POST 130: NAZI-CONFISCATED BOOKS STORED IN RATIBOR (RACIBÓRZ, POLAND), MY FATHER’S BIRTH PLACE

 

Note: This post tiers off an earlier one where I discussed my failed attempt to obtain compensation for my family from the French Ministry of Culture for artworks confiscated from my father’s first cousin by Nazi authorities at the port of Bordeaux in December 1940. As I explained in Post 105, I’m my father’s cousin’s closest surviving blood relative. The Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), the Nazi’s primary agency of plunder, spearheaded the seizure of artworks in Bordeaux but was also heavily involved in the plunder of libraries and archives throughout the areas the Nazis occupied. Surprisingly, many of the books wound up in Ratibor [today: Racibórz, Poland], the town in Silesia where my father was born.

Related Posts:

POST 105: FEDOR LÖWENSTEIN ‘S NAZI-CONFISCATED ART: RESTITUTION DENIED

POST 126: MY GREAT-AUNT FRANZISKA BRUCK, FLORIST TO THE LAST GERMAN KAISER

POST 127: MY GREAT-AUNT ELSBETH BRUCK, “LA COMMUNISTE,” A DDR APPARATCHIK

 

This story begins in 2014 when I spent 13 weeks in Europe traveling from Poland to Spain exploring places associated with my Jewish family’s diaspora. This included visiting the Stadtmuseum in Spandau, Berlin’s westernmost borough, where the surviving papers of two of my renowned great-aunts, Franziska Bruck (1866-1942) and Elsbeth Bruck (1874-1970), are archived; both have been the subject of recent posts. I photographed all the documents, pictures, and personal effects in the files for later study.

Upon my return to the states, I tried to make sense of what I’d obtained. Obviously, the letters were most useful though some were handwritten in Sütterlinschrift or Kurrentschrift, historical forms of German handwriting that are indecipherable to me as well as most contemporary Germans; fortunately, I know a few older German friends and relatives who learned Sütterlin in school who were able to translate these letters for me.

The most informative letter, however, was a typed one, composed by one of my father’s first cousins, Jeanne “Hansi” Goff née Löwenstein, to her aunt, my great-aunt, Elsbeth Bruck in East Berlin. In this letter written in 1946, Hansi explained that a painting by her recently deceased brother Fédor Löwenstein had posthumously sold for 90,000 French Francs. (Figure 1) Realizing this represented a significant amount of money at the time, I began to suspect Fédor was an accomplished artist. I already knew of his existence from photographs and other letters found among my great-aunt’s papers. (Figure 2) Additionally, knowing Fédor had died in 1946 in Nice, France, I’d previously obtained his certificat de décès, death certificate, when I visited L’Hôtel de Ville in Nice, Nice’s City Hall.

 

Figure 1. The section of Jeanne Löwenstein’s 1946 letter to her aunt Elsbeth Bruck telling her of the posthumous sale of one of her brother Fédor Löwenstein’s paintings for 90,000 French Francs

 

Figure 2. Fédor Löwenstein (middle) and his brother Heinz with their mother Hedwig Löwenstein née Bruck in Nice, France

 

I began my investigation in Nice by contacting the lady I know at L’Hôtel de Ville asking if she could find and send me Fédor’s obituary. This acquaintance did one better and sent me several web links with information about Fédor Löwenstein. Unbeknownst to me during my 13 weeks in Europe the Musée des Beaux-arts in Bordeaux, France had featured three of Fédor’s oil paintings on display between May 15th and August 24th. Naturally, had I known about this special exhibit, I would have detoured there to see the artworks.

The exhibit catalog (livret_lowenstein.pdf (musba-bordeaux.fr) included a lot of detail on Fédor and his paintings, and their history. (Figure 3) The exhibit and the new information confirmed what I already suspected, namely, that Löwenstein had not been an ordinary painter. He was born on the 13th of April 1901 in Munich. He studied at the School of Decorative Arts in Berlin, then at the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden. In 1923, he moved to Paris, France, attracted by the artistic influence of the capital. Between the two world wars, an artistic movement dominated there referred to as École de Paris, the School of Paris, which was not an actual school. It was in this rich artistic context that Löwenstein painted and drew. His early works reflected the influence of cubism, and his subsequent creations evolved towards abstraction, although his personal style was on the border between the two. In 1936, Fédor joined the Salon des Surindépendants, an association of artists who no longer wanted an admission jury and questioned the restrictions imposed by the new regulations of the Salon des Indépendants of 1924.

