Peter Albrecht von Preußen Archives

POST 164: THE NAZI SS & WEHRMACHT SOLDIER, PRINZ WILHELM VON HESSEN-PHILIPPSTHAL-BARCHFELD

Note: In this lengthy and involved post, I continue to discuss recently obtained documents related to the Nazi SS and Wehrmacht soldier Prinz Wilhelm von Hessen-Philippsthal-Barchfeld. As with other individuals discussed in my blog, notably one of my father’s first cousins, Heinz Löwenstein, my knowledge about them is not obtained linearly but rather comes in spurts and episodically. Inevitably, my Jewish family came into contact and had their lives convulsed by the Nazis so for this reason I will occasionally discuss the fate of some of these individuals.

POST 133: “THE BUTCHER OF PRAGUE,” THE STORY BEHIND A UNIQUE PHOTO OF REINHARD HEYDRICH (PART I)

POST 133: “THE BUTCHER OF PRAGUE,” THE STORY BEHIND A UNIQUE PHOTO OF REINHARD HEYDRICH (PART II)

POST 157: USING AI TO CONFIRM THE MISIDENTIFICATION OF REINHARD HEYDRICH, “THE BUTCHER OF PRAGUE” IN POSTS 133, PARTS I & II

POST 157, POSTSCRIPT: USING AI TO CONFIRM THE MISIDENTIFICATION OF REINHARD HEYDRICH, “THE BUTCHER OF PRAGUE” IN POSTS 133, PARTS I & II

My continued interest in the Nazi Schutzstaffel (SS) and Wehrmacht soldier Prinz Wilhelm von Hessen-Philippsthal-Barchfeld stems from the fact that in Posts 133, Parts I & II, I misidentified him as Reinhard Heydrich, the notorious “Butcher of Prague.” The picture in which the putative Heydrich appeared was a group photo taken at Castle Kamenz (Figures 1a-b) in Lower Silesia [today: Kamieniec Ząbkowicki, Poland], purportedly in 1936 or 1937.

Figure 1a. The photograph from ca. 1935 taken at Castle Kamenz, Germany [today: Kamieniec Ząbkowicki, Poland] when several high-level Nazis visited, including Prinz Wilhelm von Hessen, originally misidentified as Reinhard Heydrich (photo courtesy of Peter Albrecht von Preußen)

Figure 1b. Prinz Wilhelm von Hessen dressed in an SS uniform

To remind readers Reinhard Heydrich was a high-ranking German SS and police official during the Nazi era and a principal architect of the Holocaust. Heydrich was chief of the SS’s Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RHSA), the Reich Security Main Office, and Stellvertretender Reichsprotektor, Deputy Protector of Bohemia and Moravia. The resemblance of the individual in the group photo to Heydrich, and the fact the person was clearly dressed in a SS uniform convinced me he was indeed Heydrich. I further explained in Posts 133, Parts I & II how and why Heydrich might have been at Castle Kamenz at the time the picture was taken. For these reasons I had no reason to question the identification.

My misidentification might well have gone unnoticed save for the fact that an astute German physics teacher with an avid interest in German military history pointed out my mistake. He told me the Nazi in the SS uniform at Castle Kamenz was Prinz Wilhelm von Hessen, a relative of Prinz Friedrich Heinrich Albrecht von Preussen (Figure 2), the then-owner of the castle. While initially hesitant to believe I’d made such a blatant error, I realized further investigation was necessary given the high standard of accuracy to which I strive. I used an artificial intelligence application to confirm that Wilhelm was indeed Heydrich’s doppelganger. This was the subject of Post 157 & Post 157, Postscript.

Figure 2. Prinz Friedrich Heinrich Albrecht von Preussen in the front row of the ca. 1935 group photo at Castle Kamenz

Some brief background on the group photo. It was furnished to me by a reader who stumbled upon Post 46 where I discussed Prinz Friedrich Heinrich Albrecht von Preussen. This reader, related to both Prinz Friedrich and Prinz Wilhelm, originally estimated the picture was taken in 1936 or 1937, though the evidence now suggests it was probably taken in 1935; more on this below. While the reader who sent me the photo was initially reluctant to believe Heydrich was Prinz Wilhelm von Hessen, additional research he’s undertaken proves this is the case.

Below I discuss recently uncovered evidence of Prinz Wilhelm von Hessen’s time and place of death and review the earlier documents related to Wilhelm von Hessen’s Nazi Party membership and military service discussed in Post 157, Postscript. This data helps explain why in the ca. 1935 picture Wilhelm von Hessen is wearing a SS uniform while in subsequent images he is dressed as a Wehrmacht soldier. The recent records confirm Wilhelm von Hessen’s fate in the Soviet Union following Germany’s defeat at the Battle of Moscow and its subsequent retreat.

As I explained in Post 157, Postscript, the Berlin State Archives retains a list of members of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSDAP), the Nazi Party, who were members of the royal houses. Wilhelm Prinz von Hessen-Philippsthal-Barchfeld’s name is included in this roster. (Figure 3)

Figure 3. “Prinz Wilhelm von Hessen’s” name among a list of members of the royal houses who belonged to the Nazi Party showing he joined on the 1st of May 1932 and that his Nazi Party number was “1187621”

The unseen column headings from this list of aristocrats who were members of the Nazi Party and the information specific to Wilhelm von Hessen reads as follows:

“Region” (Kurhessen)

“Name” (Prinz Wilhelm von Hessen)

“Date of Birth” (1st of March 1905)

“Member Number” (of the Nazi Party) (1187621)

“Date of Admission” (to the Nazi Party) 1^st of May 1932)

“Remarks” (in Prinz Wilhelm’s case, it shows that he died on the 1st of May 1942).

The roster indicates Wilhelm died on the 1^st of May 1942, but elsewhere his death is recorded as the 30^th of April 1942. I reckon Wilhelm died on the 30^th of April but that his death was officially recorded a day later.

Separately, some of my German contacts also found “Prinz von Hessen Wilm.,” as he’s identified, in the so-called Dienstalterliste, the SS seniority list. This is further proof that Wilhelm was indeed a member of the SS.

As discussed in Post 157, Postscript, Prinz Wilhelm von Hessen’s name appears on the Dienstalterslisten for the years 1934-1937. Below is what these lists tell us.

1934 Dienstaltersliste (Figures 4a-d)

Figure 4a. Cover page of the 1934 “Dienstaltersliste”

Figure 4b. First page of the 1934 “Dienstaltersliste” with the key to abbreviations

Figure 4c. Column headings from the page with “Prinz v. Hessen Wilh.’s” name from the 1934 “Dienstaltersliste”

Figure 4d. Line with “Prinz v. Hessen Wilh.’s” name and information

The column headings are as follows:

“Consecutive number”

“Surname & first name”

“Service”

“Nazi Party Number 1-500,000”

“Nazi Party Number 500,001-1,800,000”

“Nazi Party Number over 1,800,000”

“SS Number”

“Sturmführer” (Date rank obtained)

“Obersturmführer” (Date rank obtained)

Prinz von Hessen Wilhelm’s party number “1 187 621” is again shown on the SS seniority list, but in a separate column his SS member number, “52 711,” is now indicated. Wilhelm von Hessen joined the SS as a SS-Sturmführer on the 20th of April 1934. Sturmführer was a paramilitary rank of the Nazi Party which began as a title used by the Sturmabteilung (SA) in 1925 and became an actual SA rank in 1928. Translated as “storm leader or assault leader,” the origins of the rank dated to the World War I when the title of Sturmführer came to be used.

In 1934 Prinz von Hessen Wilhelm was a member of the service unit abbreviated as “F. Mo. II/27.” “F.” is short for Führer, while “Mo. Sta.” stands for “Motorstaffel,” or motorized squadron. Thus, it appears that in 1934 he was head of the motor assault team of II Sturmbann of the Standarte 27. Let me try and explain what this means. Bear in mind I know little about the organization of the SS so my explanation may be imprecise. I invite knowledgeable readers to correct and/or amplify my characterization.

The number of soldiers in a motorized squadron is unknown but was possibly only a few men. Standarte was a regimental sized unit of the SS; more on this below. Sturmbann refers to an “assault unit,” and was a paramilitary unit within the Nazi Party. As previously mentioned, the term originated from German shock troop units used during World War I who were characterized by their aggressive tactics and were often at the forefront of assaults. Putting this together suggests Wilhelm von Hessen was the motorized squadron leader of the assault unit of a particular regiment.

1935 Dienstaltersliste (Figures 5a-d)

Figure 5a. Cover page of the 1935 “Dienstaltersliste”

Figure 5b. First page of the 1935 “Dienstaltersliste” with the key to abbreviations

Figure 5c. Column headings from the page with “Prinz v. Hessen Wilh.’s” name from the 1935 “Dienstaltersliste”

Figure 5d. Line with “Prinz v. Hessen Wilh.’s” name and information

The number of column headings in the 1935 Dienstaltersliste was expanded to two side-by-side pages. Wilhelm’s previous rank of Sturmführer was now referred to as an Untersturmführer. A SS-Untersturmführer was the first commissioned SS officer rank, equivalent to a second lieutenant in other military organizations.

Translated, the left-hand page columns include the following information:

“Consecutive number”

“Surname & first name”

“Epee”

“Ring”

“SA sports badge”

“Reich sports badge”

“Service”

“Nazi Party Number 1-1,800,000”

“Nazi Party Number over 1,800,000”

“SS Number”

“Date of birth”

Several of the columns above refer to orders and decorations awarded during World War I by the German Empire, then later by the Nazis.

The right-hand page columns include the expanded list of SS paramilitary ranks, and the date, if applicable, that a soldier attained the rank:

“Untersturmführer”

“Obersturmführer”

“Hauptsturmführer”

“Sturmbannführer”

“Obersturmbannführer”

“Standartenführer”

“Oberführer”

“Brigadeführer”

“Gruppenführer”

“Obergruppenführer”

The 1935 Dienstaltersliste tells us that Wilhelm von Hessen was promoted to a SS-Obersturmführer on the 9^th of November 1934. A SS-Obersturmführer was typically a junior company commander in charge of fifty to a hundred men.

Then on the 20^th of April 1935 he was promoted to a SS Hauptsturmführer. This rank was a mid-level commander who had equal seniority to a captain (Hauptmann) in the Wehrmacht and the equivalency of captain in foreign armies. (Figure 6)

Figure 6. Circled the three SS ranks Wilhelm von Hessen attained, “SS-Untersturmführer,” “SS-Obersturmführer,” and “SS Hauptsturmführer”

By 1935 Wilhelm von Hessen was now attached to the “6 Mo. Sta.,” believed to mean that he was then part of the “6 Motor-Standarte.” Again, the number of soldiers in this motorized squadron is unknown. Not entirely clear to me is whether the “6 Motor-Standarte” equates to the 6^th SS-Standarte, though this seems likely.

1936 & 1937 Dienstalterslisten (Figures 7a-d; 8a-d)

Figure 7a. Cover page of the 1936 “Dienstaltersliste”

Figure 7b. First page of the 1936 “Dienstaltersliste” with the key to abbreviations

Figure 7c. Column headings from the page with “Prinz v. Hessen Wilh.’s” name from the 1936 “Dienstaltersliste”

Figure 7d. Line with “Prinz v. Hessen Wilh.’s” name and information

Figure 8a. Cover page of the 1937 “Dienstaltersliste”

Figure 8b. First page of the 1937 “Dienstaltersliste” with the key to abbreviations

Figure 8c. Column headings from the page with “Prinz v. Hessen Wilh.’s” name from the 1937 “Dienstaltersliste”

Figure 8d. Line with “Prinz v. Hessen Wilh.’s” name and information

According to the Dienstalterslisten, Wilhelm von Hessen was assigned to new units in both 1936 and 1937. In 1936, he had a position in the “Stammabt. Bez. 14.” “Stammabt.” stands for “Stammabteilung,” which was a unit of the so-called Allgemeine SS (more on this below) in which men older than 45 years of age or SS members no longer fit for service were grouped together. These “Stammabteilung” were in turn divided into “Bezirke” or districts. Wilhelm von Hessen’s assignment to this organizational unit is puzzling since in 1936 he was only 31 years old and had no known physical disabilities that would have limited his fitness for service.

By 1937 Wilhelm von Hessen was no longer with the “Stammabt. Bez. 14.” but had been reassigned to the “SS Abschnitt XXVII.” This unit had originally been established in November 1933, but by October 1936 had been reorganized. SS Abschnitt XXVII was primarily an administrative and organizational unit within the Allgemeine SS. It did not directly engage in major military campaigns or operations, but instead was focused on overseeing SS activities, recruitment, and coordination within its designated area. While the unit was not involved in combat, SS Abschnitt XXVII played an essential role in supporting the Nazi regime and its ideology.

Let me quickly explain two things I mentioned above, namely, the Allgemeine SS and the Standarte.

Wilhelm was a member of the so-called “General SS,” or Allgemeine SS which was the administrative and the non-combative part of the SS. This is to be distinguished from the Waffen-SS which was the combat branch of the Nazi Party’s paramilitary Schutzstaffel organization.

As discussed in Post 157, the German physics teacher mentioned above tells me that in the group photo Wilhelm von Hessen is wearing the letter “M” on his collar tab. This is the badge of the Motor-Standarten of the SS. As previously mentioned, according to the Dienstaltersliste der SS for 1935, he was a member of the 6. Motor-Standarte, suggesting the group photo was taken at around this time. The SS-Standarte was the primary regimental-sized unit of the Allgemeine SS. There were 127 SS-Standarten although by 1945 most existed only on paper never reaching their prescribed strength.

The Standarten regiments each had their own number, but were also referred to by other names, such as location, a popular name, or an honorary title. After Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, the 6th SS-Standarte, for example, adopted the honorary title of “Charlottenburg” and often participated in major Nazi Party rallies held in the German capitol.

In ancestry.com, I found Prinz Wilhelm von Hessen’s military personnel card (Figure 9) which provides information on the date and place of his death and confirms the Wehrmacht unit he was a member of at the time of his death including his rank. To remind readers, I erroneously concluded in Post 157, Postscript based on inaccurate information in the German Wikipedia entry for Wilhelm von Hessen that he was a soldier in the SS at the time of his death. The transcription and translation of Wilhelm’s personnel card proves otherwise:

Figure 9. Prinz Wilhelm von Hessen’s Wehrmacht military personnel card

[Familien- und Vorname = surname and first name]

Prinz von Hessen, Wilhelm

[geb. am = born on the] [in] [Kreis = county]

1.3.1905 (1 March 1905) Rotenburg = today Rotenburg on the Fulda Kassel

[Truppenteil = unit]

Stabskomp(anie) Schütz.(en) Reg(imen)t. 2 (garrison: from 1934 in Meiningen in Thuringia, from 1938 in Austria)

[Ersatztruppenteil = substitute unit]

Schütz.(en) Ers.(atz) Bat(ail)l.(on) 2 Mähr.(isch) Weisskirchen [today: Hranice in Moravia, Czech Republic]

[Erk.(ennungs)-M.arke = identification tag]

1. (company) Kradschtz. 2 [Krad-Schützen-Bataillon 2, Krad = motorcycle]

[Dienstgrad = rank]

Hauptm.(ann)

[Tag, Stunde, Ort und Art des Verlustes = Day, hour, place and type of loss, so of death]

30.4.42, fallen

The so-called Ersatztruppenteil, the substitute unit of which Wilhelm was at one time a member, trained soldiers to make up for the losses of the fighting regiment that fought on the front; such units were not directly involved in combat. Once the war started in 1939, the Wehrmacht started to establish these “Ersatz” substitute units for every battalion. Wilhelm’s personnel card identifies his Ersatz battalion as Schützen Ersatz Bataillon 2.

Wilhelm’s military personnel card makes two things clear. First, since Wilhelm was killed in a combat Wehrmacht regiment, he was obviously no longer involved in training soldiers in the Ersatztruppenteil. Second, since he died fighting for the Wehrmacht, clearly at some point he’d voluntarily transitioned to or been conscripted into the regular army. The question of when he transferred from the SS will now be examined in depth.

While trying to make sense of Wilhelm’s military service, including when he might have transferred from the SS to the Wehrmacht, my good friend Peter Albrecht sent me a link to a newsletter published by the so-called “Eaglehorse.org” which sheds light on this issue. This organization describes itself “. . .as a rallying point for former members of the Squadron, our German comrades in the Bundeswehr, Bundesgrenzschutz, Bayern Grenzpolizei, the people of Bad Kissingen and surrounding towns in the Squadron area of operations.” The military unit in question is the 2nd Squadron/11th Armored Cavalry Regiment (ARC), once based in Bad Kissingen, Germany.

Readers might rightly ask, “How is this relevant to Wilhelm von Hessen?” Let me explain.

It turns out that officer cadets of three Wehrmacht battalions were assigned to Manteuffel Kaserne near Bad Kissingen during the Third Reich. Eaglehorse not only chronicles their history and stories but also those of U.S. regiments later stationed there. One of the Wehrmacht battalions based at Manteuffel Kaserne included the Kradschützen Bataillon 2 (also known as “2 Krad” and “K2”), a motorcycle infantry battalion which Wilhelm von Hessen was known to be a member of. According to Eaglehorse.org, records for the three battalions at Manteuffel Kaserne “are long lost or hopelessly scattered.” However, surviving sources have allowed the group to partially reconstruct the experience of officer cadets at the time using “. . .the officer accession system of the Wehrmacht Heer and the brief ‘201’ file of a cadet then lieutenant and company commander in 2 Krad named Prince Wilhelm von Hessen. . .” It appears, then, that a file related to Wilhelm survives which allows us to accurately speculate about the experiences of German soldiers who aspired to become officers when Monteuffel Kaserne initially opened in 1935.

A brief point of clarification. The Wehrmacht consisted of three branches, the Heer (army), the Kriegsmarine (navy), and the Luftwaffe (air force).

As Eaglehorse.org notes, Germany never established a national army academy in the model of Sandhurst in England; L’Ecole Speciale Militaire de Saint Cyr in France; or West Point. Instead from the 19th century onwards Germany had several private or partially supported “cadet training schools.” These academies exposed the children of the German aristocracy and the upper middle class to the study of military tactics, organization, and discipline. A graduate of these schools could enter the army as an “Officer Aspirant” or Anwärter, a German title that translates as “candidate,” “applicant,” or “recruit,” and begin a two-year probationary period on active duty. During this time, the cadet was assigned to a so-called line unit, or regiment, and trained at the junior enlisted then mid- and senior-grade NCO levels. They received specialized training monitored at the division level, attended branch specific training courses at centralized locations and were field and academically tested to either fail or progress to the next level.

In the pre-war period, a German general by the name of Heinz Wilhelm Guderian was tasked with building the Wehrmacht’s 2nd Panzer Division. It was formed on the 15^th October 1935, and was one of three tank divisions created at the time. General Guderian selected the newly promoted Major Hasso von Manteuffel from Kradschützen Bataillon 2, the same battalion in which Wilhelm von Hessen had been an officer cadet, to run the aspiring officer training program for the Panzer Division. Wilhelm von Hessen’s record as a cadet, then later as a reserve officer, has surfaced that informs us of his military service.

Quoting from Eaglehorse.org:

“Von Hessen, a minor member of a German royal family from Fulda, was highly connected to the old guard of Gernany. . .Hessen entered the Army as an aspirant officer in the reserves in 1935 with the 2 Krad in Eisenach. His title of Prince may have impressed some, but progression through the pre commissioning program was based solely on merit and achievement.

Von Hessen’s record does not specify the exact dates of advancement, however, as the unit moved to Bad Kissingen, his career clearly progressed. Perhaps at Manteuffel [EDITOR’S NOTE: BAD KISSINGEN] or in Austria [EDITOR’S NOTE: EISENSTADT, 36 MILES FROM VIENNA, AUSTRIA], he successfully passed his final examination and probationary period as a lieutenant and received his commission as a lieutenant in the reserve army with active-duty status. Upon formal commissioning, he already would have been a proven platoon leader.

Once the war began, still as a platoon leader, he was wounded in Poland and again in France. In 1941, with the campaign in Greece, he was a company commander with the K2, and, the following year, moved to a staff position with the higher command 2nd Schützen Regiment. Then, some months later, he took command of the regimental headquarters company. Continuing as a first lieutenant, as the war in Russia began and the 2nd Panzer Division was committed, he took command of Rifle Company 7 in the mechanized brigade and the same week that his promotion to captain was approved, was killed in action in April 1942.”

As I noted earlier, according to Wilhelm von Hessen’s entry in German Wikipedia he was a member of the 2nd SS Panzer Division. For this reason, I erroneously concluded that he died as a member of the SS. Confusing matters, it turns out that the Wehrmacht also had a 2nd Panzer Division, and this is the unit Wilhelm was a member of. The Wikipedia entry for the Wehrmacht’s 2nd Panzer Division matches the conflicts in Poland, France, Greece, and the Soviet Union which Wilhelm participated in according to the information in his file discussed above.

