Note: In this post, I discuss the process I went through to confirm that I’d incorrectly identified the sinister Nazi Reinhard Heydrich in a group photo taken in 1936/1937 at Castle Kamenz (Kamieniec Ząbkowicki, Poland). To prove this to my satisfaction, I made use of an AI-powered tool.
An astute reader recently informed me the person I had identified in Posts 133, Parts I & II, as Reinhard Heydrich (Figure 1), the Nazi’s notorious “Butcher of Prague,” in a group photo taken at Castle Kamenz in Silesia (today: Kamieniec Ząbkowicki, Poland) in 1936/37 (Figure 2) is not him. The picture in question was originally sent to me by a very reliable informant claiming a noted scholar had recognized Reinhard.
The German gentleman who questioned the identification is a physics teacher in Dresden with an avid interest in history, particularly German military history up to 1918. The man grew up in Gotha in the former German Democratic Republic or East Germany. According to the reader, Reinhard Heydrich’s doppelgänger is Wilhelm Prinz von Hessen-Philippsthal-Barchfeld (1905-1942), and he sent me a link to a photo of him in his military ensemble as well as his bio. (Figure 3) He claims that in the group picture Wilhelm von Hessen, who was head of a “Motor-Sturmbann” of the SS-Standarte 27, is seen wearing his military uniform with the collar tabs “M” for Motor-Sturmbann; even on the highest resolution picture of this gathering, I have difficulty distinguishing the collar tabs.
Since this is my blog the responsibility for fact checking the accuracy of the information I publish in my posts ultimately rests on my shoulders. Given the lengths I’ve gone to caution readers about cloning vital data from other people’s ancestral trees without sourcing the primary documents and verifying their accuracy, I decided I needed to take a similarly rigorous approach in determining whether the amateur historian is accurate.
Let me explain to readers who Wilhelm von Hessen was and whether it is even conceivable he could have been photographed at Castle Kamenz at the time the picture was taken. In 1936/37 Castle Kamenz was owned by Friedrich Heinrich von Preußen (1874-1940) (Figure 4) shown elegantly attired and seated in the front row of the group picture, second from the left. His younger brother was Friedrich Wilhelm von Preussen (1880-1925) (Figure 5) who obviously was not in attendance since he had died prematurely about a dozen years earlier.
Friedrich Wilhelm was a member of the House of Hohenzollern and a great-grandson of King Frederick William III of Prussia. He was married to Princess Agatha of Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst from Ratibor & Corvey (1888-1960) (Figure 6), seated as a widow in the center of the front row (Figure 7); together they had four daughters. (Figure 8) The third daughter, Princess Marianne von Preußen (1913-1983) was married to Wilhelm von Hessen. Thus, based on family connections, it is entirely plausible that he attended the family gathering at Castle Kamenz in 1936/37.
Obviously, the individuals in attendance at the gathering at Castle Kamenz are unidentified though some are familiar to the reader who furnished the group picture. I’m not entirely positive but think Princess Marianne von Preußen is standing in the second row, the third person from the left dressed in white. Though Friedrich Wilhelm and Princess Agatha’s four daughters were born between 1911 and 1919, as young women they are often difficult to tell apart.
The reader who shared the original photo included side-by-side photos of Reinhard Heydrich and the man purported to be him in the group picture. (Figure 9) Given that Heydrich’s identity had putatively been confirmed, I did not compare the images as carefully as I should have when writing Posts 133, Parts I & II. Had I done so initially, I might have observed a few things that later triggered some doubts. First, I noticed in the picture that is assuredly of Heydrich that he had a narrower face, longer nose, and bigger ears than the individual on the right. Second, and this is much more impressionistic, the person in the group picture is broadly smiling, an attribute I would hardly associate with as sadistic an individual as Heydrich.
Trained as an archaeologist steeped in the scientific method, I was still not convinced the person in the group picture was Wilhelm von Hessen. Because the link sent to me by the amateur historian depicting Wilhelm in his military uniform was not conclusive (see Figure 3), I went in search of other pictures of him. Because Wilhelm came from a royal family and married into another royal family, I had the good fortune to find several of them on the Internet and in my own collection of photos.
The first high quality picture I found of Wilhelm von Hessen was taken at the marriage of one of his wife’s sisters, Princess Luise von Preußen (1912-1973) to Moritz Richard Bruno Wilhelm Schmaltz (1901-1983) on the 30th of November 1936, possibly at Castle Kamenz. (Figure 10) It shows Princess Agatha, her four daughters, three sons-in-law, and one grandson. On the very far right in this picture can be seen Princess Marianne von Preußen (1913-1983) and her husband Wilhelm von Hessen. Regrettably, comparing this image of Wilhelm von Hessen to the group photo again yields no definitive answer to the naked eye as to whether it was Wilhelm.
My Internet search continued. I found an undated group photo of Wilhelm von Hessen including him and his four siblings. (Figure 11) He is pictured fourth from the left but once more the evidence is not clear cut that he is the person in the group picture.
Finally, I had the good fortune to find in Geni a high-quality picture of Marianne von Preußen and Wilhelm von Hessen, possibly from around the time they were married on the 30th of January 1933 (Figure 13); at the time, Marianne would have been 20 years old and Wilhelm 28 years, the approximate ages they appear to be in the picture. A simple visual comparison of this image of Wilhelm to the person in the group photo left me fairly convinced they were the same person. I asked several friends who I know from previous experience are adept with visual comparisons, and they agree. Unfortunately, the reader who originally sent me the group photo disagrees.
While I have no expertise in this area, both readers agree the man in the 1936/37 group picture is wearing a Schutzstaffel or SS uniform. However, the informant who sent the group photo claims that Wilhelm von Hessen did not switch from the Wehrmacht to the SS (i.e., German soldiers could not be members of both units simultaneously) until right before the Nazi invasion of France on the 10th of May 1940. Unfortunately, I can’t independently verify when von Hessen joined the SS. On his 30th of November 1936 photo, Wilhelm von Hessen is supposedly wearing a Wehrmacht uniform. (Figure 14) Based on this apparent discrepancy, I theorize the group photo was taken in late 1936 or in 1937 after the November 1936 marriage, by which time Wilhelm von Hessen was then a member of the SS.
Having convinced myself that the amateur historian is correct that the person in the 1936/37 group picture is not Reinhard Heydrich but Wilhelm von Hessen, as a lark I decided to see whether I could find an artificial intelligence (AI) application which could strengthen my case. I found an AI-powered tool which allows me to do precisely what I was looking to do, namely, compare two faces to measure similarity. It is called “FaceShape” and below is the link to this tool:
I’m admittedly not adept at using new technology, so the attraction of FaceShape is that it’s supremely easy to use.
Juxtaposing the images of Reinhard Heydrich and that of the person in the group photo originally sent by the first reader yields a low probability of only 27.04% that they are the same individual. (Figure 15) By comparison when I compare the known image of Wilhelm von Hessen from his sister-in-law Princess Luise’s 1936 marriage to the person in the group photo, FaceShape claims a 100% probability they are the same person. (Figure 16) Another comparison that yielded a 100% match was Wilhelm von Hessen’s photo from his sister-in-law’s marriage to one of him in his military uniform. (Figure 17) Readers can see the results of the various other images I contrasted. (Figures 18-20)
Comparing the photos I found of Wilhelm von Hessen to one another, then to the person in the group picture from 1936/37, sets my mind at ease that it is indeed Wilhelm von Hessen. However, I want to be very clear with readers that FaceShape is not perfect. Based on some of the images I juxtaposed, the application obviously does not work well with poor resolution images; where the person in question is partially blocked by another individual; where siblings are involved that resemble one another or are of similar age; when known pictures of the same person are from earlier in life vs. later in life; or in distinguishing gender.
In closing, I would merely say that I consider FaceShape or similar AI-powered applications to be one tool in an arsenal that genealogists can use to further one’s research and possibly resolve thorny identification questions. It clearly requires human interpretation after the tool is applied to consider the question of whether the results are logical and make sense. While I may not have convinced the original reader that Reinhard Heydrich is not in the group photo taken at Castle Kamenz, I have proven to my satisfaction the person in question is Wilhelm von Hessen, not Heydrich.
Note: Inspired by a reader, in this post I investigate the location of a Polish forced labor camp situated near Kamenz, Germany [today: Kamieniec Ząbkowicki, Poland], a place I’ve discussed in several earlier posts. Determining its location caused me to examine the purpose of the various networks of underground caves and subterranean structures the Nazis constructed in the latter stages of WWII in the mountainous regions of Germany, Austria, and Poland.
