Note: This post is primarily a tribute to my recently deceased friend from Racibórz, Poland, Paul Newerla, who generously and selflessly assisted me in innumerable ways over the years while I was researching and writing about my Bruck family. I am deeply saddened by his passing, but honored to have known him and appreciative he deemed my efforts worthy of his time.
Typically, I get up every morning at 4am and head to the gym. On Sundays when I’m done and am driving home my local National Public Radio station is broadcasting a show called “A Way with Words,” co-hosted by Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett. They talk with callers from around the world about slang, grammar, old sayings, word origins, regional dialects, family expressions, and speaking and writing well.
In one recent episode, an African-American gentleman from the South called to tell of his use of the word “conversate,” an expression I was unfamiliar with. Use of “conversating” instead of “conversing” is considered non-standard or informal in many English-speaking communities; as readers will surmise, it means to engage in conversation. Since my blog posts are an informal method of telling stories about my ancestors and extended family and the people and the sometimes-tragic events that surrounded their lives, conversating strikes an appropriate balance, like having a fireside chat. It’s been quite a few years since I’ve casually conversated with readers, so the moment seems right.
In the last several months I’ve acquired an astonishing amount of new information, some of it related to my earliest relatives from Ratibor, Prussia [Racibórz, Poland] and other details connected to various family and acquaintances I’ve written about over the years. The particulars will form the basis for some upcoming posts and postscripts to earlier articles.
There is a limit to how much I can reconstruct using only ancestry.com or MyHeritage, so the contributions, interpretations, and observations drawn from family memoirs and diaries, books, websites, and knowledgeable researchers and historians enhance my understanding of how, when, and where my forefathers were active in Ratibor, Prussia, Silesia, and elsewhere the Jewish diaspora took them.
Longtime readers of my blog have periodically heard me refer to my cadre of helpers as my “boots on the ground.” They are an eclectic group consisting of friends and acquaintances, professionals and amateurs, near and distant relatives, and, of course, readers.
Sadly, in the past few days, I’ve heard from no fewer than four Polish acquaintances telling me of the passing of my dear friend from Racibórz, Mr. Paul Newerla, a 91-year-old gentleman and elder statesman, who found a second calling, following his retirement as a lawyer, researching and writing about the history of Ratibor and Silesia. (Figure 1)
Like many of the people who’ve provided color commentary, history, and context for my posts, Paul found me through my blog. Our initial conversations revolved around the business enterprise, the Bruck’s “Prinz von Preussen” Hotel (Figure 2), my family owned and operated from around 1850 until 1926 in Ratibor. Our discussions quickly expanded beyond this topic as I was trying to track down primary source documents related to extended family members connected with Ratibor and trying to figure out how long my Bruck family had been associated with the town.
I clearly remember in 2019 when Paul was doing research for an article he was writing about the 200th anniversary of Ratibor’s gymnasium, high school. (Figure 3) He miraculously managed to track down the original roster of students who attended the high school from its founding in 1819 through 1849. (Figure 4) What made this discovery so astonishing is that he found this document not in the Archiwum Państwowe w Katowicach Oddział w Raciborzu, the State Archives in Katowice, Branch in Racibórz, or in the Muzeum w Raciborzu, or Racibórz Museum, but rather among the old files of the gymnasium, now an economic middle school. It goes without saying, on my own I probably could not have accessed this invaluable document with the names of multiple of my early Bruck ancestors even had I been aware of its existence.
Naturally, upon discovering the roster’s whereabouts and making special arrangements to photograph it, Paul sent me copies of the individual pages. Opening each of the roughly 100 pages reminded me of my days as a dirt archaeologist never knowing what the next shovelful or trowel scrapping would reveal. For those of you who’ve never gone through seemingly “dry” documents may not appreciate how enthralling this can sometimes be.
On another occasion, Paul again tracked down and photographed a 73-page document I could assuredly not have accessed on my own. It was the Grundbuch, the land register, for the Zuckerfabrik, the sugar factory, in Woinowitz [today: Wojnowice, Poland] (Figure 5), outside Racibórz. (Figure 6) Grundbuch means the applicable official register held by the Land Registry in which, among other things, the rights of ownership in, and encumbrances on, a plot of land are registered. Long-time readers know that I have written extensively about the Zuckerfabrik because of my family’s ancestral connection to the original co-owners of the factory, Adolph Schück and Sigmund Hirsch.
Paul knew the German land registers are archived at the State Archives in Katowice, Branch in Racibórz; he also knew that because these land registers have not yet been archived, they are currently inaccessible to researchers. Nonetheless, Paul convinced the head of the State Archives in Racibórz to let him into the basement to rummage through the uncatalogued documents to search for the land register for the sugar factory. (Figure 7) He found it in a file entitled “Woinowitz Blatt 161,” Woinowitz Sheet 161. Readers can easily imagine how improbable my gaining access to the basement of the State Archives to search for the Grundbuch would have been.
I could always count on Paul to patiently answer my endless stream of questions, no matter how mundane, and send me references, records, illustrative materials, maps, photos, postcards, etc. to better understand the history of people, places, and events in Ratibor and Silesia. Paul was helpful in multiple other ways, including on several occasions when he visited the State Archives at my request to track down a primary source document I was convinced existed.
I have little doubt a small part of why Paul was so willing to help me is that I am a direct descendant of the original owner of the Bruck’s Hotel in Ratibor and bear the Americanized version of the surname. That said, I’m positive he would have been equally helpful to anyone having an interest in the history of Ratibor and Silesia. That’s the type of man Paul was.
I consider it an extreme honor to have personally met Paul, to have had him show me some of modern Racibórz, and for his patient and professional assistance over the years. Like many others, he provided affirmation that my family history blog fulfills a service which I would not be able to provide absent the contributions and exhortations of dedicated folks like Paul and other readers. I’m deeply thankful for Paul’s help over the years, as well as the assistance provided by other followers of my blog.