 

Figure 3. The cover of the catalog from the 2014 exhibit at the Musée des Beaux-arts that displayed Fédor Löwenstein’s three “martyred” paintings

 

Fédor Löwenstein is often referred to as a Czechoslovakian painter because his father’s family was from there. The Munich Agreement concluded on the 30th of September 1938, provided for the German annexation of land on the border between Czechoslovakia and Germany called the Sudetenland, where more than three million, mainly ethnic Germans, lived. Undoubtedly the signing of this agreement in the city where Fédor was born and involving the country where his father’s family originated inspired him to paint one of his iconic works, “La Chute,” “The Fall.” As the Bordeaux exhibit catalog notes, “The composition and iconographic vocabulary of the work are reminiscent of the convulsed and screaming silhouettes of Picasso’s Guernica. . .”

When France entered the war on the 3rd of September 1939, Löwenstein, like many artists, left Paris. As a foreigner, he had to hide to escape the exclusion laws. Briefly, some background on this. During the interwar period, France was one of the more liberal countries in welcoming Jews, many of them from eastern Europe. However, in the wake of a significant influx of refugees fleeing Nazi Germany and the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, the French government began to reassess their “open-door” policy.  By 1939 the authorities had imposed strict limitations on immigration and set up several internment and detention camps for refugees, such as Gurs and Rivesaltes, in southern France. Various of my German ancestors got caught up in these detentions.

In the case of Fédor, however, he went to Mirmande in the Drôme Valley, more than 400 miles south of Paris, on the advice of a fellow artist, a place he’d previously stayed in 1935 and 1938. At the time, Miramande was a village in ruins that became a refuge for many Parisian artists of foreign origin. All seemed to lead a peaceful existence there except for the difficulties obtaining art supplies. In any case, sometime in May 1940, Fédor left Miramande for Paris to select works of art to be shipped to a gallery in New York City via the port of Bordeaux. These works would eventually be seized there in December 1940 by the Nazi authorities.

Bordeaux is located in Aquitaine, a historical region in southwestern France. Quoting from the exhibit catalog: “Considered a sensitive and strategic coastal area, the Atlantic coastline was governed in a special way by the army, and access to it was forbidden. Very quickly, the military authorities blocked the shipment of all goods then leaving the port of Bordeaux. December 5 [1940] seems to have been the date of an important seizure operation by the ERR (Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg), two sets of goods on their way out were confiscated.” This included Fédor Löwenstein’s consignment of works destined for America.

A little more history. German forces invaded France on May 10, 1940, and by June 22, 1940, France signed an armistice with Germany that went into effect on June 25, 1940. Under the terms of the armistice, Germany annexed the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, and occupied the remainder of northern and western France. However, southern and eastern France remained unoccupied until November 1942. There a French collaborationist government, referred to as the Vichy Regime, governed. However, the suppression of the demarcation line in November 1942 caused the artist colony gathered in Miramande to break up. From then on, it was the French Resistance network that protected the refugees of Miramande, allowing many Jewish painters to escape.

By the fall of 1943, Fédor was already ill and traveled to Paris under a false identity to consult a specialist at the Curie Institute, though his disease was not diagnosed. His mastery of the French language, his support network, and his discretion about his religion were undoubtedly responsible for his survival during the Nazi occupation. Shortly after the war on the 4th of August 1946 he was hospitalized and died a few days later of Hodgkin Lymphoma in Nice.