A gentleman, Mr. Wayne Lewan, from New South Wales, Australia recently contacted me through my blog regarding his father, Zbigniew Lewandowski. Wayne’s surname is obviously a truncated version of his ancestors’ family name. He happened upon several recent blog posts I wrote about Castle Kamenz [today: Kamieniec Ząbkowicki, Poland] that my friend Peter Albrecht von Preußen’s family owned through several generations.
Wayne sent me two pages (Figures 1a-b) documenting that his father had indeed been a forced laborer in Kamenz in Silesia near Breslau [today: Wrocław, Poland] between 1944-1945, when Silesia was part of Germany. I found these and other pages, including Zbigniew Lewandowski’s photograph (Figure 2) on his 1948 “Application for Assistance” requesting help to immigrate to Australia, in the online Arolsen Archives database. This database has the largest collection of information on Nazi victims, including documents on concentration camps, forced labor and displaced persons.
According to Wayne, his father was picked up by the Nazis in a street roundup in Warsaw on the 17th of July 1944. Given the timing of his arrest, it is likely that Zbigniew was arrested during the Warsaw Uprising, the World War II operation by the Polish underground resistance to liberate Warsaw from German occupation. It occurred in the summer of 1944, and it was led by the Polish resistance Home Army. Following Zbigniew’s arrest, he was held in Kamenz between July 1944 and January 1945, then moved to Mühldorf, a subcamp of the Dachau concentration camp located near Mühldorf in Bavaria, where he was liberated in May 1945.
Aware that present-day Kamieniec Ząbkowicki, Poland, located in the Lower Silesian Voivodeship (i.e., an “administrative district”) of south-western Poland, has a population of only about 4,200 people today and is a small community, I became curious as to where exactly in Kamenz the internment camp might have been located.
For geographic reference, Kamieniec Ząbkowicki is approximately 80 miles northwest of Racibórz (Figure 3), where my father was born, and roughly 50 miles south of Wrocław, Poland [formerly: Breslau, Germany]. (Figure 4) Wrocław is a city in southwestern Poland and the largest city in the historical region of Silesia. Kamieniec Ząbkowicki is an important railroad junction, located on the main line which links Wrocław with Kłodzko [Glatz, Germany] and Prague.
The reason the location of a forced laborer camp in Kamenz is so fascinating is that in the numerous discussions I’ve had with Peter Albrecht von Preußen the existence of such a purported camp has never previously come up. And, in fact, the document Wayne Lewan sent me merely indicated his father had been interned in “Kamenz, Schles., near Breslau,” (see Figure 1a) making no allusion to Castle Kamenz proper. Still, while my online research yielded no mention of any forced laborer camp near Kamenz in Silesia, I confusingly discovered there had been a concentration camp in another town by the same name located in Saxony; the latter was a subcamp of the Gross-Rosen concentration camp.
I began to wonder whether an internment camp might have existed underground near Castle Kamenz. While researching this possibility, I learned that the Nazis had begun a secret construction project in the Owl Mountains [Polish: Góry Sowie; German: Eulengebirge] beneath Książ Castle, located only about 43 miles northwest of Castle Kamenz. Książ Castle is a castle in northern Wałbrzych (Figure 5) in Lower Silesian Voivodeship, Poland, and the largest castle in Silesia. It stood to reason that if the Nazis had begun fabrication of massive underground bases beneath a nearby castle in Silesia, they might have done the same beneath Castle Kamenz. Nonetheless, Peter Albrecht confirmed that a similar assembly project had never been built under Castle Kamenz.
The project underneath Książ Castle was code named “Project Riese” and involved the construction between 1943 and 1945 of seven massive underground bases. The purpose of this vast subterranean network project remains uncertain. Some sources suggest that all the structures were part of the Führer Headquarters; according to others, it was a combination of headquarters (HQ) and arms industry, with Książ Castle intended as an HQ or other official residence, and the tunnels in the Owl Mountains planned as a network of underground factories. The tunnels were never finished though thousands of prisoners of war, forced laborers, and concentration camp inmates worked and died during the construction work.
In any event, the revelation of underground bases the Nazis excavated or natural caves or old mines they expanded upon has opened a plethora of topics I’ve either never previously discussed or only touched upon. They relate to the final phase of WWII when their development was widespread throughout the mountainous areas of Germany, Austria, and Poland and widely involved the use of forced laborers, prisoners of war, and concentration camps inmates. Because they often lack documentary evidence, they invite endless speculation as to their true function. I will briefly explore some of these issues.
Let me begin by discussing what I learned from Peter Albrecht as to the presumed location of the forced labor camp in Kamenz vis a vis Castle Kamenz. Some of Peter’s information comes from an informant named Stefan Gnaczy who started the local historical society and the small museum in Kamieniec Ząbkowicki; regrettably, Stefan passed away in 2019, though his son Matthew Gnaczy continues to be involved with the historical society and museum.
Before relating what Peter has learned about the forced labor camp near Castle Kamenz let me review some of what I presented to readers in Post 135 for context. Peter’s great-great-grandfather Friedrich Wilhelm Nikolaus Albrecht von Preußen (1837-1906) was gifted Castle Kamenz by his mother upon his marriage to Princess Marie of Saxe-Altenburg (1854-1898) in 1873. Shortly thereafter he started to build a large steam boiler house (Figure 6); the source of heat for a boiler is typically combustion of any of several fuels, such as wood, coal, oil, or natural gas. It’s unknown to me which of these fuels was used to create the steam, though underground pipes running through a tunnel connecting the boiler house to the castle are known to have carried the steam between the two.
Upon Nikolaus’ death in 1906, Castle Kamenz was inherited by his eldest son, Friedrich Heinrich von Preußen (1874-1940), mentioned in several earlier posts. Beginning around this time, he converted approximately 50 rooms into apartments and outfitted them with baths, telephones, radios, and electricity. By then, the boiler house had an electric generator and the tunnels now carried not only steam but electricity. The significance of this will soon become clearer.
Prior to Friedrich Heinrich’s death in 1940, he sold Castle Kamenz to his second cousin, Waldemar von Preußen (1889-1945), who owned the castle throughout WWII.
According to what Peter has learned from local residents of Kamieniec Ząbkowicki as well as the historical society, there is a tunnel/cave system running below the town that is at least six miles long, perhaps longer depending on who you believe. Purportedly, the system was developed hundreds of years earlier for unknown reasons by monks from the former Kamieniec Abbey, which still stands but was secularized in 1810. The caves and tunnels thus predate Castle Kamenz which was constructed between about 1838 and 1872.
Part of this web of tunnels and caves may have included the adits of the former gold and arsenic mine located in Złoty Stok [German: Reichenstein, Germany] mined in the Middle Ages, located a mere 6.1 miles south of Kamieniec Ząbkowicki. (Figure 7)
Peter was able to discover there was indeed a forced work camp near Kamieniec Ząbkowicki at a place formerly call Reichenau, Germany [today: Topola, Poland], located 3.6 miles southeast of the castle. (Figures 8a-b) Topola is a village in the administrative district of Kamieniec Ząbkowicki.
The source of the information on Topola is a report prepared by the Lux Veritatis Foundation, based in Warsaw, called “The Compilation of Places of Crimes Committed against the Civilian Population by the Nazi Occupant on the Polish Territories in Years 1939–1945.” According to Volume 3 of this compilation entitled “The Report on the Losses Sustained by Poland as a Result of German Aggression and Occupation During the Second World War, 1939–1945” (Figure 9) which includes a “List of Atrocity Sites,” 82 Polish citizens, including Poles, Jews, and Romanis, were murdered in Topola during its existence, likely from the extremely harsh and tortuous working conditions. (Figure 10)
The Lux Veritatis’ “List of Atrocity Sites” was compiled based on the work of the Central Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes Committed in Poland. According to the report, “Each volume contains the records of Nazi German atrocities committed in a particular voivodeship (according to the territorial administrative division of Poland in the 1970s), and presents the facts and figures as known to Polish scholars in the 1980s and up to the early 1990s. This series of volumes does not include data on Nazi German concentration and death camps, POW camps, or atrocity sites on territories now beyond the borders of Poland.”
The report further states the following as to the vast scale Nazi Germany’s efforts to exterminate the people of Poland: “Polish citizens were killed in individual incidents of murder, in mass executions by firing squad, during raids to ‘pacify’ whole villages, butchered while held in German prisons, hanged on the gallows in public executions, or slaughtered in barbaric atrocities of miscellaneous other types. Victims included women and children as well as persons with no connection at all with the circumstances triggering an atrocity, who just had the bad luck to be there when the killing started. The German authorities occupying Poland pursued a policy of collective accountability and executed ‘hostages’.”