Note: In this post, I discuss the fate of the hotel my family owned for three generations in Ratibor [today: Racibórz, Poland]. Largely intact following the cessation of hostilities after WWII, it appears to have been demolished for a combination of reasons, including geopolitical ones and the Soviet Union’s desire to remove historical traces of German connections to Silesia.
Regular readers know I periodically revisit topics or people I’ve talked about to amplify new findings. Since the process of learning rarely follows a linear path, one is often left to reevaluate previous findings or conclusions considering more recently uncovered evidence.
The family establishment in Ratibor [today: Racibórz, Poland], the Bruck’s “Prinz Von Preußen” Hotel, was owned for what I estimate are roughly three generations, from the early 1850s to around the mid-1920s. (Figures 1-2) A historic police file found at the “State Archives in Katowice Branch in Racibórz” indicates the business was sold in around 1926, and subsequently went through a series of owners. (Figure 3)
I thought I had previously laid to rest the issue of why the building does not stand today. It would be reasonable to assume the structure was destroyed during World War II, by Allied bombing of the city prior to its capture or in the waning days of the war when the Soviets encircled and seized the city. However, a post-WWII photo given to me by a curator at the Muzeum w Raciborzu proves the structure was largely intact possibly apart from the roof; the photo, while of high resolution, is taken at too great a distance to ascertain how badly the roof was damaged. (Figure 4)
Realizing the Bruck’s “Prinz Von Preußen” Hotel, which oddly retained its name throughout its existence despite its Jewish origins, outlasted the cataclysmic events of WWII, I sought another explanation for why it might not have survived. This was provided, so I thought, by Mr. Paul Newerla (Figure 5), my friend from Racibórz, a retired lawyer who now researches and writes extensively about the history of Silesia and Ratibor. Paul sent me a copy of a letter he found in the Racibórz Archives dated the 27th of March 1950 from the so-called Racibórz Municipal Board to the Municipal National Council in Racibórz (Figure 6); in essence, the letter states that damaged buildings in the town had been evaluated for their “historic character” and found lacking, so that parts of or all a structure could be dismantled to provide 5,000,000 bricks needed for the reconstruction of Warsaw.
Indicative of the method used to clear burned and destroyed houses and buildings in Racibórz, Paul found another letter dated the 12th of January 1948 sent from the Konservator of the Voivodeship, essentially the province, to the Technical Department of Racibórz’s Municipal Department. (Figure 7) The province was reminding the Municipal Board that the use of explosives to clear these damaged structures in the vicinity of historic edifices such as the Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Racibórz was prohibited. It is safe to assume that explosives were similarly used to take down the Bruck’s Hotel.
Why the city of Racibórz would have agreed to or recommended the dismantling of perfectly functional structures like the former family hotel probably requiring only minor reconstruction at a time when housing was likely in short supply seems to defy logic. Paul jumped to my assistance to explain broader geopolitical factors that apparently dictated why the former family establishment was torn down. I will attempt to explain this to readers.
The address for the Bruck’s “Prinz Von Preußen” Hotel was Oderstraße 16 (Figure 8); the hotel was located on an east-west street that terminated along the west bank of the Oder River [Polish: Odra]. (Figure 9) The historic walled city of Ratibor lay along the west side of the Oder River, as does much of the current central part of Racibórz. The location of the hotel along the west side of the Oder River is significant, as I will demonstrate. Spoiler alert. The destruction of the Bruck’s Hotel may be partially related to the anticipated location of the German-Polish frontier following the end of WWII.
The subject of Poland’s western frontier was brought up by the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin as early as late 1943 at the Tehrān Conference; this was a meeting between U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin held in Tehrān between November 28–December 1, 1943. The chief discussion centered on the opening of a “second front” in western Europe. Stalin agreed to an eastern offensive to coincide with the forthcoming Western Front. On the Polish question, the western Allies and the Soviet Union were at sharp odds. While the Americans were not interested in discussing any border changes during the Tehrān Conference, Roosevelt agreed in principle that Poland’s western border should be extended west to the Oder River.
At the Yalta Conference, during the second of the Big Three conferences between Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin held in February 1945, American and British officials agreed on the basics of Poland’s future borders. In the east, the British agreed to the Curzon line, the proposed demarcation line between the Second Polish Republic and the Soviet Union, two new states emerging after World War I; this line was first proposed in 1919. The British acknowledged that the Americans might push for Lwów, current-day Lviv in western Ukraine, to be included in post-war Poland. It was generally agreed that Poland should receive part of East Prussia, Danzig, the eastern part of Pomerania, and Upper Silesia; for reference Ratibor, present-day Racibórz, was in Upper Silesia.
In terms of this blog post, the following observation in Wikipedia is relevant: “With respect to Poland’s western frontiers, Stalin noted that the Polish Prime Minister in exile, Stanisław Mikołajczyk, had been pleased when Stalin had told him Poland would be granted Stettin/Szczecin and the German territories east of the Western Neisse [River]. Yalta was the first time the Soviets openly declared support for a German-Polish frontier on the Western as opposed to the Eastern Neisse. Churchill objected to the Western Neisse frontier, saying ‘it would be a pity to stuff the Polish goose so full of German food that it got indigestion.’ He added that many Germans would be shocked if such large numbers of Germans were driven out of these areas, to which Stalin responded that ‘many Germans’ had ‘already fled before the Red Army.’” The question of Poland’s western border was ultimately left to be decided at the Potsdam Conference.
Let me digress briefly to give readers a sense of geography regarding the whereabouts of the Western and Eastern Neisse Rivers in relationship to the location of Racibórz. The Neisse River, in Polish Nysa, is two rivers in present-day southwestern Poland. The better-known Nysa Łużycka, or Lusatian Neisse, is the more westerly and longer of the two rivers running 157 miles or 252 km; the Nysa Kłodzka, or Glatzer Leisse or Neisse of the city of Kłodzko (Glatz), is the shorter is 113 miles or 182 km and lies entirely within Poland. Both rivers rise in the Sudeten Mountains, flow northward, and empty into the Oder River. (Figure 10) Near the village of Ratzdorf, the Lusatian Neisse discharges into the Oder River.