The 2014 exhibit at the Musée des Beaux-arts de Bordeaux (livret_lowenstein.pdf (musba-bordeaux.fr) was prompted by the rediscovery of three looted works of art, entitled “Landscape (Composition (Paysage)) (Figure 4),” “The Poplars (Les Peupliers),” and “The Trees (Arbres)” painted by Fédor Löwenstein that had been confiscated by the Nazis. As previously mentioned, the three works displayed were part of a consignment that F. Loevenstein, as Fédor signed his works, tried to send to an American gallery in New York. Seized at the port of Bordeaux in December 1940, they were sent to the Jeu de Paume in Paris, to be stored in the so-called “Salle des Martyrs,” “Martyrs Room” (Figure 5), a chamber to which works in a style repudiated by the aesthetics of the Third Reich, were relegated. It was only at the end of 2010 that the connection between these works that were held at the Musée National d’Art Moderne housed at the Centre Pompidou and the Löwenstein seizure at Hanger H in the port of Bordeaux was made.

 

Figure 4. Fédor Löwenstein’s painting entitled “Landscape (Composition)”

 

Figure 5. The so-called “Salle des Martyrs,” “Martyrs Room,” at the Jeu de Paume in Paris; Löwenstein’s painting “Landscape” is circled (Anonymous 1940. Archive from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs)

 

Researchers Alain Prévet, Thierry Bajou, Edouard Vasseur, along with the curator of the Bordeaux exhibit Mme. Florence Saragoza, about whom more will be said below, identified the paintings. They accomplished this using two negatives preserved in the Archives of the National Museums that showed views of the Salle des Martyrs of the Jeu de Paume. The researchers undertook detailed digitization of these negatives, painting by painting, and reconciled this with data that had been recorded by Rose Valland, then curatorial attaché at the Jeu de Paume. (Figure 6) In the list that Rose Valland had drawn up in March 1942, she listed eleven works—six watercolors being grouped together in one lot—that had been stolen from Fédor Löwenstein. At least two of the artist’s paintings are visible in one of the photographs taken of the Salle des Martyrs. 

 

Figure 6. Rose Valland, curatorial attaché at the Jeu de Paume, in the Martyrs Room

 

The Salle des Martyrs of the Jeu de Paume became the central repository of the works of art confiscated in France by the Nazi services, the contents of which were made available to the ERR, the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (the Reichsleiter Rosenberg Taskforce). The ERR was one of the primary Nazi Party organizations dedicated to appropriating cultural property during WWII. It was led by the ideological henchman of the Nazi Party Alfred Rosenberg, from within the NSDAP Office of Foreign Affairs. Between 1940 and 1945, the ERR operated in France, Netherlands, Belgium, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Greece, Italy, and on the territory of the Soviet Union.

The Löwenstein works mentioned by Rose Valland and rediscovered in 2010 had also been catalogued by the ERR agents.  They were listed under ERR file numbers Löwenstein 4 (Landscape), Löwenstein 15 (The Poplars), and Löwenstein 19 (The Trees). Following the war, the works were kept at the Musée National d’Art Moderne. The researcher Alain Prévet previously mentioned involved in the identification of the Löwenstein works has shown that the works were inventoried in 1973 as coming from an anonymous donation. The Bordeaux catalog notes the following:

“According to the minutes of the session of the Commission des Musées Nationaux of December 6, 1973, this ‘donation’ was in fact a regularization of artistic goods that had been ‘lying around’ in the Louvre; works that had ‘remained unclaimed, some of them for forty years,’ in a storeroom of the national museum. Because of the lack of knowledge of the real provenance of these works, it was decided to register them as ‘anonymous gifts’. . . works that had been deposited in the Louvre during the Occupation, following the Nazi spoliations, were . . . part of this collection. . .

As the Bordeaux exhibit catalog notes, Löwenstein’s works, which are conserved to this day at the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou “. . .bear the stigma of their aesthetic condemnation: a large red cross indicating that they were among others destined to be discarded. The files drawn up by the ERR bear the mention vernichtet, ‘destroyed’. . .The curator at the Jeu de Paume, Rose Valland, confirms this fatal destiny on July 20, 1943: ‘Scholz and his team continue to choose from among the paintings in the Louvre’s escrow and stab the paintings they do not want to keep. This is how they destroyed almost all of Masson’s works, all of Dali’s. The paintings in the Löwenstein, Esmont (sic), M[ichel]-G[eorges] Michel collections are almost all shredded (…)’’. . . On July 23, she added: ‘The paintings massacred in the Louvre’s sequestration were brought back to the Jeu de Paume. Five or six hundred were burned under German surveillance in the museum garden from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.. . .’” That Löwenstein’s three paintings escaped destruction is astonishing and is probably due to the fact they were classified as “paintings of lesser importance.”