Given Topola’s proximity to Castle Kamenz and the estimated extent of the nearby tunnel/cave system beneath Kamieniec Ząbkowicki, Peter knows the Nazis tapped into the electric grid and also siphoned off steam from the castle’s electric generator and boiler house to power whatever activities they were clandestinely pursuing. Naturally, this left the castle with limited electricity and steam.
The boiler house tunnel system is currently undergoing restoration, and Peter sent several photos of the ongoing work. (Figures 11a-f) Clearly, the tunnel system once connected to the larger web of subterranean tunnels and caves that were part of the Topola network, though the photos confirm the juncture was sealed off. Apparently, this was done in 1947 by Poland’s Communist government in a covert operation.
Peter emphasizes, however, that in the time that his ancestor Prince Waldemar owned the castle during WWII no forced laborers were used in the operation of Castle Kamenz’s operations nor were any interned in the boiler house tunnel system since the latter is too narrow.
The absence of documentary materials about Reichenau and, more generally, the question on what purpose the various secretive Nazi bunkers and subterranean bases served, invites further examination and speculation.
According to Peter’s informant, the forced laborers that lived and worked in the underground bunker or cave in Topola (Reichenau) may have been gulaged by the infamous Organization Todt (OT). This organization was a civil and military engineering group in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945, named for its founder, Fritz Todt, an engineer, and senior member of the Nazi Party. Incidentally, Todt was responsible for the construction of the German autobahns.
OT had oversight for a huge number of engineering projects both in Nazi Germany and in occupied territories from France to the Soviet Union during WWII. The organization became notorious for using forced labor. From 1943 until 1945 during the late phase of the Third Reich, OT administered all constructions of concentration camps to supply forced labor to industry.
Todt was killed in February 1942 near Rastenburg when his aircraft crashed shortly after take-off. He was succeeded as Reichsminister and head of the OT by Albert Speer. This coincided with the absorption of the organization into the renamed and expanded Reich Ministry of Armaments and War Production. Approximately 1.4 million laborers were in the service of the organization. About one percent were Germans excused from military service, another 1.5 percent were concentration camp inmates, and the remainder were prisoners of war and forced laborers from occupied countries. Many of the laborers did not survive the arduous work which they were condemned to.
Suffice it to say, that according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website, “Between 1933 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its allies established more than 44,000 camps and other incarceration sites (including ghettos). The perpetrators used these locations for a range of purposes, including forced labor, detention of people deemed to be ‘enemies of the state,’ and mass murder.”
It is possible, and indeed likely, that if forced laborers were used for whatever activities were being undertaken in the tunnel and cave system at Topola, the OT might have brought the needed workers from concentration camp Gusen (Figure 12), located three miles from Mauthausen concentration camp, and 280 miles south-southwest of Kamieniec Ząbkowicki. Recall that Kamenz was a major railway hub to Breslau and Prague, the latter 153 miles directly north of Gusen.
A possible clue as to what clandestine activities may have been going on beneath Topola is the presence of a high-ranking Nazi official named Hans Kammler who is reputed to have maintained a residence in Kamieniec Ząbkowicki after 1943. Hans Kammler was an SS-Obergruppenführer (translated as “senior group leader,” the highest commissioned SS rank after only Reichsführer-SS) responsible for Nazi civil engineering projects and its top V-weapons program. He oversaw the construction of various Nazi concentration camps before being put in charge of the V-2 rocket and Emergency Fighter Programs towards the end of WWII.
V-weapons formed part of the range of the so-called Wunderwaffen (superweapons, or “wonderweapons”) of Nazi Germany, and were intended to be used in a military campaign against Britain, although only the V-1 and V-2 were ever used against them. The V-2 and other German guided missiles and rockets were developed by the Peenemünde Army Research Center (German: Heeresversuchsanstalt Peenemünde, HVP).
Britain’s RAF successfully bombed the Nazi’s rocket production facilities at Peenemünde in August 1943 in Operation Crossbow. Following this successful raid, Albert Speer recommended transferring the V-2 rocket production underground. Hitler immediately agreed, and he and Speer decided that the SS, with its access to a massive supply of slave labor, was best suited to undertake this task.
As the SS construction chief, Hans Kammler was selected to oversee the project. The secret weapons projects for which Kammler was given responsibility included manufacturing both the Messerschmitt Me 262, the first operational jet fighter, and the V-2, which Kammler—in a construction effort of ruthless brutality and speed—had in production before the end of 1943.
The first below-ground project began at a huge fuel storage facility in the German state of Thuringia. By late August 1943, Kammler had a sizable detachment of concentration camp inmates from Buchenwald working at the new underground installation. There were so many slave laborers by the end of 1943 that the subcamp of Mittlebau-Dora was established. The latter supplied slave labor from many Eastern countries occupied by Germany (including evacuated survivors of eastern extermination camps), for extending the nearby tunnels in the Kohnstein and for manufacturing the V-2 rocket and the V-1 flying bomb. Gypsum mining in the hills in the Kohnstein had created tunnels that were ideally suited as a fuel/chemical depot and for Nazi Germany factories, including the V-2 rocket factory.
Regular readers may recall Post 114 and Post 114, Postscript where I discussed one of my distant cousins, Edward Hans Lindenberger, who was compelled to work in the underground tunnels near Buchenwald and Mittlebau-Dora and was never heard from again, no doubt a victim of the Nazis policy of working concentration camp inmates to death.
Assuming the accounts of Hans Kammler’s presence in Kamieniec Ząbkowicki after around 1943 are credible, given the responsibilities he was assigned by Hitler and Speer, it is reasonable to assume that he was engaged in preparing the caves around Topola to produce secret weapons. The mounting pressure on the Nazis from the Allies as the war proceeded suggests that most of the planned underground bunkers and caves were never completed. Pictures of the unfinished bunkers that were part of Project Riese, for example, show old winches, abandoned munitions carts, and primitive railway tracks leading into the tunnels, but not enough to conclusively determine what activities were planned.
In the absence of documentary evidence, one can only surmise what the network of caves, tunnels, bunkers, and subterranean structures scattered throughout Germany, Poland, Austria, and elsewhere were developed for. Likely, they were intended for a range of different purposes, including production of munitions, planes, and missiles; headquarters from which to direct troop movements; places to house batteries of cannons; safe havens from which to make a last stand; and even locations to stash war plunder. What I find mystifying is that among the myriad Nazi documents that survived WWII, seemingly few related to the purpose of the underground caves exist. Either they were never produced, which seems unlikely, destroyed before the Allies could get their hands on them, or carted off by the Allies and are still classified.
Fascinatingly, treasure hunters have expended a lot of time, money, and effort exploring and radar scanning from above searching for underground cavities where a “Nazi gold train” rumored to contain 300 tons of gold, diamonds, other gems, and industrial equipment may have been hidden. According to legend, the train was loaded by the Nazis and entered a tunnel in the mountainous Lower Silesian region before Soviet Army Forces closed in, but the train was never seen again. There are periodic reports in the media about treasure seekers claiming to have found evidence of this train. According to Peter, the tunnels connecting Castle Kamenz to the boiler house are periodically broken into by fortune hunters seeking this chimera.
There is another factor complicating understanding the purpose of the various subterranean structures, namely inaccessibility and/or flooding of the chambers. In the case of Reichenau, the Neisse River runs through it. To the southwest of the site there was once a quarry. According to Stefan Gnaczy, Peter’s informant, in 1947 the Polish government sealed off the entrance to the caves and tunnels and flooded the quarry including the sealed entrance diverting water from the Neisse River. Stefan further claims to have found an unpublished Polish government report from the 1960s stating that only half of the underground tunnel is accessible for exploration, with the remainder flooded.
Coming full circle back to Wayne Lewan’s father. According to his father’s records, he was stationed in Kamenz for only about six months. It’s not clear why he was moved from Kamenz to Dachau concentration camp in January 1945. His pre-war occupation was telephone lineman mechanic, and perhaps he was considered a skilled worker whose abilities were better utilized in Dachau. (Figure 13) Regardless, alerted to the fact that Zbigniew Lewandowski had once been interned in Kamenz led me to track down the camp where he was likely held and to investigate Nazi underground bases and tunnels, the purpose of which remain shrouded in mystery.
Hall, John. “Inside the Nazi’s abandoned military shelters in Poland.” DailyMail.com, 12 August 2015. https://www.dailymail.co.uk
Ilsley, Natalie. “Top 5 Nazi Discoveries.” Newsweek, 31 August 2015.
Lux Veritatas Foundation. “The Report on the Losses Sustained by Poland as a Result of German Aggression and Occupation During the Second World War, 1939–1945: List of Atrocity Sites.”
