mentally disabled, homosexuals, and other persecuted groups (e.g. Communists, members of the anti-Nazi Resistance, Christian opponents, etc.). So far, they have been placed in 27 European countries. The names and fates of the victims are engraved on the brass plaques, along with information on where and when they were deported.

Initiated in 1992 by the German artist Gunter Demnig (Figure 1), his idea was to place a cobblestone-like memorial outside a Holocaust victim’s “last address of choice.” By placing a Stolperstein on a sidewalk or in the middle of a pavement, Demnig hopes people happening upon them will stop, curious to know whom it commemorates and what happened to them. He is convinced “there’s a difference between a teenager opening a book and reading about 6 million murdered Jews, and them learning about the fate of family while standing where they lived.”

 

Figure 1. Gunter Demnig, artist who developed the idea of “Stolpersteine” in 1992, holding two commemorative brass plaques

 

Placement of Stolpersteine in the middle of pavements has not been without its detractors. Interestingly, Munich, the historic home of the Nazi movement, banned the implementation of Stolpersteine until recently. The reason for Munich’s opposition actually stems from a member of the city’s Jewish community, a Charlotte Knobloch, herself a Holocaust survivor. Ms. Knobloch argues that it is disrespectful for people to walk over the names of Holocaust victims, allowing the victims’ lives to figuratively be desecrated.

The Munich City Council recently decided to move ahead with plans to commemorate the last known addresses of Holocaust victims in their city but stopped short of allowing the installation of Stolpersteine. The compromise allows plaques on private property with the owners’ approval and on top of posts on public property. While sidewalk plaques remain against the law, there will be a central memorial with a list of the Holocaust victims’ names.

Elsewhere, for example in some places in Poland, such as Szczecin, city authorities have refused to install memorial stones for Holocaust victims because the country’s “Institute of National Remembrance” fears that visitors to the city might think the perpetrators of the crimes were Poles.

Notwithstanding the concerns some people and jurisdictions have expressed about Stolpersteine, it came as a pleasant surprise to learn that several had recently been placed in the town where my father was born, Ratibor, Germany [today: Racibórz, Poland]. An acquaintance, Magda Wawoczny, a Jewish studies student from Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland who hails from Racibórz, recently sent me photos of the first ever brass plaques installed in her hometown.

They were for three members of a family deported in 1938 to the Łódź Ghetto (Figure 2), namely, Szyja Kochen (1897-1944), Ester Bajla Kochen (1898-1944), and Natan David Kochen (1935-1944). (Figure 3) The family once lived in an apartment at 10 Breite Strasse, also known in German times as Brunken; the building still stands today (Figure 4), and the address today is ulica Londzina 10. The Stolpersteine were placed in front of this building. And, Gunter Demnig, who initiated the project in 1992 installed the brass plaques himself. (Figures 5-9)

 

Figure 2. Map showing distance between Racibórz and Łódź

 

Figure 3. Ester Bajla Kochen (1898-1944) and her husband Szyja Kochen (1897-1944) (Yad Vashem)

 

Figure 4. The apartment building as it looks today at Breite Strasse 10, today Londzina 10, where the Kochen family once lived

 

Figure 5. Gunter Demnig preparing to install the first ever Stolpersteine in Racibórz, Poland

 

Figure 6. Gunter Demnig beginning the installation of the Stolpersteine in Racibórz, Poland

 

Figure 7. The installed Stolpersteine for three members of the Kochen family

 

Figure 8. The installed Stolpersteine for three members of the Kochen family, surrounded by peonies and roses

 

Figure 9. Gunter Demnig with the Kochen family descendants from Israel in front of their family’s “last address of choice”

 

While multiple members of my family died during the Shoah, my family had departed Ratibor no later than 1926, therefore, no Stolpersteine are located there. Stumbling stones have been placed at two separate locations in Berlin for my beloved aunt Susanne Müller née Bruck (1904-1942) (Figure 10) and my great-aunt Franziska Bruck (1866-1942). (Figure 11) From personal experience I know that a target of the Nazis need not have died to have a commemorative stone placed at their last address of choice; two members of my Mombert family by marriage have Stolpersteine placed on the pavement in front of their last residence in Giessen, Germany. (Figure 12)

 

Figure 10. Stolperstein for my beloved aunt Susanne Müller née Bruck (1904-1942) placed in front of her “last address of choice,” Kastanienallee 39 in the Charlottenburg borough of Berlin

 

Figure 11. Stolperstein for my great-aunt Franziska Bruck (1866-1942) situated in front of her apartment building at Prinzregentenstrasse 75 in the Wilmersdorf borough of Berlin

 