Let me turn now to another issue that may confuse readers as it did me. The SS seniority lists, the Dienstalterslisten, from 1936 and 1937 continue to include Wilhelm von Preussen’s name even though he is known by 1935 to have been in the cadet training school and as noted above assigned to the Wehrmacht’s Kradschützen Bataillon 2. This suggests Wilhelm continued to hold a commission within the SS. This possibility is supported by a sentence in Wikipedia tucked into the discussion about the Allgemeine SS: “SS members could also hold reserve commissions in the regular military as well as a Nazi Party-political rank.” This means that Wilhelm von Hessen could have been a member of the non-combative Allgemeine SS and worn their uniform, but also had a commission in the Wehrmacht and separately worn their uniform. In the case of the ca. 1935 picture Wilhelm is obviously wearing a black SS uniform while in seemingly contemporaneous photos he is in a Wehrmacht outfit. (Figure 10)

Figure 10. November 1936 photo of Wilhelm von Hessen in his Wehrmacht uniform with his wife Princess Marianne von Preußen at her sister Princess Luise’s marriage

I briefly summarize Wilhelm von Hessen’s trajectory in the Nazi Party, SS, and the Wehrmacht roughly as follows. He was admitted to the Nazi Party on the 1^st of May 1932; joined the SS on the 20^th of April 1934; transitioned to the cadet training school and the Wehrmacht around the 15^th of October 1935 when the cadet school opened in Bad Kissengen; continued to retain a commission in the SS while in the Wehrmacht until 1937; fought as a member of the 2nd Panzer Division in Poland (1939), France (1940), Greece (1941), and the Soviet Union, before eventually being killed on the 30^th of April 1942 in Russia.

Before closing out this lengthy post, I want to discuss two other documents related to Wilhelm von Hessen that were found.

Peter Albrecht ordered and sent me Wilhelm’s official death certificate he obtained from the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge e. V. (VDK), Germany’s War Graves Commission. (Figures 11a-b) It confirms that Wilhelm was in a Wehrmacht unit as a Hauptmann (Captain), and that he was killed-in-action on the 30th of April 1942 in a place called Wyschegory, Russia. The VDK included a map of the location of Wyschegory. (Figure 12) They stated that an official casualty report does not provide a clear grave location, and that he likely could not be buried by his comrades. They noted that Wilhelm probably rests in an unmarked grave, and that if he’s eventually found he will be moved to a war cemetery in Germany. Wilhelm’s death was reported in the New York Times. (Figures 13a-b)

Figure 11a. Page 1 of letter with Prinz Wilhelm’s official death information obtained by Peter Albrecht from the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge e. V. (VDK), Germany’s War Graves Commission

Figure 11b. Page 2 of letter with Prinz Wilhelm’s official death information obtained by Peter Albrecht from the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge e. V. (VDK), Germany’s War Graves Commission

Figure 12. Map provided by the VDK showing location of Wyschegory where Wilhelm von Hessen was killed in relation to a place called Belyi, Russia

Figure 13a. Cover page from June 18, 1942, New York Times article reporting Wilhelm von Hessen’s death

Figure 13b. June 18, 1942, New York Times article reporting Wilhelm von Hessen’s death

By way of historic context, Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, known as Operation Barbarossa, started on Sunday, the 22^nd of June 1941. The failure of Operation Barbarossa reversed the fortunes of Nazi Germany. The German offensive came to an end during the Battle of Moscow near the end of 1941 and resulted in the Wehrmacht’s defeat and the eventual collapse of Nazi Germany in 1945.

Possibly, Wilhelm’s unit was retreating westward following the Battles of Rzhev (Tver Oblast, Russia) when he was killed near Belyi (Tver Oblast, Russia). Belyi is about 74 miles west-southwest of Rzhev. (Figure 14) The likelihood that Wilhelm was involved in the Battles of Rzhev is conjecture.

Figure 14. Map showing the relation of Rzhev where battles were fought to Belyi, near where Wilhelm von Hessen died

While I found Wilhelm’s military personnel card in ancestry, I also found his “death certificate” from Herleshausen in the German state of Hesse. (Figures 15a-b) The page is from the town’s civil registry book. This certificate was completed on the 7^th of August 1942, so several months following Wilhelm’s death in Russia. Herleshausen is where Wilhelm and his wife and children lived in a castle now owned by his great-grandson.

Figure 15a. Cover page of Wilhelm von Hessen’s death certificate from Herleshausen, Hesse completed on the 7th of August 1942, more than three months after his death

Figure 15b. Wilhelm von Hessen’s death certificate from Herleshausen, Hesse completed on the 7th of August 1942, more than three months after his death

Below is a transcription and translation of the page:

TRANSCRIPTION:

Nr. 16 – Herleshausen, den 7. August 1942 Der Hauptmann der Reserve Prinz und Landgraf Wilhelm von Hessen, gottgläubig, wohnhaft in Herleshausen Schloss Augustenau ist am 30. April 1942 um — Uhr — Minuten (Todesstunde unbekannt) bei Wyschegory, östlicher Kriegsschauplatz, verstorben.  Der Verstorbene war geboren am 1. März 1905 in Rotenburg an der Fulda (Standesamt Rotenburg Nr. 21).  Vater: Landgraf Chlodwig von Hessen Mutter: Landgräfin Karoline von Hessen geborene Prinzessin zu Solms-Hohensolms-Lich  Der Verstorbene war verheiratet mit der Prinzessin Marianne von Hessen geborene Prinzessin von Preußen.  Eingetragen auf schriftliche Anzeige der Wehrmachtauskunftstelle für Kriegesverluste und Kriegsgefangene.  Todesursache: gefallen  Eheschließung des Verstorbenen am 30.1.1933 in Tabarz (Standesamt Tabarz Nr. 2 / 33)

REMARK TOP LEFT:

Herleshausen, den 22. August 1962  Auf Anordnung des Amtsgerichts in Kassel vom 7. Mai 1962 ( 1 III 52/61) wird berichtigend vermerkt, dass der Name des Verstorbenen  Wilhelm Ernst Alexis Hermann Prinz und Landgraf von Hessen  (nicht Prinz und Landgraf Wilhelm von Hessen) lautet.

TRANSLATION

No. 16 – Herleshausen, the 7. August 1942

The captain of the reserve Prince and Landgrave Wilhelm of Hesse (Figure 16), a believer in God, residing in Herleshausen Castle Augustenau is on 30. April 1942 at — clock — minutes (death hour unknown) at Wyschegory, eastern theater of war, died.

The deceased was born on the 1st. March 1905 in Rotenburg an der Fulda (Rotenburg Registry Office No. 21).

Father: Landgrave Chlodwig of Hesse

Mother: Landgrave Karoline of Hesse born Princess of Solms-Hohensolms-Lich

The deceased was married to Princess Marianne of Hesse, born Princess of Prussia.

Registered on written notification of the Wehrmacht information office for war losses and prisoners of war.

Cause of death: fallen

Marriage of the deceased on 30.1.1933 in Tabarz (Registry Office Tabarz No. 2 / 33)

TRANSLATION—REMARK UPPER LEFT

Herleshausen, the 22. August 1962

By order of the district court in Kassel of 7. May 1962 (III 52/61) is corrected that the name of the deceased

Wilhelm Ernst Alexis Hermann Prince and Landgrave of Hesse

(Not Prince and Landgrave Wilhelm of Hesse).

Figure 16. A formal photo of Lieutenant Prinz Wilhelm von Hessen while assigned to the K2

One final observation. After the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II and the termination of Germany’s monarchy following their loss in WWI, the nobility was no longer legally recognized in Germany. While noble titles and designations are still commonly used as part of family names, the 1962 remark in the upper left of Wilhelm’s death certificate is an acknowledgment of this new reality where the title “Prince” is added after his name rather than before.

REFERENCES

“2nd Panzer Division (Wehrmacht).” Wikipedia, Wikipedia Foundation, 23^rd September 2024.

“Allgemeine SS.” Wikipedia, Wikipedia Foundation, 24 August 2023. Allgemeine SS – Wikipedia

Cadets: The Hidden Stories: 1970-From Starch to Permanent Press. Eaglehorse.org.

http://www.eaglehorse.org/home_station/hidden_stories/70s/cadets/cadets.htm

“Wilhelm von Hessen-Philippsthal-Barchfeld (1905–1942).” Wikipedia, Wikipedia Foundation, 20 January 2024. Wilhelm von Hessen-Philippsthal-Barchfeld (1905–1942) – Wikipedia

POST 155: HISTORY OF THE PROPERTY WHERE THE BRUCK’S “PRINZ VON PREUßEN” HOTEL IN RATIBOR CAME TO BE BUILT

CORRECTIONS ADDED IN RED ON 3/1/2024

Note: In a post I’ve long wanted to write, using maps and contemporary accounts, I discuss the history of the property where the inn stood that my family owned from ca. 1850 until 1926 in Ratibor [today: Racibórz, Poland], the Bruck’s “Prinz von Preußen” Hotel. I also make a case for when I think the hotel was likely constructed.

POST 11, POSTSCRIPT: RATIBOR & BRUCK’S “PRINZ VON PREUßEN” HOTEL

POST 11, POSTSCRIPT 2: RATIBOR & BRUCK’S “PRINZ VON PREUßEN” HOTEL

POST 61: THE WOINOWITZ ZUCKERFABRIK (SUGAR FACTORY) OUTSIDE RATIBOR (PART IV-GRUNDBUCH (LAND REGISTER))

POST 132: FATE OF THE BRUCK’S “PRINZ VON PREUßEN“ FAMILY HOTEL IN RATIBOR (RACIBÓRZ): GEOPOLITICAL FACTORS

I’ve spilled a lot of ink writing about my next of kin’s business in Ratibor, Germany [today: Racibórz, Poland], the Bruck’s “Prinz von Preußen” Hotel (Figures 1-2), owned by three generations of my family from roughly 1850 until 1926. My recently departed friend Paul Newerla from Racibórz (Figure 3), a lawyer who found his second calling in retirement researching and writing about the history of Ratibor and Silesia, was very instrumental in furthering my understanding of the hotel’s history and generously sharing multiple historical references and illustrations related to the establishment.

Figure 1. The Bruck’s “Prinz von Preußen” Hotel

Figure 2. Entrance to the Bruck’s “Prinz von Preußen” Hotel

Figure 3. In 2018 in Racibórz, Poland me standing alongside my recently deceased friend Mr. Paul Newerla in front of the historic statue of John of Nepomuk, now located in the middle of a parking lot

Paul was never able to tell me exactly when the inn was constructed and whether a previous owner had built the structure. For the longest time, I imagined the name “Prinz von Preußen” meant it might have been erected and lived in by a member of the von Preußen family, a royal lineage with longstanding ties to Silesia. Another friend whom I’ve often mentioned to readers, Peter Albrecht von Preußen (Figure 4), a descendant of this illustrious bloodline now living in the United States, explained to me that the “Prinz von Preußen” name was franchised from at least the 19^th century. Thus, the Bruck Hotel’s incorporation of the Prinz von Preußen honorific may simply reflect a business arrangement. So far evidence of this has not been found.

Figure 4. My good friend Peter Albrecht von Preußen who was of enormous assistance in the course of writing this post

One document Paul was unable to track down in the Archiwum Państwowe w Katowicach Oddział w Raciborzu, the State Archives in Katowice, Branch in Racibórz, was the so-called Grundbuch, the land register, for the Bruck’s “Prinz von Preußen” Hotel. Grundbuch means the applicable official register held by the Land Registry in which, among other things, the rights of ownership in, and encumbrances on, a plot of land are registered.

In Post 61, I discussed how Paul found the Grundbuch for the Zuckerfabrik, the sugar factory owned by distant family relatives, located in Woinowitz [today: Wojnowice, Poland] outside Ratibor, among the uncatalogued documents in the basement of the Racibórz State Archives. Regular readers know I’ve written multiple posts about the Zuckerfabrik. Had Paul been able to locate the Grundbuch for the Bruck’s Hotel, it might have shed some light on when the building was built and/or exactly when my family purchased the establishment. Whether the file still exists is an unanswered question though I suspect if it did Paul Newerla would have tracked it down.

Another of my Polish friends, Małgosia Ploszaj (Figure 5), from Rybnik, Poland, 15 miles east of Racibórz, was able to find a police file in the Racibórz State Archives related to the Bruck’s Hotel (Figures 6a-b), but this dated to the period that my grandparents, Felix (1864-1927) and Else Bruck (1873-1957), owned the hotel during the first quarter of the 20^th century. This file includes reports on periodic inspections conducted by the local police; safety issues my grandparents were compelled to address; authorizations they were required to obtain to operate beyond normal working hours; violations for which they were fined, etc. Nothing in the file related to the history nor tenancy of the hotel prior to my grandparents’ ownership.

Figure 5. Another of my Polish friends Małgosia Ploszaj from Rybnik, Poland who discovered the early 20th century police file on the Bruck’s “Prinz von Preußen” Hotel

Figure 6a. Cover of the police file on the Bruck’s “Prinz von Preußen” Hotel found in the “Archiwum Państwowe Racibórz,” State Archives in Racibórz

Figure 6b. Closeup of the cover of the police file on the Bruck’s “Prinz von Preußen” Hotel

My good friend Peter Albrecht von Preußen spent a good deal of time explaining the contents of this police file. Additionally, because of his own family’s connection to Silesia, he spent a lot of time searching publications for mentions of the hotel and the sequential Bruck family members who owned the inn, namely, Samuel Bruck (1808-1863), Fedor Bruck (1834-1892), and Felix Bruck (1864-1927).

One of the most useful public domain sources Peter discovered was a 695-page book entitled “Geschichte der Stadt Ratibor,” “History of the Town of Ratibor,” written by Augustin Weltzel in 1861. (Figure 7) Therein, Peter found mention of a Bruck who was a “gastwirth,” an innkeeper, no doubt Samuel Bruck (1808-1863) the original owner of the Bruck’s Hotel. (Figure 8)

Figure 7. Cover of the 1861 book by Augustin Weltzel, “Geschichte der Stadt Ratibor,” “History of the Town of Ratibor”

Figure 8. Page from “Geschichte der Stadt Ratibor” mentioning the “gastwirth Bruck,” the innkeeper believed to be my great-great-grandfather Samuel Burck (1808-1863), first family owner of the Bruck’s Hotel

The book is written in Fraktur, which was the subject of Post 154. Unfortunately, the text has not been transcribed into German, nor has it been translated into Polish or English. However, because Peter can read Fraktur, he graciously perused and summarized relevant sections of Weltzel’s book.

This book was commissioned in 1859 by the Protestant Church in Breslau [today: Wrocław, Poland], who had searched in the archives and discovered that the history of the entire Upper Silesian region, a principally Catholic area at the time, had not been documented. As a result, Dr. Weltzel, a Catholic Priest, was contracted to write about Ratibor. This seemingly odd arrangement was an indirect outcome of the First Silesian War from 1740 to 1742 which resulted in Prussia seizing most of the region of Silesia (today mostly in southwestern Poland) from Austria but Catholics in Silesia being guaranteed the right to continue practicing their religion.

Based on Peter’s synopsis and analysis, I can reconstruct a partial history of the property where the Bruck’s Hotel was built and theorize when the hotel is likely to have been constructed. Another of my Polish contacts from Racibórz is Magda Wawoczny, an acquaintance in the Jewish Studies program at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. At my request, she graciously sent me high-resolution plans of Ratibor from 1831 and 1843, as well as a map from 1812 with a birds-eye view of Ratibor and its fortifications, that allow me to clarify using contemporary maps what likely was going on in the area at the time in conjunction with Augustin Weltzel’s description of historic events.

First, a brief digression. I’ve periodically told readers about my “boots on the ground” without whom I would be unable to relate my family stories to the depth I feel is required. As readers can easily tell, I have limited knowledge about many of the subjects I discuss so the assistance of knowledgeable people is crucial. In the case of this post, for example, I felt the need to illustrate with historic maps what Ratibor may have looked like at different points in time to make the case for approximately when the Bruck’s Hotel might have been constructed.

Erroneously recalling there exists a map from 1829 with the Bruck’s Hotel shown, I asked Magda, my student acquaintance from Racibórz, if she could track it down for me. In the process, Magda directed me to a historical portal run by her father, Grzegorz Wawoczny, a historian. The portal includes a post written by a German gentleman, Christoph Sottor, describing the oldest plans of the city of Ratibor. This is how I learned about the 1812, 1831, and 1843 plans of Ratibor mentioned above. This post was very useful and one I encourage readers with an ancestral link to Ratibor to skim:

https://ziemiaraciborska.pl/najstarsze-plany-miasta-raciborza/

Let me continue.

Historically, Ratibor was a fortified castle-town. The period the Bruck’s Hotel could conceivably have been built is closely related to when the fortifications surrounding Ratibor were dismantled because of the hotel’s proximity to where the protective walls once stood. Let me briefly relate to readers some of the history of the town’s defensive system. The defensive walls have existed in Ratibor since 1299. They were extended in the 14^th century, and several fortified towers and three wooden gates were later added. A deep moat was constructed in front of the walls. The curtain walls were reinforced in 1663 in anticipation of a Turkish invasion.

Beginning in the 18^th century, the fortifications were gradually eliminated. Between 1764 and 1771 the moat was filled in. According to Weltzel, the wooden gate (Figure 22) of the defensive tower nearest where the Bruck’s Hotel was eventually built was removed in 1825 and relocated to the Ratibor side of the bridge crossing the nearby Oder River; some of the nearby curtain walls were removed but the tower remained.

Figure 22. Example of a Medieval wooden gate that was part of a fortified tower

All that remains of the fortifications today is a Renaissance style tower constructed in 1574 and some remnants of the Gothic curtain walls that abutted this tower. (Figures 9-10) At the apex of the tower, there is an attic with embrasures (sometimes called gun holes) and four turrets. The building provided shelter for the garrison of defenders and was also used as a prison tower.

Figure 9. As it looks today, the surviving Renaissance-style tower and curtain walls that were once part of the fortifications surrounding Ratibor (picture courtesy of Magda Wawoczny)

Figure 10. The surviving Renaissance-style tower in Racibórz today (photo courtesy of Magda Wawoczny)

The removal of the moat, including the gradual elimination of some of the defensive structures, coincides with the end of the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763). Let me say a few words about this conflict.

The Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) was a global conflict involving most of Europe’s great powers that was fought primarily in Europe, the Americas, and Asia-Pacific. Without getting too far into the weeds, suffice it to say the opposing alliances were led by Great Britain and France, each seeking to establish global pre-eminence at the expense of the other. France and Spain fought against England and their ally Prussia in Europe and overseas. Long-standing rivalries pitted these adversaries against one another in North America and the West Indies.

No less a personage than Winston Churchill described the Seven Years War, which went by different names in its respective theaters (e.g., Franch and Indian Wars (1754-1763); War of the Conquest in French-speaking Canada; the Third Silesian Wear (1756-1763) between Prussia and Austria) as the first “world war” because of its global reach.

For purposes of this post, suffice it to say that in Europe, Prussia sought greater influence in the German states (i.e., Prussia and the other German states did not unite to form Germany until 1871) while Austria sought to contain Prussian influence as well as regain Silesia which they’d lost at the end of the First Silesian War in 1742. Austria failed in this regard. Based on Augustin Weltzel’s discussions, it is evident the city’s fortifications suffered heavy damage from cannonball strikes during the conflict.

Perhaps, the end of the war, new economic opportunities, ongoing deterioration of the defensive walls and towers, along with a need to expand the city caused town officials to gradually remove the fortifications and towers.

The address of the Bruck’s “Prinz von Preußen” Hotel was Oderstrasse 16. The inn stood on the northwest corner of Oderstrasse where it met Bollwerk Strasse. A 1929 street map of Ratibor includes the hotel’s name and location (Figure 11), while a 1933 plan shows the number “16” on Oderstrasse. (Figure 12) A map from around 1890 indistinctly outlines an area where the Bruck’s Hotel stood that is identified by the number “104,” which may indicate the lot number. (Figure 13) Since I don’t have copies of all Ratibor’s plans, it’s not clear when the hotel was first plotted on a map.

Figure 11. 1929 plan map of Ratibor with the “Bruck’s Hotel” name circled

Figure 12. 1933 plan map of Ratibor with “16” circled referring to the address of the Bruck’s Hotel, Oderstrasse 16

Figure 13. 1890 plan map of Ratibor with the indistinctly outlined plot where the Bruck’s Hotel once stood, identified as the number “104”

The “Prinz von Preußen” is listed in John Murray’s 1850 “Hand-Book for Travellers on the Continent” as a place for people to stay in Ratibor while voyaging between Breslau and Vienna. (Figures 14a-b) Family ownership of the inn is thought to have begun at around this time.

Figure 14a. Cover of John Murray’s 1850 “Hand-Book for Travellers on the Continent” discussing the “Prinz von Preußen” Hotel

Figure 14b. Page of John Murray’s 1850 “Hand-Book for Travellers on the Continent” discussing the “Prinz von Preußen” Hotel

Next, I’ll discuss a few of the historic maps I had access to, and what they suggest regarding the construction of the Bruck’s Hotel. I’ll also touch on some of Weltzel’s historic accounts for reference.

Let me start by discussing the map that Christoph Sottor dates to 1812 (Figure 15) that I previously described as a birds-eye view of the city with its still-standing fortifications.