Sulzer, Andreas. “The two lives of Hans Kammler/Hitler’s Secret Weapons Manager.” YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkKFX9HLAxc
“10 Nazi bunkers and subterranean bases.” Heritage Daily. https://www.heritagedaily.com/
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “Forced Labor.” https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/forced-labor
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “Gusen.” https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/gusen
Note: In this post I provide a short historical overview and visual sketch of Schloss Kamenz [Kamieniec Ząbkowicki Palace], the estate in Silesia where my third cousin’s father, Dr. Hans Vogel, worked for the von Preußen family during the Nazi Era. I also briefly touch on geopolitical factors that make it improbable the family will ever be able to reclaim the castle.
The von Preußen and Bruck families are not related in any but an “Adam and Evish” sort of way though both have affiliations with Silesia, now mostly located in Poland. The filament of a familial connection passes through my third cousin Agnes Stieda née Vogel whose father Dr. Hans Vogel (Figure 1) was employed by Friedrich Heinrich von Preußen (1874-1940) (Figure 2) and his second cousin Waldemar von Preußen (1889-1945) (Figure 3) following Friedrich’s death in 1940. While employed by the von Preußen family, Dr. Vogel was tasked with archiving the vast collection of art and historical treasures stored at the castle in Kamenz. (Figure 4) Not only did the family employ Hans, but they also provided a measure of protection for his Jewish wife Suse and mischling half-Jewish daughter Agnes during the Nazi Era. For this reason, to this day the family is held in high esteem by the Stiedas.
After a series of blog posts dealing with Reinhard Heydrich, one of the evilest characters in a Nazi panoply full of them, I need to step away from this emotionally draining subject to tackle a lighthearted topic. Ergo, this pictorial essay and a brief history on Schloss Kamenz [Kamieniec Ząbkowicki Palace] that Peter Albrecht von Preußen’s ancestors once owned in Kamenz, Germany [today: Kamieniec Ząbkowicki, Poland].
One side comment before I proceed. Peter Albrecht has been exceptionally gracious and helpful in tracking down and sending me an enormous amount of illustrative and research matter, related not only to his von Preußen ancestors but also to my Bruck family. For example, as it relates to my antecedents, Peter uncovered two wills archived in Opole, Poland that I ordered that may possibly be related to my great-great-grandfather, Samuel Bruck (1808-1863), the first-generation owner of the Bruck’s “Prinz von Preußen” Hotel in Ratibor [today: Raciborz, Poland]. Though I’ve had them translated and interpreted by my fourth cousin, they are challenging in the extreme to make sense of because they are handwritten in Fraktur calligraphy and never give a precise date of birth of the testator, a man named Samuel Bruck but likely not my ancestor. That said, Peter has uncovered other materials that are definitively related to “my” Samuel Bruck, and, though somewhat dry, will form the basis of a future blog post as I discuss recent intriguing findings about him.
As I proceed to give readers a pictorial sketch of Schloss Kamenz [Kamieniec Ząbkowicki Palace], let me start by providing an historical overview of the castle. The first owner was Princess Marianne of the Netherlands (1810-1883) (Figure 5) who in 1838 commissioned the most prominent German architect of the time, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, to design the structure. Noted for his neo-Classical and neo-Gothic buildings, most famously found in and around Berlin, Schinkel created a monumental palace in the form of a medieval castle.
Aware that he was dying of stomach cancer and having no surviving siblings and no children of his own, FH sold castle Kamenz along with the nearby “castle” in Seitenberg [today: Stronie Śląskie, Poland] (Figure 10), and all its belongings to his second cousin, Waldemar von Preußen (1889-1945), nephew of Germany’s last Emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II. (Figure 11) Upon FH’s death, Prince Waldemar transferred the cash to FH’s trust to be divided equally in five parts to FH’s nephew, Friedrich Karl Erich Albrecht (EA) von Preußen (1901-1976) (Figure 12), and four nieces, the daughters of FH’s youngest brother, Friedrich Wilhelm (FW) von Preußen (1880-1925). (Figure 13)
Prince Waldemar fled castle Kamenz as the Red Army was approaching in 1945, dying in Tutzing, Bavaria on May 2nd, six days before the official end of World War II in Europe. Obviously, the castle was abandoned along with all the artworks and belongings. Relocated Poles looted the castle and Russians burned and pillaged it. According to Peter Albrecht, however, Polish citizens report that 14 to 17 railroad cargo trains worth of movables were taken by the Russians and shipped to an unknown destination. The marble used for exterior construction was salvaged to construct the Congress Hall at the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw.
Following Prince Waldemar’s death, rights to the castle that he obviously no longer had physical control over passed to his younger brother, Sigismund von Preußen (1896-1978) (Figure 14), then in turn to his son Alfred Friedrich Ernst Heinrich Conrad von Preußen (1924–2013), “Uncle Alfred” (Figure 15) as he is known to Peter Albrecht. Shortly before Prince Alfred’s death in 2013, he transferred all rights to the estate to Peter including the contents of the 14 to 17 railroad cargo trains, should they materialize.
A brief word on an intriguing aside. Schloss Kamenz or Kamieniec Ząbkowicki Palace, as it is currently known, is situated within Poland. In a minor way, it figured into the negotiations leading to the eventual reunification of Germany in 1989. The “Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany,” or the “Two Plus Four Agreement,” is the international agreement that allowed for the reunification of Germany in the 1990s. The reference to “Two Plus Four” means that the agreement was negotiated between the Federal Republic of Germany and the Germany Democratic Republic (GDR), along with the Four Powers which had occupied Germany at the end of World War II, namely, France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States. This treaty replaced the Potsdam Agreement, and involved the Four Powers renouncing all rights they held in Germany, allowing Germany to become fully sovereign the following year.
As I discussed in Post 132, the “provisional border” between Poland and Germany following World War II was known as the Oder-Neisse line. This partition meant that most of Germany’s former eastern provinces, including East Prussia and most of Silesia as well as the eastern parts of Brandenburg and Pomerania, including Danzig, were awarded to Poland and the Soviet Union. (Figure 16) The German populations of these areas either fled, as in the case of Peter Albrecht’s ancestors, or were expelled. The GDR accepted the border in 1950, but the Federal Republic of Germany always demurred considering it as provisional, pending a finalized peace settlement. However, as a condition of the Final Settlement, East and West Germany agreed to the existing border with Poland, with the renunciation and exclusion of any other territorial claims, in other words Germany’s former eastern provinces.
The biggest issue for the Soviet Union at the time the “Two Plus Four Agreement” was being negotiated was Germany’s former territory of East Prussia, which today includes the Kaliningrad Oblast, the westernmost part of Russia. The other indirect issue for the Soviets was Poland which was regarded as a satellite state in the Soviet sphere of influence but was never part of the Soviet Union. Because the Oder-Neisse line was ultimately upheld as the border between the reunified Germany and Poland, any possibility that Peter’s family could make clams on Schloss Kamenz was obviated.
This was true at least until Poland joined the European Union (EU) in 2004. Peter’s family could now potentially make a claim for return of the castle. However, because of the exorbitant cost for the reconstruction of the castle, estimated at well north of $300 million, they have not yet done so. To date, the EU has already provided the city of Kamieniec Ząbkowicki €750,000 (more than $800,000) to restore the mausoleum and €5 million ($5,362,000) to fix the roof and the small copper clad spires atop the four corner towers. If the Polish government were to return the castle, they would do so in “as is” condition and the family would be compelled to reimburse the EU for all the work done to date.
The possibility exists, nonetheless, that Peter could make a claim for any of the castle’s goods secreted in the Soviet Union should they ever resurface.
Much of the information on castle Kamenz presented below is derived from personal communication with Peter. While there are multiple features that are part of the castle or grace the gardens surrounding Schloss Kamenz, I will discuss only two, the boiler house and the mausoleum. As previously mentioned, Nicholas Albrecht received the castle from his mother in 1873 upon his marriage, and in 1883 he started to build a large steam boiler house. (Figure 17) The conversion from coal to steam heat took place at this time, although the castle still had no sanitary installations.
