Note: In this post, I discuss how I recently came into possession of images of ancestors from a branch of my family that originates mostly from Breslau [today:Wrocław, Poland], and learned about a memoir written by the grandfather of the English lawyer who shared these pictures.
A scant three months ago, on the 29th of September 2023 to be precise, I received an email from a lawyer living in Wolverhampton in the West Midlands of England, Helen Winter, née Renshaw. (Figure 1) I say “scant” because in the short period since we’ve been in touch, we’ve already exchanged several hundred emails.
In Helen’s initial missive, she explained that she is a descendant of the Bruck family and that her maternal grandfather was Professor Eberhard Friedrich Bruck (1877-1960). (Figure 2) He taught law at the University of Bonn until enactment of “The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service” (German: Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums, shortened to Berufsbeamtengesetz) by the Nazis on the 7th of April 1933. The primary objective of this law was to establish a “national” and “professional” civil service by dismissing certain groups of tenured civil servants, including individuals of Jewish descent and non-Aryan origins. Additionally, the law forbade Jews, non-Aryans, and political opponents from holding positions as teachers, professors, judges, or within the government. It also extended to other professions such as lawyers, doctors, tax consultants, musicians, and notaries.
Following Eberhard’s dismissal as university professor and confiscation of his home, he fled to the United States and wound-up teaching at Harvard University. As Helen further explained, her grandfather wrote a memoir for his daughter, Helen’s mother (Figure 3), relating the history of his branch of the Bruck family. As a Christmas gift to her nephews and nieces, Helen has slowly been translating the account. Her grandfather’s chronicle makes mention of the Bruck’s “Prinz von Preußen” Hotel, the family business in Ratibor [today: Racibórz, Poland] owned by three generations of my family. (Figure 4) While researching the history and fate of the hotel, Helen stumbled on multiple blog posts where I made mention of the establishment.
Helen has promised to share her grandfather’s translated story but has given me a preview of the brief entry her grandfather Eberhard Bruck wrote about his great-grandfather, Jacob Nathan Bruck, my great-great-great-grandfather from Ratibor. Since Jacob arguably died in 1832 or 1836 and Eberhard was born in 1877, he would not have known him personally. Eberhard’s written accounts of Jacob are likely stories he heard about him growing up and may have been clouded by the lens through which childhood memories are often remembered. In an upcoming post, I intend to discuss the meager details I’ve been able to uncover about my earliest known ancestor from Ratibor but suffice it for now to say the particulars caused me to more thoroughly investigate when the Bruck’s Hotel might have been built. These findings will be the basis for yet another post because they give insights on avenues others may want to follow in examining their own family histories.
On various occasions I’ve told readers that my ancestral tree has fewer than 1,500 names, which pales in comparison to multiple trees I’ve come across with more than 100,000 names. I use my tree mostly to orient myself to the people I write about on my blog. That said, I have people in my tree, living and deceased, whose names I’ve come across without knowing anything about them. This was the case with my fourth cousin Thomas “Tom” Friedrich Brook until he contacted me asking if we were related; I wrote about Tom in Post 143. (Figure 5) This was also true of Helen who previously existed only as a wraith. Coincidentally, Tom and Helen Winter are second cousins who’ve never met (i.e., Helen and Tom’s grandfathers were brothers), and like Tom, Helen is my fourth cousin.
In conjunction with translating her grandfather’s memoirs, Helen recently obtained family documents and pictures her older sister was curating. (Figure 6) Scrutinizing these items in combination has caused Helen to become obsessed with ancestral research. I can relate!
It is not my intention to further dwell on this branch of my family. However, as I just mentioned, I have numerous individuals in my tree I know nothing about and have no idea what they looked like. As names only, they are lifeless. Helen has been like the gift that keeps on giving because she has sent me pictures of many of my ancestors, including some of the earliest known ones from Breslau [today: Wrocław, Poland]. Acquiring these visuals for my ancestral tree is like filling in my Bingo card!
Among the most beguiling images Helen sent are ones of Jacob Bruck’s son and daughter-in-law, Dr. Jonas Julius Bruck (1813-1883) (Figures 7a & b-10) and Rosalie Bruck, née Marle (1817-1890) (Figures 11-12) and his famous grandson, Dr. Julius Bruck (1840-1902). (Figure 13) Julius is known for having designed in 1867 a water-cooled diaphanoscopic instrument for transillumination of the bladder via the rectum.
Jonas and Julius Bruck and their respective wives are interred in a mausoleum-like structure at the Old Jewish Cemetery in Wrocław, Poland (Figure 14), and are among my only Bruck ancestors whose burial location is known. Because I am friends with the Branch Manager of the Old Jewish Cemetery, Dr. Renata Wilkoszewska-Krakowska (Figure 15), I shared the pictures Helen sent with her and she was thrilled to receive them since some of the people are interred in “her” cemetery.
To close this post, I will share two other images (Figures 16-17) Helen has sent over the last several weeks, like the twelve daily gifts of Christmas! Suffice it to say, my Bingo card is becoming quite full!
Note: In this post, I talk about Dr. Curt Glaser, a prominent Jewish art historian, museum director, art critic, and art collector, who until recently lost his place in the history of art and was almost completely forgotten following the Nazi seizure of power. He is a distant relative by marriage. I discuss the ongoing and challenging efforts by his heirs to obtain a fair and just settlement for the large and outstanding art collection Glaser was forced to sell in 1933, a collection that wound up scattered around the world.
With this post, I embark on a series of articles that may be of broader interest to readers. While the upcoming posts are inspired by circumstances that impacted members of my family, near and distant, they touch on historical events and people that followers may have some familiarity with. That’s to say, some of the topics transcend and relate to affairs and happenings that affected more than just my family.
In Post 97, I introduced readers to Dr. Curt Glaser (1879-1943), a relative by marriage. For context, Dr. Glaser’s second wife was Maria Milch (1901-1981) (Figure 1), my third cousin once removed, so by no means a close relative. Curt and Maria were married on the 30th of May 1933 in Berlin, following the death of Curt’s first wife, Elsa Glaser née Kolker (1878-1932) (Figure 2) at the age of just 54 from a serious illness. In Post 97, I related the sad fate of Curt and Maria’s only child, Eva Renate Glaser (1935-1943), who died of Trisomy-21, the most common form of Down Syndrome.
This post is focused instead on the extensive art collection that Curt amassed with his first wife, its fate following the Nazi ascension to power in 1933, and the ongoing efforts by Dr. Glaser’s heirs to receive just compensation for the forced sale of Curt and Elsa’s accumulation of exceptional artworks.
Curt was born on May 29, 1879, in Leipzig, Germany, the son of the businessman Simon Glaser (1841-1904) and his wife Emma Glaser née Haase (1854-1927). Curt’s parents moved to Berlin shortly after his birth. Curt Glaser received his doctorate in medicine in Munich in 1902, then immediately began a second degree in art history, a topic that had always interested him. He first studied in Freiburg and Munich, then in Berlin where he worked with Heinrich Wölfflin. He wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on Hans Holbein the Elder and received his doctorate in 1907. Glaser, born Jewish, converted to the Protestant faith in around 1911.
In 1903, Curt married his first wife Elsa Kolker from Breslau [today: Wrocław, Poland], the daughter of the industrialist and art collector Hugo Kolker. (Figure 3) Starting around 1910, with the support and in part at the bidding of Glaser’s father-in-law, Curt and Elsa began to build a significant art collection that encompassed, among others, the works of Edvard Munch, Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and Hans Purmann. To give readers an idea of the extent of the art collection Curt and Elsa amassed, according to a footnote in Wikipedia on Curt Glaser, “The German Lost Art Foundation lists 1806 objects that belonged to Glaser and his wife in its database.” It’s not clear, however, from this footnote whether this constitutes an itemized inventory.
Beginning in around 1902, Glaser began to be active as an art critic and became one of the most important critics and commentators in Berlin over the next thirty years. Yet, as a central figure in Berlin’s art scene, he has largely been forgotten in the years since his death.
Glaser started working in 1909 at the Königliches Kupferstichkabinett where, by 1912, he began significantly expanding their collection of modern and contemporary art and promoting it through numerous exhibitions. Curt’s tenure at the Kupferstichkabinett corresponded with the publication of some of his most important scholarly works, including monographs on Lucas Cranach the Elder (1921) and Hans Holbein the Younger (1924).
In 1924, Glaser became the director of Berlin’s Kunstbibliothek (State Art Library), where he was tasked with redefining it “as an art historical research library.” By 1925, Curt and Elsa had moved into a civil service apartment unattached to Curt’s position as director of the Berlin Art Library in which the Glaser’s art collection could be suitably exhibited. Curt’s lofty position and the Glasers’ luxurious apartment where they could host important art salons meant they now belonged to Berlin’s intellectual elite. (Figures 4-7) The Glaser home on Prinz-Albrecht-Straße [today: Niederkirchnerstraße] became a meeting point for art intellectuals.
Curt Glaser’s fate was reflective of that of many Jews living in Germany during the 1930’s. Following the seizure of power by the National Socialists in January 1933, the “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service” was enacted in April 1933. As a result, Glaser was swiftly placed on administrative leave, then fired from his post at the Berlin State Art Library. By May 1933, he was forced from his apartment, a building which came to house the Gestapo headquarters.
May 1933 also corresponds with the period that much of the Glasers’ collection was auctioned in Berlin. The bulk of Glaser’s art collection and library, as well as his home furnishings, were auctioned at the Internationales Kunst- und Auktions-Haus on May 9, 1933, and at the Berlin Buch- und Kunst-Antiquariat Max Perl on May 18-19, 1933. These auctions in 1933 resulted in Glaser’s collection being scattered across the globe.
An auction was believed to be the option that provided the opportunity to obtain the best possible prices given the circumstances at the time. These circumstances included the world economic crisis, the National Socialists’ seizure of power, and an increasing number of auctions of entire collections belonging not only to fleeing Jews but recently impoverished owners as well. There’s no question that many museums and private collectors tried to take advantage of these conditions to make inexpensive purchases of sought-after art collections. It’s clear that Glaser largely dissolved his collection for personal reasons, but also under pressure from the National Socialists. More will be said about this below in connection with the purchase in 1933 by the Kunstmuseum in Basel of almost 200 drawings and graphics from the Glaser collection.
According to a report by the Kunstmuseum in Basel entitled “Curt Glaser Report: III. Summary of the Historical Facts,” “While proceeds from auctions by Jewish consignors were already being transferred to blocked accounts during the first years of the Nazi regime, in Glaser’s case the research assumes that he received the proceeds of the auctions. It cannot be ascertained whether and to what extent Glaser had access to his salary and bank accounts from abroad in 1933 due to the foreign currency legislation of 1931.”