Figure 15. 1812 birds-eye view of Ratibor and its fortifications, with the approximate location of the future Bruck’s Hotel marked

Sottor says the following about this map:

“On the newly made plan (in 1812 on the basis of measurements from 1810) the orientation to the west was improved, buildings in towns near Racibórz were described and projections of several buildings in Racibórz itself were marked. The “Situations-Plan von der Stadt Ratibor” covers a smaller area than the 1811 plan and is on a smaller scale, 1 : 7,200. The plan measures 48 cm x 32.3 cm. It was also created by the geometer Andre Wihrheim. The only copy of the plan is in AP Opole, reference number: AP Opole, Rej. Opole. Kart., sign. IX/92. I only have a blurry picture of him.” [EDITOR’S NOTE: “AP Opole” stands for “Archiwum Państwowe Opole,” the State Archives in Opole, Poland]

The main conclusion one can draw from this map is that the defensive towers and curtain walls were mostly still intact in 1812. This means the Bruck’s Hotel, whose approximate location I’ve shown on the map, could not yet have existed at this time since the curtain walls would have impeded its construction.

According to Weltzel, the Bruck’s Hotel was referred to as the “Prinzen von Preußen” (“Princes of Prussia”) rather than “Prinz von Preußen” (“Prince of Prussia”), with no mention of the Bruck surname. He also tells us the property where the hotel was eventually built had previously been owned by the so-called Schützengilde, the shooting club, and sat along Oder Gasse, as Oderstrasse was then known. The Schützengilde had two structures on their property, a Schützenzwinger, or clubhouse, and a Schießstand, or firing range. The clubhouse faced Oder Gasse, while the firing range sat towards the rear of the property closer to the Oder River.

At the time Weltzel was researching his book he had access to the shooting club’s records dating back to 1620. According to these documents the Schützengilde owned the property on Oder Gasse until 1824/25 when they sold it to the city of Ratibor in two transactions; by May 1825 the city had full possession of the entire property. Using the proceeds from the sale of the property, the shooting club purchased another property in town. Seemingly, Weltzel does not discuss how the city used the property following its acquisition.

Peter Albrecht von Preußen uncovered a YouTube video describing the activities of the Schützengilde today featuring none other than my late friend Paul Newerla. While the video is in both German and Polish with subtitles in both these languages, readers can get a general idea of how the shooting club operates today and view some of the antique weapons members fire:

Schlesien Jornal 23 08 2016

youtu.be

In essence, Paul Newerla says that today the Schützengilde is principally a historical society and functions as a recreational club rather than as a defensive force as it once did. As previously mentioned, the club relocated from Oder Gasse in 1825, but moved again in 1898 to their present location. The existing clubhouse incorporates a tower (Figure 16) that may be a remembrance of the Oder Thor that once stood adjacent to their property on Oder Gasse. According to Paul, the oldest documents the club possesses date to 1925, so he is appealing to anyone that may have older artifacts or memorabilia to contact the club. And finally, we learn the Schützengilde was inoperative from the 8^th of May 1945 until 2004, when it was resurrected.

Figure 16. The “Schützengilde’s” existing clubhouse incorporating a tower than be a remembrance of the “Oder Thor” near its original location on Oder Gasse

Let me turn now to the two high resolution maps from 1831 and 1843 that Magda sent me and discuss what inferences can be drawn from them. Both plans show two buildings on the property, the 1843 map more distinctly, where the Bruck’s Hotel would eventually be built. On the 1831 map (Figure 17), in the rear structure, that’s to say the shooting range, readers can vaguely make out what Weltzel refers to as a “wall extension” that paralleled the lane where Bollwerk Strasse was ultimately sited. It would appear the firing range incorporated as an extension a fragmentary part of the curtain walls that once surrounded Ratibor.

Figure 17. 1831 plan map of Ratibor with the two structures and the defensive curtain walls that were part of the “Schützengilde” along Oder Gasse vaguely visible

One thing we can conclude from the 1843 map (Figure 18) is that the Oder Thor, Oder Tower, the tower closest to where the hotel was ultimately built had apparently not yet been demolished, though as previously mentioned the wooden gate had been removed in 1825. The tower is labelled on the map suggesting it was still in place. It’s difficult to know precisely where the Oder Thor was situated relative to the hotel making it hard to know whether it would have impeded construction of the building; however, the defensive curtain walls would assuredly have prevented construction of the inn.

Figure 18. 1843 plan map of Ratibor with the “Oder Thor”, as well as the two structures that formed part of the “Schützengilde” circled

Another thing we can observe from the 1843 ocular map of Ratibor is that if you extend the line that was formerly part of the curtain wall and the extension of the Schießstand, it lines up perfectly with the side of the Oder Thor that was closest to the Oder River.

So, we return to the question of when the Bruck’s Hotel might have been built and what the impetus for doing so would have been. A French travel guide dated 1836 entitled “Manuel du Voyageur en Allemagne” (Handbook for Travelers in Germany), mentions an auberge or inn in Ratibor, “Auberge de Jaeschke.” (Figure 19) Prior to construction of the Bruck’s Hotel this is believed to have been the only guesthouse in Ratibor.

Figure 19. Page from the 1836 “Manuel du Voyageur en Allemagne” (Handbook for Travelers in Germany) mentioning an “auberge” or inn in Ratibor named “Auberge de Jaeschke”

As previously discussed, the “Prinz von Preußen” is mentioned in John Murray’s 1850 publication “A Hand-Book for Travellers on the Continent,” and is described as a “very comfortable hotel.” (see Figure 14b) Clearly, by 1850 the “Prinz von Preußen” Hotel was open for business. This is further confirmed by a concert the famed Austrian composer Johann Strauss delivered on the 17^th of October 1850 in the hotel’s concert hall. (Figure 20) A similar recital by Dr. Franz Lizst four years earlier on the 29^th of May 1846 was performed at the so-called “Jaschke’schen Saale” (Figure 21), presumably part of the “Auberge de Jaeschke,” indirect evidence the newer and larger Prinz von Preußen concert hall was not yet open.

Figure 20. Notice for Johann Strauss’ recital at the “Prinz von Preußen” on the 17th of October 1850

Figure 21. Notice for Dr. Franz Lizst’s recital at the “Jaschke’schen Saale” on the 29th of May 1846

According to Weltzel, the anticipated arrival of the railroad in Ratibor, which began service on the 1^st of January 1846, caused a “building boom” between 1842 and 1850. If the 1843 map is accurate, the Oder Thor still stood at this time, so construction of the hotel post-dates its removal. While there is no smoking gun, the indirect evidence points to the Prinz von Preußen having been built sometime between 1845 and 1847, coinciding with the arrival of the railroad. No doubt regular train service and mention of the Prinz von Preußen in an English travel guide would have accelerated the number of visitors and tourists from Germany, Austria, and far-off places who would have expected modern conveniences. It can only be hoped the hotel’s Grundbuch still exists and is eventually found to definitively answer the question of what year the inn was built.

REFERENCES

First Silesian War. (2023, July 20). In Wikipedia. First Silesian War – Wikipedia

Knie, Johann G. (1845). Alphabetisch-statistisch-topographische Uebersicht der Dörfer, Flecken, Städte und andern Orte der Königl. Preuß. Provinz Schlesien.

Alphabetisch-statistisch-topographische Uebersicht der Dörfer, Flecken … – Johann G. Knie – Google Books

Murray, John (1850). A hand-book for travellers on the continent. London: John Murray.

A hand-book for travellers on the continent. [1st] [2 issues of the 16th and … : John Murray : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Racibórz. (2024, January 25). In Wikipedia. Racibórz – Wikipedia

Seven Years’ War. (2024, February 24). In Wikipedia. Seven Years’ War – Wikipedia

Sottor, Christoph (2020, August 3). The oldest plans of the city of Racibórz. ZiemiaRaciborska.pl.

The oldest plans of the city of Racibórz – Ziemia Raciborska

Weltzel, Augustin (1861).

Geschichte der Stadt Ratibor : Weltzel, Augustin : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

POST 150: UPPER SILESIAN GENEALOGICAL SOCIETY, PRIMARY SOURCE DOCUMENTS FROM RATIBOR [RACIBÓRZ, POLAND]

Note: In this post I discuss some primary source documents from Ratibor [today: Racibórz, Poland] and Upper Silesia I was recently made aware of. I also explain to readers how to access these online ancestral records digitized by the Upper Silesian Genealogical Society. Finally, I highlight a few “gems” I uncovered that date back to my earliest known Bruck ancestor from Ratibor.

POST 14, POSTSCRIPT: RATIBOR & THE BRAUER (BREWER) M. BRAUN “LINK” TO AMERICA

POST 149: A CHILDHOOD FRIEND’S EARLY ANCESTORS FROM UPPER SILESIA & RATIBOR [RACIBÓRZ, POLAND] (PART 1-BACKGROUND)

This story begins with an email my good friend Peter Albrecht von Preußen (Figure 1) sent me with a link to a Dropbox account with a stash of primary source documents from Ratibor, Germany [today: Racibórz, Poland]. Regular readers will recognize this as the town in Upper Silesia (Figure 2) to which some of my Jewish ancestors had an association of over 100 years and where the erstwhile family establishment, the Bruck’s “Prinz von Preußen” Hotel, was owned through three generations of my family, from around 1850 until 1926.

Having previously and on multiple occasions carefully examined three microfilm rolls of Jewish vital records from Ratibor (i.e., LDS Family History Center (FHC) Microfilms 1184447, 1184448, & 1184449) available through the Mormon Church’s familysearch website and having personally visited and spent many hours at the Archiwum Państwowe w Katowicach Oddział w Raciborzu, the State Archives in Katowice, Branch in Racibórz (Figure 3), scrutinizing civil registration records of vital events for my family, I had scant expectations of finding anything new. I had no reason to believe additional documents of vital events for Jews from Ratibor still exist. I could not have been more wrong.

Figure 3. Entrance to the “Archiwum Państwowe w Katowicach Oddział w Raciborzu,” the State Archives in Katowice, Branch in Racibórz

Below I will walk readers step-by-step through how to access the database I learned about that includes not only primary source documents about Jews from Ratibor and some adjoining towns but also the more extensive Catholic and Lutheran parish records from across Upper Silesia. I will also detail some of the most satisfying discoveries I made about some near and distant forebears, breakthroughs I honestly thought I would never realize. However, I’m going to start at the tail end and explain the origin of these primary source documents.

The source of the documents Peter sent me is the “Górnośląskie Towarzystwo Genealogiczne ‘Silius Radicum’,” or the Upper Silesian Genealogical Society “Silesian Roots.” Under an agreement signed on the 21^st of January 2015 with the State Archives in Katowice, the Society obtained permission to digitize genealogical records in the State Archive, a function not then being undertaken by the National Archives. The Society further obtained authorization to post the digitized records to their website.

The published books are classified according to the three main faiths, Roman Catholic, Evangelical, and Jewish within the historical area of Upper Silesia. The records generally cover the years 1800 to 1874 and are duplicates of records which were submitted to the court. At the time these records were created, the Standesämter, the civil registration offices, had not yet been established in Prussia, something which began in 1874.

The Ratibor-related files to which Peter Albrecht sent me the Dropbox link are listed in the following table:

Book Signature Number	Polish & English Names	No. of Pages

1693	*Racibórz akta ludności wyznania mojżeszowego—urodzenia 1851-1855.* Racibórz population records of the Jewish faith, births 1851 – 1855.	304
1694	*Racibórzakta ludności wyznania mojżeszowego–urodzenia 1910* Racibórz population records of the Jewish faith, births 1910	12
1695	*Racibórzakta ludności wyznania mojżeszowego–małżeństwa 1869-1870* Racibórz records of Jewish population, marriages 1869-1870	299
1696	*Racibórzakta ludności wyznania mojżeszowego–małżeństwa 1872-1885* Racibórz records of the Jewish population, marriages 1872-1885	376
1697	*Racibórzakta ludności wyznania mojżeszowego–urodzenia, małżeństwa 1852-1853* Racibórz population records of the Jewish faith, births + marriages 1852-1853	386
1698	*Racibórz(powiat)akta ludności wyznania mojżeszowego–urodzenia, zgony 1841-1847* Racibórz (county) population records of the Jewish faith, births + deaths 1841-1847	17
1699	*Racibórzakta ludności wyznania mojżeszowego–urodzenia, małżeństwa, rozwody, zgony 1815-1844* Racibórz Jewish population records – births + marriages + divorces + deaths 1815-1844	87
1700	*Racibórzakta ludności wyznania mojżeszowego–urodzenia, małżeństwa, rozwody, zgony 1845-1847* Racibórz Jewish population records, births + marriages + divorces + deaths 1845-1847	18
1701	*Gorzyceakta ludności wyznania mojżeszowego–urodzenia, małżeństwa, zgony 1843-1847* Gorzyce (Groß Gorschütz) Jewish population records, births + marriages + deaths 1843-1847	26
1702	*Kornowacakta ludności wyznania mojżeszowego–urodzenia, małżeństwa, zgony1845-1848* Kornowac (Kornowatz) Jewish population records – births, marriages, deaths 1845-1848	24
	TOTAL PAGES	1,549

For my purposes, Signature Books 1701 (Groß Gorschütz) and 1702 (Kornowatz) were of no interest.

While theoretically including records between 1800 and 1874, readers will notice significant gaps in what’s been digitized. Whether those records still exist or have yet to be scanned is unknown. Excluding Signature Books 1701 and 1702 which cover areas outside Ratibor, the table below shows the years for which birth, marriage, divorce, and death records are available for Ratibor through the Upper Silesian Genealogical Society’s website:

Ratibor Births

Ratibor Marriages

Ratibor Divorces

Ratibor Deaths

1815-1844 (Book 1699)

1841-1847 (Book 1698)

1845-1847 (Book 1700)

1851-1855 (Book 1693)

1910 (Book 1694)

1815-1844 (Book 1699)

1845-1847 (Book 1700)

1869-1870 (Book 1695)

1872-1885 (Book 1697)

1815-1844 (Book 1699)

1845-1847 (Book 1700)

1815-1844 (Book 1699)

1841-1847 (Book 1698)

1845-1847 (Book 1700)

Comparing the above to what’s available for Ratibor through the Mormon Church’s Family History Library, we find three films with Jewish records. Microfilm 1184447 includes cemetery deeds between 1888 and 1940; Microfilm 1184448 records deaths between 1865 and 1930; and Microfilm 1184449 documents births between 1815 and 1874 and marriages between 1814 and 1862. Clearly researchers would want to examine both databases since there’s only partial overlap. More on this below.

Before discussing the most informative documents found in the other Signature Books, let me describe the process step by step for accessing the primary source documents digitized by the Upper Silesian Genealogical Society:

Go to https://siliusradicum.pl/en/ksiegi-metrykalne/
On the portal page, readers can select one of four languages: English, German, Polish, or Czech;
While the “User Panel” allows you to sign in or register, the records can be accessed without doing so simply by scrolling down the page to the list of towns;
The towns for which Signature Books are available are listed alphabetically;
By way of example, select “ASC Jewish Community—Racibórz (Ratibor”;
Select “Browse online with Dropbox” towards the bottom of the page, and the ten Signature Books described above will be listed;
Select one, then scroll through the pages, and download relevant pages individually;
Once done perusing all the pages in a particular Signature Book, hit the “Back” button. Select “ASC gminy żydowskiej – Racibórz (Ratibor)” under “Copy to Dropbox” or “Download” and you’ll be taken back to the list of Signature Books. The first page of each Signature Book is a PDF page that describes its contents.

Towns in Upper Silesia besides Ratibor for which Jewish Signature Books have been digitized include Beuthen [today: Bytom, Poland]; Chorzow [today: Chorzów, Poland]; Dzietzkowitz [today: Dziećkowice, district of Mysłowice, Poland]; Gleiwitz [today: Gliwice, Poland]; Gollasowitz [today; Golasowice, Poland]; Kattowitz [Katowice, Poland]; Königshütte [today: Royal Huta, Poland]; Myslowitz [today: Mysłowice, Poland]; Pless [today: Pszczyna, Poland]; Rybnik [today: Rybnik, Poland]; and [Tarnowskie Góry, Poland];

For my purposes, Ratibor Signature Books, 1693, 1695, 1699, and 1700 were most informative.

I dub my great-great-great-grandfather Jacob Nathan Bruck (1770-1836) the paterfamilias of the Ratibor line of the Bruck family. As recently as Post 149, Part 1, I wrote it was indeterminately estimated he was born in 1762 or 1770 and died in 1832 or 1836. Thanks to a death register listing I found in Signature Book 1699, I now know his exact death date, the 29th of June 1836, when he was 66 years of age (Figure 4), meaning he obviously was born in 1770. This was the most exciting find in the Signature Books from Ratibor.

Figure 4. The death register listing found in Ratibor Signature Book 1699 showing my great-great-great-grandfather Jacob Nathan Bruck died on the 29th of June 1836 at the age of 66

I will devote an upcoming post to the scant but tantalizing clues I’ve collected about Jacob Nathan Bruck, including the number of children I can firmly document that he and his wife, Marianne Aufrecht, begat. Various ancestral trees I’ve found on ancestry.com and in MyHeritage claim that his first offspring was a daughter named Helene Bruck who was purportedly married to an Itzig Mendel Guttman Aufrecht. Serendipitously, I also found Helene Aufrecht, née Bruck’s, death register listing showing she died in 1838 at the age of 68 (Figure 5), meaning that like Jacob Bruck she too was born in 1770. They could conceivably have been twins but were more likely cousins. While it’s possible Jacob’s first daughter was indeed named Helene, something I’ve not yet found evidence of, Helene Aufrecht was assuredly not Jacob’s daughter and Itzig Aufrecht was certainly not Jacob’s son-in-law. Intriguingly, Helene gave birth to a child in 1815 at the improbable age of 45. (Figure 6)

Figure 5. The death register listing found in Ratibor Signature Book 1699 for Marianne Aufrecht, née Bruck, married to Itzig Mendel Guttman Aufrecht, showing she died on the 20th of May 1838 at the age of 68

Figure 6. Birth register listing showing that Helene Bruck and Itzig Mendel Guttman Aufrecht had a boy named Nathan born on the 2nd of September 1815 when Helene would have been 45 years old

I often remind readers that some information found on family trees in ancestry.com, MyHeritage, and Geneanet with respect to dates of vital events and names and numbers of offspring is notoriously unreliable. Unverified vital data is often cloned from existing trees by people seeking to build their own genealogical charts. I typically reject much of this data unless it’s backed up by primary source documentation, particularly as it relates to individuals born in the late 18th and early 19th centuries when records on Jews living then are sparse.

It is not my intention to review all the personally intriguing discoveries I made in perusing the digitized Silius Radicum records from Ratibor, since they are of scant interest to most readers. However, several things stand out that are worth briefly discussing.

Even if the Ratibor records in Silius Radicum themselves are unique, some of the data was previously known to me from similar documents in which the same data was recorded. For example, three of the paterfamilias Jacob Nathan Bruck’s oldest daughters were married, respectively, in 1814 (Wilhelmine Bruck), 1817 (Dorothea Babette Bruck), and 1822 (Fanny Bruck). I previously discovered this information on LDS Family History Center Microfilm 1184449 where a register documenting their marriages and family relationships was found. (Figures 7-8) On the typed Jewish Records Indexing-Poland database, much of the same information is recorded, presumably copied from the Mormon Church’s films. (Figure 9)

Figure 7. Page from LDS FHC Microfilm 1184449 showing that two of Jacob Nathan Bruck’s daughters got married, Wilhelmine on the 7th of March 1814 and Dorothea Babette Bruck on the 25th of February 1817

Figure 8. Another register page from LDS FHC Microfilm 1184449 showing that another of Jacob Nathan Bruck’s daughters, Fanny, got married on the 26th of November 1822

Figure 9. Page from the Jewish Records Indexing-Poland database listing the marriages of Jacob Nathan Bruck’s three eldest daughters

In Silius Radicum I discovered register pages for the same three marriages, with family relationships similarly noted. (Figures 10-11) However, the handwriting is noticeably different and the registers dissimilar in appearance, meaning the information was recorded in duplicate and likely stored separately. Clearly, the records that Silius Radicum digitized were never photographed by the Mormon Church. Obviously, this is noteworthy because it means the possibility exists that additional records for Jews from Ratibor and Upper Silesia may eventually materialize.

Figure 10. Register page from Signature Book 1699 listing the marriages of two of Jacob Nathan Bruck’s elder daughters, Wilhelmine in 1814, and Dorothea Babette Bruck in 1817, written in a different hand than the registers on FHC Microfilm 1184449

Figure 11. Another register page from Signature Book 1699 listing the marriage of Fanny Bruck in 1822, again written in a different hand

One of my ancestors from Ratibor through whom I’m related to most of my cousins in America because of his fecundity was the brewer Markus Braun (1817-1870). On LDS Family History Center Microfilm 1184449, the birth register shows he had twelve children with his first wife, Caroline Spiegel, then another two with his second wife, Johanna Goldstein, the last of whom was born after he died and named after him. Signature Book 1693, while only covering the years 1851 through 1855, includes copies of the actual birth certificates for several of Markus’ children with his first wife. In Signature Book 1700, I learned that Markus and Caroline were married on the 25th of August 1846 (Figure 12), and discovered they had a daughter named Sara, the first of 13 rather than only 12 children, on the 28th of October 1846 (Figure 13), shortly after they wed.

Figure 12. Register page from Signature Book 1700 indicating that Markus Braun and his first wife got married on the 25th of August 1846

Figure 13. Another register page from Signature Book 1700 showing that Markus Braun and Caroline Spiegel gave birth to their first child Sara on the 28th of October 1846, several months after they married

Again, the dates of birth of most of Markus’ children was previously known to me from Microfilm 1184449. What is new based on the Signature Books from Ratibor are the actual birth certificates for several of Markus and Caroline’s children and the discovery of a 13^th child with his first wife. This again proves that the documents digitized by Silius Radicum were not previously photographed by the Mormon Church and likely have not been closely studied by people investigating their ancestors from Ratibor.