Upon the arrival of relocated Poles to the area of Schloss Kamenz the bodies in the mausoleum were disinterred and defiled, and reportedly hung from trees. (Figure 22) Before they could be set ablaze, however, some virtuous Polish citizen calmed the rioters and reburied the bodies, carefully marking their locations on a map. Before this concerned citizen died, he gave his map to the President of the local historical society, and in 2017, the City of Kamenz and the Catholic Church of Poland exhumed the graves and held a funeral service at the reconsecrated mausoleum. (Figures 23-24)
According to what Peter reports, the European Union has provided funding for the eventual restoration of Castle Kamenz to its full glory. To date only the mausoleum and part of the main hall of the castle proper have been renovated. (Figures 25-32)
In closing, I understand if readers are overwhelmed by the von Preußen family tree. My personal interest is trying to understand how the Bruck’s Hotel in Ratibor [today: Racibórz. Poland] owned by three generations of my family, obtained a “franchise” to use the “Prinz von Preußen” surname. This entails nailing down exactly when the building that eventually became the Bruck’s Hotel was built, whether its construction preceded or coincided with my family’s acquisition of the establishment, and, if it preceded it, when exactly my family purchased it. I’m uncertain whether historic documents survive to answer these questions. And, finally, because of our collaboration, Peter (Figure 33) has now found some not-so-distant ancestors that hail from Ratibor, suggesting our families may have had business dealings long ago. So, while this post may be of limited interest to many readers, I am pursuing it to better understand my family’s deep-seated connection to Ratibor and Silesia.
Note: In this second part of Post 133, I highlight an extraordinary photograph sent to me by a reader, Peter Albrecht von Preußen, featuring high-level Nazis taken at his family’s von Preußen estate in Silesia in around 1936 or 1937 in Kamenz, Germany [today: Kamieniec Ząbkowicki, Poland]. The picture allows me to explore two issues, namely, support for the National Socialists among the aristocracy and noblemen and the so-called “Gay Nazis myth.” The von Preußens were distinguished members of the royal House of Hohenzollern, the family from which Germany’s last Emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II, came from.
In part I of Post 133, I introduced readers to Mr. Peter Albrecht von Preußen (Figure 1), a German living in the United States who is a descendant of the royal German House of Hohenzollern. Germany’s last Emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II, who abdicated the throne in 1918 following Germany’s defeat in World War I, hails from this family. In fact Kaiser Wilhelm II is Peter’s second cousin three times removed. (Figure 2)
Even more distantly, Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom is Peter’s second cousin five times removed. (Figure 3) As a further bit of trivia, Queen Victoria married her first cousin Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha in 1840, and together they had nine children. Their offspring married into royal and noble families across the European continent, earning Victoria the moniker “the grandmother of Europe” and spreading hemophilia in European royalty. Enough about sovereign relationships.
As I mentioned in part I of this post, Peter first contacted me on the 7th of March, sharing with me a unique group photo taken in 1936 or 1937 (Figure 4) at his family’s castle in Kamenz, Germany [today: Kamieniec Ząbkowicki, Poland]. (Figure 5) What makes this photo so unusual is that it shows the notorious Reinhard Heydrich (Figure 6), principal architect of the Holocaust, known as “The Butcher of Prague” and other frightful epithets, along with other high-ranking Nazis visiting the von Preußen estate in Silesia; seated in the front row of this photos is Peter’s great-great-uncle, Friedrich Heinrich von Preußen (Figure 7), the prince who protected my half-Jewish third cousin Agnes Stieda and her family during World War II.
As I explained in part I, Friedrich Heinrich was openly homosexual. Several of the high-ranking Nazis who visited Kamenz on the day the photo was taken were also bisexual or arguably bisexual. More on this below.
Beyond discussing the high-level Nazis who visited Castle Kamenz, the photo allows me to explore two topics of broader interest, namely, the question of support or resistance among the nobles and aristocrats to National Socialism and the issue of gays in the ranks of the National Socialists. As a lead-in, I would note that if I was exploring these subjects as an academic endeavor rather than simply providing context for my ancestral research, I would take a much more rigorous intellectual approach. For my purposes, however, I simply want to provide some basic background.
Before I discuss the senior Nazis photographed at Castle Kamenz, let me first attempt to answer a question I initially asked Peter after he sent me the picture, namely, what occasioned the visit by the Nazis to the von Preußen estate.
Readers will recall that in the first part of Post 133, I discussed the relationship that Prinz Friedrich Heinrich von Preußen had with members of the “Organization Consul” during the 1920s. The Consul was a right-wing organization opposed to the harsh terms imposed on Germany by the Versailles Treaty and dedicated to regime change by violent means. It was formed by members of the disbanded Freikorps group Marine Brigade Ehrhardt and operated in the Weimar Republic between 1920 and 1922, when it was banned. Following the ban, Prince Friedrich Heinrich, also opposed to the “repressive measures” of the Versailles Treaty, allowed its former adherents to conduct live fire exercises at Kamenz. Many supporters of the banned Organization Consul went on to join the National Socialist Party.
While never a member of the Nazi Party, Friedrich Heinrich’s relationship with future Nazi party elite no doubt stems from the friendships he established during the 1920s. Given his sexuality, it makes sense that he would have associated with other gays. Regardless of his sexual and political leanings, however, it seems highly unlikely that Friedrich Heinrich would have been in any position to reject an overture by Reinhard Heydrich to visit Castle Kamenz for a few days. It’s safe to assume that Reinhard Heydrich and his entourage invited themselves to the von Preußen estate.
Charles Edward, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (1884-1954) (Figure 8) was the last sovereign duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha until 1918 when the Prussian monarchy and Germany’s 22 constituent monarchies were abolished following the German Empire’s defeat in World War I. Apropos of what I mentioned earlier about Queen Victoria, Charles Edward was a male-line grandson of her and Prince Albert. Though he spent his childhood years in the United Kingdom he was sent to Germany in his mid-teens. His support for his adopted country during World War I led to him being viewed with increased hostility in the United Kingdom, where he was eventually stripped of his British titles. After this, he drifted towards far-right politics, and later became involved in the Nazi regime. After World War II, he was fined by a Denazification court and lost ownership of land in what later became East Germany.
Reinhard Heydrich (1904-1942) (Figure 10) was talked about in part I of Post 133, so I refer readers to my earlier discussion for more details. I will only add the following quote from Wikipedia about Heydrich’s assassination because it explains why Kurt Daluege, another visitor at Castle Kamenz in 1936 or 1937, succeeded Heydrich as the Deputy/Acting Protector of Bohemia and Moravia: “Heydrich was mortally wounded in Prague on 27 May 1942 as a result of Operation Anthropoid. He was ambushed by a team of Czech and Slovak soldiers who had been sent by the Czechoslovak government-in-exile to kill the Reich-Protector; the team was trained by the British Special Operations Executive. Heydrich died from his injuries a week later. Nazi intelligence falsely linked the Czech and Slovak soldiers and resistance partisans to the villages of Lidice and Ležáky. Both villages were razed; the men and boys aged 14 and above were shot and most of the women and children were deported and murdered in Nazi concentration camps.”
Kurt Daluege (1897-1946) (Figure 11) was chief of the national uniformed Ordnungspolizei (Order Police) of Nazi Germany. Following Reinhard Heydrich’s assassination in 1942, he served as Deputy Protector for the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Daluege directed the German measures of retribution for Heydrich’s assassination, including the Lidice massacre. Wikipedia notes other war crimes of which Daluege was guilty: “During the war in 1941, he attended a mass shooting of 4,435 Jews by Police Battalion 307 near Brest-Litowsk and a mass shooting of Jews in Minsk. Furthermore, in October 1941 Daluege signed deportation orders for Jews from Germany, Austria and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, to Riga and Minsk. On 7 July 1942, he attended a conference led by Himmler which discussed the ‘enlargement’ of Operation Reinhard, the secretive Nazi plan to mass-murder Polish Jews in the General Government district of occupied Poland, and other matters involving SS and police policies in the east.” After the end of World War II, he was extradited to Czechoslovakia, tried, convicted, and executed in 1946.
Gottfried Graf von Bismarck-Schönhausen (1901-1949) (Figure 12) was a grandson of the 19th century Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, well-known to readers. He was a member of the Nazi Party and in 1933 he was elected to the Reichstag as a Nazi member. In 1935 he became chairman of the regional council (Regierungspräsident) for Stettin [today: Szczecin, Poland], and later also for Potsdam. By 1942, presumably disillusioned by the course of the war and Germany’s worsening prospects, he reached out to other members of the German aristocracy who were working against the Nazi regime with the aim of beginning negotiations with the Allies; some of these aristocrats were involved in the 20th of July 1944 Plot to assassinate Hitler. Despite being aware of these plans and having connections to the plotters, after the failed attempt, von Bismarck merely lost his position in the Reichstag and was expelled from the SS but was not tortured. His powerful connections and name recognition saved him, though he was nonetheless incarcerated in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp until the camp was liberated by the Red Army in April 1945. In September 1949 Bismarck and his wife were killed in a car accident near Bremen in the American Occupation Zone.
The presence of the aristocrats and Nazi Party members including Charles Edward, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha and Gottfried von Bismarck-Schönhausen at Prinz Friedrich Heinrich von Preußen’s Silesian estate in 1936 or 1937 attests to an ongoing relationship between former members of the monarchy and the National Socialists.