Contained within the materials on the Löwenstein exhibit was the name of the curator who organized the show, Mme. Florence Saragoza, previously mentioned as one of the people involved in identifying Fédor’s works from the negatives of the Salle des Martyrs.

Intriguingly, also included within the Bordeaux museum’s promotional materials was the following statement in French:

Si près de soixante-dix ans après la fin du conflit, de nombreux cas de restitution d’objets d’art restent en attente, trois d’entre eux sont désormais sortis de l’ombre et attendant maintenant l’identification des ayants droit de Wilhelm Fédor Löwenstein  (1901-1946) pour être remis à leurs propriétaires légitimes.

Translated :

“While nearly seventy years after the end of the conflict, many cases of art object restitution remain pending, three have now emerged from the shadows and are now awaiting the identification of the rightful owners of Wilhelm Fédor Löwenstein (1901-1946) to be returned to their rightful owners.”

This is a significant “concession.” Oftentimes, heirs of Jews whose works were either confiscated by the Nazis or whose sale was forced at a deeply discounted price and/or that eventually and illicitly wound up in museums spend years litigating their cases against these museums or private owners. The fact that the France Government’s Premier Ministre’s Commission for the Compensation of Victims of Spoliation or “CIVS” acknowledged that it was looking for the rightful heirs of goods taken illegally by the Nazis suggested the process of receiving compensation or acquiring possession could theoretically be short-circuited.

As I explained in detail in Post 105, I was able to establish contact with Mme. Florence Saragoza (Figure 7) who was literally brought to tears to learn that someone from Fédor Löwenstein’s family still exists. Florence, who I hold in the very, very highest esteem helped me file a claim in 2014 with the CIVS for compensation on behalf of my family; this involved requesting compensation for 25 pieces of art seized and/or destroyed.

 

Figure 7. Mme. Florence Saragoza

 

For orientation, my father and Fédor were first cousins (Figure 8), so I would be Fédor’s first cousin once removed. Being intimately acquainted with my family tree and knowing that neither Fédor nor his two siblings ever had any children, I quickly realized I’m his closest surviving blood relative. Notwithstanding this fact, as I deeply lamented in Post 105, when the CIVS finally rendered their decision in June 2021, they refused to acknowledge I had any rights to compensation for the destruction and confiscation of Fédor’s artworks. Suffice it to say, because France is ruled by the principles of civil law rather than common law, my rights have been supplanted by Fédor’s siblings, who are obviously no longer alive, or by the heirs named in his sibling’s wills. The living heirs are referred to as “universal legatees,” and their rights according to French law supersede my own. That said, there is still some gray area based on which a French lawyer I’ve hired is contesting the decision. Stay tuned for further updates.

 

Figure 8. Heinz Löwenstein (middle) with my parents in Israel in 1973

 

Following their determination in 2021, the CIVS notified me that one of Fédor Löwenstein’s painting entitled “Composition” had been shipped to the Jewish Museum of New York for an exhibit entitled “Afterlives: Recovering the Lost Stories of Looted Art,” scheduled to run between August 20, 2021, and January 9, 2022. This was one of the paintings I had filed a claim for with the CIVS. Even though I’d been denied restitution by the French Minister of Culture, I took an avid interest in how the CIVS would handle the process going forward. For this reason, I ordered the exhibition catalog which, during Covid, took many months to arrive.

Tucked into the book was a surprising picture labeled as having been taken in Ratibor [today: Racibórz, Poland]. This is the town where my father and many of his immediate family were born and where the family business, the Bruck’s “Prinz von Preußen” Hotel, operated through three generations. The photo shows crates containing thousands of books. According to the caption, in 1943 the Nazis established a research and sorting operation for plundered libraries in Ratibor. Eventually more than two million books were transported there. The photograph was included in the photo records of the Offenbach Archival Depot. (Figure 9) The Depot was a central collecting point in the American Sector of Germany for books, manuscripts and archival materials looted, confiscated, or taken by the German army or Nazi government from the occupied countries during World War II.