This report also makes the following observation as to the final sale amounts realized at the Glaser auction in Berlin, specifically the Max Perl auction, and its impact on Glaser’s fortune: “The final sale amounts at the auction reflect the trend that important pieces attained high prices while less important works remained below expectations. The two prominent lithographs by Munch that were acquired for the Kunstmuseum Basel were bid up above the appraisal (by 29.2% and 8.3%), while the total price of all 200 works acquired for the museum amounted to 10.1% below the appraised value. Existing research, as well as the Glaser compensation proceeding of 1963, indicates that Glaser lost a considerable portion of his fortune in the auctions.”
A brief digression. Following the death of Curt Glaser’s first wife Elsa in 1932, as a tribute to her life as a wife, collector, and patron of Edvard Munch’s work, Curt donated Munch’s painting “Music on Karl Johan Street (1889)” to the Nationalgalerie in Berlin. This painting was eventually returned to Curt Glaser by the Nationalgalerie, no doubt as a part of the Nazi effort to remove from museums what they deemed as “degenerate” art. This included works of Expressionism, Dadaism, the New Objectivity, Surrealism, Cubism, and Fauvism; more than 21,000 objects were seized by the Nazis, many of which were presented in the exhibition “Degenerate Art,” which traveled throughout Germany. In any case, Glaser took Munch’s painting with him when he later left for Switzerland. No longer able to afford donating it, he sold it to the Kunsthaus Zürich in December 1940 for 12,000 Swiss Francs.
Curt Glaser was permanently dismissed from the civil service on September 27, 1933, Ironically, in January 1934, he was awarded a pension by the Nazi government, although it amounted to only three-quarters of what would have been paid to an Aryan civil servant. Apparently, Glaser’s pension was transferred abroad, although after November 1, 1936, the Reich Flight Tax introduced by the Nazis was deducted.
Following the liquidation of his art collection, Curt left Germany with his future second wife Maria Milch. In June/July of 1933 they stayed briefly in Paris, then moved temporarily to Ascona, Switzerland. Between 1936 and then again between 1938-1939, the Glasers stayed in Florence, Italy with their daughter, who was born in 1935, probably in Ascona. After WWII was declared and Italy became part of the Axis powers, the Glasers emigrated to America in 1941 via Italy and Cuba without their daughter. Curt died in New York in 1943, aged just 64, never having managed to reestablish a professional career either in Switzerland or the United States following his departure from Germany.
As mentioned briefly above, about 200 works in Curt Glaser’s collection were acquired by the Kunstmuseum Basel at the Max Perl auction. In what can only be considered another ironic development, in the summer of 1938, Glaser had applied unsuccessfully for the directorship of the Kunstmuseum in Basel that had acquired so many of his artworks.
Next, I want to contrast the differing approaches taken vis a vis Glaser’s heirs by the Kunstmuseum in Basel and the family of the Norwegian shipowner Thomas Olsen who recently auctioned a masterpiece by Edvard Munch that once belonged to Curt Glaser.
First, however, let me briefly touch on the 1998 Washington Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets. This was a conference hosted by the Department of State and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum at the Department of State from November 30 through December 3, 1998. Forty-four countries as well as numerous international non-governmental organizations with a stake in these issues participated. The attendees adopted eleven basic rules, known as the Washington Principles, that are meant to help resolve open questions relating to Nazi-looted art. Museums are urged to review their collections, fill in gaps in the histories of the works, and identify illegal changes in ownership. As necessary, museums should initiate steps to return and restitute the works in question to the rightful owners or seek another form of “just and fair solution.”
A subsequent conference, the Holocaust Era Assets Conference, took place in Terezín, Czech Republic, the site of the Theresienstadt Ghetto, in June 2009. This resulted in the Terezin Declaration, a non-binding declaration by 47 countries agreeing on measures to right economic wrongs that accompanied the Holocaust against the Jews and other victims of Nazi persecution in Europe. It is neither a treaty nor a legally binding international agreement. As far as the current discussion is concerned, the Terezin Declaration ruled that forced sales fell under the terms of the Washington Conference on Holocaust-era Assets and were thus entitled to a “fair and just solution.” A forced sale would apply to the 1933 auctions of the Glaser collection.
According to the guidelines in the Terezin Declaration, while restitution of the property itself is preferred, the participating countries acknowledged, however, this is not always possible; alternatively, the guidelines suggest possible compensation that is “genuinely fair and adequate.” Since the declaration is not legally binding, it does not define how countries should act on its principles.
In terms of the artworks acquired by the Kunstmuseum in May 1933, the Glaser heirs initially approached the Basel government demanding restitution in 2008. This was roundly rejected by the city government who argued that under civil law the purchase had been lawful and was still legally binding. They further claimed, falsely as it turns out, that they had been unaware the acquisitions came from the Glaser collection. For readers interested in this issue, I refer them to the previously cited “Curt Glaser Report” by the Kunstmuseum.
By November 2017, when the heirs once again approached the Basel government, the political landscape had shifted. German museums had by then paid out millions in restitution, so the Basel government felt pressured to act to protect their reputation. They handed the question over to their Art Commission who sought a face-saving solution.
Applying the Washington Principles the Commission sought a “fair and just” settlement, writing in their report “because it is not primarily a question of legal issues, but of moral issues.” However, fearing being disavowed by the then left-green city government majority, the Commission made it clear that the government’s decision of 2008 was not being called into question, in other words, there was no “right of return” of the artworks. Rather, they argued Glaser had to be regarded as a victim of National Socialism and thus his heirs were entitled to a “fair and just” settlement. Having established the framework for an agreement that “an extrajudicial restitution of the drawings and graphics was excluded,” the Art Commission finessed the situation and negotiated financial compensation with Glaser’s heirs in 2020. This included organizing an exhibition on Glaser as an art collector and art historian and covering the legal fees and expenses for the heirs to travel to Switzerland to attend the exhibition. The exhibition allowed Curt Glaser to be remembered as one of the most important and influential museum directors of his time. While the Basel government eventually came to an amenable resolution, it took decades for Glaser’s heirs to attain satisfaction.
Let me move now to a discussion of a “fair and just” settlement recently reached with the Glaser heirs related to a painting by Edvard Munch that once belonged to Curt Glaser. This has been characterized by the Glaser family’s lawyer, David Rowland, as a case that was handled in an “exemplary” manner.
As a brief aside, I am in touch with Curt Glaser’s wife’s niece, Bettina Basanow née Meyer. (Figure 8) Following publication of Post 105 where I lamented my failed attempt to obtain restitution from the French Ministry of Culture for paintings confiscated by the Nazis in December 1940 from my father’s first cousin, Bettina referred me to David Rowland. David recommended a French-speaking law school classmate of his who in turn put me in touch with the French lawyer who is representing me in my restitution case.
One painting Curt Glaser was forced to sell under duress after the Nazis came to power was “an expressionist masterpiece” by Edvard Munch entitled “Dance on the Beach.” It was part of a pioneering 12-panel work, referred to as “The Reinhardt Frieze.” The work was originally commissioned in the early 20th century by Max Reinhardt, the famed Jewish financier of plays, operas, and concerts, for his avant-garde theater in Berlin. As Southeby’s explained in media materials, this 12-panel work was designed as an “immersive installation” before audience members stepped into the Berlin theater’s upper level. Eventually in 1912 when the theater was being refurbished, the frieze was split into its component parts, and Glaser, who was a friend of Munch, acquired the piece.
After Glaser was forced to sell “Dance on the Beach,” the Norwegian shipowner Thomas Olsen acquired the painting at a sale in Oslo in 1934. Like Glaser, Olsen was a friend and patron of Munch, and after the Nazis invaded Norway in 1940, he hid the painting in a barn. It stayed hidden until the end of the war, and since 1945 had remained in the hands of the Olsen family, the only part of the original Reinhardt-commissioned frieze still in private hands. On March 1st of this year, the painting was auctioned by the Olsen heirs, and sold for $20 million. Prior to its sale, Petter Olsen, the scion of the Olsen family, reached a “fair and just” settlement with the Glaser heirs that avoided litigation.
I’m not privy to the terms of the settlement, although Bettina Basanow, Maria Milch’s niece, tells me there are four groups of Glaser heirs involved in ongoing litigation. A 2021 New York Times noted that “Since 2007, 13 private collectors or institutions — including the Dutch Restitutions Committee, the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation in Berlin, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne and the city of Basel — have concluded that Glaser sold his collection in May 1933 as a result of Nazi persecution, and agreed to either return or pay some compensation to his heirs for art he sold that wound up in their collections.”
The New York Times article goes on to say, however, that “. . .the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston have repeatedly rejected the heirs’ claims for paintings that were sold at the same auctions. They argue there is not enough evidence that Glaser sold under duress.” Similarly, David Rowland is critical of the United Kingdom’s Spoilation Advisory Panel conclusion in 2009 that while “Nazi oppression” was a “predominant reason” for Glaser’s sale of eight drawings in 1933 to the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, the “moral claim was insufficiently strong to warrant the transfer of the drawings” to Glaser’s heirs.
Suffice it to say, it is reasonable to assume that time-consuming and expensive litigation will continue with these and other institutions and individuals until some “fair and just” settlement is reached with Glaser’s heirs on his behalf.
“Glaser, Curt.” Dictionary of Art Historians, https://arthistorians.info/glaserc
Hickley, Catherine. “Did the Nazis Force an Art Sale? The Question Lingers 88 Years Later.” New York Times, 6 Jul. 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/06/arts/design/nazis-art-forced-sales.html
Kunstmuseum Basel. Curt Glaser Report: III. Summary of the Historical Facts. https://www.bing.com/search?q=curt+glaser+report%3A+III.+Summary+of+the+historical+facts&form=ANNTH1&refig=4bbfef8a88ec40c29ae32f9547d03369
Mensch, Christian. “Curt Glaser Case: The squaring of the cultural circle: in the case of Glaser, an agreement has been reached.” BZ Basel, 27 Mar. 2020, https://www.bzbasel.ch/basel/basel-stadt/die-quadratur-des-kulturzirkels-im-fall-glaser-wurde-eine-vereinbarung-getroffen-ld.1414834
Parzinger, Hermann. “Remembrances of Curt Glaser: A cosmopolitan, forced into exile.” Commemorative plaque unveiling: May 9, 10:30 a.m. in the foyer of the Cultural Forum of the Kunstbibliothek. https://rowlandlaw.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Parzinger-Essay-ENG.pdf
Philpot, Robert. “Heirs of Nazi-persecuted collector hail justice in auction of Edvard Munch painting.” Times of Israel, 24 February 2023, https://www.timesofisrael.com/heirs-of-nazi-persecuted-collector-hail-justice-in-auction-of-edvard-munch-painting/
Note: In this post, I discuss “stashes” of family photos I’ve uncovered, and the efforts I’ve undertaken with the help of near and distant relatives to identify people in some of those images even absent captions. In a few instances the photos are significant because they illustrate individuals renowned or notorious in history. In other cases, a good deal of sleuthing was required, including comparing the pictures of people in captioned versus uncaptioned images. On other occasions, I recognized portrayals of family members I knew growing up. And, in rare instances, I was able to determine a photographed person based on an educated guess.