One of the most extensive records I discovered was a 14-page marriage folio in Signature Book 1695 which includes Ratibor marriages from only 1869 and 1870. This brief period happens to coincide with when Alma Braun (1851-1919) (Figure 14), one of Markus’ daughters, got married to Adolph Schück (1840-1916) (Figure 15) on the 1^st of September 1870, and is their marriage file. One of my German cousins translated and interpreted the document for me. Suffice it to say, the pages contain an astonishing amount of ancestral information, including the precise date Markus Braun died, the 4^th of February 1870, at the age of 52; clearly, he died some months before Alma got married. Additionally, had I not already known this information, the file would have allowed me to work out family relationships which are recorded in detail.

Figure 14. Markus and Caroline Braun’s daughter Alma (1851-1919)

Figure 15. Adolph Schück (1840-1916) whom Alma Braun married on the 1st of September 1870; Adolph was the co-owner of the Zuckerfabrik, sugar factory, in Woinowitz, outside of Ratibor

As I mentioned above, there is some overlap between the Jewish records for Ratibor available online through familysearch and the newer stash found in Silius Radicum. For example, all the offspring of Jacob Nathan Bruck’s three eldest daughters married, respectively, in 1814, 1817, and 1822, are found in both databases. By contrast, for my great-great-grandparents Samuel Bruck (1808-1863) (Figure 16) and Charlotte Marle (1809-1861) (Figure 17), the Silius Radicum records only include eight of their nine known children; the ninth one can only be found on LDS Microfilm 1184449.

Figure 16. My great-great-grandfather Samuel Bruck (1808-1863)

Figure 17. My great-great-grandmother, Charlotte Bruck, née Marle (1809-1861)

In closing, I admit that I do not know whether the Jewish and non-Jewish vital records the Upper Silesian Genealogical Society has digitized are widely known and/or used by ancestral researchers. I can only speak for myself and acknowledge that I was unaware of them. I hope for others who are in my situation that they may discover some hidden “gems” like I did.

POST 144: SPURIOUS AND AUTHENTIC HISTORIC DOCUMENTS RELATED TO MY GREAT-GREAT-GRANDFATHER, SAMUEL BRUCK (1808-1863)

Note: In this post, which I anticipate will be of limited interest to most readers, I examine primary source documents related to my great-great-grandfather Samuel Bruck (1808-1863) which shed light on his business activities and legacy. The fact that he owned one of the first hotels in Ratibor in Silesia [today: Racibórz, Poland] and had his hand in other commercial ventures made finding information about him easier than it would have been for a less prominent individual.

POST 11, POSTSCRIPT: RATIBOR & BRUCK’S “PRINZ VON PREUßEN” HOTEL

POST 11, POSTSCRIPT 2: RATIBOR & BRUCK’S “PRINZ VON PREUßEN” HOTEL

POST 60: 200 YEARS OF THE ROYAL EVANGELICAL HIGH SCHOOL IN RATIBOR & A CLUE TO THE BRUCK FAMILY

POST 132: FATE OF THE BRUCK’S “PRINZ VON PREUßEN“ FAMILY HOTEL IN RATIBOR (RACIBÓRZ): GEOPOLITICAL FACTORS

Thanks to the assistance of readers, friends, and distant relatives, over the last few months I’ve acquired primary source documents that shed light on the activities of a few of my earliest Bruck relatives from Silesia (Figure 1) when it was a part of Prussia before Germany became a unified state in 1871. Primary source documents including contemporary registers of vital events, such as births, marriages, and deaths; records certifying these occurrences; contemporary handbooks and address directories; and concurrent historical accounts or diaries, are my “gold standard” for verifying the age and context of ancestral events. While these records are not infallible, they come as close as possible to confirming the timing of vital events.

Figure 1. General map of Silesia when it was part of the state of Prussia

In this post, I will discuss some evidentiary materials that my dear friend Peter Albrecht von Preußen and others have unearthed related to my great-great-grandfather Samuel Bruck (1808-1863). (Figure 2) Samuel is thought to be the original owner of the family establishment in Ratibor, Prussia [today: Racibórz, Poland], the Bruck’s “Prinz von Preußen” Hotel (Figure 3), believed to have been purchased in around 1850. However, a recently uncovered memoir penned by Eberhard Friedrich Bruck (1877-1960), one of Samuel’s grandnephews, currently being translated by his granddaughter, Helen Winter née Renshaw (b. 1948), now suggests Samuel’s father, Jacob Bruck (1770-1836), may originally have conceived the idea of building the hotel. As we speak, I am trying to run to ground other primary source documents that can not only confirm which Bruck ancestor first owned the hotel but possibly when the hotel might have been constructed.

Figure 3. Bruck’s “Prinz von Preußen” Hotel

Before launching into the documents that Peter Albrecht (Figure 4) and others have found and what I learned about Samuel, I would like to share with readers something I discovered in the process. I mistakenly believed that because the Bruck’s Hotel was in Ratibor, relevant archival materials would be restricted to the “Archiwum Państwowe w Katowicach Oddział w Raciborzu,” that’s to say the “State Archives in Katowice Branch in Racibórz.” Such is not the case. While I’ve assuredly found records about the Bruck’s Hotel in Racibórz’s archives, thanks to one of my readers I recently learned about and obtained archival materials related to the hotel from the State Archives in Wrocław, Branch in Kamieniec Ząbkowicki [formerly Kamenz, Prussia]. These latter materials will be the subject of a future post as they speak to the subject of the last days of my family’s ownership of the hotel in 1926-1927. My point to readers is that even if your family originates from one specific town in Silesia, you should keep an open mind as to which archives you search for ancestral information.

Figure 4. My good friend Peter Albrecht von Preußen

Because Peter’s surname is contained within the name of the former family establishment in Ratibor, Bruck’s Hotel “Prinz von Preußen,” and the fact that both of our families have deep ties to Silesia, caused Peter to take an interest in finding Bruck-related documents. Among other things, his discoveries shed light on my great-great-grandfather Samuel Bruck’s business activities.

Materials uncovered about Samuel Bruck provide a cautionary tale of the lens through which primary source documents should be examined. Just because historical files are related to an individual with the same name as one’s ancestor does not guarantee they are relevant, particularly if the surname is reasonably common in a geographic area.

In the online extracts of files archived at the Archiwum Państwowe w Opolu, State Archives in Opole [formerly Oppeln, Prussia], Peter found the following two files related to a Samuel Bruck from the former Prussian town of Zülz [today: Biała, informally Biała Prudnicka, Poland]:

“Die letzwillige Bestimmung des Breltesten und Handelsmannes Samuel Bruck Zülz: 1820-1835” (Figure 5)

(“The last will and testament of the brethren and merchant Samuel Bruck Zülz: 1820-1835”)

“Die gerichtliche Annahme und Niederlegung das von dem Kaufmann Samuel Bruck am 13 Januar 1832 verschlossen übergebene Testaments: 1832-1839” (Figure 6)

(“The judicial acceptance and filing of the will handed over by the merchant Samuel Bruck on 13 January 1832 in sealed form: 1832-1839”)

Figure 5. Index in the State Archives in Opolo to the file containing “The last will and testament of the brethren and merchant Samuel Bruck Zülz: 1820-1835”

Figure 6. Index in the State Archives in Opolo to the file containing “The judicial acceptance and filing of the will handed over by the merchant Samuel Bruck on 13 January 1832 in sealed form: 1832-1839”

Though the wills relate to a Samuel Bruck who filed testaments in the town of Zülz [today: Biała, informally Biała Prudnicka, Poland], this alone was not enough to convince me they related to someone other than my ancestor. As I just mentioned, I’ve found documents on the Bruck’s Hotel in Ratibor in archives other than Racibórz. For geographic reference, Opole is roughly 26 miles north-northeast of Biała. (Figure 7)

Figure 7. Map showing the distance between Biała (German: Zülz) and Opole (German: Oppeln)

Let me briefly digress. Readers cannot fail to notice that the two wills filed with the court in Zülz date from when Samuel Bruck, born in 1808, would respectively have been only 12 and 24 years of age. However unlikely writing wills at such a young age might appear to us, I try and imagine how different things might have been almost 200 years ago. I considered the possibility that Samuel had been extremely precocious and might have felt obligated to write a will as improbable as this seems.

Persuaded both files might relate to my ancestor, I ordered them. (Figures 8-9) Upon their arrival, I asked my fourth cousin Thomas Koch if he could help me make sense of the 39 pages of records I’d been sent; Thomas is the great-great-grandnephew of Samuel Bruck, thus he has an interest in the Bruck’s Hotel and Samuel Bruck.

Figure 8. Cover page of the 1820 file for the merchant Samuel Bruck from Zülz

Figure 9. Cover page of the 1832 file for the merchant Samuel Bruck from Zülz

There were some immediate clues the wills from Zülz related to someone other than my Samuel Bruck. The Samuel Bruck in question was apparently the owner of a local pawnshop and an ironmonger (i.e., a dealer in iron and hardware), as well as a money lender, trades I’ve never heard associated with the Samuel Bruck from Ratibor. The Zülz wills also refer to Samuel as a parish or community elder, terms unlikely to have been applied to a 12 or 24-year old person. For the most part, the files document what court officials said, the actions of Samuel Bruck, and the fees to be paid by Samuel. Something notably absent that would affirmatively have allowed me to determine the testator are named heirs, none of whom are identified.

Convinced the Samuel Bruck from Zülz, though likely related to my Bruck family from Ratibor (Biała and Racibórz are only about 38 miles apart (Figure 10)) in some unknown way, was not the former owner of the Bruck’s Hotel, I investigated other possibilities. I examined the Church of Latter-Day Saints Family Historic Center Microfilm 1271493 for Zülz, and discovered a Samuel Bruck born there on the 10th of September 1761. (Figure 11) It seems likely this Samuel Bruck is the person whose 1820 and 1832 wills were filed locally.

Figure 10. Map showing the distance between Biała (German: Zülz) to Racibórz (German: Ratibor)

Figure 11. Record from LDS Family Historic Center Microfilm 1271493 for Zülz listing a Samuel Bruck born there on the 10th of September 1761

One document, however, that unequivocally relates to the Samuel Bruck from Zülz is a notice about a bankruptcy auction that took place on the 23^rd of June 1837 in Zülz (Figures 12a-b), presumably following this Samuel Bruck’s death in 1836 or 1837. The reason for this certainty is that this Samuel Bruck is identified in the notice as a “Eisenhändlert,” an iron trader, just as his wills identify him. According to Peter, while it is unusual for the estate of a deceased person to wind up in bankruptcy, this is possible when there are no heirs and/or no will. We know two testaments existed, so likely there were no heirs.

Figure 12a. Bankruptcy auction notice for the estate of the iron trader Samuel Bruck placed in a newspaper from Zülz dated the 23rd of June 1837

Figure 12b. Transcribed bankruptcy auction notice for Samuel Bruck identifying him as a “Eisenhändlert,” an iron trader

There is another document in my possession that should have clued me in to the fact that Samuel Bruck from Zülz was not my great-great-grandfather. In connection with his research, my retired lawyer friend from Racibórz, Paul Newerla, who has written extensively about Ratibor and Silesia found a historic publication from 1820 about the grand opening of the Royal Evangelical High School in Ratibor on the 2^nd of June 1819. (Figures 13a-c) It lists the names of the enrolled students, including both Samuel Bruck and his younger brother, Jonas Bruck (1813-1883). It is more reasonable to surmise that at the age of 11, Samuel Bruck would have been in school in Ratibor rather than writing wills.

Figure 13a. Cover of 1820 publication about the grand opening of the Royal Evangelical High School in Ratibor on the 2nd of June 1819

Figure 13b. Inside cover of 1820 publication about the grand opening of the Royal Evangelical High School in Ratibor on the 2nd of June 1819

Figure 13c. Page 70 of the 1820 publication listing the names of enrolled students, including Samuel Bruck and Jonas Bruck who attended the inaugural class at the Royal Evangelical High School in Ratibor on the 2nd of June 1819

Samuel Bruck is listed in an 1843 merchant member book, entitled “Grosses Adressbuch der Kaufleute, Fabrikanten und handelnden Gewerbsleute von Europa und der hauptplazen der fremden Weltheile: Brandenburg, Preussen, Posen, Pommern, Schlesien,” “Large address book of the merchants, manufacturers, and trading professionals from Europe and the main square of the foreign world salvation: Brandenburg, Prussia, Posen, Pomerania, Silesia.” (Figures 14a-b) Interestingly, 1843 corresponds with the year that a city map of Ratibor shows the location where the Bruck’s Hotel once stood having a building on the lot. (Paul Newerla, personal communication) Samuel Bruck’s listing in the 1843 merchant member guide, however, may or may not have anything to do with his ownership of the Hotel “Prinz von Preußen” at this time. Samuel is known to have been involved in other businesses.

Figure 14a. Cover of 1843 merchant guide, entitled “Grosses Adressbuch der Kaufleute, Fabrikanten und handelnden Gewerbsleute von Europa und der hauptplazen der fremden Weltheile: Brandenburg, Preussen, Posen, Pommern, Schlesien,” listing Samuel Bruck from Ratibor

Figure 14b. Page from 1843 merchant guide listing Samuel Bruck from Ratibor

As a related aside, Ratibor was once a walled city. It was not until 1828 that the Oder gate, the tower nearest where the Bruck’s Hotel was eventually built, was demolished; the removal of this gate made it possible to extend Oderstraße, the street on which the Bruck’s Hotel stood (Paul Newerla, personal communication). It’s safe to assume that it was only after 1828 that the Hotel “Prinz von Preußen” Hotel could have been built.

As readers can generally make out from the photo of the hotel (see Figure 3), it was a reasonably large building known to have had 32 guest rooms. How long the hotel took to build, who paid for the construction, and the date of the grand opening are yet unknown. Whether I will be able to work out the answers to these questions is a big unknown.

The famous Austrian composer, Johann Strauss II, is known to have performed twice at the Hotel “Prinz von Preußen” once on the 17^th of October 1850, then again, a month later, on the 17^th of November 1850. Neither advertisement makes mention of the “Bruck’s Hotel,” only “Prinz von Preußen.” Possibly at the time Samuel Bruck did not yet own the hotel.

By the middle of 1852, Samuel Bruck assuredly owned the establishment because he signed a contract on the 14^th of October 1852 permitting the so-called Liedertafel to hold meetings in the hotel’s ballroom beginning in January 1853. (Figures 15a-c) Page 20 (Figure 15c) mentions the “Hotelbesitzer Bruck,” that’s to say, the hotel owner Bruck. This citation occurs in a 1909 publication, entitled “Festschrift zum 75 jährigen Jubelfest der Liedertafel,” “The commemorative publication for the 75th anniversary of the Liedertafel,” in Ratibor. It was released on the 25^th and 26^th of September 1909 in conjunction with the unveiling of the Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorf monument in Ratibor. (Figure 15d)

Figure 15a. Page 20 of book about the Liedertafel mentioning the Bruck’s Hotel

Figure 15b. Page 21 of book about the Liedertafel mentioning the Bruck’s Hotel

Figure 15c. Page 20 of Liedertafel book with Bruck’s Hotel citation circled

Figure 15d. Cover page of the book marking the 75th anniversary of the “Liedertafel” in Ratibor, released in conjunction with the unveiling of the Eichendorff monument

The Liedertafel translates literally to “song board.” It was a co-ed musical society or amateur choir, which in the case of the Ratibor group consisted of about 88 members. They met in the large ballroom of the Bruck’s Hotel every Thursday and Friday evening for an à la carte dinner with plenty of alcohol, followed by a sing-along to music played by a pianist, often accompanied by a bassist, cellist, and violinist. Their contract with the hotel suggests Samuel Bruck was a well-regarded and integrated member of the community.

Another mundane document tracked down by Peter Albrecht shows that Samuel Bruck was allowed to operate as an inn keeper by the police after obtaining fire insurance for the hotel through a company in Stettin [today Szczecin, Poland] called “Pommerania.” (Figure 16) Although the announcement published in Oppeln, Prussia [today: Opole, Poland] on the 4^th of March 1856 makes no specific mention of fire insurance, to secure police permission to operate the inn, it is implicit that fire insurance was obtained.

Figure 16. March 4, 1856, announcement in Oppeln paper proving Samuel Bruck had obtained police approval to operate his inn after obtaining insurance from a company called “Pommerania,” located in Stettin [today: Szczecin, Poland]

An advertisement Samuel Bruck posted in April 1858 indicates that he was involved in more than running an inn and being a lumber wholesaler. According to this ad he also sold lump lime (Figure 17):

Figure 17. April 1858 advertisement by Samuel Bruck offering lump lime for sale from his lime kiln in Moerau [German: Mohrau; Polish: Morów]

Transcribed:

Kalk-Anzeige

Von meinem in Moerau gelegenen Kalkoefen verkaufe ich besten Stueckkalk, den Waggon von 33 Tonnen mit 27 Rthlr. (Reichstahler) frei hier. Gefaellige Auftraege werden prompt und bestens ausgefuehrt.

Ratibor, im April 1858

S. Bruck

im Hotel “ Prinz von Preußen”

Translated:

Lime Ad

From my lime kiln located in Moerau I am selling the best lump lime, the wagon of 33 tons with 27 Rthlr. (Reichstahler) free here. Appropriate orders are executed promptly and in the best possible way.

Ratibor, April 1858

S. Bruck

in the hotel “Prince of Prussia”

Let me offer a few comments about this ad. The spelling of many place names in Prussia changed between 1890 and 1900, so “Moerau” became known as “Mohrau,” (Figure 18) and is now known as Morów, Poland. It is about 57 miles northwest of Racibórz. (Figure 19)

Figure 18. Old map from Meyers Gazetteer showing location of Mohrau, Prussia

Figure 19. Map showing the distance between Racibórz and Morów

From 1855 onwards, a Prussian ton was equivalent to 200 kilos or almost 441 pounds. Thirty-three Prussian tons was equivalent to 6,600 kilos, 6.6 metric tons, or 14,551 pounds. Presumably this was the maximum weight an ox cart could handle.

Samuel Bruck passed away in July 1863. In June 1864, an official notice was placed in the Ratibor paper stating that Samuel Bruck’s handelsgesellschaft, holding company, which had been inherited by Samuel’s seven children, was ceded by the co-heirs to Samuel’s oldest child, Oskar Bruck, making him the sole owner of the S. Bruck Handelsgesellschaft. (Figure 20)

Figure 20. June 2, 1864 notice from Ratibor paper announcing Samuel Bruck’s “handelsgesellschaft,” holding company, which had been inherited by Samuel’s seven children, was ceded by the co-heirs to Samuel’s oldest child, Oskar Bruck

Transcription:

Bekanntmachung

Bei der sub Nr. 69 unseres Firmen-Register fūr den Kaufmann Samuel Bruck eingetragen Firma S. Bruck ist zufolge Verfügung vom 2ten Juni 1864 der Vermerk:

Die Firma ist durch Erbgang auf die Geschwister Oskar, Fedor, Jenny, Emilie, Julius, Helene und Wilhelm Bruck übergangen und die Miterben haben dieselbe dem Kaufmann Oskar Bruck abgetreten, und sub Nr. 189 unseres Firmen-Registers der Kaufmann Oskar Bruck hierselbst als Inhaber der hiesigen Firma S. Bruck zufolge Verfügung von dem selben Tage eingetragen worden.

Ratibor, den 2. Juni 1864

Königliches Kreisgericht, 1. Abtheilung

Translation:

Announcement

According to the decree of June 2, 1864, the company S. Bruck, registered under No. 69 of our register of companies for the merchant Samuel Bruck, is marked:

The company has passed by inheritance to the siblings Oskar, Fedor, Jenny, Emilie, Julius, Helene and Wilhelm Bruck and the co-heirs have ceded the same to the merchant Oskar Bruck, and sub No. 189 of our company register the merchant Oskar Bruck has been registered here as the owner of the local company S. Bruck according to the decree of the same day.

Ratibor, June 2, 1864

Royal District Court, 1st Department

We learn a few unexciting things from this announcement. First, Oskar Bruck was a kaufmann, a merchant, which would have required a four-year apprenticeship. Had I not already known the names of Samuel’s children, this announcement would have provided this information. Samuel Bruck’s Handelsgesellschaft was registered as Number 69 in the District Court, while Oskar Bruck’s Handelsgesellschaft is registered as Number 189. As we speak, I’m trying to determine whether these files still exist in the Racibórz archives.

The final document related to Samuel Bruck involves a landmark Prussian case that his eldest son Oskar Bruck got involved in following his father’s death. The case is discussed at length in a book on Prussian case law published in 1867, entitled “Central-Organ fur die deutsche handels- und Wechselrecht,” “Central Organ for German Commercial and Exchange Law.” (Figure 21)

Figure 21. Cover of Prussian case law book published in 1867, entitled “Central-Organ fur die deutsche handels- und Wechselrecht,” “Central Organ for German Commercial and Exchange Law,” providing a detailed description of the landmark case involving Samuel and Oskar Bruck’s estate

While the following will be of limited interest to most readers, let me briefly outline and summarize the salient points of this very involved case for readers.