In layman’s terms, below I will attempt to succinctly explain what may initially have attracted noblemen and monarchists to National Socialism and some events that took place during the 1930s when Hitler consolidated power often at the expense of the aristocrats. To understand the extent of their resistance to the Nazi regime in this period, I asked my fourth cousin, Dr. Frank Thomas Koch (Figure 13), for some background on this question, so some of the following discussion is a synopsis of what he explained.
The National Socialists were adherents of the so-called Völkisch movement, a German ethno-nationalist movement active from the late 19th century through to the Nazi era and beyond. The principal belief of ethno-nationalists is that nations are defined based on a shared heritage, such as common language, common faith, and a common ethnic ancestry. Individuals who don’t share this common heritage are deemed to be second-class citizens. Völkisch nationalists generally considered Jews to be from a different Volk (“race” or “folk”) than Germans and deemed them to be inferior. This was the central tenet which led to the Holocaust. Many noblemen also adhered to Völkisch nationalism, thus drew common cause with the National Socialists in this regard. Other aristocrats and monarchists, however, kept a critical distance from National Socialism, viewing Hitler as an “upstart” and the Sturmabteilung (SA, literally “Storm Detachment” or Stormtroopers) as “uneducated thugs.”
Very quickly after his ascension to power in 1933, Hitler eliminated critics within his administration from the noble classes and the Wehrmacht, the German Army. During the so-called Röhm Putsch in 1934, Hitler had Ernst Röhm, leader of the SA, who had been an early ally but whom he saw as a growing threat, executed by the SS during the “Night of the Long Knives.” In the Blomberg-Fritsch affair of 1938, Hitler succeeded, in the context of partly contrived stories, in deposing Werner von Fritsch, Commander-in-Chief of the Army, and Werner von Blomberg, Minister of War, who had dared to object to his aggressive foreign policy. Then, during the September Conspiracy in 1938, the so-called “Valkyrie Conspiracy,” Hitler faced the first attempt by Germans to bring down his regime; headed by the Chief of the German General Staff at the time, Franz Halder, it was supported by many senior army generals. Halder lost his nerve and the coup attempt was ultimately undermined because of the Munich Agreement when France and Great Britain accepted Hitler’s word that signing away the Sudetenland was Hitler’s “last” territorial ambition, and they called the agreement “Peace in our Time.”
The attitude of the Hohenzollerns was one of opportunism. By nurturing the hope that the monarchy would be restored, the Nazis hoped to enlist the support of Germany’s last Emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II. (Figure 14) Support for the Nazis among the Hohenzollerns and the constituent monarchies was a mixed bag, so to speak. So, for example in the case of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s eldest son, Crown Prince Wilhelm, who had initially promoted the rise of the Nazis later promised in July 1941 to make himself available to the resistance, only to reverse course again shortly thereafter. More clearly aligned against the Nazis, by contrast, was the House of Wittelsbach from Bavaria, notably Crown Prince Rupprecht.
As World War II ground on and Germany’s fortunes changed and their atrocities came to light, an increasing number of initially enthusiastic and moderately supportive grandees distanced themselves from National Socialism and became opponents of the regime. Aristocrats often played a leading role within resistance circles, and military officers from noble families also played a central role in a series of specific attempts to assassinate Hitler. This was particularly in evidence during the 20th of July Plot.
One curious side note. Peter Albrecht shared with me a series of news articles he discovered related to a purported “purge of princes” by Hitler in 1939, including from his royal House of Hohenzollern. The story was printed in London’s “Daily Herald” (Figures 15a-b); New York’s “Daily News” (Figures 16a-b); and the “Cleveland Plain Dealer” (Figure 17) on the 14th of November 1939. As it turns out, several weeks prior, Peter’s great-grandfather, Joachim Albrecht von Preußen (b. 27 September 1876-d. 24 October 1939) (Figure 18) had passed away of natural causes. Since Joachim Albrecht had been friends with the head of Germany’s Foreign Office, the story was shared with correspondents in London. While no foul play was ever suspected, the foreign press, intentionally or unintentionally, mischaracterized Joachim’s death as part of a “monarchist putsch” by Hitler, possibly for propaganda purposes. Regardless, contrary to what western papers reported at the time, there was no monarchist purge in 1939.
The above is all I will say about aristocratic support for and opposition to National Socialism. Next, I want to move on to a discussion of the question of homosexuality within the ranks of the Nazi Party.
There is a widespread and pervasive myth claiming that homosexuals were prevalent and prominent as a group within the Nazi Party, a falsity referred to as the “Gay Nazis myth.” As the German cultural historian Andreas Pretzel has written in his article “Schwule Nazis (Homosexual Nazis),” “The legend of the homosexual Nazi has been used for decades after the Nazi era to deny or marginalize the extent and intensity of homosexual persecution, as well as to deny the memory of, discredit or prevent the memory of persecuted homosexual men.”
The impression that homosexuality was ubiquitous in Nazi organizations was created by antifascist leftists, including the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). The clause in the German Criminal Code that criminalized homosexuality was adopted in 1871 and was referred to as Paragraph 175. While both the SPD and the KPD were supporters of repealing this provision, both parties opportunistically used accusations of homosexuality against opponents. For example, in what is referred to as the Röhm affair of 1931 and 1932, anti-Nazis including the SPD, publicly disclosed Ernst Röhm’s homosexuality in an apparent bid to delay the Nazi seizure of power when supporters of the democratic Weimar Republic justifiably sensed their time was running out.
According to a footnote in the Wikipedia entry on “Gay Nazis myth,” there are three events which firmly established the stereotype that homosexuality was a characteristic of the Nazi system: (1) the just mentioned Röhm scandal of 1931 and 1932; (2) the Reichstag fire in 1933 when the parliament building was destroyed and a clique of homosexual stormtroopers was blamed; and (3) the previously discussed Night of the Long Knives or the Röhm Putsch in 1934 when a large number of leaders of the SA, many allegedly gay chieftains promoted by Röhm, were liquidated for political reasons. While leftists have largely been blamed for spreading the idea that homosexuals were prominent in the Nazi Party, it benefited Hitler to exaggerate the extent of homosexuality within the SA to justify his 1934 purge. Thus, it can be argued that the avowedly homophobic Nazis themselves contributed to the notion that gays were widespread in their ranks.
According to Andreas Pretzel, “What role homosexuality actually played in the Nazi movement, however, is largely unanswered, because important sources, such as those on the murdered homosexual SA leaders, are missing, because they were destroyed after the murder campaigns of the summer of 1934. Therefore, there have been various attempts to explain the significance of homosexuality for the Nazi movement through gender-historical perspectives and to find explanations as to why the avowedly homophobic Nazi movement attracted homosexuals, tolerated them for a while and even allowed some to rise to leadership and executive positions.” What is clear though is that while some gay men joined the Nazi Party, there is no evidence they were overrepresented.
In closing, let me return to the high-level Nazis that visited Castle Kamenz and Friedrich Heinrich von Preußen in 1936 or 1937. Friedrich Heinrich is clearly known to have been gay. His Wikipedia entry confirms this, as does a 1959 article in Der Spiegel magazine entitled “Die Insel der Wachteln” speaking of the time Friedrich spent on Italy’s Isle of Capri where gays often congregated. By contrast, the Wikipedia entries for the other attendees make no mention of their sexuality, and in fact state all were married with children. This is not surprising given that the Nazi movement was admittedly homophobic; it’s likely gays would have stayed “in the closet” and been married to mask their sexual proclivities.
According to Peter Albrecht, however, both Karl Daluege and Gottfried Graf Bismarck-Schönhausen were bisexual, and Reinhard Heydrich was also arguably bisexual. The source of this information is one of Peter’s friends, Warren Allen Smith, who wrote a book entitled “Who’s Who in Hell: A Handbook and International Directory for Humanists, Freethinkers, Naturalist, Rationalists and Non-theists”; while researching this book Mr. Smith came across information confirming these Nazis’ sexuality. Fundamentally, however, the war crimes these individuals committed is not a reflection of their sexuality, merely evidence they were inherently evil.
REFERENCES
Anti-monarchist purge by Gestapo rumored. (1939, November 14). Cleveland Plain Dealer.
“Die Insel der Wachteln” (1959 May 5). Der Spiegel, (19/1959).
Name ex-Kaiser in bomb plot: Report royalist, army purge. (1939, November 14). Daily News.
New purge of princes. (1939, November 14). Daily Herald.
Pretzel, Andreas (2014). Schwule Nazis: Narrative und Desiderate. In Michael Schwartz (Ed.) Homosexuelle im Nationalsozialismus (pp. 69-76). Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg.