The antisemitic and racist laws enacted by the Nazis short-circuited my father’s career as a dentist. Pursuant to his formal training at the University of Berlin, followed by an apprenticeship in Danzig (today: Gdansk, Poland), my father, Dr. Otto Bruck (Figure 1), opened his own dental practice in Tiegenhof in the Free City of Danzig (today: Nowy Dwór Gdański, Poland) in April 1932; by April 1937, my father was forced to flee Tiegenhof, and by March 1938 he had left Germany altogether, clearly seeing the handwriting on the wall. As an unmarried man with few family ties, this was an option open to him. My father would never again legally practice dentistry.
My father considered the five years he spent in Tiegenhof to be the halcyon days of his life. Judging from the numerous photos of his days spent there, including those illustrating his active social life, his professional acquaintances, and recreational pursuits, I would be hard-pressed to argue otherwise.
I originally intended in this post to briefly discuss with readers the history of Polish Mennonites because Tiegenhof, the town where my father had his dental practice, was largely Mennonite when my father lived there. The Mennonites arrived in the Żuławy Wiślane region (i.e. “the Vistula fens,” plural from “żuława”), the alluvial delta area of the Vistula in the northern part of Poland, in the 17th century. They came to escape religious persecution in the Netherlands and Flanders. I have instead decided to devote the subsequent Blog post to discussing the history of Polish Mennonites, and briefly explore how the Mennonites, who are committed to pacifism, inexplicably, became strong adherents of Hitler. I intend in the following post to use photos from my father’s collection to focus on one Mennonite family, the Epp family, with whom my father was acquainted and friends with. They have a dark history related to their connection to the Nazi regime.
Getting back on track. Curious whether the office building where my father had both his dental practice and residence still existed (Figure 2), in 2013 my wife Ann Finan and I visited Nowy Dwór Gdański. We quickly oriented ourselves to the layout of the town, and promptly determined that his office and residential building no longer stands. I would later learn that the structure had been destroyed by Russian bombers when Nazi partisans shot at them from this location.
During our initial visit to Nowy Dwór Gdański, we were directed to the local museum, the Muzeum Żuławskie. The museum docent the day we visited spoke English, so I was able to communicate to her that my Jewish father had once been a dentist in the town and had taken many pictures when living there of Tiegenhof and the Żuławy Wiślane region. I offered to make the photos available, which I in fact did upon my return to the States.
In 2014, my wife Ann and I were invited to Nowy Dwór Gdański for an in-depth tour and a translated talk. Naturally, during my presentation, I used many of my father’s photos. There was a question-and-answer period following my talk, and one Polish gentleman of Jewish descent commented on how fortunate I am to have so many photographs of my father, family, and friends. I agreed. In the case of this gentleman, he remarked he has only seven family pictures, which I think is often true for descendants of Holocaust survivors. In my instance, my father’s seven albums of surviving photos, covering from the 1910’s until 1948 when my father came to America, are the reason I started researching and writing about my family.
Given the importance pictures have played in the stories I research and write about, and the development of this Blog, I thought I would highlight a few of the more interesting and historically significant pictures in my father’s collection, as well as discuss other “stashes” of photos I’ve uncovered. Obviously, it’s impossible and would be of scant interest to readers to discuss all the photos.
My father was a witness to the rise of National Socialism from the window of his dental office in Tiegenhof. On May 1, 1933, my father photographed a regiment of “SA Sturmabteilung,” literally “Storm Detachment,” known also as “Brownshirts” or “Storm Troopers,” marching down the nearby Schlosserstrasse, carrying Nazi flags, framed by the “Kreishaus” (courthouse) on one side. (Figure 3)
Again, a year later to the day, on May 1, 1934, my father documented a parade of veterans and Brownshirts following the same path down Schlosserstrasse led by members of the Stahlhelm (“Steel Helmet”), a veterans’ organization that arose after the German defeat of WWI. (Figures 4a-b) In 1934, the Stahlhelme were incorporated into the SASturmabteilung, the original paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party.
Then again, the following year, on April 5, 1935, there was another Nazi parade. On this occasion Field Marshall Hermann Göring visited and participated in the march through Tiegenhof. The day prior, on April 4, 1935, Hermann Göring had visited the Free City of Danzig to influence the upcoming April 7th parliamentary elections in favor of Nazi candidates. The visit to Tiegenhof the next day was merely an extension of this campaign to influence the Free City’s parliamentary elections. In the photos that my father took on April 5th there can be seen a banner which in German reads “Danzig ist Deutsch wenn es nationalsozialistisch ist,” translated as “Danzig is German when it is National Socialist.” (Figures 5a-b) It appears that along with everyday citizens of Tiegenhof and surrounding communities, members of the Hitler Youth, known in German as Hitlerjugend, also lined the street in large number.
Students of history know about Hermann Göring but for those who are unfamiliar with him, let me say a few words. He would evolve to become the second-highest ranking Nazi after the Führer. Unlike many of Hitler’s sycophants and lieutenants, Göring was a veteran of WWI, having been an ace fighter pilot, a recipient of the prestigious Blue Max award, and a commander of the Jagdgeschwader a fighter group that had previously been led by the renowned Red Baron, Manfred von Richthofen. Göring was drawn to Hitler for his oratorical skills and became an early member of the Nazi Party. He participated with Hitler in the failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, during which he was wounded in the groin. During his recovery he was regularly given morphine to which he became addicted for the remainder of his life.
Göring oversaw the creation of the Gestapo, an organization he later let Heinrich Himmler run. He was best known as the commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe, although after the Nazi victory over France, he was made Reichsmarschall, head of all the German armed forces. He amassed great wealth for himself by stealing paintings, sculptures, jewelry, cash, and valuable artifacts not only from Jews and people whom Nazis had murdered but also by looting museums of defeated nations.
Towards the end of the war, following an awkward attempt to have Hitler appoint him head of the Third Reich and thereby drawing Hitler’s ire, he turned himself in to the Americans rather than risk being captured by the Russians. He eventually was indicted and stood trial at Nuremberg. The once obese Göring, who’d once weighed more than three hundred pounds, was a shadow of his former self at his trial. Expectedly, he was convicted on all counts, and sentenced to death by hanging. His request to be executed by firing squad was denied, but he was able to avoid the hangman’s noose by committing suicide using a potassium cyanide pill that had inexplicably been smuggled to him by an American soldier.
My uncle, Dr. Fedor Bruck, has been the subject of multiple previous posts (i.e., Post 17, Post 31, Post 41). My uncle, like my father was a dentist. He was educated at the University of Breslau (today: Wrocław, Poland) and had his dental practice in Liegnitz, Germany (today: Legnica, Poland) until around 1933 when he was forced to give it up due to the “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service” passed by the Nazi regime on the 7th April 1933, two months after Adolf Hitler had attained power. My uncle’s life is of interest because he miraculously survived the entire war hidden in Berlin by friends and non-Jewish family members. His story has also been of interest because he counted among his friends a woman named Käthe Heusermann-Reiss, who had been his dental assistant in Liegnitz.
Following the loss of his business my uncle relocated to Berlin hoping the anonymity of the larger city would afford him the possibility to continue working under the auspices of another dentist, which it did for a time. Käthe Heusermann also moved to Berlin and opportunistically landed herself a job as a dental assistant to Hitler’s American-trained dentist, Dr. Hugo Blaschke. In this capacity, she was always present when Dr. Blaschke treated Hitler. Following the end of the war, she was interrogated by the Russians and asked to identify dental remains which had been recovered in a burn pit outside the Reichstag. The bridgework performed by Dr. Blaschke on Hitler was outmoded so Käthe was easily able to recognize Blaschke’s work and Hitler’s teeth, a fact Stalin kept hidden from the world. Following Russia’s capture of Berlin at the end of the war, my uncle who’d temporarily been hiding in Käthe’s apartment learned from her that Hitler had committed suicide. This dangerous information resulted in Käthe being imprisoned in the USSR for many years, and my uncle barely escaping the same fate. Surviving among my father’s photographs is a noteworthy picture taken in Liegnitz of my uncle and Käthe Heusermann. Though uncaptioned, I have been able to compare it to known pictures of Käthe to confirm it is her. (Figure 6)
As I have told readers in multiple earlier posts my father was an active sportsman, and an excellent amateur tennis player. Among my father’s belongings I retain multiple of the prizes he was awarded for his achievements, including many newspaper clippings documenting his results. In August 1936, my father attended an International Tennis Tournament in Zoppot, Germany (today: Sopot, Poland), located a mere 32 miles from Tiegenhof. During his attendance there, he photographed the great German tennis player, Heinrich Ernst Otto “Henner” Henkel (Figure 7), whose biggest success was his singles title at the 1937 French Championships. Interestingly, Henkel learned to play tennis at the “Rot-Weiss” Tennis Club in Berlin. My father was a member of the “Schwarz-Weiss” Tennis Club in Berlin, so perhaps my father and Henner played one another and were acquainted. Henner Henkel was killed in action during WWII on the Eastern Front at Voronezh during the Battle of Stalingrad while serving in the Wehrmacht, the German Army.
As I mentioned above, my father left Germany for good in March 1938. He was headed to stay with his sister Susanne and brother-in-law, then living in Fiesole, a small Tuscan town outside Florence, Italy. During his sojourn in Italy, before eventually joining the French Foreign Legion later in 1938, my father visited some of the tourist attractions in Italy, including the Colosseum in Rome. One of the images that my father took there has always stood out to me because of the paucity of people around what is today a very crowded and visited venue. (Figure 8)
My father’s collection of photos number in the hundreds but I’ve chosen to highlight only certain ones because they illustrate a few personages or places that may be known to readers. My father’s collection is merely one among several caches of images I was able to track down through family and acquaintances. I want to call attention to a few pictures of family members that grabbed my attention from these other hoards.