In addition to being an inn owner, Samuel Bruck was a lumber wholesaler, and may have made his money here which enabled him to construct and/or purchase the Bruck’s Hotel. Shortly before his death in 1863, Samuel entered into a contract with a Dutch merchant, David Schwedter, agreeing to sell him 260 pieces of 4” x 4” structural lumber, possibly the equivalent of four ox carts of finished product. The Dutchman lived in the vicinity of Berlin, and had requested Samuel deliver the milled lumber there, which he’d agreed to.

Following Samuel’s death, Oskar Bruck acted on an interim basis on behalf of the the S. Bruck Handelsgesselchaft, which the probate court only officially granted him authority to do in his own name on the 2nd of June 1864 (see Figure 20). Regardless, following his father’s death, he notified Schwedter by mail that the transaction would go forward as planned and that he would run the S. Bruck Handelsgesselchaft.

Either Samuel before his death or Oskar contracted with an agent named Atzpodim who had a warehouse in Brieskow (Figure 22), near Frankfurt an der Oder. Schwedter had agree that Atzpodim would be the pickup point for the lumber. Oskar Bruck shipped the lumber to Atzpodim who acknowledged receipt of the materials. Oskar then notified Schwedter the lumber was ready for pickup at Atzpodim’s warehouse, and invoiced him, as agreed upon.

Figure 22. Old map from Meyers Gazetteer showing location of Brieskow, near Frankfurt an der Oder

Schwedter then mailed a letter to Oskar requesting him to instruct Atzpodim to transport the lumber to J.J. Stramer’s warehouse located in Stralow [today: Stralau in the Friedrichshain district of Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg in Berlin, Germany]. (Figure 23) The distance between the two towns is about 64 miles. (Figure 24)

Figure 23. Old map from Meyers Gazetteer showing location of Stralow [today: Stralau]

Figure 24. Map showing the distance between Brieskow and Stralau

Three or four days later, Schwedter filed for bankruptcy. Atzpodim had not yet shipped the lumber to Stramer for reasons that are not entirely clear, although possibly Atzpodim through word-of-mouth had learned of Schwedter’s financial woes and sought to protect the young Oskar Bruck. I surmise Atzpodim had been one of Samuel’s trusted business associates over the years.

At this point, the trustee for the Bankruptcy Court in Frankfurt an der Oder sued Atzpodim for release of the lumber. Had the lumber already been delivered, the Bankruptcy Court would have carried it on their books and could then have sold it at a bankruptcy auction; Oskar, as creditor, would have been paid pennies on the dollar. Atzpodim, by not delivering the lumber to Stramer, saved Oskar from a steep financial loss.

Prussian law dealt with merchandise in bankruptcy proceedings where the debtor had taken possession of the merchandise three days or less before the debtor filed for bankruptcy and had paid not in cash but with credit.

In the case at hand, Atzpodim didn’t receive instructions from Oskar Bruck until the 26th of November 1863. Schwedter filed for bankruptcy on the 30th of November 1863. The Supreme Court in Berlin upheld the lower court’s ruling that the lumber shipment fell under the 3-day rule. If the lumber had been delivered to Schwedter, which it obviously wasn’t, he would have been required to return it because he hadn’t paid in cash but by credit, with a so-called Wechsel.

Let me say a few brief words about a Wechsel. According to German law, even today, transactions based on Wechsels can only be transacted by full merchants, meaning those who have completed a 4-year apprenticeship and received a kaufmann’s certificate. Upon certification, the kaufmann is registered either as a sole proprietor or as a Handelsgesellschaft, a trading company, like those Samuel and Oskar Bruck had recorded, in the Handelsregister, commercial register, of the city where the business is licensed.

The Wechsel allows the parties to do several things. It can be used as collateral for a bank loan. It can also be used as a futures contract; thus, with a Wechsel in hand, Schwedter could have sold the lumber at a higher price for a profit. Similarly, Samuel or Oskar could have sold his obligation to produce the lumber to a different sawmill (other than the one they originally contracted with) or another lumber merchant for a profit.

In closing, let me say a few things. The specifics of the information contained in some of the primary source documents cited above are less important than the fact they still exist. For researchers seeking comparable information about their ancestors who may have owned or operated businesses, an awareness that such documents may still exist can be useful. Often, it’s a question of knowing where to look and what to ask for. On a personal level, the fact that my family was involved in a legal case that was deemed of sufficient importance to merit inclusion in a book about Prussian commercial and trade law is fascinating.

Cobbling together one’s family history invites a clichéd comparison to the saying that “Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

POST 141: ZBIGNIEW LEWANDOWSKI, POLISH FORCED LABORER IN AN UNDERGROUND NAZI INTERNMENT CAMP

Note: Inspired by a reader, in this post I investigate the location of a Polish forced labor camp situated near Kamenz, Germany [today: Kamieniec Ząbkowicki, Poland], a place I’ve discussed in several earlier posts. Determining its location caused me to examine the purpose of the various networks of underground caves and subterranean structures the Nazis constructed in the latter stages of WWII in the mountainous regions of Germany, Austria, and Poland.

POST 114, POSTSCRIPT—EDWARD HANS LINDENBERGER, A DISTANT COUSIN: DID HE SURVIVE BUCHENWALD?—HIS FATE UNCOVERED

POST 135: PICTORIAL ESSAY OF THE VON PREUßEN CASTLE IN KAMENZ, GERMANY [TODAY: KAMIENIEC ZĄBKOWICKI, POLAND]

A gentleman, Mr. Wayne Lewan, from New South Wales, Australia recently contacted me through my blog regarding his father, Zbigniew Lewandowski. Wayne’s surname is obviously a truncated version of his ancestors’ family name. He happened upon several recent blog posts I wrote about Castle Kamenz [today: Kamieniec Ząbkowicki, Poland] that my friend Peter Albrecht von Preußen’s family owned through several generations.

Wayne sent me two pages (Figures 1a-b) documenting that his father had indeed been a forced laborer in Kamenz in Silesia near Breslau [today: Wrocław, Poland] between 1944-1945, when Silesia was part of Germany. I found these and other pages, including Zbigniew Lewandowski’s photograph (Figure 2) on his 1948 “Application for Assistance” requesting help to immigrate to Australia, in the online Arolsen Archives database. This database has the largest collection of information on Nazi victims, including documents on concentration camps, forced labor and displaced persons.

Figure 1a. Page 1 of “Application for Assistance” form completed by Zbigniew Lewandowski on the 17th of December 1948 requesting help to immigrate to Australia; form shows he was interned in “Kamenz, Schles. (Silesia), near Breslau” between July 1944 and January 1945

Figure 1b. Page 2 of “Application for Assistance” form completed by Zbigniew Lewandowski on the 17th of December 1948 requesting help to immigrate to Australia

Figure 2. Photo of Zbigniew Lewandowski attached to his 1948 “Application for Assistance” form showing he was born on the 1st of March 1926 in Mława, Poland

According to Wayne, his father was picked up by the Nazis in a street roundup in Warsaw on the 17^th of July 1944. Given the timing of his arrest, it is likely that Zbigniew was arrested during the Warsaw Uprising, the World War II operation by the Polish underground resistance to liberate Warsaw from German occupation. It occurred in the summer of 1944, and it was led by the Polish resistance Home Army. Following Zbigniew’s arrest, he was held in Kamenz between July 1944 and January 1945, then moved to Mühldorf, a subcamp of the Dachau concentration camp located near Mühldorf in Bavaria, where he was liberated in May 1945.

Aware that present-day Kamieniec Ząbkowicki, Poland, located in the Lower Silesian Voivodeship (i.e., an “administrative district”) of south-western Poland, has a population of only about 4,200 people today and is a small community, I became curious as to where exactly in Kamenz the internment camp might have been located.

For geographic reference, Kamieniec Ząbkowicki is approximately 80 miles northwest of Racibórz (Figure 3), where my father was born, and roughly 50 miles south of Wrocław, Poland [formerly: Breslau, Germany]. (Figure 4) Wrocław is a city in southwestern Poland and the largest city in the historical region of Silesia. Kamieniec Ząbkowicki is an important railroad junction, located on the main line which links Wrocław with Kłodzko [Glatz, Germany] and Prague.

Figure 3. Map showing distance from Kamieniec Ząbkowicki to Racibórz

Figure 4. Map showing distance from Kamieniec Ząbkowicki to Wrocław

The reason the location of a forced laborer camp in Kamenz is so fascinating is that in the numerous discussions I’ve had with Peter Albrecht von Preußen the existence of such a purported camp has never previously come up. And, in fact, the document Wayne Lewan sent me merely indicated his father had been interned in “Kamenz, Schles., near Breslau,” (see Figure 1a) making no allusion to Castle Kamenz proper. Still, while my online research yielded no mention of any forced laborer camp near Kamenz in Silesia, I confusingly discovered there had been a concentration camp in another town by the same name located in Saxony; the latter was a subcamp of the Gross-Rosen concentration camp.

I began to wonder whether an internment camp might have existed underground near Castle Kamenz. While researching this possibility, I learned that the Nazis had begun a secret construction project in the Owl Mountains [Polish: Góry Sowie; German: Eulengebirge] beneath Książ Castle, located only about 43 miles northwest of Castle Kamenz. Książ Castle is a castle in northern Wałbrzych (Figure 5) in Lower Silesian Voivodeship, Poland, and the largest castle in Silesia. It stood to reason that if the Nazis had begun fabrication of massive underground bases beneath a nearby castle in Silesia, they might have done the same beneath Castle Kamenz. Nonetheless, Peter Albrecht confirmed that a similar assembly project had never been built under Castle Kamenz.

Figure 5. Map showing distance from Kamieniec Ząbkowicki to Wałbrzych near where Książ Castle is situated

The project underneath Książ Castle was code named “Project Riese” and involved the construction between 1943 and 1945 of seven massive underground bases. The purpose of this vast subterranean network project remains uncertain. Some sources suggest that all the structures were part of the Führer Headquarters; according to others, it was a combination of headquarters (HQ) and arms industry, with Książ Castle intended as an HQ or other official residence, and the tunnels in the Owl Mountains planned as a network of underground factories. The tunnels were never finished though thousands of prisoners of war, forced laborers, and concentration camp inmates worked and died during the construction work.

In any event, the revelation of underground bases the Nazis excavated or natural caves or old mines they expanded upon has opened a plethora of topics I’ve either never previously discussed or only touched upon. They relate to the final phase of WWII when their development was widespread throughout the mountainous areas of Germany, Austria, and Poland and widely involved the use of forced laborers, prisoners of war, and concentration camps inmates. Because they often lack documentary evidence, they invite endless speculation as to their true function. I will briefly explore some of these issues.

Let me begin by discussing what I learned from Peter Albrecht as to the presumed location of the forced labor camp in Kamenz vis a vis Castle Kamenz. Some of Peter’s information comes from an informant named Stefan Gnaczy who started the local historical society and the small museum in Kamieniec Ząbkowicki; regrettably, Stefan passed away in 2019, though his son Matthew Gnaczy continues to be involved with the historical society and museum.

Before relating what Peter has learned about the forced labor camp near Castle Kamenz let me review some of what I presented to readers in Post 135 for context. Peter’s great-great-grandfather Friedrich Wilhelm Nikolaus Albrecht von Preußen (1837-1906) was gifted Castle Kamenz by his mother upon his marriage to Princess Marie of Saxe-Altenburg (1854-1898) in 1873. Shortly thereafter he started to build a large steam boiler house (Figure 6); the source of heat for a boiler is typically combustion of any of several fuels, such as wood, coal, oil, or natural gas. It’s unknown to me which of these fuels was used to create the steam, though underground pipes running through a tunnel connecting the boiler house to the castle are known to have carried the steam between the two.

Figure 6. The steam boiler house as it looks today; one of the towers of the castle can be seen in the background through the trees

Upon Nikolaus’ death in 1906, Castle Kamenz was inherited by his eldest son, Friedrich Heinrich von Preußen (1874-1940), mentioned in several earlier posts. Beginning around this time, he converted approximately 50 rooms into apartments and outfitted them with baths, telephones, radios, and electricity. By then, the boiler house had an electric generator and the tunnels now carried not only steam but electricity. The significance of this will soon become clearer.

Prior to Friedrich Heinrich’s death in 1940, he sold Castle Kamenz to his second cousin, Waldemar von Preußen (1889-1945), who owned the castle throughout WWII.

According to what Peter has learned from local residents of Kamieniec Ząbkowicki as well as the historical society, there is a tunnel/cave system running below the town that is at least six miles long, perhaps longer depending on who you believe. Purportedly, the system was developed hundreds of years earlier for unknown reasons by monks from the former Kamieniec Abbey, which still stands but was secularized in 1810. The caves and tunnels thus predate Castle Kamenz which was constructed between about 1838 and 1872.

Part of this web of tunnels and caves may have included the adits of the former gold and arsenic mine located in Złoty Stok [German: Reichenstein, Germany] mined in the Middle Ages, located a mere 6.1 miles south of Kamieniec Ząbkowicki. (Figure 7)

Figure 7. Map showing distance from Kamieniec Ząbkowicki to Złoty Stok [German: Reichenstein, Germany] where gold and arsenic mining took place during the Middle Ages

Peter was able to discover there was indeed a forced work camp near Kamieniec Ząbkowicki at a place formerly call Reichenau, Germany [today: Topola, Poland], located 3.6 miles southeast of the castle. (Figures 8a-b) Topola is a village in the administrative district of Kamieniec Ząbkowicki.

Figure 8a. Old map showing the relative location of Kamenz [today: Kamieniec Ząbkowicki, Poland] formerly called “Camenz” and Reichenau [today: Topola, Poland]

Figure 8b. May showing the distance from the Kamieniec Ząbkowicki Palace to Topola

The source of the information on Topola is a report prepared by the Lux Veritatis Foundation, based in Warsaw, called “The Compilation of Places of Crimes Committed against the Civilian Population by the Nazi Occupant on the Polish Territories in Years 1939–1945.” According to Volume 3 of this compilation entitled “The Report on the Losses Sustained by Poland as a Result of German Aggression and Occupation During the Second World War, 1939–1945” (Figure 9) which includes a “List of Atrocity Sites,” 82 Polish citizens, including Poles, Jews, and Romanis, were murdered in Topola during its existence, likely from the extremely harsh and tortuous working conditions. (Figure 10)

Figure 9. Cover of the unpublished report by the Lux Veritatis Foundation entitled “The Report on the Losses Sustained by Poland as a Result of German Aggression and Occupation During the Second World War, 1939–1945: List of Atrocity Sites”

Figure 10. Pages 10-11 of “The Report on the Losses Sustained by Poland as a Result of German Aggression and Occupation During the Second World War, 1939–1945: List of Atrocity Sites” with Topola circled

The Lux Veritatis’ “List of Atrocity Sites” was compiled based on the work of the Central Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes Committed in Poland. According to the report, “Each volume contains the records of Nazi German atrocities committed in a particular voivodeship (according to the territorial administrative division of Poland in the 1970s), and presents the facts and figures as known to Polish scholars in the 1980s and up to the early 1990s. This series of volumes does not include data on Nazi German concentration and death camps, POW camps, or atrocity sites on territories now beyond the borders of Poland.”

The report further states the following as to the vast scale Nazi Germany’s efforts to exterminate the people of Poland: “Polish citizens were killed in individual incidents of murder, in mass executions by firing squad, during raids to ‘pacify’ whole villages, butchered while held in German prisons, hanged on the gallows in public executions, or slaughtered in barbaric atrocities of miscellaneous other types. Victims included women and children as well as persons with no connection at all with the circumstances triggering an atrocity, who just had the bad luck to be there when the killing started. The German authorities occupying Poland pursued a policy of collective accountability and executed ‘hostages’.”

Given Topola’s proximity to Castle Kamenz and the estimated extent of the nearby tunnel/cave system beneath Kamieniec Ząbkowicki, Peter knows the Nazis tapped into the electric grid and also siphoned off steam from the castle’s electric generator and boiler house to power whatever activities they were clandestinely pursuing. Naturally, this left the castle with limited electricity and steam.

The boiler house tunnel system is currently undergoing restoration, and Peter sent several photos of the ongoing work. (Figures 11a-f) Clearly, the tunnel system once connected to the larger web of subterranean tunnels and caves that were part of the Topola network, though the photos confirm the juncture was sealed off. Apparently, this was done in 1947 by Poland’s Communist government in a covert operation.

Figure 11a. Inside of restored tunnel connecting the Castle Kamenz to the boiler house

Figure 11b. Inside of restored tunnel connecting the Castle Kamenz to the boiler house

Figure 11c. Inside of restored tunnel connecting the Castle Kamenz to the boiler house

Figure 11d. Inside of restored tunnel connecting the Castle Kamenz to the boiler house

Figure 11e. Inside of restored tunnel connecting the Castle Kamenz to the boiler house

Figure 11f. Inside of restored tunnel connecting the Castle Kamenz to the boiler house

Peter emphasizes, however, that in the time that his ancestor Prince Waldemar owned the castle during WWII no forced laborers were used in the operation of Castle Kamenz’s operations nor were any interned in the boiler house tunnel system since the latter is too narrow.

The absence of documentary materials about Reichenau and, more generally, the question on what purpose the various secretive Nazi bunkers and subterranean bases served, invites further examination and speculation.

According to Peter’s informant, the forced laborers that lived and worked in the underground bunker or cave in Topola (Reichenau) may have been gulaged by the infamous Organization Todt (OT). This organization was a civil and military engineering group in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945, named for its founder, Fritz Todt, an engineer, and senior member of the Nazi Party. Incidentally, Todt was responsible for the construction of the German autobahns.

OT had oversight for a huge number of engineering projects both in Nazi Germany and in occupied territories from France to the Soviet Union during WWII. The organization became notorious for using forced labor. From 1943 until 1945 during the late phase of the Third Reich, OT administered all constructions of concentration camps to supply forced labor to industry.

Todt was killed in February 1942 near Rastenburg when his aircraft crashed shortly after take-off. He was succeeded as Reichsminister and head of the OT by Albert Speer. This coincided with the absorption of the organization into the renamed and expanded Reich Ministry of Armaments and War Production. Approximately 1.4 million laborers were in the service of the organization. About one percent were Germans excused from military service, another 1.5 percent were concentration camp inmates, and the remainder were prisoners of war and forced laborers from occupied countries. Many of the laborers did not survive the arduous work which they were condemned to.

Suffice it to say, that according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website, “Between 1933 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its allies established more than 44,000 camps and other incarceration sites (including ghettos). The perpetrators used these locations for a range of purposes, including forced labor, detention of people deemed to be ‘enemies of the state,’ and mass murder.”

It is possible, and indeed likely, that if forced laborers were used for whatever activities were being undertaken in the tunnel and cave system at Topola, the OT might have brought the needed workers from concentration camp Gusen (Figure 12), located three miles from Mauthausen concentration camp, and 280 miles south-southwest of Kamieniec Ząbkowicki. Recall that Kamenz was a major railway hub to Breslau and Prague, the latter 153 miles directly north of Gusen.

Figure 12. Map showing general direction from Kamieniec Ząbkowicki via Prague to the Gusen concentration camp where forced laborers used at Topola may have come from

A possible clue as to what clandestine activities may have been going on beneath Topola is the presence of a high-ranking Nazi official named Hans Kammler who is reputed to have maintained a residence in Kamieniec Ząbkowicki after 1943. Hans Kammler was an SS-Obergruppenführer (translated as “senior group leader,” the highest commissioned SS rank after only Reichsführer-SS) responsible for Nazi civil engineering projects and its top V-weapons program. He oversaw the construction of various Nazi concentration camps before being put in charge of the V-2 rocket and Emergency Fighter Programs towards the end of WWII.

V-weapons formed part of the range of the so-called Wunderwaffen (superweapons, or “wonderweapons”) of Nazi Germany, and were intended to be used in a military campaign against Britain, although only the V-1 and V-2 were ever used against them. The V-2 and other German guided missiles and rockets were developed by the Peenemünde Army Research Center (German: Heeresversuchsanstalt Peenemünde, HVP).

Britain’s RAF successfully bombed the Nazi’s rocket production facilities at Peenemünde in August 1943 in Operation Crossbow. Following this successful raid, Albert Speer recommended transferring the V-2 rocket production underground. Hitler immediately agreed, and he and Speer decided that the SS, with its access to a massive supply of slave labor, was best suited to undertake this task.

As the SS construction chief, Hans Kammler was selected to oversee the project. The secret weapons projects for which Kammler was given responsibility included manufacturing both the Messerschmitt Me 262, the first operational jet fighter, and the V-2, which Kammler—in a construction effort of ruthless brutality and speed—had in production before the end of 1943.

The first below-ground project began at a huge fuel storage facility in the German state of Thuringia. By late August 1943, Kammler had a sizable detachment of concentration camp inmates from Buchenwald working at the new underground installation. There were so many slave laborers by the end of 1943 that the subcamp of Mittlebau-Dora was established. The latter supplied slave labor from many Eastern countries occupied by Germany (including evacuated survivors of eastern extermination camps), for extending the nearby tunnels in the Kohnstein and for manufacturing the V-2 rocket and the V-1 flying bomb. Gypsum mining in the hills in the Kohnstein had created tunnels that were ideally suited as a fuel/chemical depot and for Nazi Germany factories, including the V-2 rocket factory.