Smith, Warren Allen. Who’s Who in Hell: A Handbook and International Directory for Humanists, Freethinkers, Naturalist, Rationalists and Non-theists. Barricade Books, 2000.
Note: In Part I of this two-part post, I talk about a homosexual member of the royal House of Hohenzollern, Friedrich Heinrich Prinz von Preußen, whom I first introduced to readers in Post 64. I was recently contacted by his great-grand-nephew who sent me a historically significant group photo showing his relative in the presence of several high-ranking Nazis including Reinhard Heydrich, the principal architect of the Holocaust. Part I of this post lays the groundwork for a discussion on the story behind the photo.
It is hard to know how to begin a story where the protagonist, Reinhard Heydrich, was one of the darkest figures in the Nazi regime. Often referred to as “The Butcher of Prague,” he had other equally disquieting nicknames, “The Hangman,” “The Blond Beast,” “Himmler’s Evil Genius,” and the “Young Evil God of Death.” Even Adolf Hitler described him as “the man with the iron heart.”
Heydrich (Figure 1) was the founding head of the Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service, SD), an intelligence organization charged with seeking out and neutralizing resistance to the Nazi Party via arrests, deportations, and murders. He helped organize Kristallnacht, a series of coordinated attacks against Jews throughout Nazi Germany and parts of Austria on the 9th-10th of November 1938, and was also chief of the Reich Security Main Office (German: Reichssicherheitshauptamt, RSHA), including the Gestapo, Kripo, and the SD. Reinhard Heydrich, however, is perhaps best known for chairing the January 1942 Wannsee Conference, the summit which formalized the plans for the “Final Solution to the Jewish question,” that’s to say, the deportation and genocide of all Jews in German-occupied Europe. Simply put, Heydrich was the principal architect of the Holocaust.
Readers might justifiably theorize that members of my extended family were victims of the genocidal policies formulated by this sinister character, and they would be correct. It seems almost obscene to speak the names of my revered ancestors in the same breath as I utter the name of this horrifyingly wicked individual. Yet, given the tenuous and divisive times we are currently living through, I think it’s important to talk about despicable people from the past to provide context for equally vile individuals running around today who espouse similarly annihilative intentions. Such people and policies should not be permitted to spawn in darkness and anonymity.
I can best begin this post by reintroducing readers to Agnes Stieda née Vogel (b. 1927) (Figure 2), my cherished 95-year-old third cousin from Victoria, Canada. Regular followers know that she and her parents have been the subject of several earlier posts, and I refer readers to those publications. Agnes’ parents were Dr. Hans Vogel (1897-1973) and Susanne Vogel née Neisser (1899-1984). (Figure 3) The Nazis used the pejorative term “mischling” to denote persons of mixed “Aryan” and non-Aryan ancestry, such as Agnes, who was half-Jewish. The Nazis applied a lot of pressure on their Aryan population to divorce their Jewish spouses, but in the case of Dr. Vogel he refused their exhortations.
Suse Vogel was a prolific writer. (Figure 4) Memories of her father, Dr. Ernst Neisser, and his final days were the subject of Post 48, while her 1944-1945 wartime diary was the basis for Post 86. Rather than summarize her recollections, I refer subscribers to my previous posts.
“From 1925 until 1932, Dr. Vogel worked as an art historian. He was a volunteer at the Kunstgewerbemuseum in Leipzig; established an art and local history museum in Zeulenroda in the state of Thuringia; was an assistant at the Städtisches Museum in Moritzburg; and was a lecturer for art history and a librarian at the Staatliche Kunstakademie in Kassel; after the Kunstakademie closed in 1932, he worked as a “wissenschaftlicher Hilfsarbeiter,” an unpaid scientific assistant, at the Gemäldegalerie and Landesmuseum in Kassel. In 1934, Dr. Vogel’s continued employment at the museum in Kassel was no longer possible because of his so-called ‘mixed marriage’ to Agnes’s Jewish or ‘non-Aryan’ mother, Susanne Vogel née Neisser. Between 1934 and 1935, while trying in vain to emigrate, he managed to secure a grant to inventory the building content and art collection of the Hohenzollern in Sigmaringen in southwestern Germany. This work caught the attention of Friedrich Heinrich Prinz von Preußen, who was a Prussian officer and member of the House of Hohenzollern and led to a project in 1936 cataloging the Prince’s library and copperplate collection; by 1937 though Dr. Vogel was relegated to a clerical position in the property of the Prince.”
As I further discussed in Post 64, Agnes has fond memories of Friedrich Heinrich Prinz von Preußen (1874-1940) (Figure 5) because he and his relatives protected her family and provided employment for her father during World War II. Friedrich Heinrich studied law at Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, and upon graduation joined the military. (Figure 6) However, in early 1907 he was relieved from the military because of his homosexuality. He was excluded from the Prussian army for this reason, but at the beginning of WWI he was once again allowed to become a soldier, but only at the rank of Gefreiter, basically a Private First Class, with no opportunity for promotion.
In late 1906, Friedrich Heinrich was nominated by Kaiser Wilhelm II as Lord Master of the Order of St. John or the Johanniter Order (German: Johanniterorden) as the successor to his late father, Prinz Albrecht von Preußen (1837-1906) (Figure 7), who’d died earlier that year; the Johanniter Order is the religious order of the House of Hohenzollern, the dynasty to which Friedrich Heinrich belonged. The poorly kept secret of Friedrich’s homosexuality, however, caused him to ask the Kaiser to withdraw his nomination, which he did. His secret eventually became public, so upon the advice of contemporaries, he left Berlin, eventually withdrawing to his estates in Kamenz [today:Kamieniec Ząbkowicki, Poland] (Figure 8) and Seitenberg [today: Stronie Śląskie, Poland] (Figure 9) in Lower Silesia where Dr. Vogel would later work for him.
Until recently, the above was the extent of my knowledge of Friedrich Heinrich’s life. However, as has been happening with increasing frequency of late, I’ve learned more about multiple people I’ve written about over the years, including Prince Friedrich. On the 7th of March, through my blog’s Webmail, I received a fascinating email from a German gentleman living in the United States named Peter Albrecht von Preußen (Figure 10); astonishingly, he explained that Friedrich Heinrich was his “second great uncle” (i.e., great-great-uncle).
Peter stumbled upon Post 64, and obviously interested in the subject, sent me a unique group photo showing Friedrich Heinrich and a handful of high-ranking Nazis, including Reinhard Heydrich, taken in 1936 or 1937 at Prince Friedrich’s estate in Silesia. I will get into a prolonged discussion about this exceptional image in Part II of this post but in Part I, I will discuss some other things Peter mentioned in his various emails that eventually provided the context for the cataloguing work that Dr. Hans Vogel was doing for the von Preußen family at their estates in Silesia.
There are multiple levels on which the current story intersects with topics I have previously discussed, so splitting the current post into two installments makes sense.
As a brief aside, soon after being contacted by Peter Albrecht, I asked him whether any of his relatives had lived in Ratibor, erroneously assuming that the Bruck’s “Prinz von Preußen” Hotel had previously been owned by a member of his House of Hohenzollern. Peter explained that it was not uncommon for the use of the family name, e.g., von Preußen, Prinz von Preußen, Prinz Albrecht Hotel, etc. to be licensed to business owners for a small annual fee. This is an early example of a franchise.
The Weimar Republic, officially named the German Reich, was the historical interval of Germany from the 9th of November 1918 to the 23rd of March 1933, during which Germany was a constitutional federal republic for the first time in its history. At the time, Friedrich Heinrich Prinz von Preußen owed back taxes to the German Reich. To pay them, in 1926 he agreed to rent the government the Prinz-Albrecht-Palais in Berlin, the palace the family once owned in the present-day Kreuzberg district of the city that was destroyed during World War II. This was a Rococo city palace in the historic Friedrichstadt suburb of Berlin built between 1737 and 1739 and acquired by the royal House of Hohenzollern in 1772. (Figures 11-12)
With Hitler’s take over of power in 1933, the arrangement that Prince Friedrich had with the Weimar Republic was annulled and Friedrich Heinrich once again took possession of the Prinz-Albrecht-Palais that year. One of Prince Friedrich’s younger brothers and Peter Albrecht von Preußen’s great-grandfather, Joachim Albrecht von Preußen (1876-1939), moved into the palace as the sole occupant. However, in 1934 the German government, now the National Socialists, again sued Prince Friedrich for the back taxes that he still owed. Friedrich Heinrich, however, had contacts with certain homosexual members of the SS, the Schutzstaffel, the Nazi organization most responsible for the genocidal murder of the estimated 5.5 to 6 million Jews and millions of other victims during the Holocaust. Accordingly, he was able to cut a deal with Reinhard Heydrich to again lease the Palais to the government, and the Nazis’ lawsuit ended. Peter’s great-grandfather moved into an apartment that Peter’s grandfather, Friedrich Karl Erich Albrecht von Preußen (1901-1976), Erich Albrecht for short (Figure 13), rented for him on the same block where he operated his car rental business.