Görlitz, located on the more westerly Lusatian Neisse River, is the easternmost town in Germany (easternmost village is Zentendorf), and lies opposite the Polish town of Zgorzelec. Görlitz is slightly less than 200 miles west-northwest of Racibórz (Figure 11), while Kłodzko along the Eastern Neisse is only about 90 miles to the west-northwest of Racibórz. (Figure 12)
As readers can easily discern for themselves, the Soviet proposal to establish Poland’s western frontier along either the Western Neisse or Eastern Neisse would have resulted and did ultimately result in considerably more land being included within Poland. However, at the time of the Yalta Conference, the precise location of Poland’s western border was still an open question. The western Allies accepted in general that the Oder River into which both the eastern and western Neisse rivers emptied would be the western border of Poland in that area. Still in doubt at the time was whether the border would follow the eastern or western Neisse. The western Allies sought to place the border on the eastern Neisse closer to Breslau [today: Wrocław, Poland]. Suggestions of a border on the Bóbr River (Bober) were also supposedly rejected by the Soviets.
At the latitude at which Racibórz is located, the eastern and western Neisse are situated much further to the west of the Oder River. In none of the materials I’ve read have I seen any mention that the Allies were seriously considering establishing the border between Germany and Poland along the Oder at this latitude; as mentioned above, the discussion always revolved around establishing the western frontier along the Neisse rivers or conceivably along the Bober River. (see Figure 10) While this may be true, as far as the local authorities in Racibórz may have been concerned, there may have been sufficient uncertainty as to where the final frontier would be established. Thus, to hedge their bets, the Communist authorities may have decided to dismantle the Bruck’s Hotel and salvage the bricks fearing it would remain on the German side of the border.
A recent citation sent to me by Paul Newerla sheds additional light on how the Bruck’s Hotel was destroyed. On page 69 of a book entitled in Polish “Od Joannitow Do Ratownikow–Czyli Dzieje Strazakow Ziemi Raciborskiej,” translated roughly as “From the Joanites to the rescuers or the history of firefighters of the Racibórz Land,” there is an eyewitness account by a former firefighter who worked for the fire brigade in Racibórz. (Figures 13a-c)
“One day (it was 1945, without further date) the fire brigade was alerted and ordered to the fire of the Hotel Bruck on the corner of Oderstraße and Bollwerkstraße (now Reymonta-Straße). The hotel was in unusually good condition after the war. When the firefighters appeared with their firefighting trailer in front of the burning hotel, they met Russian soldiers equipped with weapons. They refused to have the hotel deleted [sic]. The Polish administration was also powerless. So the beautiful hotel burned.”
It would appear, based on this account, that perhaps an evening of drunken debauchery by occupying Russian soldiers “accidentally” led to the Bruck’s Hotel being set on fire and to the establishment’s ultimate destruction; clearly, the soldiers had no interest in seeing the fire extinguished when the firefighters showed up. Depending on the intensity of the fire, it’s likely the bricks would still have been usable and likely salvaged.
Time and again through history, we have seen foreign invaders attempting to destroy traces of earlier history and culture in places they occupy, to rewrite the past, so to speak. The Nazis sought to eradicate Jewish culture. Currently, we are witnessing in the Ukraine Russians plundering museums in places like Kherson and Mariupol, because, above all, according to Putin’s propaganda, “Ukraine as a country doesn’t exist, it’s part of Russia—so they can grab anything they want.” Thus, like today, it’s probable the orders to wipe out evidence of earlier cultures in Racibórz following WWII were coming from someone high in the Kremlin, likely Stalin himself. Later, during the Communist Era, the headstones in the former Jewish Cemetery in Ratibor were removed and sold off because again, after all, Jews were never considered a part of the cultural fabric of the city.
In closing, let me make a few observations about the frontier between Germany and Poland, and the territorial losses that both suffered because of WWII. The Potsdam Agreement between the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union concluded on the 2nd of August 1945, in anticipation of a final peace treaty, placed the German territories east of the Oder-Neisse line under Polish administration. All Germans remaining in the old and new Poland, it was decided, should be expelled. The Oder-Neisse line marked the border between the former East Germany and Poland from 1950 to 1990. The then-two Communist governments agreed to the border in 1950, while then-West Germany, after a period of refusal, conceded with reservations in 1970. Notwithstanding West Germany’s misgivings about this frontier, with the reunification of Germany, they eventually agreed to it when the German-Polish Border Treaty was signed on the 14th of November 1990.
Ultimately, Poland for its loss to the Soviet Union of 72,000 sq. miles (187,000 sq. km.) of lands east of the Curzon line was compensated with 43,000 sq. miles (112,000 sq. km.) of former German territory. The final borders resulted in Germany’s loss to Poland of most of Silesia, half of Pomerania, the eastern portion of Brandenburg, a small part of Saxony, and part of East Prussia. The northern part of East Prussia, including Königsberg [today: Kaliningrad, Russia], was annexed by the Soviet Union, while Memelland became part of the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic, today Lithuania. (Figure 14)
Thus, while we may wish to believe frontiers and borders are immutable, as we’ve seen in just the past nine years since Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula, they are ever-changing and much more fluid than we would expect.
REFERENCES
Dafoe, Taylor. “Before Retreating from Kherson, Russian Troops Emptied One of Ukraine’s Top Museum of Nearly 15,000 Objects.” Artnet News, 14 Nov. 2022, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/russian-troops-loot-kherson-museum-2209777
Geanous, Jacob. “Russian art curators have reportedly helped loot dozens of Ukraine museums.” New York Post, 4 Feb. 2023, https://flipboard.com/article/russian-art-curators-have-reportedly-helped-loot-dozens-of-ukraine-museums/f-1f12bf14a5%2Fnypost.com
Grutchot, Katarzyna (ed.) “Od Joannitow Do Ratownikow—Czyli Dzieje Strazakow Ziemi Raciborskiej.” (“From the Joanites to the rescuers or the history of firefighters of the Racibórz Land”). Nowiny Publishing House.