In Post 33, I explained to readers how I tracked down the grandchildren of my grandfather’s brother, Wilhelm “Willy” Bruck (1872-1952). Based on family correspondence, I knew my great-uncle Willy wound up in Barcelona after escaping Germany in the 1930’s and theorized his children and grandchildren may have continued to live there. Official vital documents I procured during a visit there convinced me otherwise, that at least his son returned to Germany after WWII. I was eventually able to track down both of my great-uncle’s grandchildren, that’s to say my second cousins Margarita and Antonio Bruck, to outside of Munich, Germany. (Figure 9) I have met both, and they’ve shared their family pictures, which again number in the hundreds.
The cache included many images of family members, but there are two pictures I was particularly thrilled to obtain copies of. My uncle Dr. Fedor Bruck (1895-1982), previously discussed, fought in WWI on the Eastern Front. (Figure 10) Among the family memorabilia I retain is a postcard he sent to his aunt Franziska Bruck on the 3rd of September 1916 coincidentally from the Ukraine announcing his promotion to Sergeant. (Figures 11a-b) The ongoing conflict between the Ukraine and Russia makes me realize how long the Ukraine has been a staging area for wars.
Regular readers may recall that my father was born in Ratibor, Germany (today: Racibórz, Poland), in Upper Silesia. The family hotel there, owned through three generations between roughly 1850 and the early 1920’s, was known as the Bruck’s “Prinz von Preußen” Hotel. Among my second cousins’ photos is a rare image of the entrance to this hotel, which no longer stands. (Figure 12)
I introduced readers to two of my grandfather’s renowned sisters, my great-aunts Franziska and Elsbeth Bruck, way back in Post 15. Their surviving personal papers are archived at the Stadtmuseum in Spandau, the westernmost of the twelve boroughs of Berlin; these files have been another source of family photographs. Franziska Bruck was an eminent florist, and it is reputed that one of her clients was the last German Kaiser, Wilhelm II (1859-1941). One undated photograph taken in my great-aunt’s flower shop shows Duchess Cecilie Auguste Marie of Mecklenburg-Schwerin (1886-1954), the last Crown Princess of Germany and Prussia, who was married to Kaiser Wilhelm II’s son, Wilhelm, the German Crown Prince. (Figure 13)
My second cousins Margarita and Antonio Bruck introduced me to one of my third cousins, Andreas “Andi” Pauly, also living part-time in Munich, Germany. (Figure 14) The Pauly branch of my extended family, which originally hailed from Posen, Germany (today: Poznan, Poland) has been the subject of multiple blog posts, including Post 45 on Pauly family Holocaust victims and reflections in Post 56 by the paterfamilias, Dr. Josef Pauly (1843-1916), Andi Pauly’s great-grandfather. Josef Pauly and his wife Rosalie Pauly née Mockrauer (1844-1927) had eight daughters and one son born between 1870 and 1885; thanks to photos provided by Andi Pauly, not only was I able to obtain images of all nine children but also some of Pauly cousins I knew of by name.
Again, it is not my intention to boggle readers’ minds by showing all these photos but I want to focus on one particular picture I originally obtained from Andi Pauly that was the subject of Post 65. The photo was taken in Doorn, Netherlands on the 28th of May 1926, and shows a then-unknown Bruck family member standing amidst a group that includes the last German Kaiser, Wilhelm II, his second wife, Princess Hermine Reuss of Greiz (1887-1947), and her youngest daughter by her first marriage, Princess Henriette of Schönaich-Carolath (1918-1972), and the Royal Family’s entourage. (Figure 15) At the time I wrote Post 65, I was unable to determine who the Bruck family member was, nor whom the initials “W.B.” stood for.
Fast forward. In early 2021, I was astonished to receive an email from a Dr. Tilo Wahl, a doctor from Köpenick in Berlin, who stumbled upon my Blog and contacted me. He shared copies of the extensive collection of personal papers and photographs he had copied from the grandson of one of my esteemed ancestors, Dr. Walter Bruck (1872-1937), from Breslau, Germany (today: Wrocław, Poland) Again, this relative and my findings related to Dr. Walter Bruck have been chronicled in multiple earlier posts. The very same image discussed in the previous paragraph I had obtained from Andi Pauly was included among Dr. Bruck’s images. It was then I realized the unidentified Bruck family member standing with Kaiser Wilhelm II, his family, and his entourage was none other than Dr. Bruck’s second wife, Johanna Elisabeth Margarethe Gräbsch (1884-1963). (Figure 16) I discussed these findings in Post 100.
Dr. Walter Bruck’s collection of papers and photos yielded images of multiple family members about whom I was aware, including one of Dr. Walter Bruck’s three siblings. However, one that stands out amongst all these photos was the one of Dr. Walter Bruck’s grandfather Dr. Jonas Julius Bruck (1813-1883). (Figure 17) Dr. Jonas Bruck is buried along with his son, Dr. Julius Bruck, in the restored tombs at the Old Jewish Cemetery in Wrocław, Poland. (Figure 18) Dr. Jonas Bruck was a brother of my great-great-grandfather Samuel Bruck (1808-1863), the original owner of the Bruck’s “Prinz von Preußen” Hotel in Ratibor, Germany (today: Racibórz, Poland) I previously discussed.
In various places, I found fleeting references that Dr. Walter Bruck and Johanna Elisabeth Margarethe Gräbsch had both previously been married. I eventually found historic documents, my gold standard, confirming this. Using educating guesses based on incomplete captions and estimating the timeframe a few pictures in Dr. Walter Bruck’s collection were taken, that’s to say during WWI and before, I was even able to find pictures of both of their previous spouses among his photos.
Dr. Walter Bruck’s album also contain multiple pictures of his daughter, Renate Bruck (1926-2013). She was married three times, with images of two of her husbands included. Thanks to Post 99 Renate’s twin daughters, whom I knew about but had no expectation of ever finding since they’d left England years ago, instead found me. From this, I learned that Walter Bruck’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren live in Sydney, Australia.
I suspect the story I’m about to relate may resonate with some readers, the topic of missing or incomplete captions on pictures of one’s ancestors. Let me provide some context. During the time that my uncle Dr. Fedor Bruck was a dentist in Liegnitz, Germany he carried on an illicit affair with a married non-Jewish woman, Irmgard Lutze (Figure 19), with whom he had two children, my first cousins Wolfgang (Figure 20) and Wera Lutze. During the Nazi era time when it was prohibited and dangerous for an Aryan to have an affair with a Jew, the cuckolded husband nonetheless raised the children as his own. Therefore, they had the Lutze rather than the Bruck surname.
I knew both first cousins well, though both are now deceased. In any case, included among my cousin’s photographs was one that left me perplexed. It showed three generations, the eldest of whom was identified as “Tante Grete Brauer (mother’s sister).” (Figures 21a-b) The “Brauer” surname reverberated only because when perusing my great-aunt Elsbeth Bruck’s papers at the Stadtmuseum I discovered multiple letters written by Brauers. At the time I had no idea this represented another branch of my extended family.
As I discussed in Post 34, I would eventually work out that “Tante Grete Brauer” was my grandmother Else Bruck née Berliner’s sister, Margarethe Brauer née Berliner (1872-1942) who was murdered in the Holocaust. Prior to finding this isolated picture of my great-aunt, I was completely unaware of her existence. I’ve repeatedly told readers that my father had scant interest in family and rarely spoke of them to me growing up, so I was not surprised by this discovery.
I will give readers one last example of caches of family photos I’ve been able to recover by mentioning my third cousin once-removed, Larry Leyser (Figure 22), who very sadly passed away in 2021 due to complications from Covid. Over the years, Larry and I often shared family documents and photos. Several years ago, he borrowed and scanned a large collection of photos from one of his cousins named Michael Maleckar which he shared with me. As with any such trove, I found a few gems, including one of my own parents at a party they attended in Manhattan the early 1950’s. My father literally “robbed the cradle” when he married my mother as she was 22 years younger than him. This age difference is particularly pronounced in the one picture I show here. (Figure 23)
I will merely say, in closing, that I am aware of other caches of family photos that unfortunately I have been unable to lay my hands on. I completely understand that some of my cousins are busy leading their lives and don’t share my passion for family history, so they are excused. One other thought. The longer I work on my family’s history, the more I realize how much I regret not talking with my relatives when they were alive about some of our ancestors as my stories would be broader and would then be grounded in truths rather veiled in so much conjecture.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Sussman, Jeffrey. Holocaust Fighters: Boxers, Resisters, and Avengers. Roman & Littlefield, 2021.
Note: In this Blog post, I introduce readers to the visitors and clients who signed one of two guestbooks maintained by my ancestor Dr. Walter Wolfgang Bruck, an array of nobiliary and accomplished patrons representing many duchies and disciplines.
Dr. Walter Wolfgang Bruck (1872-1937) (Figure 1), acclaimed dentist and distant relative of mine from Breslau, Germany [today: Wrocław, Poland], has been the subject of multiple Blog posts. Thanks to a German doctor from Köpenick, Berlin, Dr. Tilo Wahl, who photographed or purchased at auction many personal letters, photos, medals, and memorabilia belonging to my esteemed ancestor and generously shared scans of them with me, I have had a trove of materials to mine for Blog stories. The current post is another result of a closer examination of Dr. Bruck’s private papers.
During the late 1920’s and the early 1930’s Dr. Bruck and his family lived in Breslau, Germany in a luxurious home at Reichspräsidentenplatz 17, also called Kaiser Wilhelm-Platz (Figure 2), with the owner of record at the time being Walter Bruck. Following the death of Paul von Hindenburg, the German general and statesman who led the Imperial German Army during World War I and later became President of Germany from 1925 until his death in 1934, Reichspräsidentenplatz was renamed by the Nazis to Hindenburgplatz. The renaming of the square was reflected in Breslau address books from 1935 onwards. By 1937, however, Walter’s wife Johanna Bruck was now shown as the owner of record even though Walter continued to live there until he died on the 31st of March 1937. The change in ownership from Walter to Johanna Bruck was a measure to avoid expropriation of the estate by the Nazis as Walter was considered “Jewish,” whereas his wife was deemed to be “Aryan.”