Figure 12. Four Stolpersteine for my Mombert family by marriage located at Molktstrasse 18 in Giessen, Germany; only Ernst Mombert was murdered in the Holocaust, arrested on the same day in Fayence, France as my aunt Susanne, and both murdered in Auschwitz

 

In the case of the Kochen family from Ratibor, I have no concrete evidence that they interacted with my family, although I’m certain the Kochen family would have been familiar with my family’s establishment, the Bruck’s “Prinz von Preußen” Hotel. Szyja Kochen, the patriarch of the family, is believed to have been a salesman, possibly a “stepper” (i.e., dancer), so unless he dealt in a service required by the hotel, it is unlikely our families’ paths ever crossed. Still, one can never be certain given that Ratibor was a relatively small town with a small Jewish population. Also unknown is how long the Kochen family was associated with Ratibor; my Bruck family was there since the early 19th century.

Aware that three members of the Kochen family had perished in the Holocaust, I checked the Yad Vashem Holocaust Remembrance Center’s victims’ database. As expected, I found all three listed along with Pages of Testimony that have been submitted by a Nadav Kochen, who I surmise is a grandson or a grandnephew of Szyja and Ester Kochen. Nadav also included two photographs of his ancestors. (see Figure 3)

According to the Stolperstein for Szyja Kochem, he was deported to Łódź, and purportedly murdered there on the 7th of March 1944 in the Łódź Ghetto. By contrast, his wife Ester Bajla Kochen’s Stolperstein and that of his son Natan David Kochen indicate they were murdered in August 1944 at Auschwitz [Oświęcim, Poland]. Obviously, at some point they were moved from the Łódź Ghetto to Auschwitz. (Figure 13)

 

Figure 13. Map showing distance between Łódź and Auschwitz

 

Among the documents I found for Szyja, Ester, and David Kochen was a list with their names showing their address when they were locked inside the Łódź Ghetto, Pfeffergasse 14, Flat 25; this information comes from a so-called “Jewish Ghetto Inhabitant List.” (Figure 14) The dates of birth on this list match the dates on the Pages of Testimony submitted by Nadav Kochen. Yad Vashem also includes Szyja Kochen’s Łódź work permit with his photo confirming his address (Figure 15); boldly stamped across this document is the word “GESTORBEN,” died.

 

Figure 14. A page from the “Łódź Ghetto Inhabitant List” showing four members of the Kochen family were living at Pfeffergasse 14, Flat 25, including the previously unknown to me Frida Kochen born on the 28th of December 1925

 

Figure 15. Szyja Kochen’s Łódź Ghetto work permit with his photograph, place of residence, and the word “GESTORBEN,” died, boldly stamped across it

 

What immediately caught my attention on the Łódź Jewish Ghetto Inhabitant List was the name of another family member, Frida Kochen, shown as being born on the 28th of December 1925. (see Figure 14) Obviously, no Stolperstein has been placed in her honor in Racibórz, so I assumed her fate might have turned out differently. And, sure enough, I found another list in Yad Vashem, entitled “Stutthof survivors who had been on a barge that was stranded in the bay of Eckernförde in Schleswig-Holstein (Northern German)” with Frida listed under her married name, “Frieda Ben David Cohen,” born in 1925 in Ratibor. (Figure 16) Again, in contrast to her mother and brother, this list makes clear that at some point she had been transferred from Auschwitz to the concentration camp in Stutthof [today: Sztutowo, Poland], located about 370 miles north of Auschwitz. (Figure 17)

 

Figure 16. A list from Yad Vashem, entitled “Stutthof survivors who had been on a barge that was stranded in the bay of Eckernförde in Schleswig-Holstein (Northern German)” with Frida listed under her married name, “Frieda Ben David Cohen”

 

Figure 17. Map showing the distance from Auschwitz to Sztutowo (Stutthof)

 

I next turned to ancestry.com trying to untangle this surprising finding. I quickly found information for “Fridah Ben David” who I ascertained was the Frida Kochen in question, born on the 28th of December 1925 in Ratibor, and learned she had done an interview with the USC Shoah Foundation on the 5th of February 1998 in Tel Aviv, Israel; unfortunately the dialogue is in Hebrew and no transcript nor translation has been done of the two-hour long testimonial. (Figure 18)

 

Figure 18. Screen shot from the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive with information on the testimonial Fridah Ben David née Kochen did in 1998

 

Obviously, Frida avoided the fate of her parents and younger brother, although I’m still trying to understand the circumstances of how she accomplished this. Separately, in ancestry, I discovered Szyja and Ester had two additional offspring, Shoshonah Rozah Fayvel née Kochen (b. 1920 in Ratibor) and Me’ir Maks Kochen (b. 1921 in Ratibor), both of whom also survived the Holocaust. (Figure 19) I’m trying to contact Nadav Kochen who submitted the Pages of Testimony to Yad Vashem hoping he might shed some light on his ancestor’s ordeal. Watch this space for a future postscript.