Note: The Blog post is about Berlin’s Jewish Community Hospital that inexplicably outlasted the Nazis, and its wartime Director, Dr. Walter Lustig, born in Ratibor, Germany, the same town where my father was born.
This post has to do with my family only insofar as Dr. Walter Lustig, the man at the center of this story, was born in Ratibor [today: Racibórz, Poland], the town in Upper Silesia where my father and many of his family were born. From around 1942 until shortly after WWII ended in April 1945 Dr. Lustig was the Director of Berlin’s Krankenhaus der Jüdischen Gemeinde, the Hospital of the Jewish Community, a Jewish institution that miraculously withstood the Nazi onslaught.
This assault on German Jews left only between 5,000 and 6,000 Jews alive in Germany by the end of the war, compared to 500,000 Jews living there towards the end of the Weimar Republic in 1933 when the Nazis seized power. By the time WWII started in 1939 two-thirds of these Jews had emigrated, though there still remained roughly 167,000 Jews in Germany in 1941, most of whom would be murdered.
Berlin’s Jewish Hospital is 265 years old. It was originally built in 1756 on Oranienburger Strasse near the Jewish cemetery in Berlin. Then, during Berlin’s mid-nineteenth century economic expansion that was due in large measure to its entrepreneurial Jewish population, the Jewish community built the city’s first general hospital, one of the largest of its kind, on Auguststrasse; it was built primarily to serve the needs of the Jewish population. As the years passed, even this structure proved inadequate, so in 1913, the current hospital along Iranischestrasse opened on the site it occupies today (Figure 1); there were seven principal buildings, together with ancillary structures. Presently, the hospital is located in the Wedding locality in the borough of “Berlin-Mitte” (Figure 2), which prior to 2001 was a separate borough in the northwestern part of Berlin.
I have briefly mentioned Berlin’s Jewish Hospital in connection with three previous Blog posts. In Posts 48 and 49, I related the story of how one of my distant relatives, Dr. Ernst Neisser, was taken there on the morning of October 1, 1942, following his attempted suicide after being told to report to an “old age transport,” a euphemism for deportation to a concentration camp; fortunately, he survived only three days until October 4th before succumbing to his trauma. I say “fortunately” because the fear among Jews who attempted suicide is they would be resuscitated only to then be shipped to a concentration camp and gassed there.
According to a Jerusalem Post article by Judy Siegel-Itzkovich, published on June 23, 2007, entitled “A hospital with history,” numerous Berlin Jews, like Dr. Ernst Neisser, who attempted suicide with gas or sleeping pills in the face of deportations ended up in Berlin’s Jewish Hospital for treatment, the only hospital that would still treat Jews during the Nazi era. According to this article, upwards of 7,000 Berlin Jews killed themselves before the Nazi dictatorship fell. Although Jews committed suicide in all sorts of ways, by far the most common method involved the ingestion of a poison such as potassium cyanide or an overdose of an opiate or sedative, usually Veronal.
Then, in Post 107, I mentioned an English lady named Kathy York, whose grandmother Maria Wundsch née Pauly (Figure 3), a distant relative of mine, worked at Berlin’s Jewish Hospital during WWII when Dr. Lustig was the Director there. Kathy tells me letters written about her grandmother’s fraught time working at the hospital exist, but these have yet to surface.
I previously also told readers about Daniel B. Silver’s book about the hospital, entitled, “Refuge in Hell: How Berlin’s Jewish Hospital Outlasted the Nazis.” I have relied heavily on this book in describing Dr. Lustig’s tenure as Director of the hospital and the hospital’s situation during the war. It is not my intention here to thoroughly review what interested followers can easily read for themselves, but rather to bring to light a few findings and connections I made on my own that add a little to the story. This said, some background about Dr. Walter Lustig and his wartime administration of the hospital are warranted.
After fierce street-to-street fighting against entrenched remnants of Hitler’s SS, on April 24, 1945, Russian soldiers had finally succeeded in wresting control from the Nazis of a stretch of Iranischestrasse that included the battle-scarred buildings of the “Krankenhaus Der Jüdischen Gemeinde” (Hospital of The Jewish Community). There they found hundreds of people including doctors, nurses, patients, workmen, and others who claimed to be Jewish. The Russians did not initially give credence to their assertions believing Joseph Goebbels’ 1943 declaration, chief propagandist for the Nazi party, that Berlin was “Judenrein,” or “Judenfrei,” meaning “cleansed (or free) of Jews,” according to National Socialist terminology applied in the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.” Eventually the survivors convinced their Russian liberators they were Jews who had inexplicably outlasted the Nazis.
At the time of liberation, three of the hospital’s seven main buildings were no longer a part of the hospital. In late 1942, the German Army, the Wehrmacht, had expropriated the nurses’ residence, the Schwesterheim, as well as buildings that had housed the gynecology and infectious disease departments, for use as a military hospital, the Lazarett. Then, in 1944, the Gestapo appropriated and fenced off the hospital’s pathology laboratory and an adjacent gatehouse to use as a Sammellager, a collection camp for Jewish deportees. By 1944, most of Berlin’s remaining Jews had already been deported so a single, smaller holding facility now sufficed.