From surviving pictures and two guestbooks belonging to Dr. Bruck that Dr. Wahl physically acquired we know that Dr. Bruck and his wife Johanna Bruck née Gräbsch often entertained and had overnight guests. The visitors seemingly were expected to sign the larger of the guestbooks upon their departure. (Figures 3a-b) This register is 35 pages long with the first guest signature written on the 13th of July 1900 and the last one on the 14th of January 1934. Though the visitors included known family members the bulk of the autographs and entries appear to have been recorded by friends, acquaintances, and colleagues, many of whom were renowned and accomplished individuals. Possibly later I will write a post about this first guestbook and tell readers about some of the names I recognize or have been able to uncover information about.
However, this Blog post will deal with the much shorter second guestbook, what I’ll characterize as the register for “special” guests. I presume that most of the people who signed this register were clients of Dr. Walter Bruck rather than guests of my ancestor, although one cannot preclude the possibility that some of these acclaimed individuals were provided with accommodations. Names and several business cards are found on seven pages of this guestbook. (Figures 4a-g) My friend Peter Hanke graciously deciphered the names, and, astonishingly, found web links to most of the people. There are 42 separate entries representing 40 different individuals. In the case of a few individuals the written name was insufficient to positively identify the person; only one signature could not be construed. The earliest signature is recorded in January-February of 1923, and the last one on the 7th of October 1932, making the time span this guestbook covered much shorter than the first one.
Given the illustrious cadre of clients Dr. Bruck treated, it is impossible in a few words to render justice to their enormous accomplishments. Still, there are a few things that stand out in the roles some played in historic events of their day or as relatives to individuals known to readers. I will identify the signators whose names could be made out and highlight a few things of possible interest.
Edwin Henckel von Donnersmarck (1865-1929) (Figures 4b & 5) was a German-Polish count, landowner, mining entrepreneur, and member of the Prussian House of Representatives.
Albrecht Eugen Maria Philipp Carl Joseph Fortunatus Duke of Württemberg (1895-1954) (Figures 4b & 6) was a German officer and prince of the Royal House of Württemberg. Albrecht Eugen belonged to the Catholic line of the House of Württemberg. At the beginning of WWI, he was drafted into the Württemberg Army where he served four years as captain of the 1st Württemberg Grenadier Regiment; he fought in Flanders, France, and Italy. With the death of King Wilhelm II of Württemberg in 1921, Albrecht Eugen inherited the lordship of Carlsruhe in Silesia, where he worked as a farmer and forester.
During WWII, Albrecht Eugen Herzog von Württemberg again did military service in the Wehrmacht, but not at the front, but in staff service, without a rank as a general staff officer. Because members of the House of Württemberg were known as opponents of the Nazi regime, Albrecht Eugen remained in the rank of captain and was not promoted. He was involved in missions in France, Romania, and the Soviet Union. In 1943 he was forced to resign from the Wehrmacht due to the “Prince’s Decree” (German: Prinzenerlass) This refers to a secret decree issued by Adolf Hitler in the spring of 1940. In it, he prohibited all princes that were soldiers in the Wehrmacht who came from the princely and royal houses that had ruled until 1918 from participating in combat operations in WWII. On the 19th of May 1943, Hitler completely expelled all members of formerly ruling princely houses from the Wehrmacht.
By January 1945, Albert Eugen was forced to flee from Carlsruhe (now spelled Karlsruhe) in the current German state of Baden-Württemberg, as Russian troops besieged the area. His castle there with its extensive library of over 30,000 volumes was destroyed by the Red Army.
On the 24th of January 1924, Albrecht Eugen Duke of Württemberg married the Bulgarian Princess Nadezhda (1899-1958), a daughter of Tsar Ferdinand I of Bulgaria. Like her husband, she too signed Dr. Bruck’s guestbook and was probably also one of his patients. (see signature 19)
3. Otto Lummer, Direktor des Physikalischen Instituts der Universität Breslau, Geh[eimer] Reg[ierungs-] Rat, Dr. ing. h.c. etc.—März 1923
(Otto Lummer, Director of the Institute of Physics of the University of Breslau, Privy Government Councilor, Doctor of Engineering, h.c. etc., March 1923)
Otto Richard Lummer (1860-1925) (Figures 4b & 7) was a German physicist. Among multiple other inventions, with Eugen Brodhun (1860-1938) he developed the photometer cube. A photometer cube or photometer is an instrument for measuring photometric quantities such as luminance or luminous intensity. In astronomy, it is used to measure the brightness of celestial bodies, while in photography, as readers know, the photometer is used as an exposure meter.
Julius Heinrich Pohl (1861-1942) (Figure 4b) was an Austrian-German pharmacologist and biochemist. From 1897 to 1911 he was Professor of Pharmacology at the German University of Prague and then Professor of Pharmacology at the University of Breslau until 1928.
This signature belongs to Mary Theresa Olivia Cornwallis-West, called “Daisy” (1873-1943) (Figures 4b & 8), who was born in Ruthin Castle, Wales, Great Britain. She became the Princess of Pleß [today: Pszczyna, Poland], the Countess of Hochberg, and the Baroness of Fürstenstein [today: Wałbrzych, Poland]. She was considered the first high-society lady of the European aristocracy. Quoting about her from a website entitled “hostedby.pl”:
Figure 9. Current map showing the distance from Pless, Germany [today: Pzczyna, Poland] to Breslau, Germany [today: Wrocław, Poland]“Duchess Maria Teresa Olivia Hochberg von Pless, born on June 28, 1873, known as Daisy, was a English aristocrat connected with the palace in Pszczyna, Poland [German: Pless] (Figure 9) and castle in Książ, Wałbrzych [German: Waldenberg] (Figure 10), eldest daughter of Colonel William Cornwallis-West, the owner of the castle Ruthin and estate Newlands, and Mary Adelaide from the home of Fitz-Patrick. She spent all her happy childhood in the Ruthin Castle in North Wales and in a manor house in Newlands. She was closely associated with the court of King Edward VII and George V, relative to the major aristocratic houses of Great Britain. Her brother George was the stepfather of Winston Churchill. She was considered one of the most beautiful aristocrats of her time. Her involvement with the House of Hochberg resulted from an invitation to a masked ball hosted by the Prince of Wales where she met her future husband, Hans Heinrich XV, Prince of Pless, eleven years her elder.
On the 8th of December 1891, (one year after first meeting him) the eighteen-year-old Daisy married wealthy Prince Hans Heinrich XV Pless Hochberg. The wedding took place at London’s Westminster Abbey, and the witness was Edward, Prince of Wales. The wedding was very impressive (the Hochberg Family was the third richest family in Germany and the seventh richest in Europe), echoed in the wide world with the political and aristocratic guests from all parts of Europe. After the wedding ceremony Daisy and her husband went on their honeymoon around the world. After that she came to the Ksiaz, where she felt at this point like a princess from a fairy tale: she had her own castle, own service, beautiful costumes, rich husband and… was terribly far from her native home in England.”
Daisy hosted lavish parties at her family’s immense estates in Silesia and at the magnificent castles of Fürstenstein and Pleß. Invitations to her affairs were highly sought. She was friends with the outstanding men of her time, including the last German Emperor Wilhelm II. Despite her fairytale existence and trying to become a good subject of her new country, Daisy von Pless felt a British sense of superiority over Germany, which she considered “uncivilized.”
At the beginning of WWI, Daisy von Pless left Fürstenstein Castle for political and family reasons. As an Englishwoman, she was constantly subjected to political hostility and accusations of treason. From August 1914, she worked as a Red Cross nurse on hospital trains in France and experienced the end of the war in 1918 in an Austrian hospital in Serbia.
She did not return to Silesia until 1921. On December 12, 1922, Daisy divorced her husband in Berlin and received a severance payment, which lost value due to inflation. She first lived in the English community of La Napoule near Cannes and in Munich until she moved back to Waldenburg for financial reasons. The entire property of the von Pless family was expropriated in 1939, and in 1940 she had to move out of the castle when a new Führer’s headquarters was expanded there. She visited the Groß-Rosen concentration camp nearby several times and sent food there to demonstrate her revulsion with the Nazi regime. In 1943, lonely due to chronic diseases and social isolation, she died impoverished in Waldenburg. Her coffin was reburied in an unknown place before the Red Army invaded in 1945.
This signature belongs to Prince Heinrich XXX of Reuss (1864-1939). (Figures 4b & 11) On September 28, 1898, in Breslau, he married Princess Feodora of Saxe-Meiningen (i.e., located in the southwest of the present-day German state of Thuringia (Figure 12)). He was born in the Duchy of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha [German: German Sachsen-Coburg und Gotha] (Figure 13) which was a dual monarchy in Germany. This means that one ruler ruled over two countries, in this case the duchies of Coburg and Gotha.
Hans Heinrich XV, Prince of Pless, Count of Hochberg (1861-1938) (Figures 4b & 14) was a German nobleman and mining industrialist and married to Daisy von Pless (1873–1943) (see signature 6). They and their three children often lived at Fürstenstein Castle, the largest castle in Silesia. It is located on the northern edge of the town of Wałbrzych [German: Waldenberg] in the Książ district in Lower Silesian Voivodeship, Poland (see Figure 10). Prince Pleß had a close relationship with Kaiser Wilhelm II, who regularly spent the hunt season in autumn at Pleß Castle. The emperor also commissioned the prince with confidential missions. During WWI, Pleß Castle was the seat of the imperial headquarters for months.
After the end of the war and the re-establishment of the Polish state, Hans Heinrich remained in Upper Silesia. The attempt to sell the entire property before July 12, 1922, the official takeover of Upper Silesia by Poland after WWI, failed. Thus, Hans Heinrich XV became a Polish citizen, although he was often on trips abroad or lived on the estates located in Germany.
Hans Heinrich XIV Bolko Graf (Count) von Hochberg (1843-1926) (Figures 4b & 15) was a German diplomat, conductor, and composer. He was born at Fürstenstein Castle [German: Waldenberg; Polish: Wałbrzych] (see Figure 10) and came from the noble family of the Counts of Hochberg who resided at Fürstenstein Castle.
10. Per aspera ad astra – R. Pfeiffer—30.4.23
(“Through hardships to the stars,” R[udolf] Pfeiffer: 30th of April 1923)
This signature belongs to Rudolf Carl Franz Otto Pfeiffer (1889-1979) (Figure 4b) who was a German classical philologist (i.e., a person who studies classical antiquity usually referring to the study of Classical Greek and Latin literature and the related languages; it also includes Greco-Roman philosophy, history, archaeology, anthropology, art, mythology, and society as secondary subjects)
Per aspera ad astra is a Latin phrase meaning “through hardships to the stars” or “Our aspirations take us to the stars.” The phrase is one of the many Latin sayings that use the expression ad astra, meaning “to the stars.”