 

Figure 19. Page from ancestry.com showing the names of Frida Ben David’s three siblings, two of whom survived the Holocaust

 

Even though Frida’s testimonial contains no transcript nor translation, the USC Shoah Foundation’s website includes very brief one-line annotations for the 137 segments of the two-hour interview. These notations provide clues to the places where Frida was held during the war and moved to following the war though in no chronological order.

I know from the document I found in Yad Vashem of Stutthof survivors who were stranded in the bay of Eckernförde in Schleswig-Holstein that Frida was moved from the Stutthof concentration camp to mainland Germany. Let me reconstruct what may have happened based on the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s historical accounts of this concentration camp.

The Germans established the Stutthof camp in a wooded area west of Stutthof [today: Sztutowo, Poland], a town about 22 miles east of Danzig [today: Gdansk, Poland] in September 1939. Stutthof was secluded. To the north was the Bay of Danzig, to the east the Vistula Lagoon, and to the west the Vistula River. The land was very wet, almost at sea level. As a related aside, Danzig is where my father apprenticed as a dentist; the Bay of Danzig where he sometimes went sailing; Stutthof where he often went to the beach; and the Vistula Lagoon where he engaged in winter sports.

Originally, Stutthof was a civilian internment camp under the Danzig police chief. In November 1941, it became a “labor education” camp, administered by the German Security Police. Finally, in January 1942, Stutthof became a regular concentration camp.

Tens of thousands of people were deported to Stutthof, mostly non-Jewish Poles, Polish Jews from Warsaw and Białystok, as well as Jews from forced labor camps in the occupied Baltic states, which the Germans evacuated in 1944 as the Red Army was approaching. I can find no clue as to why Frida would have been transferred all the way from Auschwitz to Stutthof.

Conditions in the camp were brutal. Typhus epidemics regularly swept the camp and many prisoners died. Those too weak to work were gassed in the camp’s small gas chamber. Camp doctors were complicit in killing many injured or sick prisoners by injection. Purportedly, more than 60,000 people died in the camp.

The Germans used Stutthof prisoners as forced laborers. Some prisoners worked in SS-owned businesses while others labored in local private industrial enterprises. In Post 121 and Post 121, Postscript I discussed Gerhard Epp’s use of forced laborers from Stutthof in his nearby metal working and munitions workshop; Gerhard was the brother of two close friends of my father from Tiegenhof [today: Nowy Dwór Gdański, Poland], 10 miles to the south of Stutthof, when my father had his dental practice between 1932 and 1937.

The part of the story I want to focus on is the evacuation of prisoners from Stutthof, which was barbaric. By January 1945, there were nearly 50,000 prisoners in the 105 subcamps of Stutthof, mostly Jews. Beginning at around this time, about 5,000 prisoners were marched to the Baltic Sea, forced into the water, and machine gunned. The remainder of the prisoners were marched towards eastern Germany but were cut off by advancing Soviet forces. The Germans forced the survivors back to Stutthof, thousands of whom died en route on account of the severe winter conditions and brutal treatment by SS guards.

By late April 1945, because Stutthof was completely encircled by Soviet forces, the remaining prisoners were removed by sea. Again many prisoners were forced into the sea and gunned down. Over 4,000 were sent by small barge to Germany. (Figure 20) The list of survivors includes Frida’s name showing she made it to Eckernförde in the German state of Schleswig-Holstein and was incarcerated in an adjacent concentration camp in Kiel. She was finally liberated by British Army troops in May 1945. It is estimated that of the 50,000 prisoners held in Stutthof in January 1945, 25,000, or one in two, died during the evacuation. This makes Frida’s survival even more remarkable.

 

Figure 20. Forcible evacuation by barge of Stutthof concentration camp inmates in 1945 from Danzig (from the United States Holocaust Museum website)

 

The annotated interview the USC Shoah Foundation conducted with Frida lists a host of places connected to her presumed movements following her liberation, including cities in Germany (i.e., Schafstedt) Austria (i.e., Innsbruck, Bad Gustein, and Klagenfurt), and Italy (i.e., Udine Displaced Person’s Camp, Savona). Absent translation and chronology, it is mere conjecture whether these movements were by choice or necessity.