According to Daniel B. Silver, several published sources report the hospital’s population at the time of liberation at around 800. However, Hilda Kahan, Dr. Lustig’s secretary throughout his tenure as Director of the Jewish Community Hospital, states in a videotaped interview that the number was closer 500. Regardless of the precise number, they represented a large proportion of Germany’s identifiable Jews as they were defined by the Nazis. Statistics a young Jewish woman was compelled to maintain for the Gestapo on a monthly basis indicate only 6,284 known Jews remained in Berlin on February 28, 1945. (Silver, 2003, p. 2)
Included in the final number of Jews found at the Hospital upon its liberation, according to Daniel Silver “. . .were patients and members of the medical, nursing, and support staff who had taken up residence in the hospital at various times, either because they had been bombed out or evicted as Jews from their former homes or because they were slave laborers assigned to work at the hospital. Also on hand were the remnants of groups of Jews who had been transferred to the hospital when the Nazis closed other Jewish institutions in Germany, such as orphanages and old age homes. Most of these unfortunates had been deported before the war ended, but some remained in April 1945. Among them were a handful of abandoned children who were suspected of being fully Jewish but whose ‘racial’ status had not been definitively determined. The Nazis had used the hospital as a kind of ghetto to which they consigned Jews who had nowhere else to live or whose status was ambiguous. These included Jews of foreign nationality and Jews who were being held there as potential bargaining chips in negotiating exchanges for German nationals captured in Palestine. The authorities also used the hospital to house Jews who had been brought to Berlin from other cities in Germany as part of a Nazi effort to separate them from their Aryan spouses. This was intended as a first step in overcoming the political and legal barriers to the deportation of Jewish men who lived in mixed marriages and whose Aryan spouses refused to divorce them despite Gestapo pressure to do so.” (2003, p. 8) As Winter further notes, “Most of the hospital population were half-Jews or spouses of Aryans. As such, they had been protected by Nazi rules that everyone knew could be changed at any time.” (2003, p. 12)
Also included among the “patients” were several Jews not receiving medical treatment who were protected from deportation by one or another prominent Nazi; this may have included Jews who had illicit affairs with well-placed Nazis, childhood friends of important Nazis who sought to protect them, Jews who had bribed high-ranking Nazis, or other cases whose reasons can only be guessed. A “lucky” group of survivors included Jews who had been incarcerated in the hospital’s auxiliary police ward, the so-called Polizeistation. These were Jews who fell ill while already in the hands of the police, Gestapo, or SS who for unknown reasons the Nazis sought to restore to health before killing them. Unbelievable!
My family’s remote association to Berlin’s Jewish Community Hospital and its miraculous survival through WWII, in addition to the hospital’s wartime Director’s connection to Ratibor, the same town in Upper Silesia where my father was born, drew my interest in writing this Blog post. Hoping I might be able to add a little to what has already been written and is known about Dr. Walter Lustig, I contacted Mr. Paul Newerla (Figure 4), my retired lawyer friend from Racibórz who now researches and writes about the history of the town and Silesia and asked whether he could track down a copy of Dr. Walter Lustig’s birth certificate at the archive. Paul graciously agreed to help. He not only was able to locate Dr. Lustig’s birth certificate, but the Racibórz archives also provided a legal document related to Dr. Walter Lustig’s father, Bernhard Lustig, dated the 22nd of March 1939. I will discuss this in further detail below.
First, let me tell readers a little about Walter Lustig. He was born as Walter Simon Lustig on the 10th of August 1891 in Ratibor, the son of the merchant Bernhard Lustig and his wife Regina Lustig née Besser. He graduated from the local gymnasium in March 1910 and enrolled at the University of Breslau in October of the same year. He studied medicine, specializing in surgery, and received his medical degree and license in the spring of 1915. He was drafted during WWI and served as a military doctor. During his wartime stint, he obtained a Ph.D., also in medicine. His military service was performed in Breslau, where he treated casualties from the eastern front. After the war he worked in public administration while maintaining a private medical practice; he spent most of his career as a medical administrator. He wrote prolifically on medical subjects.
Clearly driven to advance professionally, in 1927 he relocated to Berlin. His move there coincided with two changes that had far-reaching consequences. He married a non-Jewish physician, Dr. Annemarie Preuss, and took a job with the Berlin police department where he became acquainted with Fritz Wöhrn and Rolf Günther who eventually became Adolf Eichmann’s key aides in overseeing the hospital. It was Adolf Eichmann’s department in the Reichssicherbeitshauptamt (RSHA), the Reich Security Main Office, that had formal jurisdiction over the Jewish hospital.
According to Daniel Silver, Lustig “. . .advanced within the police hierarchy until in 1929 he was appointed to the position of director of the Police Presidium’s medical affairs department. He held the prestigious bureaucratic titles of Oberregierungsrat (chief administrative counselor) and Obermedizinalrat (chief medical counselor).” (2003, p. 24-25) The police department had broad administrative responsibilities that extended beyond criminal matters, and included overseeing health matters in schools, institutions, and group care facilities, and conducting occupational training for medical personnel; suffice it to say, this brought Lustig into contact with many senior government officials and leaders in the medical community.
In October 1933, Lustig lost his job because of the issuance of the Nazis’ Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service (“Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums”). This law initially exempted veterans of WWI such as Lustig but because he had been stationed in Breslau and not on the eastern front, the exemption did not apply to him, and he lost his position. At some time, between 1933 and 1935 Lustig was employed by the health department of the Berlin Jewish Gemeinde, or community (more on this below). According to Daniel Silver, when exactly Lustig was employed by the Gemeinde, and what his exact duties were are unknown, though he apparently became active in matters relating to the Jewish hospital around this time. Regardless, Lustig proved as adept at rising in the official Jewish bureaucracy at the Gemeinde as he had rising through the ranks of the Berlin police department.
Without overwhelming readers with the tangled structure of the Jewish community, it is still worth reviewing the hospital’s situation following the events of Kristallnacht that took place on the 9-10 November 1938 to provide context for Dr. Lustig’s powerful administrative position during the war. In a structure that prevailed before the Nazis came to power and still exists today, every religious denomination was organized into a Gemeinde, depending on context, roughly translated as community, municipality, congregation, or parish. Prior to the Nazis seizing power in 1933, the Gemeinde in smaller cities resisted the formation of a central Jewish organization fearing it would be dominated by the Berlin Gemende. Eventually the reality of the Nazi takeover overtook regional concerns, and a central organization called the Reichsvertretung der deutschen Juden, or Central Representation of German Jews, was formed. It was renamed after 1935 to “Jews in Germany,” a significant distinction meant to signal that Jews were no longer to be considered Germans.