Princess Hermine Reuss of Greiz (German: Hermine, Prinzessin Reuß zu Greiz (1887-1947) (Figure 4c) was the second wife of Germany’s last Emperor, Wilhelm II. (Figure 16) They were married in 1922, four years after he abdicated as German Emperor and King of Prussia. He was her second husband; her first husband, Prince Johann of Schönaich-Carolath, had died in 1920. I have previously explained Dr. Bruck’s relationship with Kaiser Wilhelm II and his second wife in Post 100.
12. Geheimrat Professor Dr. Max Koch—25. Juni 1923
(Privy Councilor Professor Dr. Max Koch, 25th of June 1923)
Maxwell “Max” Koch (1854-1925) (Figure 4c) was a German-born Australian botanical collector.
13. Dr. jur. Bernhard Grund, den 17. Juli 1923—Präsident der Handelskammer
(Dr. jur. Bernhard Grund, President of the Chamber of Commerce)
Dr. Felix Porsch (1853-1930) (Figures 4c & 17) was a German lawyer and politician of the Centre Party. The latter gained its greatest importance between 1871 and 1933 (i.e. the period between the founding of the German Empire and the end of the Weimar Republic). It was the party of Catholics and political Catholicism in the strongly Protestant-dominated German Empire.
15. Fürstin Hatzfeldt—24. Mai 1924 [Trachenberg bei Breslau] (Figure 18)
(Princess Hatzfeldt, Trachenberg [today: Żmigród, Poland] near Breslau, 24th of May 1924)
Hatzfeld, also spelled Hatzfeldt (Figure 4c), is the name of an ancient and influential German noble family. It is not clear who exactly was this princess.
Karl von Frisch (1886-1982) (Figures 4c & 19) was a German-Austrian ethologist (i.e., someone who studies animal behavior) who received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1973, along with Nikolaas Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz. His work centered on investigations of the sensory perceptions of the honeybee, and he was one of the first to translate the meaning of the waggle dance. Waggle dance is a term used in beekeeping and ethology for a particular figure-eight dance of the honeybee. By performing this dance, successful foragers can share information with other members of the colony about the direction and distance to patches of flowers yielding nectar and pollen, to water sources, or to new nest-site locations.
17. M[ax] Friederichsen, Universitätsprofessor Dr. phil, Direktor des Geographischen Instituts—3.6.1924
(M[ax] Friederichsen, University Professor, Dr. Phil., Director of the Geographical Institute, 3rd of June 1924)
18. Dr. Fritz Reiche, Universitätsprofessor für theoretische Physik—5.6.1924
(Dr. Fritz Reiche, University Professor for theoretical physics, 5th of June 1924)
Dr. Fritz Reiche (1883-1969) (Figure 4c) was a German theoretical physicist who emigrated to the United States in 1941. I will not try to unintelligibly explain to readers the disciplinary studies Reiche was involved in. There is, however, one fascinating account from a book written by a Robert Jungk entitled “Heller als tausend Sonnen,” “Brighter Than A Thousand Suns,” worth mentioning. The book describes the history of the atomic bomb and its carriers. According to this book, shortly before his departure to the United States in March 1941, Max Reiche was approached by the physicist Friedrich Georg Houtermans asking him to deliver a secret message to physicists in America about the atomic bomb. Anticipating that the Nazis would urge the German physicists to build an atomic bomb, the German theoretical physicist Werner Karl Heisenberg, one of the key pioneers of quantum mechanics, was supposedly trying to slow-walk the process. Reiche delivered this message to Rudolf Ladenburg, whom he knew from Berlin and Breslau, who forwarded the message to Washington. However, according to a play entitled “Copenhagen” by Michael Frayn, a three-person play based on the historic meeting of the two physicists Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr and his wife Margrethe in 1941 in German-occupied Copenhagen, there are strong doubts as to whether Heisenberg and his working group were really trying to thwart the construction of the atomic bomb. Perhaps, future historic documents may reveal the truth?
(Nadezhda, Duchess of Württemberg, 18th of July 1924)
Figure 20. Nadejda [Nadezhda] Herzogin von Württemberg (1899-1958)Nadezhda (1899-1958) (Figures 4d & 20) who spent her childhood mainly in Sofia and Euxinograd, Bulgaria as well as on the estates of her father came from the House of Saxe-Coburg (see Figure 13). After WWI she had to leave Bulgaria with her family and went into exile in Coburg. In 1924 she married Duke Albrecht Eugen (see signature 2) with whom she had five children. From 1925 to 1930 the couple lived in Carlsruhe (now spelled Karlsruhe) in the current German state of Baden-Württemberg (see Figure 12).
20. Universitätsprofessor Dr. Ludolf Malten—Direktor des Philologischen Seminars
(University Professor Dr. Ludolf Malten, Director of the Philological Seminary)
Heinrich Wilhelm Ludolf Malten (1879-1969) (Figure 4d) was like Rudolf Pfeiffer (see signature 10) a German classical philologist and religious scholar. As previously mentioned, philology is the literary study of Latin and Ancient Greek, the two languages considered “classical.” In 1919 Malten became a professor at the University of Königsberg in East Prussia. In 1922 he moved to the University of Breslau, where he remained until the end of WWII. After his escape from Breslau in 1945 as the Red Army was approaching, Malten went to the University of Göttingen where he spent the remainder of his career.
21. ?????
UNKNOWN
22. Professor Puppe—Direktor des Gerichtsärztlichen Instituts—Geheimer Medizinalrat
(Puppe, Director of the Judicial Medical Institute- Privy Medical Councilor)
Georg Puppe (1867-1925) (Figure 4d) was a German forensic and social physician. He basically founded the field of social medicine which essentially deals scientifically and practically with the state of health of the population and its determinants, the organization of health care, social security, and the political determinants of health, as well as the effects and costs of medical care. According to some experts, social medicine is a bridge between medicine and other disciplines, such as law, sociology, social work, psychology, statistics, and economics.
23. Professor R[obert] Wollenberg—Direktor der Univ[ersitäts] Nervenklinik—Geheimer Medizinalrat
(Professor R[obert] Wollenberg, Director of the Univ[ersity] Nerves Clinic – Privy Medical Councilor)
Sieghard (1886-1963) (Figures 4d & 22) was a Prince from the Schoenaich-Carolath family, a Lower Lusatian noble family that came to Silesia as a branch in the 16th century; the Silesian branch was elevated to the rank of Imperial Count in 1700 and to the Prussian princely status in 1741. Lower Lusatia is a region and former territory in the south of the state of Brandenburg, northern Saxony, and western Poland. Its principal city is Cottbus. He got married in May 1936 to Gräfin (Countess) Elisabeth zu Castell-Rüdenhausen (1906-1977), from whom he divorced in 1956.
Friedrich Christian Albert Leopold Anno Sylvester Macarius Prince of Saxony Duke of Saxony (1893-1968) (Figures 4e & 23) was the second eldest son of King Frederick August III of Saxony, the last King of Saxony, and his wife Louise of Tuscany. Friedrich Christian Herzog was the younger brother of Georg, Crown Prince of Saxony (see signature 29), born a mere eleven months later.
Kinsky of Wchinitz and Tettau (originally Wchinsky, Czech Kinští z Vchynic a Tetova) is the name of a Bohemian noble family, which is known in documents since 1237. Historically, the family acquired important properties in the Kingdom of Bohemia, a medieval and early modern monarchy in Central Europe and the predecessor of the modern Czech Republic. By 1929, roughly 50 percent of Prince Rudolf’s (1859-1930) extensive Bohemia properties had been expropriated. The remaining Czech possessions were lost after WWII due to nationalization because of the Beneš Decrees, though some former possessions in the Czech Republic were returned to the family after 1990. The Kinskys provided numerous important statesmen in the Kingdom of Bohemia and in the Habsburg Monarchy. The historical capital of Bohemia was Prague, since 1918 the capital of Czechoslovakia and now the Czech Republic.
27. Friedrich Christian Herzog zu Sachsen—17.III.1925
(Sieghard Prince of Schoenaich-Carolath, 17th of March 1925)
Georg, Crown Prince of Saxony (1893-1943) (Figures 4e & 25), the last Crown Prince of Saxony, was the heir to the King of Saxony, Frederick Augustus III, at the time of the monarchy’s abolition on 13 November 1918. After the abolition of the monarchy and the abdication of the emperor and the federal princes, George became a Roman Catholic priest. As I implied under Duke Albrecht Eugen von Württemberg (see signature 2), during the time of the National Socialists, former royal members were unpopular, so Georg Herzog devoted himself to consulting at this time. He died of a heart attack while swimming at the age of 50. Georg was the older brother of Friedrich Christian Herzog of Saxony (see signatures 25 & 27).
30. Carl Budding—Deutscher Staatsvertreter bei der Gemischten Kommission und dem Schiedsgerichte für Oberschlesien
(Carl Budding, German State Representative to the Mixed Commission and Arbitration Court for Upper Silesia)
Aloys Fürst of Löwenstein-Wertheim-Rosenberg (1871-1952) (Figures 4e & 27) was a member and from 1908 head of the southern German noble family Löwenstein-Wertheim-Rosenberg, a centrist politician and from 1920 to 1948 president of the Central Committee of German Catholics. Adolf Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933 made it impossible for the Central Committee to continue working. In 1934, for the planned German Katholikentag, German Catholic Day, Prussian Prime Minister Hermann Göring demanded an oath of allegiance to the Third Reich, which Aloys zu Löwenstein refused to provide resulting in cancellation of the event; it would not again take place until 1948.
Hermann Friedrich Anton was the 3rd Prince of Hatzfeldt of Trachenberg (see Figure 18). He was born at the family castle in Trachenberg and raised Catholic. In 1874 he succeeded his deceased father, who was excommunicated in 1847, as head of the Hatzfeldt-Trachenberg line. On the 1st of January 1900 he was awarded the hereditary title “Duke of Trachenberg” in primogeniture. From 1894 to 1903 he was President of the Province of Silesia. In 1872 he married Natalie Gräfin von Benckendorff (1854–1931), who is presumed to be signature 34.