Some further explanation regarding Friedrich Heinrich’s association with the gay community is useful. It is not my intention to reveal salacious details to readers about Prince Friedrich’s homosexual lifestyle, but rather to provide some relevant context which happens to be engrossing. Within the family, Friedrich Heinrich’s nickname was “Uncle Freddy.” He was known in Berlin’s gay community as “Straps Harry,” with “Straps” referring in German to garter belt stockings; as a cross-dresser he had an obsession for wearing these with French high heels.
Following the death of Friedrich Heinrich’s father, Friedrich Wilhelm Nikolaus Albrecht (1837-1906) (Figure 14), Friedrich Heinrich would throw lavish parties at the Prinz-Albert-Palais. Even though these events took place in the throes of the Victorian age which placed severe restrictions on the liberty of certain groups and occurred at a time when homosexuality was outlawed, because Friedrich Heinrich was a member of the House of Hohenzollern, there was nothing the Berlin police could do. Because of his ability and willingness to openly flaunt public norms and engage in what was tantamount to illegal activity, according to Peter Albrecht, Prince Friedrich was a “legend for gay rights,” even within the American gay community and even to this day. (Figure 15)
In the early through mid-1920s, Friedrich Heinrich allowed members of the so-called “Organization Consul” to use his estate in Kamenz for live fire and hand grenade exercises. (Figure 16) Wikipedia describes this organization as “. . . an ultra-nationalist and anti-Semitic terrorist organization that operated in the Weimar Republic from 1920 to 1922. It was formed by members of the disbanded Freikorps group Marine Brigade Ehrhardt and was responsible for political assassinations that had the ultimate goal of destroying the Republic and replacing it with a right-wing dictatorship.” While the group was technically banned by the Weimar Republic in 1922, live fire exercises apparently were not disallowed by the government until around 1926 so continued at Kamenz until then. It was around this time, that many members of the Consul joined the SS/SA and the Nazi Party. Friedrich Heinrich’s connections to the Nazi Party, specifically to its gay members, stem to this period.
Knowing that Friedrich Heinrich had protected Dr. Hans Vogel’s Jewish family, I wondered about Prince Friedrich’s support of an organization that Wikipedia characterizes as “anti-Semitic.” I asked Peter Albrecht about this, and he explained that between roughly 1948 and 1953, the U.S. Government started a full-blown investigation into the history of the Organization Consul. According to Peter, the study “revealed a staunch anti-armistice [i.e., Versailles Treaty] sentiment but wrote or documented very little about anti-Semitic motives within the organization.” It appears the assassinations were targeted at politicians who had signed or helped negotiate the Versailles Treaty, rather than at any members of the Jewish community. Peter stressed there’s no knowledge that Friedrich Heinrich was anti-Semitic, rather the opposite. However, what is clear is that he was a stalwart supporter of any group which opposed the Versailles Treaty.
One other thing is worth mentioning. The Organization Consul consisted of 5,000 or more members, and, likely, those of its members who were committed anti-Semites later joined the various Nazi organizations and were involved in the implementation of the “Final Solution.”
Let me resume the story. There is a relevant entry in Wikipedia under the history of the Prinz-Albrecht-Palais about the period after the palace was leased by the Nazis:
“The last chapter in the Palais’ history began after the Nazi Machtergreifung in 1933. In May, the headquarters of the newly established Gestapo secret police moved into a neighbouring building around the corner on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. When in 1934 the Sicherheitsdienst intelligence agency of the Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler took control over the Gestapo, Sicherheitsdienst chief Reinhard Heydrich moved from Munich to the Berlin Prinz-Albrecht-Palais. In 1935 also the neighbouring buildings at 101 Wilhelmstrasse and 103/104 Wilhelmstrasse were taken over and integrated into the large complex, which in 1939 became the main administrative seat of the SS-Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA).”
As a related aside, in a previous post, Post 131, I discussed the apartment where Curt and Elsa Glaser lived, displayed their extensive art collection, and held their regular art salons. It was located on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse in the same building later confiscated by the Gestapo for use as their headquarters and was one reason the Glasers were evicted from their residence.
After the Nazis leased the Prinz-Albrecht-Palais from Peter’s ancestors, it required the entire household of the Palais to be moved to the family estate in Kamenz. Peter Albrecht’s grandfather (see Figure 13), the most practical member of the family according to Peter, orchestrated the move. It was accomplished between October and December 1934, and involved the use of an armed 10-ton truck to move the valuable items during multiple trips, and several railroad box cars to move the rest of the belongings; on the receiving end, Friedrich Heinrich’s employees from his forestry operations unloaded the box cars. By the beginning of 1935, the complete inventory of two large castles, which had accumulated since approximately 1830, were stored in the basement in Kamenz.
Clearly, Friedrich Heinrich needed someone like Dr. Hans Vogel to assist in inventorying the valuable items and art work after Prince Friedrich’s bookkeepers had tallied the household items and furniture. This was a time-consuming operation since more than 50 tons of artwork needed to be catalogued. Suse Vogel, Dr. Vogel’s wife, indicates her husband stayed in the castle in Seitenberg, but Peter thinks this would have been impractical because the 20-miles between Kamenz and Seitenberg was connected by a cobblestone road that would have taken an hour of travel each way. There would have been ample accommodation for Dr. Vogel in Kamenz since Prince Friedrich had converted 50 of the 100 or so rooms in the castle to apartments with full baths, telephones, radio, electricity, and steam heat.
The circumstances of Dr. Vogel’s living arrangements and ongoing relationship with the von Preußen family are clarified in Suse Vogel’s diary. Friedrich Heinrich had an estate building in Seitenberg [today: Stronie Śląskie, Poland] which was his office and served as the headquarters of his brewery, vineyard, and forestry/agricultural operations. The prince’s primary residence was the castle in Kamenz [today: Kamieniec Ząbkowicki, Poland]. (For reference, Kamenz is approximately 373 miles northeast of Munich, Germany. (Figure 17))
Dr. Vogel had an apartment in the Castle Kamenz until the death of Friedrich Heinrich in November 1940 of prostate cancer. Upon Friedrich Heinrich’s death, his second cousin Prinz Waldemar von Preußen (1889-1945) purchased both Kamenz and Seitenberg from the community of heirs, consisting of Friedrich’s nephew and four nieces, along with 90 percent of the collections. (Figures 18-19) As a matter of interest, Prinz Waldemar was the nephew of the last German Kaiser, Wilhelm II. (Figure 20) In any case, Prince Waldemar relocated Dr. Hans Vogel to the Seitenberg estate following the death of his second cousin while Hans continued to catalog the von Preußen collection.
Suse Vogel provides a precise date in her diary when the von Preußen family and the German community evacuated Kamenz and the surrounding towns, the 11th of April 1945. This corresponds with the same week that the Soviet Red Army overran Breslau [today: Wrocław, Poland] and was closing in on Kamenz. The Vogel family fled to Berlin, while Prince Waldemar and his kin left for Bavaria; the Prince died there in 1945 of a blood disease.
The castle was looted and set ablaze by the arriving Soviet troops and then, what remained, was looted by the newly transferred Polish inhabitants. (Figure 21) Ultimately, the Polish government removed the remaining marble from the castle, and as with the Bruck’s “Prinz von Preußen” Hotel, transferred it to Warsaw to be used for the reconstruction of buildings there. In the case of the marble stripped from the castle in Kamenz, it was used to construct the Congress Hall at the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw. (Figure 22)
The von Preußen mausoleum at Castle Kamenz was desecrated by the newly arriving Poles with the burials disinterred. (Figures 23a-b) Fortunately, an honorable Polish citizen ended things before they got too out of hand and reburied the remains in the forest near the castle, carefully noting their location on a map. Before this concerned citizen died, he gave his map to the President of the local historical society, and in 2017, the City of Kamenz and the Catholic Church of Poland exhumed the graves and held a funeral service at the reconsecrated mausoleum. The European Union has provided funding for the rebuilding of the castle which is being overseen by the City of Kamenz.
This concludes Part I of this post. Part II will involve a discussion of the group photograph sent to me by Peter Albrecht showing his great-great-uncle Friedrich Heinrich von Preußen and the high-ranking Nazis who visited the Castle Kamenz in 1936 or 1937.