Regular readers may recall Post 114 and Post 114, Postscript where I discussed one of my distant cousins, Edward Hans Lindenberger, who was compelled to work in the underground tunnels near Buchenwald and Mittlebau-Dora and was never heard from again, no doubt a victim of the Nazis policy of working concentration camp inmates to death.

Assuming the accounts of Hans Kammler’s presence in Kamieniec Ząbkowicki after around 1943 are credible, given the responsibilities he was assigned by Hitler and Speer, it is reasonable to assume that he was engaged in preparing the caves around Topola to produce secret weapons. The mounting pressure on the Nazis from the Allies as the war proceeded suggests that most of the planned underground bunkers and caves were never completed. Pictures of the unfinished bunkers that were part of Project Riese, for example, show old winches, abandoned munitions carts, and primitive railway tracks leading into the tunnels, but not enough to conclusively determine what activities were planned.

In the absence of documentary evidence, one can only surmise what the network of caves, tunnels, bunkers, and subterranean structures scattered throughout Germany, Poland, Austria, and elsewhere were developed for. Likely, they were intended for a range of different purposes, including production of munitions, planes, and missiles; headquarters from which to direct troop movements; places to house batteries of cannons; safe havens from which to make a last stand; and even locations to stash war plunder. What I find mystifying is that among the myriad Nazi documents that survived WWII, seemingly few related to the purpose of the underground caves exist. Either they were never produced, which seems unlikely, destroyed before the Allies could get their hands on them, or carted off by the Allies and are still classified.

Fascinatingly, treasure hunters have expended a lot of time, money, and effort exploring and radar scanning from above searching for underground cavities where a “Nazi gold train” rumored to contain 300 tons of gold, diamonds, other gems, and industrial equipment may have been hidden. According to legend, the train was loaded by the Nazis and entered a tunnel in the mountainous Lower Silesian region before Soviet Army Forces closed in, but the train was never seen again. There are periodic reports in the media about treasure seekers claiming to have found evidence of this train. According to Peter, the tunnels connecting Castle Kamenz to the boiler house are periodically broken into by fortune hunters seeking this chimera.

There is another factor complicating understanding the purpose of the various subterranean structures, namely inaccessibility and/or flooding of the chambers. In the case of Reichenau, the Neisse River runs through it. To the southwest of the site there was once a quarry. According to Stefan Gnaczy, Peter’s informant, in 1947 the Polish government sealed off the entrance to the caves and tunnels and flooded the quarry including the sealed entrance diverting water from the Neisse River. Stefan further claims to have found an unpublished Polish government report from the 1960s stating that only half of the underground tunnel is accessible for exploration, with the remainder flooded.

Coming full circle back to Wayne Lewan’s father. According to his father’s records, he was stationed in Kamenz for only about six months. It’s not clear why he was moved from Kamenz to Dachau concentration camp in January 1945. His pre-war occupation was telephone lineman mechanic, and perhaps he was considered a skilled worker whose abilities were better utilized in Dachau. (Figure 13) Regardless, alerted to the fact that Zbigniew Lewandowski had once been interned in Kamenz led me to track down the camp where he was likely held and to investigate Nazi underground bases and tunnels, the purpose of which remain shrouded in mystery.

Figure 13. 1946 or 1947 photo of Wayne Lewan’s father, Zbigniew Lewandowski (right), believed to have been taken at Dachau

REFERENCES

Hall, John. “Inside the Nazi’s abandoned military shelters in Poland.” DailyMail.com, 12 August 2015. https://www.dailymail.co.uk

Ilsley, Natalie. “Top 5 Nazi Discoveries.” Newsweek, 31 August 2015.

Lux Veritatas Foundation. “The Report on the Losses Sustained by Poland as a Result of German Aggression and Occupation During the Second World War, 1939–1945: List of Atrocity Sites.”

Sulzer, Andreas. “The two lives of Hans Kammler/Hitler’s Secret Weapons Manager.” YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkKFX9HLAxc

“10 Nazi bunkers and subterranean bases.” Heritage Daily. https://www.heritagedaily.com/

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “Forced Labor.” https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/forced-labor

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “Gusen.” https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/gusen

POST 136: SABAC EL CHER, BLACK PERSON AT THE PRUSSIAN COURT

Note: This post deals with a Black Nubian child who was “gifted” to Peter Albrecht’s great-great-great-grandfather Friedrich Heinrich Albrecht von Preußen (1809-1872) during the latter’s “Oriental Journey” in 1843. Because this post allows me to examine so many different historical and ancestral topics, I thought I would present it to readers.

In anticipation of an upcoming trip my wife and I are planning to Egypt to visit the pyramids and other archaeological remains there, I’ve been reading a 2003 book by Dr. Zahi Hawass, entitled “Secrets from the Sand.” Dr. Zawass is an eminent Egyptian archaeologist, Egyptologist, and former Minister of State for Antiquities Affairs. (Figure 1)

Figure 1. Noted Egyptologist Dr. Zahi Hawass signing his book for me during his May-June 2023 USA speaking tour

Among the many things I learned in reading this book is that the world-famous bust of Nefertiti which is on display at the Neues Museum in Berlin and which I once saw in person, was discovered in 1912 in Amarna, Egypt by the German-Jewish archaeologist Dr. Ludwig Borchardt. The surname caught my attention because my pediatrician was named Dr. Lilo Borchardt, so naturally I wondered whether they might have been related. I investigated this, discovered there is a remote ancestral connection between the two, and found the interconnection intriguing enough to mention to my friend Peter Albrecht von Preußen, whom I’ve talked about multiple times in recent posts. It was then that Peter told me the more absorbing tale I’m about to relate to readers about a Black Nubian child named “Sabac el Cher” who was “gifted” in 1843 to his great-great-great-grandfather, Friedrich Heinrich Albrecht von Preußen (FHA) (1809-1872) (Figure 2), during a trip the prince took to areas that are part of the Middle East.

Figure 2. Friedrich Heinrich Albrecht von Preußen (1809-1872) in 1850 or 1852, Peter Albrecht’s great-great-great-grandfather, to whom Sabac el Cher was “gifted” in 1843

While the young child was never a slave, nonetheless, the story harkens back to the colonial era, and what was considered appropriate at the time. Clearly the subject of this post is tangential to my own family history but is engrossing enough for me to share this unusual bit of history with readers.

Given the rather extensive details I’m about to provide, it is worth telling readers at the outset the sources of the information. Beginning on the 4^th of July and lasting through the 31^st of October 2023, as part of its Black History Month celebration, the “Stiftung Preussische Schlösser & Gärten In Berlin-Brandenburg,” the Foundation of Prussian Palaces and Gardens Berlin-Brandenburg, is drawing attention to the history and achievements of Black people. This includes an exhibition on four Blacks who came to Prussia via the enslavement trade and had a connection to the Prussian Royal family or are depicted in paintings in Prussian palaces. To reiterate, Sabac el Cher is known principally because he appeared in several paintings that were displayed in Prussian palaces but did not arrive through enslavement, though this may be a distinction without a difference. Some of the details provided below are drawn from the Foundation of Prussian Palaces’ blog and exhibit catalog.

There is a brief entry in Wikipedia about August Sabac el Cher with limited details. August’s son, Gustav Albrecht Sabac el-Cher, who became a successful military bandmaster, was the subject of a Stern Plus magazine account and some of the particulars presented below are drawn from this write-up; many of the specifics in the article were drawn from a book by Gorch Pieken and Cornelia Kruse entitled “Preußisches Liebesglück: Eine deutsche Familie aus Afrika,” as well as an interview with one of August Sabac el Cher’s descendants. Additionally, I was able to locate several documents on ancestry.com that fill in a few holes. But, by far the source of most information on August Sabac el Cher and his descendants is drawn from the oral history handed down to Peter Albrecht (Figure 3) from his ancestors that he has graciously shared with me.

With the above as a backdrop, let me tell readers what is known about Sabac el Cher, or August Albrecht Sabac el Cher as he was named by FHA following his arrival in Prussia and subsequent baptism. Sabac el Cher is believed to have been born in 1836 in Kurdufan, today’s Sudan. (Figure 4) His given name is unknown. A high Egyptian official, Vizier Mehmet Ali, “gifted him” to Prince Albrecht of Prussia in February 1843 while the prince was on his “Oriental Journey.” The child was purportedly seven years old at the time. Prince Albrecht named the boy Sabac el Cher, which sounds in Arabic something like “Good morning,” among the few words Prince Albrecht knew. Sabac el Cher accompanied the prince on his journey which took him through areas that are today part of Egypt, Palestine, Israel, Lebanon, and Turkey.

Figure 4. Map of Kurdufan in pre-2011 Sudan

The history of how Sabac el Cher is believed to have fallen into the hands of Vizier Mehmet Ali is intriguingly indirectly related to Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt and Syria between 1798 and 1801; this campaign was instigated to defend French trade interests and to establish scientific enterprise in the region. As a trivial aside, on the scientific front this is the expedition that led to the discovery of the renowned Rosetta Stone, which we all learned about in grade school.

When the French withdrew from Egypt in 1801, tensions between the Ottoman and the local Mamluk beys (governors) once again increased. At the time, a Muhammad Ali Pasha, born in 1769 in Macedonia, then part of the Ottoman Empire, was stationed there. He had fought bravely in the Battle of Abukir (1799) on behalf of the Ottoman sultan against the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt. Following the French withdrawal and the vacuum left behind, between 1801 and 1805, Muhammad Ali used the Albanian troops at his disposal to take advantage of the conflict between the Mamluk, English, and Ottoman forces to consolidate power. In 1805, at the behest of the Ottomans, he initiated a series of mass executions.

He then built on the popular anti-Ottoman and Mamluk sentiment and gained the support of the Egyptian elite to force the Ottoman authorities to appoint him governor of Egypt, which was still under their control. Having compelled the sultan in Istanbul to acknowledge his regional authority, Muhammad Ali then proceeded to do away with his local rivals. In 1811, he permanently eliminated the Mamluk threat to his power by inviting them to a celebration at the Cairo Citadel where he had them all assassinated. Muhammad Ali ruled Egypt from 1805 to 1849 and is known as “the Founder of Modern Egypt.”

It appears that in 1821 Muhammad Ali successfully invaded the region of Darfur to wrest control of the area for the Ottoman Empire or to quell local unrest. His occupational forces captured around 20,000 Sudanese soldiers who they marched back to Cairo intending to turn them into slaves for his military; only 3,000 of them survived, the remainder having perished from starvation, thirst, illness, and exhaustion.

Local unrest in the Sudan apparently continued. According to oral accounts, Sabac el Cher was the son of a Bedouin sheik in Nubia (Figure 5), today part of central Sudan, who was killed in battle with Egyptian troops. When Sabac was examined by a royal court doctor upon his arrival in Prussia in 1843, the doctor determined he was about seven years old so “decided” his date of birth was 1836. It is likely his father went to war against the Egyptian occupational forces around this time. Following his father’s death, possibly also his mother’s, the Egyptians took Sabac to Cairo. As the son of a tribal chief, Sabac was likely treated with privilege by the conquering Egyptians, and purportedly enrolled in the royal cadet school in Cairo.

Figure 5. Map of Ancient Egypt with the Nubian Desert shown

Sabac el Cher appears to have been “gifted” to FHA during an audience he had with the Vizier Mehmet Ali in 1843 in Khan Yunis, a city in today’s southern Gaza Strip. (Figure 6) How Sabac arrived there is unknown. According to Pieken and Kruse, “It was by no means uncommon in Egypt at that time to give black children to European travelers of rank as a gesture of hospitality.” In those days, slave markets in the Middle East were rather common and it was not unusual for Europeans to purchase domestic servants in these bazaars.

Figure 6. Map of Khan Yunis within Palestine

Accompanying FHA on his 1843 “Oriental Journey” was a gifted 22-year-old painter named Johannes Rabe (1821-1894) (Johannes Rabe (Maler) – Wikipedia). Several of his works from this trip depict Sabac el Cher, including one of him in Damascus (Figures 7a-b), a second of Sabac el Cher seated atop a camel (Figure 8), and another of him in Khan Yunis. The one in Khan Yunis shows FHA’s tent camp outside the city, and in the foreground can be seen a young Sabac lighting FHA’s very long pipe. (Figure 9)

Figure 7a. A Johannes Rabe painting rendered in Damascus showing Sabac el Cher with Friedrich Heinrich Albrecht’s dog

Figure 7b. Closeup painting of Sabac el Cher in Damascus

Figure 8. Johannes Rabe painting of Sabac el Cher atop a camel holding FHA’s dog

Figure 9. Friedrich Heinrich Albrecht’s tent camp outside Kahn Yunis showing Sabac el Cher lighting FHA’s long-stemmed pipe, his “chibouk,” and FHA’s cook pouring him a glass of wine

I surmise that FHA picked up the habit of smoking this very long-stemmed Turkish tobacco pipe, known as a “chibouk,” on his trip to the Middle East. The stem of the chibouk generally ranges between 4 and 5 ft., much longer than the Western churchwarden pipes. In a painting Johannes Rabe rendered at the Prinz-Albrecht-Palais in Berlin after FHA’s return to Prussia, a young Sabac can again be seen tending to FHA’s chibouk. (Figure 10)

Figure 10. A Johannes Rabe painting from 1844 following Friedrich Heinrich Albrecht’s return to Berlin in his study at the Prinz-Albrecht-Palais showing Sabac el Cher lighting FHA’s “chibouk”

Yet another of Johannes Rabe’s paintings show FHA atop a horse with the pyramids of Giza outside Cairo as a backdrop. (Figure 11)

Figure 11. Another Johannes Rabe painting showing Friedrich Heinrich Albrecht atop a horse with the pyramids of Giza outside Cairo as a backdrop

The first written mention of Sabac el Cher was recorded by Georg Erbkam in his “Diary of my Egyptian Journey, 1842-1843.” Erbkam was an architect and part of a research expedition commissioned by the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, who happens to have been FHA’s older brother. On the 7^th of April 1843 the two groups met up while traveling in Egypt, and Erbkam noted the following: “Two servants [Mr. Amandus Strömer (Fourier) (see below) and Mr. Deubner (Butler)] and a cook [Mr. Hauptner] of the prince also followed; as well as a little black Nubian boy whom the prince had received as a gift from a governor above.” Rabe’s painting outside Khan Yunis suggests FHA’s entourage consisted of more than three other people besides the prince and Sabac, though most were probably local porters, helpers, camel drivers, and interpreters. (see Figure 9)

I will apologize in advance for what I’m about to discuss, but for serious researchers the ensuing may be mildly interesting. I should preface what I’m about to say by telling readers that I would never have learned about the following if not for Peter Albrecht’s help. Unbeknownst to me the Kingdom of Prussia, the largest of the states that eventually coalesced into Germany in 1871, used to publish an annual guide, “Das Handbuch über den Königlich Preußischen Hof und Staat,” “The Handbook on the Royal Prussian Court and State.”

For most people of plebian origins like me, one might never have cause to look at such a handbook. However, if one happens to be interested in the staff of such-and-such members of the royalty in former times, such as FHA, the guide can be useful. It identifies by name a royal individual’s court marshall, secretary, doctor, stable master, steward, cook, sommelier or wine steward, gardener, butler, nanny, etc. (Figure 12) So, in the case of the 1844 handbook, the name of FHA’s so-called “Hof-Fourier” was given, a man by the name of “[Amandus] Strömer.” (Figure 13) “Hof” means “Royal Court,” while a “Fourier” at the Prussian courts managed the accommodations of houseguests staying at the castle or when the royal traveled would secure overnight quarters and food for the lord. Accompanying FHA on his Oriental Journey we know was his Hof-Fourier [Amandus] Strömer. He is likely one of the figures that Johannes Rabe painted during the Middle Eastern trip, as is possibly his cook “Hauptner” seen serving FHA wine in the painting of the tent camp at Khan Yunis.

Figure 12. The page from the 1843 “Handbook on the Royal Prussian Court and State” showing Friedrich Heinrich Albrecht’s employees at the time

Figure 13. The page from the 1844 “Handbook on the Royal Prussian Court and State” showing that Friedrich Heinrich Albrecht’s “Hof-Fourier” at the time was a man named “(Amandus) Strömer”

August Albrecht Sabac el Cher’s name never appears in the aforementioned “Handbook on the Royal Prussian Court and State” as an employee of FHA because he was supposedly not a member of Prussia’s upper or lower nobility and/or a member of the Prussian military, the only people who could officially be listed in the Handbook. More on this below.

I hasten to emphasize the above is likely to be of limited interest to most genealogists, but one never knows.

Peter surmises that upon FHA’s return to Prussia following his Oriental Journey he likely immediately had Sabac el Cher baptized into the Lutheran Church of which he was a member; this would have been administered by a Mr. Heym, Schlossprediger zu Camenz, Castle Preacher from Kamenz. Among Lutherans, newborns in the 1800s were typically baptized within two weeks after birth; obviously, in the case of Sabac el Cher the first opportunity to do so would have been upon his arrival in Prussia in 1843. It was at this time that Sabac el Cher was given his formal name, “August Albrecht Sabac el Cher.”

This information would normally have been recorded in the so-called Court Books of the Prinz-Albrecht-Palais in Berlin. (Figure 14) The Court Books recorded all births, baptisms, confirmations, weddings, deaths, etc. at the Royal Court, along with the names of the individuals involved; even the deaths of beloved family pets were recorded. Separate service books (Dienstbucher) or accounting ledgers would only have recorded the reason for an expense, such as a baptism. All these books were apparently moved to the von Preußen estate in Schloss Kamenz [Kamieniec Ząbkowicki Palace] in Silesia in the 1930s, then disappeared at the end of World War II when they were either destroyed or removed by the invading Soviet Army.

Figure 14. The Prinz-Albrecht-Palais in Berlin in 1927

Contrary to Peter Albrecht’s understanding from his family’s oral accounts that Sabac el Cher was baptized soon after his arrival in Prussia in 1843, probably no later than September 1843, a summary page found on MyHeritage drawn from one of two rolls of microfilm (i.e., 70276 or 70277) at the LDS Genealogical Library in Salt Lake City claims he was christened on the 22^nd of April 1852. (Figure 15) These films are not available on-line, so August’s baptism date has yet to be confirmed.

Figure 15. Summary page from MyHeritage showing August Albrecht Sabac el Cher was purportedly born and baptized on the 22nd of April 1852

Thomas Röbke, author of the Stern Plus article about August Sabac el Cher’s son, claims the first mention of “Sabac el chel,” as his name is recorded, in on the 28^th of May 1851 in the service books of the Prinz-Albrecht-Palais; he is identified as a “lakai,” a lackey. More on this below. Peter Albrecht is dubious the service books are the source of this temporal information since their existence cannot be confirmed. Moreover, this detailed type of information would have been recorded in Court Books rather than the accounting ledgers.

FHA had three children with his first wife Princess Marianne of the Netherlands, and, according to Peter Albrecht, Sabac el Cher was treated as a full-fledged member of the family in the Prinz-Albrecht-Palais and lived together with his adopted siblings. Following FHA’s divorce from Marianne in 1848, he purchased Schloß Albrechtsberg in Dresden and moved there permanently with August. (Figure 16) August also maintained a residence in Berlin at the Albrecht-Palais, as FHA had to travel there frequently.

Figure 16. August Albrecht Sabac el Cher in an undated photo

August Sabac el Cher’s medal bar with his seven decorations survives. (Figure 17) I asked an acquaintance, Dr. Tilo Wahl, who helped me enormously when I was researching Dr. Walter Wolfgang Bruck, my eminent ancestor from Breslau [today: Wrocław, Poland], for help in identifying them. Besides being a family physician, Dr. Wahl is a phalerist, a person who studies medals and awards. According to Tilo, the medal bar consists of the following decorations:

Figure 17. August Albrecht Sabac el Cher’s medal bar

1.) Eisernen Kreuz 2. Klasse 1870 am weißen Band ( https://www.ehrenzeichen-orden.de/deutsche-staaten/eisernes-kreuz-2-klasse-1870-fur-kampfer.html )

2.) Medaille des Roten Adlerordens ( https://www.ehrenzeichen-orden.de/deutsche-staaten/roter-adler-orden-medaille-2-form-1871.html )

3.) Hohenzollern-Denkmünze für Nichtkämpfer ( https://www.ehrenzeichen-orden.de/deutsche-staaten/hohenzollern-denkmunze-fur-nichtkampfer-1848-1849-vergl-oek-17962.html )

4.) Erinnerungskreuz 1866 für Nichtkämpfer ( https://www.ehrenzeichen-orden.de/deutsche-staaten/erinnerungskreuz-fur-nichtkampfer-1866.html )

5.) Kriegsdenkmünze 1870 für Nichtkämpfer ( https://www.ehrenzeichen-orden.de/kaiserreich/kriegsdenkmunze-fur-nichtkampfer-18701871.html )

6.) Kriegsdenkmünze 1864 für Nichtkämpfer ( https://www.ehrenzeichen-orden.de/deutsche-staaten/kriegs-denkmunze-1864-fur-nichtkampfer.html )

7.) Krönungsmedaille 1861 ( https://www.ehrenzeichen-orden.de/deutsche-staaten/kronungsmedaille-am-band-1861.html )

Interested readers can click on the hyperlinks to learn more about August’s decorations. I will briefly recap what Dr. Wahl concluded from the awards August was given. These decorations confirm that August Sabac el Cher took part as a non-combatant and likely as FHA’s attendant in the German Revolutions of 1848-49; the Second Schleswig War of 1864 against Denmark; the 1866 Austro-Prussian War; and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. August was also awarded an Iron Cross in 1870, but, unfortunately, his name does not appear on the surviving list of recipients. August was present when Wilhelm I was crowned the King of Prussia in 1861 and was given a medal for this; Wilhelm I incidentally went on to become the first German Emperor when Germany became a country in 1871 and ruled from 1871 until his death in 1888. And, finally, the medal in the second position, the Roten Adlermedaille, was a merit decoration given to lower ranking servants.