34. Prinzessin von Hatzfeldt Trachtenberg—11.4.1927 (see signature 15)
(Princess Hatzfeldt, Trachenberg [today: Żmigród, Poland] near Breslau, 11th of April 1927)
(see signature 33 & Figure 4f)
35. v[on] Gröning—Universitätskurator—Regierungspräsident z. D.—12.4.1927 (v[on] Gröning, University Trustee-Governor (retired), 12th of April 1927)
Albert Heinrich von Gröning (1867-1951) (Figure 4f) was a German administrative lawyer in Prussia. From 1926 Gröning was curator of the Silesian Friedrich-Wilhelms-University and state commissioner for the Technical University of Breslau.
Countess Herzeleide of Ruppin (1918-1989) (Figures 4f & 30) was born on Christmas Day 1918, shortly after the defeat of the German Reich and the collapse of the monarchy. For this reason, she was given the name Herzeleide, which in German means “heartbreak.” Her grandfather was Kaiser Wilhelm II, the last German Emperor, and her father was Prince Oskar of Prussia, the 5th son of Wilhelm II. On August 15, 1938, Herzeleide married Prince Karl Biron von Courland, and was thereafter known as Herzeleide Prinzessin von Preussen (Prinzessin Biron von Curland).
Biron of Curland is a Courland noble family, originating from Latvia (Courland in Latvia is Kurzeme), that also settled in Silesia and Bohemia. Branches of the family still exist today. Courland (Latvian Kurzeme) (Figure 31) is one of the four historical landscapes of Latvia, along with Semgallen (Zemgale), Central Livonia (Vidzeme) and Latgale (Latgale).
37. Wanda, Fürstin Blücher von Wahlstatt—26.IX.1928
(Wanda, Princess Blücher of Wahlstatt, 26th of September 1928)
Gräfin Wanda Ada Hedwig Blücher von Wahlstatt (Prinzessin Radziwill) (1877-1966) (Figure 4f) was married to Gebhard Leberecht Fürst Blücher von Wahlstatt (1836-1916), a Prussian nobleman and member of the Prussian House of Lords. Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher was the 3rd Prince Blücher von Wahlstatt, a family of the Mecklenburg nobility (see Figure 13). He was one of the great feudal landowners of Silesia.
Blandine Gravina (1863-1941) (Figures 4f & 32) was a daughter of Cosima Wagner and Hans von Bülow and a granddaughter of Franz Liszt. Blandine’s parents divorced in 1870, and her mother Cosima married Richard Wagner later that same year. Richard Wagner, known to many readers, is considered one of the most important innovators of European music in the 19th century.
Princess Eudoxia of Bulgaria (1898-1985) (Figures 4f & 33) was a Bulgarian princess who played the role of the First Lady of Bulgaria for some time until her brother Boris married Princess Joan of Savoy. Eudoxia’s sister was Princess Nadezhda (see signature 19), and her brother-in-law was Duke Albrecht Eugen of Württemberg (see signature 2).
Princess Eudoxia was born in Sofia, Bulgaria as the eldest daughter of King Ferdinand I of Bulgaria and his first wife, Princess María Luisa de Borbón-Parma. Princess Eudoxia never married or had children and lived with her sister Nadezhda’s in-laws in Germany.
(M[agnus] Baron v[on] Braun, Reichminister of Agriculture, 7th of October 1932)
Magnus Freiherr von Braun (1878-1972) was a German lawyer and politician. In the last two governments of the Weimar Republic (1919-1933) he served as Minister of Agriculture (1932-32). One of his sons was the armaments and missile manager Wernher von Braun (1912-1977), the very well-known German and later American rocket engineer who pioneered weapons and space travel.
42. Dr. iur. [Dorotheus] Kracker von Schwartzenfeldt—Kaiserlich Deutscher Gesandter a.D. (fragt ergebenst an, ob er Dienstag den 5. d[es] M[onats] zu irgend einer Zeit …..) z[ur] Z[ei]t Breslau, Tauentzienstr. 71
[BUSINESS CARD—Figure 4g]
(Dr. iur. [Dorotheus] Kracker von Schwartzenfeldt, Imperial German Envoy (retired)) (humbly inquires whether he will be available on Tuesday, the 5th of March at any time. . .)
This business card belonged to Dr. iuris Dorotheus Kracker von Schwartzenfeldt (1869-1953). He was the Kaiserlicher Legations-Sekretär und Geschäftsträger in Bogotá (Imperial Legation Secretary and Chargé d’Affaires in Bogotá) and had previously worked for the last German Emperor Wilhelm II in Doorn, Netherlands, after the Kaiser abdicated the throne following WWI.
As mentioned at the outset, the entries in Dr. Bruck’s guestbook for “special” visitors and/or dental patients covers the period from January-February 1923 until October 1932. Among the signatures, you will notice multiple names that include former hereditary titles. To remind readers, the nobility system of the German Empire ended in 1919 when it was abolished. Today, the German nobility is no longer conferred by the Federal Republic of Germany, and constitutionally the descendants to German noble families do not enjoy legal privileges. Former hereditary titles, however, are permitted as part of the surname (i.e., the nobiliary particles von and zu), and these surnames can then be inherited by a person’s children. The continued use of hereditary titles by Dr. Bruck’s visitors should not surprise anyone given the brief time since their use had been abolished in 1919.
Beyond the former members of the nobility that signed Dr. Bruck’s guest register, one will also notice an array of accomplished individuals in the fields of law, politics, science, academia, and more. This speaks to the rarified environment in which Dr. Bruck worked and socialized.
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: In this post, I discuss the proof I have found for conversions from Judaism for German family members, some of which unavoidably consists of indirect evidence. This topic naturally involves touching on the political, economic, and social context under which such conversions took place.
There is a long history of Jewish conversion to Christianity, both voluntary and forced conversion. Forced conversions of Jews go back to Late Antiquity, the boundaries of which are a continuing matter of debate, but the period between roughly the 3rd and 8th centuries A.D. Royal persecutions of Jews from the 11th century onward typically took the form of expulsions with exceptions. Jews were forced to convert to Christianity before and during the First Crusade (1096-1099) including in parts of what are today France, Germany, and the Czech Republic.
The mass conversion event which took place on the Iberian Peninsula in A.D. 1391 when tens of thousands of Spain’s Jews converted to Christianity because of pogroms is the one readers will be most familiar with. Practicing Jews who refused to convert were expelled by the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella in the Alhambra Decree of 1492, following the Christian Reconquest of Spain. The net effect of the Alhambra Decree and persecutions carried out in earlier periods is that over 200,000 Jews converted to Catholicism and between 40,000 and 100,000 were expelled. In adjoining Portugal, by contrast, where an edict for Jewish expulsions was also ordered four years later in A.D. 1496, most Jews were not allowed to leave but were forced to convert.
Though conversions continued over time across many other parts of Eastern, Central, and Western Europe, forced conversions were apparently less common in the 20th century and were later more often the result of Jews choosing to convert to integrate into secular society. In Germany, which is the focus of this Blog post as it relates to my family, conversions occurred in three main periods. The first began during the Mendelssohnian era, named after Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786), the German Jewish philosopher to whose ideas the Haskalah, the “Jewish Enlightenment” of the 18th and 19th centuries, is attributed. A second wave occurred during the first half of the 19th century. And the third and longest period of conversions was a result of antisemitism and began roughly in 1880.
Conversion among German Jews was not an uncommon phenomenon in the 19th century owing to the myriad restrictions and myths that confronted them, and stymied their hopes, ambitions, dreams, and careers. In a sense, conversion to Christianity was the easy way out. Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), the noted German poet, writer, and literary critic, who himself converted, was reputed to have said conversion was his “ticket of admission into European culture.” Across most of the German states that united to create “modern” Germany in 1871, dominated by the state of Prussia, Jews were often rewarded for renouncing Judaism by being given influential positions and financial incentives. Whereas, during the 17th century, most converts were poor, by the middle of the 18th century, the converts were richer. The departure of the wealthier converts deprived the Jewish community of part of its operating budget. In any event, it is estimated that by the 20th century, close to one million Christians in Germany were of Jewish origin. According to Deborah Hertz’s book, “How Jews Became Germans: The History of Conversion and Assimilation in Berlin,” the majority of converts were infants whose parents wanted to spare them “conflicts” as adults. She notes that 60 percent of converts between 1800 and 1874 were under five years of age.
Adolf Hitler came to power in January 1933. The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service (Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums), which excluded Jews and other political opponents of the Nazis from all civil service positions, was one of the first anti-Semitic and racist laws to be passed by the Third Reich, enacted on the 7th of April 1933. The law initially exempted those who had worked in the civil service since August 1, 1914, those who were veterans of World War I, or those with a father or son killed in action in World War I. The Civil Service immediately impacted the education system because university professors, for example, were classified as civil servants.
With the seizure of power by the Nazis, the new government enacted laws that required all citizens to document their genealogy in full. The regime sought to identify Jews who had converted to Christianity over the preceding centuries. With the help of church officials, a vast system of conversion and intermarriage records was created in Berlin, the country’s foremost Jewish city. These records, the Judenkartei, the Jewish Register or File, begin in 1645. Work on creating this file had started before the Nazis even came to power under a private initiative which sought to uncover proof of the Jewish ancestry of university and college professors and judges. By 1932, this file had already collected 400,000 genealogical records of Jews in Germany. The constantly expanding file was taken over and expanded in 1933 by the Reichsstelle für Sippenforschung (RfS), renamed Reichssippenamt on the 12th of November 1940, the Reich Office for Clan Research.
Readers who have accessed ancestral records for their German Jewish relatives may have noticed notations in the upper left- or right-hand corners or along the margins of vital documents. Beginning August 17, 1938, Jews had to add “Israel” (males) (Figure 1) or “Sara” (females) (Figure 2) as their middle name. Similarly, on passports, which allowed German Jews to leave Germany, when they still could, but not return, a large “J” was imprinted. (Figure 3) These and other measures instituted by the Nazis were intended to officially separate Jews from the German populace. While German Jews still converted after the Nazis seized power, as I will illustrate in the case of my uncle Dr. Fedor Bruck, readers can easily surmise this was futile.
As I contemplated the question of conversion from Judaism among my immediate and extended ancestors, I began to wonder what evidence I could find in the ancestral records proving my relatives’ “alienation” from their Jewish roots. In my limited experience, finding such documents is not easy. In the case of some of my ancestors but not all of them, conversion was a “pragmatic” decision, as I’ve alluded to. Again, citing the poet Heinrich Heine, he declared that he was “merely baptized, not converted.” Quoting from a letter he once wrote:
“From my way of thinking you can well imagine that baptism is an indifferent affair. I do not regard it as important even symbolically, and I shall devote myself all the more to the emancipation of the unhappy members of our race. Still I hold it as a disgrace and a stain upon my honor that in order to obtain an office in Prussia—in beloved Prussia—I should allow myself to be baptized.”