 

Figure 9. Post-WWII photo showing crates of books looted by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg and shipped to Ratibor for sorting (photo from the National Archives Catalog “Photographs of the Operations of the Offenbach Archival Depot”)

 

The relocation of the ERR’s Book Control Center (Buchleitstelle) from Berlin to Ratibor in mid-1943 was prompted by the increased Allied bombing of Berlin, and a desire by the Nazis to save the books, at least until they’d had time to sort and save those they could use for propaganda. More on this below.

While I’d previously been unaware how my father’s hometown had been used during the war, Patricia Kennedy Grimstead, an academic from the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, has written extensively on the subject. In a seminal paper entitled “Roads to Ratibor: Library and Archival Plunder by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg” she goes into great detail on her findings. According to Grimstead, the ERR Silesian research center in Ratibor “. . .was the recipient of archives and books the Nazis plundered as part of a vast ideological, political, and cultural policy. Unlike art, archival and library seizures were not for display, prestige, or profit. If they bolstered Hitler’s imperial pretensions or exposed the evils of ‘Bolshevism,’ then by all means they should be sought. . .Specialists catalogued, analyzed, and preserved the materials, treating them not only as the heritage of ‘enemies of the Reich’ but as raw material for propaganda for ‘operational’ use’” Books that did not meet these criteria were burned in spectacular bonfires or sent to pulping factories. (p. 391)

According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s website, in a section on “Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg: A Policy of Plunder,” in January 1940 Hitler informed all offices of the Nazi Part that Alfred Rosenberg, head of the ERR, “. . .should be assisted in assembling a library for the planned new educational and research institute of the Party, the Hohe School, to be located at the Chiemsee in Bavaria. The library would contain 500,000 volumes. . .Preparations for the Hohe School also included other branches within the Reich, such as a ‘Center for Research on the Jewish Question’ in Frankfurt.”

The Jewish Museum exhibit catalog emphasizes this same point: “The segregation of Jews was enforced in a variety of ways. One distinctive strategy was to treat Jewish culture as the subject of historical inquiry, much as one might study a rare but obsolete specimen. Hitler called this an ‘anti-Semitism of reason,’ or ‘scientific anti-Semitism,’ which explicitly identified Jews in racial terms, rather than by religious affiliation. By the late 1930s research centers, institutes, and university departments had been founded throughout Germany and Austria to accommodate this burgeoning field and to inspire looting of works that were to be ‘saved’ expressly for the purpose of spurious academic research. Prominent among these was Alfred Rosenberg’s Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question (IEJ). It housed an estimated five hundred thousand books and manuscripts stolen from synagogues, Masonic temples, and private collections. Key to his mission was to set up a great Nazi university on the Chiemsee, in Bavaria, from the spoils of his plunder, including masterworks of both art and literature that would be instrumental in forming the curriculum.” (p. 54)

In this lengthy post, I reviewed and augmented what I had previously discussed in Post 105 regarding my failed attempt to obtain restitution on behalf of my family for paintings seized by the Nazi’s Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) from my father’s first cousin. In the process, I learned more about this agency’s role in plundering books that wound up in Ratibor where my father was born. Following the capitulation of Ratibor at the end of WWII, many of the books confiscated by the Nazis in Western Europe were later moved by the Soviets to Minsk, capital of Soviet Belorussia. To this day, an estimated half a million of these books have not been returned to their countries of origin and are referred to as “twice plundered” books.

 

REFERENCES

Afterlives: Recovering the Lost Stories of Looted Art. 20 Aug. 2021-9 Jan. 2022, Jewish Museum, New York.

Alexander, Darsie & Sam Sackeroff. Afterlives: Recovering the Lost Stories of Looted Art. Yale University Press, 2021.

“Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg: A Policy of Plunder.” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, https://www.ushmm.org/information/exhibitions/online-exhibitions/special-focus/offenbach-archival-depot/einsatzstab-reichsleiter-rosenberg-a-policy-of-plunder

Fédor Löwenstein (1901-1946), trois œuvres martyres. 15 May-24 Aug. 2014, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux, Bordeaux.

“France.” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/france

Grimstead, Patricia Kennedy. “Roads to Ratibor: Library and Archival Plunder by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg.” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, vol. 19, no. 3, Winter 2005, pp. 390-458.