Thomas Röbke notes the following about Sabac el Cher: “. . .his alleged ‘exoticism’ also plays an important role and fits into a courtly tradition: ‘As in many places in Europe, it had become fashionable in German princely houses since the 17^th century to surround oneself with ‘dark-skinned’ pages or lackeys,’ according to Pieken and Kruse. ‘Precious, colourful and extravagantly dressed,’ they are proudly presented as ‘chamber carrots.’ Incidentally, the courtly pallor, the ideal beauty of the time, is to be particularly emphasized by the contrast.”

Peter Albrecht makes an additional point. Since there was officially no slavery in Prussia, there were very few Blacks there compared to the United States. For this reason, Sabac el Cher would have been an “attraction” in a military tattoo (i.e., a military tattoo is a performance of music or display of armed forces in general), particularly when he marched in his native Egyptian military attire.

Thomas Röbke makes numerous mentions of Sabac el Cher as a “lackey,” which has obvious pejorative connotations. Interestingly, in official documents, such as in his 1867 marriage certificate, August self-identifies as a lackey. Peter Albrecht is convinced that August led a “double life.” To the outside world, he presented himself as nothing more than a low-level servant, while in his private life in the Prussian Court he would have been considered a cherished member of FHA’s family who accompanied FHA as an attendant on his numerous military forays. According to Peter, he would have been protected and enjoyed considerable status at the court and received a salary.

There is evidence to support the fact that FHA officially adopted August as his son which, if true, would have elevated him to the rank of an aristocrat. The proof of this comes from the marriage register church book from the Dreifaltigkeitskirche (Trinity Church) in Berlin where August Albrecht Sabac el Cher married Anna Marie Jung (Figure 18) on the 24^th of November 1867. This was a Protestant Church in East Berlin that opened in August 1739 and was destroyed in November 1943. The church books survive and line number 216, column 5 from the book of 1867 states that FHA gave his permission as father of the groom for August to marry (Figures 19a-b); the marriage register confirms that August was then living at Wilhelm Straße 102, which is the address of the Prinz-Albrecht-Palais. Only family members and their guests were allowed to live and stay at the Prinz-Albrecht-Palais.

Figure 18. August Albrecht Sabac el Cher’s wife, Anna Marie Jung

Figure 19a. August Albrecht Sabac el Cher and Anna Marie Jung’s 24th of November 1867 marriage register listing

Figure 19b. Closeup of Friedrich Heinrich’s “consent” for August Albrecht Sabac el Cher to get married

There would have been implications if in fact FHA formally adopted August as one of his sons. First, as previously mentioned, August would have been elevated in status to the rank of an aristocrat. As an aristocrat, August could then theoretically have been named in the “Handbook on the Royal Prussian Court and State” as an employee of FHA. Because August’s name never appears in the Handbook this may have been FHA’s effort to avoid ruffling the feathers of members of the nobility who would have been “offended” by August’s exalted status.

FHA himself was in a tenuous position because after he and Marianne divorced, he remarried a person of “lower nobility,” and was in a so-called “morganatic marriage.” This is a marriage between people of unequal social rank, which in the context of royalty or other inherited title prevents the principal’s position or privileges being passed to the spouse, or any children born of the marriage. In FHA’s case, this would have been moot since he had three children born of a royal marriage who would presumably have had precedence in terms of inheriting royal privileges. To further confuse readers, technically, as an aristocrat, August’s marriage to Anna would also have been a morganatic marriage since she was not an aristocrat.

August and Anna went on to have three children, Gustav (b. 1868), Elise (b. 1869) (Figure 20), and Gertrud (b. 1875), the last of whom died as a young child in 1880. According to Peter Albrecht, FHA is said to have had great affection for August and his grandchildren. Gustav (Figure 21) enjoyed great success as a military bandmaster and conductor.

Figure 20. August and Anna Albrecht Sabac el Cher’s two surviving children, Gustav and Elise, seated in a chair that their grandfather had specially made for them

Figure 21. Gustav Sabac el Cher in a parade uniform with his medals

August received his naturalization certificate on the 25^th of October 1882 (Figures 22a-b), issued by the Royal Prussian Police at the headquarters of the Berlin Police, less than three years before his death on the 21^st of September 1885 (Figure 23a-b), supposedly from stomach cancer. This certificate officially made August a Prussian and German citizen at the same time and served as a birth certificate allowing him to receive his military pension.

Figure 22a. August Albrecht Sabac el Cher’s naturalization certificate issued on the 25th of October 1882

Figure 22b. Closeup of the information on August’s naturalization certificate showing he was born in “Cordofan bei (near) Darfur in Afrika (Africa)”

Figure 23a. Cover page of August Albrecht Sabac el Cher’s death certificate showing he died on the 21st of September 1885 in Berlin

Figure 23b. August Albrecht Sabac el Cher’s death certificate stating he died on the 21st of September 1885 in Berlin

REFERENCES

Black History Month – Schwarze Menschen Am Preussischen Hof. 4 July-31 Oct. 2023, Stiftung Preussische Schlösser Und Gärten Berlin-Brandenburg, Berlin-Brandenburg.

Erbkam, Georg Gustav: Tagebuch meiner egyptischen Reise. Teil 3. Ägypten, 1844-1845.

Hawass, Zahi. Secrets from the Sand: My Search for Egypt’s Past. Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, 2003.

Hawass, Zahi. Zahi Hawass’s Secret Egypt. Laboratoriorosso, 2019.

Pieken, Gorch and Cornelia Kruse. Preußisches Liebesglück: eine deutsche Familie aus Afrika. Propyläen, 2007

Röbke, Thomas. (2022, February 2). From slave to officer to bandmaster: the German history of the Sabac el Cher family. Stern Plus.

POST 135: PICTORIAL ESSAY OF THE VON PREUßEN CASTLE IN KAMENZ, GERMANY [TODAY: KAMIENIEC ZĄBKOWICKI, POLAND]

Note: In this post I provide a short historical overview and visual sketch of Schloss Kamenz [Kamieniec Ząbkowicki Palace], the estate in Silesia where my third cousin’s father, Dr. Hans Vogel, worked for the von Preußen family during the Nazi Era. I also briefly touch on geopolitical factors that make it improbable the family will ever be able to reclaim the castle.

POST 133: “THE BUTCHER OF PRAGUE,” THE STORY BEHIND A UNIQUE PHOTO OF REINHARD HEYDRICH (PART I)

POST 133—THE BUTCHER OF PRAGUE, THE STORY BEHIND A UNIQUE PHOTO OF REINHARD HEYDRICH (PART II)

POST 134: SUSE VOGEL’S CHANCE ENCOUNTER WITH THE “BUTCHER OF PRAGUE’S” SON, HEIDER HEYDRICH

The von Preußen and Bruck families are not related in any but an “Adam and Evish” sort of way though both have affiliations with Silesia, now mostly located in Poland. The filament of a familial connection passes through my third cousin Agnes Stieda née Vogel whose father Dr. Hans Vogel (Figure 1) was employed by Friedrich Heinrich von Preußen (1874-1940) (Figure 2) and his second cousin Waldemar von Preußen (1889-1945) (Figure 3) following Friedrich’s death in 1940. While employed by the von Preußen family, Dr. Vogel was tasked with archiving the vast collection of art and historical treasures stored at the castle in Kamenz. (Figure 4) Not only did the family employ Hans, but they also provided a measure of protection for his Jewish wife Suse and mischling half-Jewish daughter Agnes during the Nazi Era. For this reason, to this day the family is held in high esteem by the Stiedas.

Figure 1. Dr. Hans Vogel in 1955 with the paintings he retrieved from Vienna, Austria that had been stored there for safekeeping during WWII

Figure 2. Friedrich Heinrich Prinz von Preußen (1874-1940) during the 1930’s

Figure 3. Waldemar von Preußen (1889-1945), Friedrich Heinrich Prinz von Preußen’s second cousin

Figure 4. Schloss Kamenz [Kamieniec Ząbkowicki Palace]

After a series of blog posts dealing with Reinhard Heydrich, one of the evilest characters in a Nazi panoply full of them, I need to step away from this emotionally draining subject to tackle a lighthearted topic. Ergo, this pictorial essay and a brief history on Schloss Kamenz [Kamieniec Ząbkowicki Palace] that Peter Albrecht von Preußen’s ancestors once owned in Kamenz, Germany [today: Kamieniec Ząbkowicki, Poland].

One side comment before I proceed. Peter Albrecht has been exceptionally gracious and helpful in tracking down and sending me an enormous amount of illustrative and research matter, related not only to his von Preußen ancestors but also to my Bruck family. For example, as it relates to my antecedents, Peter uncovered two wills archived in Opole, Poland that I ordered that may possibly be related to my great-great-grandfather, Samuel Bruck (1808-1863), the first-generation owner of the Bruck’s “Prinz von Preußen” Hotel in Ratibor [today: Raciborz, Poland]. Though I’ve had them translated and interpreted by my fourth cousin, they are challenging in the extreme to make sense of because they are handwritten in Fraktur calligraphy and never give a precise date of birth of the testator, a man named Samuel Bruck but likely not my ancestor. That said, Peter has uncovered other materials that are definitively related to “my” Samuel Bruck, and, though somewhat dry, will form the basis of a future blog post as I discuss recent intriguing findings about him.

As I proceed to give readers a pictorial sketch of Schloss Kamenz [Kamieniec Ząbkowicki Palace], let me start by providing an historical overview of the castle. The first owner was Princess Marianne of the Netherlands (1810-1883) (Figure 5) who in 1838 commissioned the most prominent German architect of the time, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, to design the structure. Noted for his neo-Classical and neo-Gothic buildings, most famously found in and around Berlin, Schinkel created a monumental palace in the form of a medieval castle.

Figure 5. Princess Marianne of the Netherlands (1810-1883) the first owner of Schloss Kamenz who commissioned its construction in 1838 (Photo courtesy of Peter Albrecht von Preußen through the Koninklijk van Oranje-Nassau)

Princess Marianne married Peter Albrecht’s great-great-great-grandfather, Friedrich Heinrich Albrecht (FHA) von Preußen (1809-1872) (Figure 6) in 1830 (Figure 7), but by 1848 the couple were in the process of getting divorced, so construction on the castle was halted until 1853 and not completed until 1872, the year FHA died. The following year their eldest son, Friedrich Wilhelm Nicholas Albrecht (NA) von Preußen (1837-1906) (Figure 8), got married to Princess Marie of Saxe-Altenburg (1854-1898) (Figure 9), so Princess Marianne gifted them the castle. Upon NA’s death, the castle was inherited by the eldest son, Friedrich Heinrich (FH) von Preußen (1874-1940), the homosexual scion who has been mentioned multiple times in the previous three posts.

Figure 6. Friedrich Heinrich Albrecht von Preußen (1809-1872) in 1850 or 1852, Peter Albrecht’s great-great-great-grandfather

Figure 7. Lithograph of Princess Marianne of the Netherlands and Friedrich Heinrich Albrecht von Preußen’s 1830 wedding (Photo courtesy of Peter Albrecht von Preußen through the Koninklijk van Oranje-Nassau)

Figure 8. Friedrich Wilhelm Nicholas Albrecht von Preußen (1837-1906)

Figure 9. Nicholas Albrecht’s wife, Princess Marie of Saxe-Altenburg (1854-1898)

Aware that he was dying of stomach cancer and having no surviving siblings and no children of his own, FH sold castle Kamenz along with the nearby “castle” in Seitenberg [today: Stronie Śląskie, Poland] (Figure 10), and all its belongings to his second cousin, Waldemar von Preußen (1889-1945), nephew of Germany’s last Emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II. (Figure 11) Upon FH’s death, Prince Waldemar transferred the cash to FH’s trust to be divided equally in five parts to FH’s nephew, Friedrich Karl Erich Albrecht (EA) von Preußen (1901-1976) (Figure 12), and four nieces, the daughters of FH’s youngest brother, Friedrich Wilhelm (FW) von Preußen (1880-1925). (Figure 13)

Figure 10. The former von Preußen castle in Seitenberg [today: Stronie Śląskie, Poland}, located approximately 20 miles north of Schloss Kamenz, that is today the city’s town hall

Figure 11. A rare and unique photograph showing Friedrich Heinrich’s second cousin, Prinz Waldemar von Preußen (second from the right), with family members including his uncle, the last German Emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II (in the center) (photo courtesy of Peter Albrecht)

Figure 12. (v. 2) Peter Albrecht at Christmas 1975 as a toddler with his grandfather, Friedrich Karl Erich Albrecht von Preußen (1901-1976); Erich Albrecht was one of Friedrich Heinrich’s five heirs

Figure 13. Friedrich Heinrich’s younger brother, Friedrich Wilhelm (FW) von Preußen (1880-1925), with his wife and four daughters between 1916 and 1920; the four daughters were Friedrich Heinrich’s other four heirs

Prince Waldemar fled castle Kamenz as the Red Army was approaching in 1945, dying in Tutzing, Bavaria on May 2^nd, six days before the official end of World War II in Europe. Obviously, the castle was abandoned along with all the artworks and belongings. Relocated Poles looted the castle and Russians burned and pillaged it. According to Peter Albrecht, however, Polish citizens report that 14 to 17 railroad cargo trains worth of movables were taken by the Russians and shipped to an unknown destination. The marble used for exterior construction was salvaged to construct the Congress Hall at the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw.

Following Prince Waldemar’s death, rights to the castle that he obviously no longer had physical control over passed to his younger brother, Sigismund von Preußen (1896-1978) (Figure 14), then in turn to his son Alfred Friedrich Ernst Heinrich Conrad von Preußen (1924–2013), “Uncle Alfred” (Figure 15) as he is known to Peter Albrecht. Shortly before Prince Alfred’s death in 2013, he transferred all rights to the estate to Peter including the contents of the 14 to 17 railroad cargo trains, should they materialize.

Figure 14. Sigismund von Preußen (1896-1978), younger brother of Waldemar von Preußen (1889-1945)

Figure 15. Peter Albrecht’s “Uncle Alfred,” Alfred Friedrich Ernst Heinrich Conrad von Preußen (1924–2013), last heir of Schloss Kamenz

A brief word on an intriguing aside. Schloss Kamenz or Kamieniec Ząbkowicki Palace, as it is currently known, is situated within Poland. In a minor way, it figured into the negotiations leading to the eventual reunification of Germany in 1989. The “Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany,” or the “Two Plus Four Agreement,” is the international agreement that allowed for the reunification of Germany in the 1990s. The reference to “Two Plus Four” means that the agreement was negotiated between the Federal Republic of Germany and the Germany Democratic Republic (GDR), along with the Four Powers which had occupied Germany at the end of World War II, namely, France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States. This treaty replaced the Potsdam Agreement, and involved the Four Powers renouncing all rights they held in Germany, allowing Germany to become fully sovereign the following year.

As I discussed in Post 132, the “provisional border” between Poland and Germany following World War II was known as the Oder-Neisse line. This partition meant that most of Germany’s former eastern provinces, including East Prussia and most of Silesia as well as the eastern parts of Brandenburg and Pomerania, including Danzig, were awarded to Poland and the Soviet Union. (Figure 16) The German populations of these areas either fled, as in the case of Peter Albrecht’s ancestors, or were expelled. The GDR accepted the border in 1950, but the Federal Republic of Germany always demurred considering it as provisional, pending a finalized peace settlement. However, as a condition of the Final Settlement, East and West Germany agreed to the existing border with Poland, with the renunciation and exclusion of any other territorial claims, in other words Germany’s former eastern provinces.

Figure 16. Map of the Oder-Neisse Line and Germany’s postwar territorial losses

The biggest issue for the Soviet Union at the time the “Two Plus Four Agreement” was being negotiated was Germany’s former territory of East Prussia, which today includes the Kaliningrad Oblast, the westernmost part of Russia. The other indirect issue for the Soviets was Poland which was regarded as a satellite state in the Soviet sphere of influence but was never part of the Soviet Union. Because the Oder-Neisse line was ultimately upheld as the border between the reunified Germany and Poland, any possibility that Peter’s family could make clams on Schloss Kamenz was obviated.

This was true at least until Poland joined the European Union (EU) in 2004. Peter’s family could now potentially make a claim for return of the castle. However, because of the exorbitant cost for the reconstruction of the castle, estimated at well north of $300 million, they have not yet done so. To date, the EU has already provided the city of Kamieniec Ząbkowicki €750,000 (more than $800,000) to restore the mausoleum and €5 million ($5,362,000) to fix the roof and the small copper clad spires atop the four corner towers. If the Polish government were to return the castle, they would do so in “as is” condition and the family would be compelled to reimburse the EU for all the work done to date.

The possibility exists, nonetheless, that Peter could make a claim for any of the castle’s goods secreted in the Soviet Union should they ever resurface.

Much of the information on castle Kamenz presented below is derived from personal communication with Peter. While there are multiple features that are part of the castle or grace the gardens surrounding Schloss Kamenz, I will discuss only two, the boiler house and the mausoleum. As previously mentioned, Nicholas Albrecht received the castle from his mother in 1873 upon his marriage, and in 1883 he started to build a large steam boiler house. (Figure 17) The conversion from coal to steam heat took place at this time, although the castle still had no sanitary installations.

Figure 17. The steam boiler house as it looks today; one of the towers of the castle can be seen in the background through the trees

Princess Marie of Saxe-Altenburg, married to Nicholas Albrecht, passed away unexpectedly in 1898 at the age of 44. Peter thinks the mausoleum on the grounds of Schloss Kamenz was built soon after her death; the photo of the mausoleum dates to 1899. (Figure 18) By the time the castle was abandoned at the end of World War II (Figures 19), five members of the von Preußen family had been entombed. (Figure 20) These included Princess Marie, Nicholas Albrecht, and their three sons, Friedrich Heinrich (1874-1940), Joachim Albrecht (1876-1939) (Figure 21), and Friedrich Wilhelm (1880-1925).

Figure 18. 1899 postcard of the mausoleum on the grounds of Schloss Kamenz

Figure 19. Exterior view of the restored mausoleum

Figure 20. View of the original interior of the mausoleum

Figure 21. 1920 photo of Peter Albrecht’s great-grandfather, Joachim Albrecht von Preußen (1876-1939)

Upon the arrival of relocated Poles to the area of Schloss Kamenz the bodies in the mausoleum were disinterred and defiled, and reportedly hung from trees. (Figure 22) Before they could be set ablaze, however, some virtuous Polish citizen calmed the rioters and reburied the bodies, carefully marking their locations on a map. Before this concerned citizen died, he gave his map to the President of the local historical society, and in 2017, the City of Kamenz and the Catholic Church of Poland exhumed the graves and held a funeral service at the reconsecrated mausoleum. (Figures 23-24)

Figure 22. Post-WWII photo of destroyed mausoleum

Figure 23. Location of desecrated bodies from the mausoleum relocated in 2017 using ground-penetrating radar

Figure 24. Photos of the five members of the von Preussen family reburied in the reconsecrated mausoleum following its restoration

According to what Peter reports, the European Union has provided funding for the eventual restoration of Castle Kamenz to its full glory. To date only the mausoleum and part of the main hall of the castle proper have been renovated. (Figures 25-32)

Figure 25. Burned out shell of Schloss Kamenz

Figure 26. Contemporary aerial view of Schloss Kamenz

Figure 27. One of the four corner towers of Schloss Kamenz

Figure 28. Aerial view of the gutted cloistered courtyard

Figure 29. Main hall of Schloss Kamenz in former times

Figure 30. Main stairwell as it looks today

Figure 31. Inside a main hall as it looks today

Figure 32. Peter Albrecht’s great-grandfather Joachim Albrecht (1876-1939) (left) with an unidentified man in one of the castle’s upstairs living rooms

In closing, I understand if readers are overwhelmed by the von Preußen family tree. My personal interest is trying to understand how the Bruck’s Hotel in Ratibor [today: Racibórz. Poland] owned by three generations of my family, obtained a “franchise” to use the “Prinz von Preußen” surname. This entails nailing down exactly when the building that eventually became the Bruck’s Hotel was built, whether its construction preceded or coincided with my family’s acquisition of the establishment, and, if it preceded it, when exactly my family purchased it. I’m uncertain whether historic documents survive to answer these questions. And, finally, because of our collaboration, Peter (Figure 33) has now found some not-so-distant ancestors that hail from Ratibor, suggesting our families may have had business dealings long ago. So, while this post may be of limited interest to many readers, I am pursuing it to better understand my family’s deep-seated connection to Ratibor and Silesia.

Figure 33. Peter Albrecht as a teenager with his recently deceased father, Horst Albrecht von Preußen (1934-2023)

POST 133: “THE BUTCHER OF PRAGUE,” THE STORY BEHIND A UNIQUE PHOTO OF REINHARD HEYDRICH (PART I)

Note: In Part I of this two-part post, I talk about a homosexual member of the royal House of Hohenzollern, Friedrich Heinrich Prinz von Preußen, whom I first introduced to readers in Post 64. I was recently contacted by his great-grand-nephew who sent me a historically significant group photo showing his relative in the presence of several high-ranking Nazis including Reinhard Heydrich, the principal architect of the Holocaust. Part I of this post lays the groundwork for a discussion on the story behind the photo.