In re-reading the memoirs of Dr. Josef Pauly (Figure 4), husband of my great-great-aunt, who had likely been baptized Catholic as a child and whose recollections I discussed in Post 56, I wonder whether he may not have been implying the same sentiment when he wrote:
“I believe in God as the creative force of the universe, to an immanent [NOTE: (of God) permanently pervading or sustaining the universe] consciousness, to a moral world order, to the invisible God of the world as the Jewish religion has revealed it first, whose goodness is identical with the eternal laws.”
As I began to search through my files and recollect what evidence for conversion I had found for my ancestors, I initially concluded that most of the “proof” was indirect, such as in the case of my father which I discussed in Post 38. However, upon further consideration, I realize I have found considerably more direct validation than I initially thought. Beyond the obvious instances where the graves or burial records of my forefathers interred in existing and destroyed Jewish cemeteries survive, proving they did not convert, I found corroboration for several ancestors confirming they were baptized.
The earliest instance is the case of my great-great-aunt Amalie Mockrauer (1834-1918). (Figure 5) On ancestry, I uncovered a record showing she was baptized in Dresden, Germany, 21 years after her birth, on the 13th of April 1855. (Figure 6) This was undoubtedly in anticipation of her marriage to Leopold Julius Wolf von Koschembahr (Figure 7) later that year on the 26th of September 1855 in Saint Clement Danes, Westminster, London, England, an Anglican church. (Figure 8)
Initially, I thought Leopold von Koschembahr was also of Jewish origin because his grandson, Gerhard Bruck von Koschembahr (i.e., Gerhard’s father, Wilhelm Bruck, took his baroness wife’s surname) (Figure 9), departed Germany for the United States via Switzerland in 1938 with his 12 children. However, I learned from a New York Times article dated the 2nd of October 1938 that Gerhard departed Germany NOT on account of his grandfather’s Jewish roots but because his great-grandmother, on his mother’s side, was non-Aryan. (Figure 10) This gives credence to the concern descendants of Jews whose ancestors had long ago converted or had never converted felt when the Nazis started tracing their ancestral origins. In the case of Leopold von Koschembahr, I found his baptismal record showing he was baptized on the 5th of December 1829 (Figures 11a-b), proving he was not Jewish at birth. As readers can discern from this example, confirming or refuting the Jewish origins of one’s ancestors can be like solving a complex puzzle.
Moving on to other family members, let me briefly discuss the evidence for conversion for my uncle by marriage Dr. Franz Müller, my uncle by blood Dr. Fedor Bruck, my father Dr. Otto Bruck, and Dr. Adalbert Bruck, the great-grandfather of a fourth cousin.
The Centrum Judaicum Foundation is housed in the New Synagogue Berlin which was consecrated on the Jewish New Year in 1866, at which time it became the largest Jewish house of worship with its 3,200 seats. While the synagogue was spared major damage on “Kristallnacht,” it was severely damaged by Allied bombing during WWII. In 1958, the main room of the synagogue was demolished, so that today only the parts of the building closest to the street remain structurally intact.
Documents addressing the history of Jews in and around Berlin are archived there, including surviving records on conversions that took place in the city. In the case of my uncle by marriage Dr. Franz Müller, married to my aunt Susanne Müller née Bruck murdered in Auschwitz, the Centrum Judaicum has an index card on file indicating he converted on the 25th of November 1901. This did not prevent him being dismissed from his position as Humboldt University professor when the Nazis came to power in 1933 in accordance with their Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service.
In the instance of my fourth cousin’s great-grandfather, Dr. Adalbert Bruck, the Centrum Judaicum could find nothing in their archives about him, so referred my cousin to the Evangelische Zentralarchiv in Berlin, the Protestant Central Archive in Berlin. In principle records of all Jewish conversions to Christianity in Berlin are kept here, though many did not survive WWII. According to a letter sent to my cousin, Dr. Adalabert Bruck’s record survives indicating he converted on the 27th of November 1890; however, his wife Anna Bruck née Flatow’s information survives only indirectly in the form of a 1930 document showing she supposedly converted on the 17th of February 1900. (Figures 12a-b)
The conversion of my uncle Dr. Fedor Bruck, who has been the subject of several Blog posts because of his incredible tale of survival in Berlin during the entirety of WWII thanks to family and “silent heroes,” adds another element to my uncle’s compelling story. The register documenting his conversion survives and indicates he was baptized in Berlin on the 11th of June 1939 at the Messias Kapelle, a Lutheran Church. (Figures 13a-b, 14) Two godparents are named in the register, a “Herr Engelbert Helwig” and a “Herr Roderich von Roy.” Ancestry shows Englebert Helwig to have been a Holocaust survivor, and Roderich von Roy to have been born on the 3rd of August 1895, exactly two weeks before my uncle. Did my uncle know these people beforehand, or were they just random parishioners who attended the Messias Kappelle selected to be his godparents? We may never know.
Lutheran is a denomination among the Protestant, in fact it is the oldest of the denominations to break away from Catholicism and is traced to the founder of the movement, Martin Luther of Germany. (Figure 15)
Hoping to find a picture of the Messias Kapelle, I did a Google query and stumbled upon a fascinating article written by Christiane Jurik, Editor-in-Chief of Ariel Ministries, discussing the origins of the Messias Kapelle and its role in German Jewish baptisms. I quote:
“Historically, most baptized Jews in Germany joined the Lutheran Church. There, even those who were true believers in Yeshua were mostly met with indifference; sometimes with suspicion; or worst, with anti-Semitism. In order to avoid this treatment, some Jewish believers started looking for places of worship where they could stay among themselves. In 1901, the Berlin Society purchased a property in one of the most urban boroughs of the city, called Prenzlauer Berg. The ministry not only moved its headquarters to the building but soon started construction work of what became known as the Messias Kapelle (‘Messiah Chapel’). Three days before Christmas of 1902, the chapel opened its doors to the Jewish believers of Berlin.
While the goal of the Berlin Society had been to offer a haven for Jewish believers, its work was closely affiliated with the Lutheran Church. In fact, the chapel officially belonged to the union of Protestant churches that also included the Confessing Church, whose most famous member was Dietrich Bonhoeffer. However, in 1930, the Lutheran Church revoked its support of the work of the Berlin Society and withdrew its pastors from the chapel. From then on, the Messias Kapelle was run by laymen.
In 1935, the Lutheran Synod forbade the baptizing of Jewish people. One of the pastors in Berlin expressed the general sentiment: ‘I am convinced that the family who told me it would be a horrible thought for them that the hand that baptized a Jew would touch their child is not alone.’
Yet not everyone obeyed the new directives of the Synod. The Messias Kapelle at this point separated itself completely from any state-run institution and in turn became the most important place of Messianic baptism in Berlin. According to the baptismal records of the time, over 700 German Jews got baptized there in the years between 1933 and 1940.
On November 11, 1938, during the Kristallnacht, the Messias Kapelle and the seat of the Berlin Society were trashed by the Nazis. Still, it would take until January of 1941 for the ministry and the chapel to be officially closed permanently. Ten months later, the first deportation of Jewish people began in Berlin. Records prove that of the 700 Jewish believers who had been baptized in the Messias Kapelle after 1933, 86 were hauled off to the ghettos of Lodz, Riga, Minsk, and Warsaw. Only two of them survived the Holocaust. It is unknown what happened to the rest of the congregation.”
A few observations. Among the survivors baptized in the Messias Kapelle was my uncle who lived until 1982. Beyond the obvious interest in self-preservation for the 700 or so Jews who got baptized in the Messias Kapelle during the Nazi era, the fact they could be baptized here as late as 1939, worship among other Jewish converts, and be told about the Jewish Messiah may have had appeal. While it’s unclear whether the chapel has been deconsecrated, the author of the above quote tells us that a marketing and public relations firm now owns it and that the worship hall, altar, and a marble relief resembling a Temple survive. It’s sad this is not a recognized historic monument.
Growing up my father never spoke about religion and religion was never part of my upbringing. In fact, I was baptized as a Catholic by my grandparents at six years of age in Lyon, France, at the request of my parents almost as an afterthought, hoping it might protect me in the event of another Holocaust. However, as most readers will surmise, as a half-Jew, I would have been considered a mischlinge of the first degree according to the Nuremberg Laws. Not good enough to survive being murdered.
Aware my father had attended dental school in Berlin, I checked with the Centrum Judaicum in Berlin to ascertain whether they might have a record of my father’s conversion, but they do not. Knowing my father’s penchant for procrastinating, I have always suspected my father never placed a high priority on getting baptized and converting until it became an absolute necessity. And, in my opinion, that only became necessary after he moved to the town of Tiegenhof [today: Nowy Dwór Gdański, Poland] in the Free State of Danzig where he opened his dental practice in 1932. As I discussed in Post 38, the evidence for my father’s conversion comes in the form of a receipt for payment of quarterly church taxes to the Evangelische Kirche in Tiegenhof. (Figure 16)
My second cousin twice-removed, Dr. Walter Wolfgang Bruck (1872-1937) (Figure 17), subject of several recent Blog posts is thought to have converted in Breslau [today: Wrocław, Poland]. Dr. Barbara Bruziewicz-Mikłaszewska, professor of dentistry at the University of Wrocław, who has written about Dr. Bruck, cites a file from the University’s archives saying he converted in 1916 (i.e., University file: sygn. S99, s. 62, nr sprawy AU – 481/46/2001). As we speak, I am working with one of Dr. Bruziewicz-Mikłaszewska’s colleagues to obtain verification of the date of Dr. Bruck’s baptism. Unlike his father and grandfather, who are buried in the Old Jewish Cemetery in Wrocław, Walter’s place of internment in Wrocław is unknown but was undoubtedly in a Christian cemetery that likely no longer exists.
As I mentioned above, in principle all surviving records of Jewish conversions to Christianity in Berlin are archived at the Evangelische Zentralarchiv. For conversions that took place outside of Berlin, however, there is no central repository of this information that I am aware of. Thus, the only possibility of tracking down comparable information for one’s Jewish ancestors is to know the town and parish church where the baptism occurred, and then hope the registers have survived.
REFERENCES
Bruziewicz Mikłaszewska, Barbara. Outline of the history of university dentistry in Breslau/Wrocław. [Polish: Zarys dziejów uniwersyteckiej stomatologii we Wrocławiu]. 2010, University of Wrocław, PhD.