Musée des Beaux-arts de Bordeaux. Fédor Löwenstein, destin tragique d’un élève d’André Lhote.

Photographs of the Operations of the Offenbach Archival Depot. United States National Archive, 541611, https://catalog.archives.gov/search-within/541611?availableOnline=true&typeOfMaterials=Photographs%20and%20other%20Graphic%20Materials

“Reichsleiter Rosenberg Taskforce.” Wikipedia, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichsleiter_Rosenberg_Taskforce

 

POST 120: FAMILY PHOTOS, DISCOVERING & DECODING THEM

 

Note: In this post, I discuss “stashes” of family photos I’ve uncovered, and the efforts I’ve undertaken with the help of near and distant relatives to identify people in some of those images even absent captions. In a few instances the photos are significant because they illustrate individuals renowned or notorious in history. In other cases, a good deal of sleuthing was required, including comparing the pictures of people in captioned versus uncaptioned images. On other occasions, I recognized portrayals of family members I knew growing up. And, in rare instances, I was able to determine a photographed person based on an educated guess.

 

Related Posts:

POST 15: BERLIN & MY GREAT-AUNTS FRANZISKA & ELSBETH BRUCK

POST 17: SURVIVING IN BERLIN IN THE TIME OF HITLER: MY UNCLE FEDOR’S STORY

POST 31: WITNESS TO HISTORY, “PROOF” OF HITLER’S DEATH IN MY UNCLE FEDOR’S OWN WORDS

POST 33: FINDING GREAT-UNCLE WILLY’S GRANDCHILDREN

POST 34: MARGARETH BERLINER, WRAITH OR BEING?

POST 41: DR. OTTO BERGER & OTHER “SILENT HEROES” WHO HELPED MY UNCLE DR. FEDOR BRUCK SURVIVE THE NAZI REGIME

POST 45: HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE: RECALLING MY PAULY ANCESTORS

POST 56: REFLECTIONS ON LIFE AND FAMILY BY THE PATERFAMILIAS, DR. JOSEF PAULY

POST 65: GERMANY’S LAST EMPEROR, WILHELM II, PICTURED WITH UNKNOWN FAMILY MEMBER

POST 99: THE ASTONISHING DISCOVERY OF SOME OF DR. WALTER WOLFGANG BRUCK’S PERSONAL EFFECTS

POST 100: DR. WALTER WOLFGANG BRUCK, DENTIST TO GERMANY’S LAST IMPERIAL FAMILY

 

The antisemitic and racist laws enacted by the Nazis short-circuited my father’s career as a dentist. Pursuant to his formal training at the University of Berlin, followed by an apprenticeship in Danzig (today: Gdansk, Poland), my father, Dr. Otto Bruck (Figure 1), opened his own dental practice in Tiegenhof in the Free City of Danzig (today: Nowy Dwór Gdański, Poland) in April 1932; by April 1937, my father was forced to flee Tiegenhof, and by March 1938 he had left Germany altogether, clearly seeing the handwriting on the wall. As an unmarried man with few family ties, this was an option open to him. My father would never again legally practice dentistry.

 

Figure 1. My father Dr. Otto Bruck as a dental apprentice in Danzig in 1931

 

My father considered the five years he spent in Tiegenhof to be the halcyon days of his life. Judging from the numerous photos of his days spent there, including those illustrating his active social life, his professional acquaintances, and recreational pursuits, I would be hard-pressed to argue otherwise.

I originally intended in this post to briefly discuss with readers the history of Polish Mennonites because Tiegenhof, the town where my father had his dental practice, was largely Mennonite when my father lived there. The Mennonites arrived in the Żuławy Wiślane region (i.e. “the Vistula fens,” plural from “żuława”), the alluvial delta area of the Vistula in the northern part of Poland, in the 17th century. They came to escape religious persecution in the Netherlands and Flanders. I have instead decided to devote the subsequent Blog post to discussing the history of Polish Mennonites, and briefly explore how the Mennonites, who are committed to pacifism, inexplicably, became strong adherents of Hitler. I intend in the following post to use photos from my father’s collection to focus on one Mennonite family, the Epp family, with whom my father was acquainted and friends with. They have a dark history related to their connection to the Nazi regime.