As the remaining German Jews became more concentrated in Berlin over time, the distinction between the Berlin Gemeinde and the Reichsvertretung became blurrier with many officials holding parallel positions in both organizations. After Kristallnacht, the Reichsvertretung was dissolved by the Nazis, only to be resurrected when the Nazis realized this organization facilitated emigration, which at the time the Nazis were encouraging. Consequently, a new Jewish central organization was organized, substituting the word Reichsvereinigung (central organization) for Reichsvertretung (central representation). Membership in this organization was compulsory for every Jew, which was created to better discriminate against and control the Jewish population. It was under tight Gestapo supervision.
Daniel Silver summarizes the hospital’s situation by 1941: “So it was that by 1941 the hospital functioned under the organization umbrella of the Reichsvereiningung, although, through the Gemeinde health department, it still maintained a formal relationship to the Berlin Gemeinde. The most important aspect of the new arrangements that began in 1938 was that, through the Reichsvereiningung, the hospital was placed under the direct supervision of Department IV B 4 of the RSHA. Originally this had been the department in charge of ‘Jewish emigration and evacuation.’ By 1941 it had become the department for ‘Jewish affairs and evacuation,’ emigration having been largely abandoned as a Nazi objective. Its head was Adolf Eichmann, the bureaucratic mastermind of the Final Solution.” (2003, p. 40)
Measures taken against Jewish professionals which began in 1933 with passage of the Nuremberg racial laws that pushed Jewish doctors out of jobs in non-Jewish clinics had a profound effect on the makeup of the Jewish hospital’s professional staff as it stood in 1941. Things came to a head with the decree of July 25, 1938, when all Jewish physicians, of which there were about 3,000 at the time in the Reich, were stripped of their medical licenses. By September, a limit of 700 Jewish physicians, referred to by the degrading title of Krankenbehandler, or “carer for the sick,” were restricted to treating Jewish patients or working in Jewish institutions.
Ironically, one of the beneficiaries of this provision was Walter Lustig. While many of Lustig’s contemporaries had by 1938 decided to emigrate, he consciously decided not to do so. Whether this was hubris or his marriage to an Aryan that he thought afforded him some protection or his previous relationship with Nazis during his days in the Berlin police department, Lustig benefited from others’ departures to rise in the Jewish hierarchy. Daniel Silver describes it as follows: “When his boss in the Gemeinde/Reichsvereinigung health department, Erich Seligmann, left Germany for the United States in 1939, Lustig took over his position. In July 1939, the Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt (Jewish chronicle) described him as the person who henceforth would be responsible for health matters within the Reichsvereinigung. In that capacity, he played a key role in filling vacancies that opened up at the hospital because of the emigration of members of the medical staff. At some point in 1940 or 1941 (exactly when is unclear), he was appointed as the Gesundheitsdesernent, or chief of the health department (of the Gemeinde), and thus became a member of the governing board of the Reichsvereinigung.” (2003, p. 43)
Eventually in around October 1942, Walter Lustig became the hospital’s director after the previous director Dr. Schoenfeld and his wife killed themselves; they had been among 100 Gemeinde and Reichsvereinigung officials handpicked in the second major deportation of communal officials, a selection Lustig was compelled to participate in after initially demurring. From 1942 onward, he was repeatedly forced to aid in the selection of hospital staff for deportation, and according to Daniel Silver was “. . .arguably the most powerful figure of German Jewry and the absolute master of the hospital.”
Again, quoting Daniel Silver, “For many, Lustig’s name evokes predominantly negative feelings. According to one source, ‘The name Walter Lustig awakens even today vigorous aversion among Jewish witnesses of the events.’ Yet even his detractors give grudging credit to his talents and to his accomplishment in keeping the hospital open through the final years of the Nazi regime. His contemporaries describe him in wildly differing terms—turncoat and Gestapo collaborator; savior of the hospital; the man who sent hundreds of Jews to their death; the man who saved hundreds of Jews from the camps; a protector of children; a lecher.” (2003, p. 26) Further complicating how Lustig is viewed in hindsight is the criticism that he was unsympathetic to the plight of his fellow Jews and that he was a Jewish anti-Semite, and that his mistresses may have influenced the people he selected for deportation. More on his purported anti-Semitism below.
At the time Mr. Winter published his book in 2003, he stated there were no known pictures of Walter Lustig. (2003, p. 26) While writing this Blog post, I was able to establish email contact with Daniel Winter, who formerly served as the general counsel to the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Service. He mentioned that following the publication of his book students from the University of Potsdam, outside Berlin, found a picture of Walter Lustig while developing a traveling exhibit about Berlin’s Jewish Hospital. Unable to locate his copy of this image, I have separately contacted the University of Potsdam hoping they might find and send me one. I’m optimistic about sharing it with readers in the future.