POST 48: DR. ERNST NEISSER’S FINAL DAYS IN 1942 IN THE WORDS OF HIS DAUGHTER

POST 64: MY COUSIN AGNES STIEDA’S FATHER, ART HISTORIAN DR. HANS VOGEL

POST 86: MEMORIES OF MY COUSIN SUSE VOGEL NEE NEISSER’S WARTIME YEARS

POST 131: AN “EXEMPLARY” RESTITUTION WITH CURT GLASER’S HEIRS INVOLVING AN EDVARD MUNCH PAINTING

It is hard to know how to begin a story where the protagonist, Reinhard Heydrich, was one of the darkest figures in the Nazi regime. Often referred to as “The Butcher of Prague,” he had other equally disquieting nicknames, “The Hangman,” “The Blond Beast,” “Himmler’s Evil Genius,” and the “Young Evil God of Death.” Even Adolf Hitler described him as “the man with the iron heart.”

Heydrich (Figure 1) was the founding head of the Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service, SD), an intelligence organization charged with seeking out and neutralizing resistance to the Nazi Party via arrests, deportations, and murders. He helped organize Kristallnacht, a series of coordinated attacks against Jews throughout Nazi Germany and parts of Austria on the 9^th-10^th of November 1938, and was also chief of the Reich Security Main Office (German: Reichssicherheitshauptamt, RSHA), including the Gestapo, Kripo, and the SD. Reinhard Heydrich, however, is perhaps best known for chairing the January 1942 Wannsee Conference, the summit which formalized the plans for the “Final Solution to the Jewish question,” that’s to say, the deportation and genocide of all Jews in German-occupied Europe. Simply put, Heydrich was the principal architect of the Holocaust.

Figure 1. Interpretive panel at the National Socialist Documentation Center in Munich, Germany about Reinhard Heydrich

Readers might justifiably theorize that members of my extended family were victims of the genocidal policies formulated by this sinister character, and they would be correct. It seems almost obscene to speak the names of my revered ancestors in the same breath as I utter the name of this horrifyingly wicked individual. Yet, given the tenuous and divisive times we are currently living through, I think it’s important to talk about despicable people from the past to provide context for equally vile individuals running around today who espouse similarly annihilative intentions. Such people and policies should not be permitted to spawn in darkness and anonymity.

I can best begin this post by reintroducing readers to Agnes Stieda née Vogel (b. 1927) (Figure 2), my cherished 95-year-old third cousin from Victoria, Canada. Regular followers know that she and her parents have been the subject of several earlier posts, and I refer readers to those publications. Agnes’ parents were Dr. Hans Vogel (1897-1973) and Susanne Vogel née Neisser (1899-1984). (Figure 3) The Nazis used the pejorative term “mischling” to denote persons of mixed “Aryan” and non-Aryan ancestry, such as Agnes, who was half-Jewish. The Nazis applied a lot of pressure on their Aryan population to divorce their Jewish spouses, but in the case of Dr. Vogel he refused their exhortations.

Figure 2. Painting of Agnes Stieda née Vogel, my third cousin

Figure 3. Undated photo of Dr. Hans Vogel and his wife Susanne Vogel née Neisser, Agnes Stieda’s parents

Suse Vogel was a prolific writer. (Figure 4) Memories of her father, Dr. Ernst Neisser, and his final days were the subject of Post 48, while her 1944-1945 wartime diary was the basis for Post 86. Rather than summarize her recollections, I refer subscribers to my previous posts.

Figure 4. Susanne Vogel née Neisser (1899-1984)

Here, I want to talk about an individual who I first mentioned to readers in Post 64, Friedrich Heinrich Prinz von Preußen. Quoting what I wrote earlier:

“From 1925 until 1932, Dr. Vogel worked as an art historian. He was a volunteer at the Kunstgewerbemuseum in Leipzig; established an art and local history museum in Zeulenroda in the state of Thuringia; was an assistant at the Städtisches Museum in Moritzburg; and was a lecturer for art history and a librarian at the Staatliche Kunstakademie in Kassel; after the Kunstakademie closed in 1932, he worked as a “wissenschaftlicher Hilfsarbeiter,” an unpaid scientific assistant, at the Gemäldegalerie and Landesmuseum in Kassel. In 1934, Dr. Vogel’s continued employment at the museum in Kassel was no longer possible because of his so-called ‘mixed marriage’ to Agnes’s Jewish or ‘non-Aryan’ mother, Susanne Vogel née Neisser. Between 1934 and 1935, while trying in vain to emigrate, he managed to secure a grant to inventory the building content and art collection of the Hohenzollern in Sigmaringen in southwestern Germany. This work caught the attention of Friedrich Heinrich Prinz von Preußen, who was a Prussian officer and member of the House of Hohenzollern and led to a project in 1936 cataloging the Prince’s library and copperplate collection; by 1937 though Dr. Vogel was relegated to a clerical position in the property of the Prince.”

As I further discussed in Post 64, Agnes has fond memories of Friedrich Heinrich Prinz von Preußen (1874-1940) (Figure 5) because he and his relatives protected her family and provided employment for her father during World War II. Friedrich Heinrich studied law at Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, and upon graduation joined the military. (Figure 6) However, in early 1907 he was relieved from the military because of his homosexuality. He was excluded from the Prussian army for this reason, but at the beginning of WWI he was once again allowed to become a soldier, but only at the rank of Gefreiter, basically a Private First Class, with no opportunity for promotion.

Figure 5. Friedrich Heinrich Prinz von Preußen (1874-1940) in the 1930’s when Dr. Hans Vogel worked for him on his estate in Kamenz, Prussia [today: Kamieniec Ząbkowicki, Poland]

Figure 6. Friedrich Heinrich Prinz von Preußen, member of the House of Hohenzollern, as a young man in his regimental uniform

In late 1906, Friedrich Heinrich was nominated by Kaiser Wilhelm II as Lord Master of the Order of St. John or the Johanniter Order (German: Johanniterorden) as the successor to his late father, Prinz Albrecht von Preußen (1837-1906) (Figure 7), who’d died earlier that year; the Johanniter Order is the religious order of the House of Hohenzollern, the dynasty to which Friedrich Heinrich belonged. The poorly kept secret of Friedrich’s homosexuality, however, caused him to ask the Kaiser to withdraw his nomination, which he did. His secret eventually became public, so upon the advice of contemporaries, he left Berlin, eventually withdrawing to his estates in Kamenz [today: Kamieniec Ząbkowicki, Poland] (Figure 8) and Seitenberg [today: Stronie Śląskie, Poland] (Figure 9) in Lower Silesia where Dr. Vogel would later work for him.

Figure 7. Friedrich Heinrich Prinz von Preußen’s father, Prinz Albrecht von Preußen (1837-1906) (photo courtesy of Peter Albrecht)

Figure 8. The von Preußen castle in Kamenz [today: Kamieniec Ząbkowicki, Poland] (photo courtesy of Peter Albrecht) (photo courtesy of Peter Albrecht)

Figure 9. The von Preußen “Königliche Prinzliche Schloß (Royal Princely Castle)” in Seitenberg [today: Stronie Śląskie, Poland] (photo courtesy of Peter Albrecht)

Until recently, the above was the extent of my knowledge of Friedrich Heinrich’s life. However, as has been happening with increasing frequency of late, I’ve learned more about multiple people I’ve written about over the years, including Prince Friedrich. On the 7^th of March, through my blog’s Webmail, I received a fascinating email from a German gentleman living in the United States named Peter Albrecht von Preußen (Figure 10); astonishingly, he explained that Friedrich Heinrich was his “second great uncle” (i.e., great-great-uncle).

Figure 10. Peter Albrecht von Preußen whose great-great-uncle was Friedrich Heinrich Prinz von Preußen

Peter stumbled upon Post 64, and obviously interested in the subject, sent me a unique group photo showing Friedrich Heinrich and a handful of high-ranking Nazis, including Reinhard Heydrich, taken in 1936 or 1937 at Prince Friedrich’s estate in Silesia. I will get into a prolonged discussion about this exceptional image in Part II of this post but in Part I, I will discuss some other things Peter mentioned in his various emails that eventually provided the context for the cataloguing work that Dr. Hans Vogel was doing for the von Preußen family at their estates in Silesia.

There are multiple levels on which the current story intersects with topics I have previously discussed, so splitting the current post into two installments makes sense.

As a brief aside, soon after being contacted by Peter Albrecht, I asked him whether any of his relatives had lived in Ratibor, erroneously assuming that the Bruck’s “Prinz von Preußen” Hotel had previously been owned by a member of his House of Hohenzollern. Peter explained that it was not uncommon for the use of the family name, e.g., von Preußen, Prinz von Preußen, Prinz Albrecht Hotel, etc. to be licensed to business owners for a small annual fee. This is an early example of a franchise.

The Weimar Republic, officially named the German Reich, was the historical interval of Germany from the 9^th of November 1918 to the 23^rd of March 1933, during which Germany was a constitutional federal republic for the first time in its history. At the time, Friedrich Heinrich Prinz von Preußen owed back taxes to the German Reich. To pay them, in 1926 he agreed to rent the government the Prinz-Albrecht-Palais in Berlin, the palace the family once owned in the present-day Kreuzberg district of the city that was destroyed during World War II. This was a Rococo city palace in the historic Friedrichstadt suburb of Berlin built between 1737 and 1739 and acquired by the royal House of Hohenzollern in 1772. (Figures 11-12)

Figure 11. The Prinz-Albrecht-Palais in Berlin owned by the royal House of Hohenzollern between 1772 and its destruction during WWII (photo courtesy of Peter Albrecht)

Figure 12. A family heirloom, a plate with the painted image of the Prinz-Albrecht-Palais in Berlin (photo courtesy of Peter Albrecht)

With Hitler’s take over of power in 1933, the arrangement that Prince Friedrich had with the Weimar Republic was annulled and Friedrich Heinrich once again took possession of the Prinz-Albrecht-Palais that year. One of Prince Friedrich’s younger brothers and Peter Albrecht von Preußen’s great-grandfather, Joachim Albrecht von Preußen (1876-1939), moved into the palace as the sole occupant. However, in 1934 the German government, now the National Socialists, again sued Prince Friedrich for the back taxes that he still owed. Friedrich Heinrich, however, had contacts with certain homosexual members of the SS, the Schutzstaffel, the Nazi organization most responsible for the genocidal murder of the estimated 5.5 to 6 million Jews and millions of other victims during the Holocaust. Accordingly, he was able to cut a deal with Reinhard Heydrich to again lease the Palais to the government, and the Nazis’ lawsuit ended. Peter’s great-grandfather moved into an apartment that Peter’s grandfather, Friedrich Karl Erich Albrecht von Preußen (1901-1976), Erich Albrecht for short (Figure 13), rented for him on the same block where he operated his car rental business.

Figure 13. Peter Albrecht’s grandfather, Friedrich Karl Erich Albrecht von Preußen, Erich Albrecht for short, behind Friedrich Heinrich (photo courtesy of Peter Albrecht)

Some further explanation regarding Friedrich Heinrich’s association with the gay community is useful. It is not my intention to reveal salacious details to readers about Prince Friedrich’s homosexual lifestyle, but rather to provide some relevant context which happens to be engrossing. Within the family, Friedrich Heinrich’s nickname was “Uncle Freddy.” He was known in Berlin’s gay community as “Straps Harry,” with “Straps” referring in German to garter belt stockings; as a cross-dresser he had an obsession for wearing these with French high heels.

Following the death of Friedrich Heinrich’s father, Friedrich Wilhelm Nikolaus Albrecht (1837-1906) (Figure 14), Friedrich Heinrich would throw lavish parties at the Prinz-Albert-Palais. Even though these events took place in the throes of the Victorian age which placed severe restrictions on the liberty of certain groups and occurred at a time when homosexuality was outlawed, because Friedrich Heinrich was a member of the House of Hohenzollern, there was nothing the Berlin police could do. Because of his ability and willingness to openly flaunt public norms and engage in what was tantamount to illegal activity, according to Peter Albrecht, Prince Friedrich was a “legend for gay rights,” even within the American gay community and even to this day. (Figure 15)

Figure 14. Friedrich Heinrich’s father, Friedrich Wilhelm Nikolaus Albrecht (1837-1906) (photo courtesy of Peter Albrecht)

Figure 15. Drag Queen “Chris” from the “2009 LBGT Christmas in July” fundraiser in New York, one of Friedrich Heinrich von Preußen’s biggest fans and admirers (photo courtesy of Peter Albrecht)

In the early through mid-1920s, Friedrich Heinrich allowed members of the so-called “Organization Consul” to use his estate in Kamenz for live fire and hand grenade exercises. (Figure 16) Wikipedia describes this organization as “. . . an ultra-nationalist and anti-Semitic terrorist organization that operated in the Weimar Republic from 1920 to 1922. It was formed by members of the disbanded Freikorps group Marine Brigade Ehrhardt and was responsible for political assassinations that had the ultimate goal of destroying the Republic and replacing it with a right-wing dictatorship.” While the group was technically banned by the Weimar Republic in 1922, live fire exercises apparently were not disallowed by the government until around 1926 so continued at Kamenz until then. It was around this time, that many members of the Consul joined the SS/SA and the Nazi Party. Friedrich Heinrich’s connections to the Nazi Party, specifically to its gay members, stem to this period.

Figure 16. An excerpt from an article on the “Organization Consul” from “The Journal of Modern History” mentioning “Prince Frederick Henry” (i.e., Friedrich Heinrich von Preußen) and live fire exercises (photo courtesy of Peter Albrecht)

Knowing that Friedrich Heinrich had protected Dr. Hans Vogel’s Jewish family, I wondered about Prince Friedrich’s support of an organization that Wikipedia characterizes as “anti-Semitic.” I asked Peter Albrecht about this, and he explained that between roughly 1948 and 1953, the U.S. Government started a full-blown investigation into the history of the Organization Consul. According to Peter, the study “revealed a staunch anti-armistice [i.e., Versailles Treaty] sentiment but wrote or documented very little about anti-Semitic motives within the organization.” It appears the assassinations were targeted at politicians who had signed or helped negotiate the Versailles Treaty, rather than at any members of the Jewish community. Peter stressed there’s no knowledge that Friedrich Heinrich was anti-Semitic, rather the opposite. However, what is clear is that he was a stalwart supporter of any group which opposed the Versailles Treaty.

One other thing is worth mentioning. The Organization Consul consisted of 5,000 or more members, and, likely, those of its members who were committed anti-Semites later joined the various Nazi organizations and were involved in the implementation of the “Final Solution.”

Let me resume the story. There is a relevant entry in Wikipedia under the history of the Prinz-Albrecht-Palais about the period after the palace was leased by the Nazis:

“The last chapter in the Palais’ history began after the Nazi Machtergreifung in 1933. In May, the headquarters of the newly established Gestapo secret police moved into a neighbouring building around the corner on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. When in 1934 the Sicherheitsdienst intelligence agency of the Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler took control over the Gestapo, Sicherheitsdienst chief Reinhard Heydrich moved from Munich to the Berlin Prinz-Albrecht-Palais. In 1935 also the neighbouring buildings at 101 Wilhelmstrasse and 103/104 Wilhelmstrasse were taken over and integrated into the large complex, which in 1939 became the main administrative seat of the SS-Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA).”

As a related aside, in a previous post, Post 131, I discussed the apartment where Curt and Elsa Glaser lived, displayed their extensive art collection, and held their regular art salons. It was located on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse in the same building later confiscated by the Gestapo for use as their headquarters and was one reason the Glasers were evicted from their residence.

After the Nazis leased the Prinz-Albrecht-Palais from Peter’s ancestors, it required the entire household of the Palais to be moved to the family estate in Kamenz. Peter Albrecht’s grandfather (see Figure 13), the most practical member of the family according to Peter, orchestrated the move. It was accomplished between October and December 1934, and involved the use of an armed 10-ton truck to move the valuable items during multiple trips, and several railroad box cars to move the rest of the belongings; on the receiving end, Friedrich Heinrich’s employees from his forestry operations unloaded the box cars. By the beginning of 1935, the complete inventory of two large castles, which had accumulated since approximately 1830, were stored in the basement in Kamenz.

Clearly, Friedrich Heinrich needed someone like Dr. Hans Vogel to assist in inventorying the valuable items and art work after Prince Friedrich’s bookkeepers had tallied the household items and furniture. This was a time-consuming operation since more than 50 tons of artwork needed to be catalogued. Suse Vogel, Dr. Vogel’s wife, indicates her husband stayed in the castle in Seitenberg, but Peter thinks this would have been impractical because the 20-miles between Kamenz and Seitenberg was connected by a cobblestone road that would have taken an hour of travel each way. There would have been ample accommodation for Dr. Vogel in Kamenz since Prince Friedrich had converted 50 of the 100 or so rooms in the castle to apartments with full baths, telephones, radio, electricity, and steam heat.

The circumstances of Dr. Vogel’s living arrangements and ongoing relationship with the von Preußen family are clarified in Suse Vogel’s diary. Friedrich Heinrich had an estate building in Seitenberg [today: Stronie Śląskie, Poland] which was his office and served as the headquarters of his brewery, vineyard, and forestry/agricultural operations. The prince’s primary residence was the castle in Kamenz [today: Kamieniec Ząbkowicki, Poland]. (For reference, Kamenz is approximately 373 miles northeast of Munich, Germany. (Figure 17))

Figure 17. Map showing the distance from Kamenz [Kamieniec Ząbkowicki, Poland] to Munich, Germany

Dr. Vogel had an apartment in the Castle Kamenz until the death of Friedrich Heinrich in November 1940 of prostate cancer. Upon Friedrich Heinrich’s death, his second cousin Prinz Waldemar von Preußen (1889-1945) purchased both Kamenz and Seitenberg from the community of heirs, consisting of Friedrich’s nephew and four nieces, along with 90 percent of the collections. (Figures 18-19) As a matter of interest, Prinz Waldemar was the nephew of the last German Kaiser, Wilhelm II. (Figure 20) In any case, Prince Waldemar relocated Dr. Hans Vogel to the Seitenberg estate following the death of his second cousin while Hans continued to catalog the von Preußen collection.

Figure 18. Friedrich Heinrich’s youngest brother, Friedrich Wilhelm von Preußen (1880-1925) at his marriage to Princess Agatha of Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst (photo courtesy of Peter Albrecht)

Figure 19. Friedrich Wilhelm and Princess Agatha with their four daughters, four of Friedrich Heinrich’s heirs (photo courtesy of Peter Albrecht)

Figure 20. A rare and unique photograph showing Friedrich Heinrich’s second cousin, Prinz Waldemar von Preußen (standing on the right), with family members including his uncle, the last German Kaiser Wilhelm II (in the center) (photo courtesy of Peter Albrecht)

Suse Vogel provides a precise date in her diary when the von Preußen family and the German community evacuated Kamenz and the surrounding towns, the 11^th of April 1945. This corresponds with the same week that the Soviet Red Army overran Breslau [today: Wrocław, Poland] and was closing in on Kamenz. The Vogel family fled to Berlin, while Prince Waldemar and his kin left for Bavaria; the Prince died there in 1945 of a blood disease.

The castle was looted and set ablaze by the arriving Soviet troops and then, what remained, was looted by the newly transferred Polish inhabitants. (Figure 21) Ultimately, the Polish government removed the remaining marble from the castle, and as with the Bruck’s “Prinz von Preußen” Hotel, transferred it to Warsaw to be used for the reconstruction of buildings there. In the case of the marble stripped from the castle in Kamenz, it was used to construct the Congress Hall at the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw. (Figure 22)

Figure 21. A modern-day picture showing the inside of the still unrestored Kamenz Castle (photo courtesy of Peter Albrecht)

Figure 22. The Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw which was partially reconstructed using marble stripped from the von Preußen castle in Kamenz

The von Preußen mausoleum at Castle Kamenz was desecrated by the newly arriving Poles with the burials disinterred. (Figures 23a-b) Fortunately, an honorable Polish citizen ended things before they got too out of hand and reburied the remains in the forest near the castle, carefully noting their location on a map. Before this concerned citizen died, he gave his map to the President of the local historical society, and in 2017, the City of Kamenz and the Catholic Church of Poland exhumed the graves and held a funeral service at the reconsecrated mausoleum. The European Union has provided funding for the rebuilding of the castle which is being overseen by the City of Kamenz.

Figure 23a. The von Preußen family mausoleum before the war (photo courtesy of Peter Albrecht)

Figure 23b. The von Preußen family mausoleum following its destruction; the mausoleum was restored in 2017 (photo courtesy of Peter Albrecht)

This concludes Part I of this post. Part II will involve a discussion of the group photograph sent to me by Peter Albrecht showing his great-great-uncle Friedrich Heinrich von Preußen and the high-ranking Nazis who visited the Castle Kamenz in 1936 or 1937.

REFERENCES

“Organization Consul.” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organisation_Consul

“Prinz-Albrecht-Palais.” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prinz-Albrecht-Palais#History

Stern, Howard (Mar. 1963). “The Organisation Consul.” The Journal of Modern History 35(1), pp. 20-32.