Getting back on track. Curious whether the office building where my father had both his dental practice and residence still existed (Figure 2), in 2013 my wife Ann Finan and I visited Nowy Dwór Gdański. We quickly oriented ourselves to the layout of the town, and promptly determined that his office and residential building no longer stands. I would later learn that the structure had been destroyed by Russian bombers when Nazi partisans shot at them from this location.

 

Figure 2. The office building in Tiegenhof in the Free City of Danzig in October 1934 where my father had his dental practice and residence, which no longer exists. Note the swastikas festooning the building

 

During our initial visit to Nowy Dwór Gdański, we were directed to the local museum, the Muzeum Żuławskie. The museum docent the day we visited spoke English, so I was able to communicate to her that my Jewish father had once been a dentist in the town and had taken many pictures when living there of Tiegenhof and the Żuławy Wiślane region. I offered to make the photos available, which I in fact did upon my return to the States.

In 2014, my wife Ann and I were invited to Nowy Dwór Gdański for an in-depth tour and a translated talk. Naturally, during my presentation, I used many of my father’s photos. There was a question-and-answer period following my talk, and one Polish gentleman of Jewish descent commented on how fortunate I am to have so many photographs of my father, family, and friends. I agreed. In the case of this gentleman, he remarked he has only seven family pictures, which I think is often true for descendants of Holocaust survivors. In my instance, my father’s seven albums of surviving photos, covering from the 1910’s until 1948 when my father came to America, are the reason I started researching and writing about my family.

Given the importance pictures have played in the stories I research and write about, and the development of this Blog, I thought I would highlight a few of the more interesting and historically significant pictures in my father’s collection, as well as discuss other “stashes” of photos I’ve uncovered. Obviously, it’s impossible and would be of scant interest to readers to discuss all the photos.

My father was a witness to the rise of National Socialism from the window of his dental office in Tiegenhof. On May 1, 1933, my father photographed a regiment of “SA Sturmabteilung,” literally “Storm Detachment,” known also as “Brownshirts” or “Storm Troopers,” marching down the nearby Schlosserstrasse, carrying Nazi flags, framed by the “Kreishaus” (courthouse) on one side. (Figure 3)

 

Figure 3. Father’s photograph of Nazis marching down Schlosserstrasse in Tiegenhof on May 1, 1933, taken from his dental office

 

Again, a year later to the day, on May 1, 1934, my father documented a parade of veterans and Brownshirts following the same path down Schlosserstrasse led by members of the Stahlhelm (“Steel Helmet”), a veterans’ organization that arose after the German defeat of WWI.  (Figures 4a-b) In 1934, the Stahlhelme were incorporated into the SA Sturmabteilung, the original paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party.

 

Figure 4a. A year later May 1, 1934, Nazi Storm Troopers and WWI veterans again marching down Schlosserstrasse in Tiegenhof

 

Figure 4b. WWI veterans, “Stahlhelme,” at the head of the Nazi parade on May 1, 1934, in Tiegenhof

 

Then again, the following year, on April 5, 1935, there was another Nazi parade. On this occasion Field Marshall Hermann Göring visited and participated in the march through Tiegenhof. The day prior, on April 4, 1935, Hermann Göring had visited the Free City of Danzig to influence the upcoming April 7th parliamentary elections in favor of Nazi candidates.  The visit to Tiegenhof the next day was merely an extension of this campaign to influence the Free City’s parliamentary elections.  In the photos that my father took on April 5th there can be seen a banner which in German reads “Danzig ist Deutsch wenn es nationalsozialistisch ist,” translated as “Danzig is German when it is National Socialist.”  (Figures 5a-b) It appears that along with everyday citizens of Tiegenhof and surrounding communities, members of the Hitler Youth, known in German as Hitlerjugend, also lined the street in large number.