Relatedly, about ten years ago, I attended a talk sponsored by the Los Angeles Jewish Genealogical Society given by a Mr. Roger Lustig (Figure 5), who specializes in research on Jewish families of Prussian Poland, and is a top expert on general German Jewish research. This talk was given just before my planned 13-week trip to Europe to follow in the footsteps of my Jewish family’s diaspora. I contacted Roger asking whether he might be able to refer me to someone in Racibórz who could help me. Because Roger also has ancestors from there, he was happy to assist. Over the years, we’ve periodically stayed in touch. Naturally assuming that Roger might in some way be related to Walter Lustig because of the common surname and their respective connections to Ratibor, while writing this Blog post, I asked him whether he might have Walter’s photograph. He was unable to help explaining that because Dr. Lustig was a short man, about 5’2”, he was self-conscious about being photographed. This comports with how informants described Lustig to Daniel Silver, namely, that he was small. (2003, p. 26) Others added that he was a “small, delicate person” and that he had “cold stabbing eyes—terrible eyes.” Another informant reported that Lustig was very Germanic in appearance, a man who “‘looked like a major from the First World War,’ with spectacles and a big moustache.” (2003, p. 26)
Roger Lustig pointed out something interesting to me during our recent exchange that speaks to whether Walter was anti-Semite. While writing his book, Silver coincidentally interviewed Roger Lustig’s father, Ernst Lustig, who addressed this question (i.e., Ernst Lustig’s great-great-grandfather was the brother of Walter Lustig’s great-grandfather (2003, p. 176)): “The characterization of Lustig as a Jewish anti-Semite is at odds with the reaction of his distant cousin Ernst Lustig. In a brief and anguished commentary on the judgment in the Wöhrn trial, Ernst Lustig expresses surprise and shock at the unfavorable way Walter Lustig is described. ‘What is difficult for me to comprehend,’ he writes, ‘is how this man could develop such a horrible attitude toward Jews when he himself was a flawless Jew.’ He remembers his cousin as a man who maintained friendly relations with his Jewish relatives, a man whom he knew as ‘Uncle Walter,’ and a man who once provided Ernst’s father with a genealogical sketch of the family that descended from Dr. Lustig’s great-grandfather Abraham, who had lived in the town of Adamowitz. This seems out of character with the picture of Walter Lustig as a man who took no interest in his Jewish roots, although it is true that the time in question, 1937-38, was already after the date when Walter Lustig decided to throw his lot in with the Jewish community to which the Nazis in any event had irrevocably assigned him.” (2003, p. 215)
It is difficult to reconcile the differing judgements of Walter Lustig. On the one hand, there is the man who selected colleagues and fellow employees for deportation, while on the other was a man who occasionally came to the rescue of assistants who’d been arrested by the Nazis. Then, in March 1943, the Gestapo showed up with trucks in front of the administrative building prepared to deport the entire establishment, patients, doctors, nurses, and all other employees; it was only Lustig’s call to Adolf Eichmann that forced the Gestapo to stand down, though it resulted in fully half of Lustig’s workmates being arrested. As Silver asks, “Did Lustig originate this Faustian bargain, offering up fully half of the total number of his professional colleagues and employees as the price for saving the hospital, and thereby himself and his job? Or was this decision imposed on him in circumstances over he which he had no control whatsoever? It is unlikely that anyone will ever know.” (2003, p. 143)
It is worth noting that while the RSHA and the Gestapo were technically part of the same organization and under the authority of the same leader, SS Führer Heinrich Himmler, the German bureaucracy was teeming with internal rivalries and tensions (2003, p. 141), a situation which may partially explain why the Jewish hospital survived the war. For all of Lustig’s purported influence with the Gestapo, he was unable to save his own father from being deported to Theresienstadt in 1943. (2003, p. 173 & p. 221)
Longtime followers of my Blog may recall the postscript to Post 13 about the former Jewish Cemetery in Ratibor. In that post, I explained the role a Polish gentleman named Mr. Kazimierz Świetliński played in photographing all the headstones of the graves before the cemetery was demolished during Poland’s Communist Era. At a time when purchasing film and processing black-and-white negatives cost a lot,Kazimierz photographed, developed, created a portfolio with a site plan, and donated all his work to the Muzeum Raciborzu to be archived. After learning about these images, I arranged to photograph all the images in 2015. Recalling these and the accompanying Excel database, I scrolled through them and discovered they include a photo of Walter Lustig’s mother’s headstone, Regina Lustig née Besser. (Figure 6) As mentioned above, Walter’s father, Bernhard Lustig, was deported to Theresienstadt where he died, so obviously no picture of his gravestone exists.
Walter’s birth certificate, which my dear friend Mr. Paul Newerla was able to obtain from the Racibórz archives confirmed Walter’s date of birth, the 10th of August 1891, and his parentage. (Figures 7a-b) As I mentioned above, while Paul was searching for Walter Lustig’s birth certificate, the archives stumbled upon a legal document related to Bernhard Lustig dated the 22nd of March 1939. (Figures 8a-g) At the time Bernhard was 82 years of age indicating he’d been born in 1857; I would later learn he was born on the 6th of February 1857. Because he was in frail health at the time, Bernhard Lustig had requested that a Mr. Arthur “Israel” Stein be appointed as his guardian, which the courts granted. Despite his failing health, four years later the Nazis deported him to Theresienstadt, where he perished. One can only imagine the cruel circumstances under which Bernhard died.
Interestingly, the legal document Bernhard submitted to the court also requested that he be allowed to submit a corrected declaration of value for assets he’d mistakenly overvalued; this resulted in overpayment of the “Jewish expiation tax,” for which he sought reimbursement. It seems unlikely the courts ever acted upon this request.
From 1945 to the present, most people have expressed incredulity that the Nazis permitted an identifiable Jewish institution to continue to exist in Berlin, a city Goebbels had declared in 1943 “cleansed of Jews.” Mr. Silver offers possible explanations: 1) the Nazis saw the hospital as playing a useful role in the large-scale deportations during a time when all other Jewish organizations and institutions had been eliminated (2003, p. 62); 2) earlier in the war, before the large-scale deportation of most Jews, it is possible the Nazis allowed the hospital to survive to provide for the treatment of Jews who could spread epidemics to the general Aryan population (2003, p. 235-6); 3) for bureaucratic convenience, that’s to say, as a place in which the Gestapo could establish a kind of ghetto (2003, p. 237); and 4) for reasons of ambition, Adolf Eichmann may have stage-managed the transfer of the land and buildings the hospital occupied to a small powerless agency, the Academy of Youth Medicine, which he could easily control and thereby preserve the hospital and the site he coveted. (2003, p. 238)
Let me end this lengthy post by briefly discussing what is known about Walter Lustig’s fate. Following the war, the hospital fell into the Soviet-administered zone of Berlin. By then, Lustig had been appointed by the occupation-controlled local government as the director of health services for the Wedding district and had turned over the administration of the hospital to his aide Ehrich Zwilsky. Incredibly, Lustig had remained head of the Reichsvereinigung and had even petitioned the Soviet authorities to have it converted to the new Jewish Gemeinde, with himself as the head. His ambition clearly clouded his judgement; a more prudent course might have compelled him to flee, given the overall negative verdict by many who worked with him and thought he was a turncoat and Gestapo collaborator. Regardless, in June 1945, according to Ruth Bileski, a young Jewish woman sent in 1943 as a forced laborer to work in Lustig’s office, he was taken away accompanied by two uniformed Soviet officers, never to be seen again. Some claim he may have stage-managed his own disappearance to avoid being tried, although the likelier outcome is that he was killed by the Soviets.