Knowing Frida eventually emigrated to British Palestine, I theorize she boarded the ship named the “Josiah Wedgewood” in Savona, which she specifically mentioned in her testimonial. Savona is a seaport community in the west part of the northern Italian region of Liguria and is known to have been one of the embarkation ports for this ship boarding Jewish refugees attempting to reach Palestine. There exists a June 1946 photography by Emil Reynolds showing some of the 1,300 European refugees aboard the former Canadian corvette Josiah Wedgewood after it was fired upon and captured on June 27th by British warships after the corvette tried to land illegally in Palestine. (Figure 21) It’s unknown whether Frida was aboard the ship at this time. What is conclusive is that unlike so many of her fellow inmates in the Łódź Jewish Ghetto and in the concentration camps of Auschwitz, Stutthof, and Kiel, Frida survived and thrived. (Figure 22)

 

Figure 21. June 1946 Emil Reynolds photograph taken aboard the “Josiah Wedgewood” ship with some of the 1,300 Jewish refugees who attempted to escape British authorities and land illegally in Palestine (from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website)

 

Figure 22. Frida Ben David née Kochen surrounded by her granddaughter and daughter in an undated photograph taken in Tel Aviv, Israel

FOOTNOTE: A Polish reader of my blog was dismayed and pained by my failure to specifically mention that non-Jewish Polish victims of Nazi German crimes should be among the groups recognized through installation of Stolpersteine in Poland. I wholeheartedly agree. While acknowledging the importance of commemorating innocent victims of the Holocaust, the reader stressed that I was “. . .distorting the historical truth by saying ‘Nazi crimes’ instead of ‘Nazi German crimes’” The reader emphasized that Nazism was a creation of German culture and it was supported in a democratic vote by Germans, and by failing to make this clear I avoided distinguishing between victims and executioners.

I don’t use the term “Nazi crimes” in this post. I was talking about German war crimes based on the extermination policies of Germany’s National Socialist regime. I acknowledge mention should be made of the millions of non-Jewish Polish citizens killed by the Germans during WWII. According to the Holocaust Encyclopedia, “It is estimated that the Germans killed between 1.8 and 1.9 million non-Jewish Polish civilians during World War II. In addition, the Germans murdered at least 3 million Jewish citizens of Poland.” My blog post was in no way intended to minimize the enormous number of non-Jewish Polish victims of Nazi aggression, which should most assuredly be commemorated, but rather was to indicate the efforts that some Polish towns and cities are making to recognize some of their Jewish victims.

REFERENCES

Ben David, Fridah. Personal interview with USC Shoah Foundation. 5 February 1998.

Ben-Tzur, Tzvi and Aryeh Malkin. “The Voyage of the ‘Josiah Wedgewood’.” http://www.palyam.org/English/Hahapala/hf/hf_Wedgwood.pdf

Dege, Stefan. “’Stolpersteine’: Commemorating victims of Nazi persecution.” DW, 30 May 2023. https://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=stolpersteine%3a+commemorating+victims+of+Nazi+persecution&d=4770772662747258&mkt=en-US&setlang=en-US&w=NjbMU3Tw6fh5fwT1QFxwCDfU2uG9SmRu

Markusz, Katarzyna. “Polish city refuses to install memorial stones for Holocaust victims.” 23 December 2019, The Times of Israel. https://www.timesofisrael.com/polish-city-refuses-to-install-memorial-stones-for-holocaust-victims/

Rafter, Catherine. “Munich compromises on Holocaust Memorial Plans.” Observer, 5 August 2015. https://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=munich+compromises+on+holocaust+memorial+plans&d=4994802452810164&mkt=en-US&setlang=en-US&w=MqJZbPJj4z_fX5-uIPDyOAtbDaiFWg_J

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “Jewish refugees wait aboard the Josiah Wedgewood after British navy fired at the ship.” Photograph Number: 37543

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

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

 

Stutthof-Sztutowo

In memory of the Jewish family Lieb/Lib in Stutthof

By Uwe Sager – Forum.Danzig.de

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

April 2020

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

Number 1445:

Name: Antony, Walter, born 1908

Place of Residence: Stutthof, Schulstraße 2

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

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

Info: Hermann Rohde

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The marriage certificate records the following information:

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Figure 7. Link to source of 1942 Woronowo ghetto list

 

COLUMN 1: Nr. 5288

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

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

COLUMN 4: Opening 1st June 1941

COLUMN 5: Liquidation 30th September 1943

COLUMN 6: Deportations Lida

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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

The following is the file from the Arolsen Archives.

Copy of 6.3.3.3/82889670 through 82889675

In conformity with IST Digital Archives

With kind permission of the publication by above mentioned archive.

REFERENCES

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Related Posts:

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

REFERENCES

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

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

 

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

RELATED POSTS:

POST 5: OTTO BRUCK & TIEGENHOF-IDSCHI & SUSE

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

REFERENCES

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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