REFERENCES
Siegel-Itzkovich, Judy. “A hospital with history.” Jerusalem Post, June 23, 2007, https://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=Siegel-Itzkovich%2c+Judy.+%e2%80%9cA+hospital+with+history&d=4898311699633967&mkt=en-US&setlang=en-US&w=KvOBC3e8wZezfu1SQux0Q8WOOLP6t1uU
Silver, Daniel B. Refuge in Hell: How Berlin’s Jewish Hospital Outlasted the Nazis. Houghton Mifflin, 2003.
Note: This short postscript provides additional historic context about the events that ultimately led to the demolition of the Bruck’s “Prinz Von Preußen” Hotel in Ratibor, Germany, information obtained from Mr. Paul Newerla, retired lawyer and Racibórz historian.
Unlike Tiegenhof, in the former Free State of Danzig (today: Nowy Dwor Gdanski, Poland), where my father practiced dentistry between 1932 and 1937, where many elegant buildings from the German era still stand, in Ratibor (today: Racibórz, Poland), where my father was born, few of the classic German structures still exist in the city center. I touched on the reason for this in my original post, as well as in the first postscript.
As too often happens, when one is not a student of European history or when one relies too heavily on Wikipedia or other superficial Internet sources, the nuances of history are lost or distorted. Such is the case with the explanation of why the Bruck’s “Prinz Von Preußen” Hotel, owned by three generations of my family, was torn down after WWII. In the interest of setting the record straight and of adhering to my principle of being as historically accurate as possible, I’m adding another postscript. I owe clarification of the actual historic events to Racibórz historian, Mr. Paul Newerla (Figure 1), although I assume full responsibility for any mischaracterization or inaccuracy surrounding the exact circumstances that sealed the hotel’s fate.
Readers will recall a post-WWII picture of the Bruck’s Hotel included in the original post capturing at a distance a view of the still standing hotel. (Figure 2) To the untrained eye, it appears the hotel was largely intact, and could easily have been rebuilt. This was confirmed by Mr. Newerla, who observed that only the roof had been burned but that the walls and the vaults between the floors seemed to be in good condition, and that the building could have been restored. Mr. Newerla explained why this never occurred, which gets to the crux of why one sometimes needs to probe more deeply into the explanation of historic events.
Ratibor was “conquered” by the Soviets on March 31, 1945. Naturally, some sections of the city had been destroyed by air raids and street-by-street fighting in the final stages of WWII. Nonetheless, during April and even into May, following German capitulation, Soviet soldiers continued to routinely destroy parts of Ratibor, systematically burning houses. Mr. Newerla sent me a 1949 map of Ratibor’s city center, showing in red buildings that were burned or damaged, and in yellow structures that had been demolished. (Figure 3)
According to the findings of Polish authorities, Ratibor’s city center had been 80 percent destroyed, although Mr. Newerla estimates the actual percentage was closer to 60 percent. Following WWII, however, no construction work was carried out, and one building after another was torn down. The goal was to obtain bricks for the reconstruction of Warsaw. Even houses that had suffered only minimal damage that could have been rebuilt with limited financial resources were torn down. In the Racibórz Archives, Mr. Newerla discovered a letter dated 1950 from the city administration justifying their plan; in a section entitled “Demolition,” city administrators established a “quota” of 5,000,000 bricks Ratibor was expected to provide for the reconstruction of Warsaw. A poor reproduction of this letter written in Polish is included. (Figure 4) Mr. Newerla told me it took the city several years to amass this number of bricks.
The question of why Ratibor was expected to ante up 5,000,000 bricks, however, requires further examination.
Racibórz, administratively once part of Upper Silesia, Germany and now in the southwestern part of Poland, is located on the western banks of the Oder River. In the post-WWII period, Polish authorities were still not certain where the German-Polish border would be established. It was assumed the line would be set along the Oder River, so that Ratibor would remain a part of the “new” Germany. Operating under this assumption, the Poles probably felt it was their “due” to retrieve what they could from Germany, the country that had been largely responsible for widespread destruction throughout Poland during WWII. Ironically, though, the boundary with Germany in southwestern Poland was established not along the Oder River, but further to the west along the Neisse River (Oder-Neisse Line); Polish authorities never dreamed the border would be established this far west. Thus, towns in what became Poland were needlessly destroyed, idiomatically-speaking, a case of “cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face”; this included not only Ratibor, but also Oppeln (today: Opole, Poland), Breslau (today: Wrocław, Poland), etc. By contrast, Mr. Newerla explained that former German towns on the right bank or east of the Oder River, such as Gleiwitz (today: Gliwice, Poland), Beuthen (today: Bytom, Poland) Hindenburg (today: Zabrze, Poland), etc. that authorities knew would remain Polish, were never dismantled.
The impact of the wholesale demolition of Ratibor’s city center in the early 1950’s is visible even today. Most of the city center is not built up, and there are green spaces or concrete squares where German buildings once stood. The systematic demolition of German-era buildings impacted yet another structure associated with my family’s connection to Ratibor, specifically the Berliner Brauerei, subject of Post 14. This brewery was located on Neumarkt, and in historic photographs and postcards of this square, one can see the monument to John of Nepomuk in the foreground. (Figures 5 & 6) Interestingly, this column still stands today, in the middle of a parking lot, while the family brewery is long gone. (Figures 7 & 8)