 

Figure 5a. Nazi Field Marshall Hermann Göring standing in his open-air limousine on March 5, 1935, as he parades through Tiegenhof

 

Figure 5b. A Nazi banner reading “Danzig ist Deutsch wenn es nationalsozialistisch ist” (translated as “Danzig is German when it is National Socialist”) hung across the street that Field Marshall Hermann Göring traveled down on March 5, 1935, as he paraded through Tiegenhof

 

Students of history know about Hermann Göring but for those who are unfamiliar with him, let me say a few words. He would evolve to become the second-highest ranking Nazi after the Führer. Unlike many of Hitler’s sycophants and lieutenants, Göring was a veteran of WWI, having been an ace fighter pilot, a recipient of the prestigious Blue Max award, and a commander of the Jagdgeschwader a fighter group that had previously been led by the renowned Red Baron, Manfred von Richthofen. Göring was drawn to Hitler for his oratorical skills and became an early member of the Nazi Party. He participated with Hitler in the failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, during which he was wounded in the groin. During his recovery he was regularly given morphine to which he became addicted for the remainder of his life.

Göring oversaw the creation of the Gestapo, an organization he later let Heinrich Himmler run. He was best known as the commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe, although after the Nazi victory over France, he was made Reichsmarschall, head of all the German armed forces. He amassed great wealth for himself by stealing paintings, sculptures, jewelry, cash, and valuable artifacts not only from Jews and people whom Nazis had murdered but also by looting museums of defeated nations.

Towards the end of the war, following an awkward attempt to have Hitler appoint him head of the Third Reich and thereby drawing Hitler’s ire, he turned himself in to the Americans rather than risk being captured by the Russians. He eventually was indicted and stood trial at Nuremberg. The once obese Göring, who’d once weighed more than three hundred pounds, was a shadow of his former self at his trial. Expectedly, he was convicted on all counts, and sentenced to death by hanging. His request to be executed by firing squad was denied, but he was able to avoid the hangman’s noose by committing suicide using a potassium cyanide pill that had inexplicably been smuggled to him by an American soldier.

My uncle, Dr. Fedor Bruck, has been the subject of multiple previous posts (i.e., Post 17, Post 31, Post 41). My uncle, like my father was a dentist. He was educated at the University of Breslau (today: Wrocław, Poland) and had his dental practice in Liegnitz, Germany (today: Legnica, Poland) until around 1933 when he was forced to give it up due to the “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service” passed by the Nazi regime on the 7th April 1933, two months after Adolf Hitler had attained power.  My uncle’s life is of interest because he miraculously survived the entire war hidden in Berlin by friends and non-Jewish family members. His story has also been of interest because he counted among his friends a woman named Käthe Heusermann-Reiss, who had been his dental assistant in Liegnitz.

Following the loss of his business my uncle relocated to Berlin hoping the anonymity of the larger city would afford him the possibility to continue working under the auspices of another dentist, which it did for a time. Käthe Heusermann also moved to Berlin and opportunistically landed herself a job as a dental assistant to Hitler’s American-trained dentist, Dr. Hugo Blaschke. In this capacity, she was always present when Dr. Blaschke treated Hitler. Following the end of the war, she was interrogated by the Russians and asked to identify dental remains which had been recovered in a burn pit outside the Reichstag. The bridgework performed by Dr. Blaschke on Hitler was outmoded so Käthe was easily able to recognize Blaschke’s work and Hitler’s teeth, a fact Stalin kept hidden from the world. Following Russia’s capture of Berlin at the end of the war, my uncle who’d temporarily been hiding in Käthe’s apartment learned from her that Hitler had committed suicide. This dangerous information resulted in Käthe being imprisoned in the USSR for many years, and my uncle barely escaping the same fate. Surviving among my father’s photographs is a noteworthy picture taken in Liegnitz of my uncle and Käthe Heusermann. Though uncaptioned, I have been able to compare it to known pictures of Käthe to confirm it is her. (Figure 6)

 

Figure 6. My uncle Dr. Fedor Bruck in his dental office in Liegnitz, Germany with his dental assistant Käthe Heusermann-Reiss who would later go on to become the dental assistant for Dr. Hugo Blaschke, Hitler’s dentist. Following the war, she would identify Hitler’s dental remains, a fact the Russians hid for many years

 

As I have told readers in multiple earlier posts my father was an active sportsman, and an excellent amateur tennis player. Among my father’s belongings I retain multiple of the prizes he was awarded for his achievements, including many newspaper clippings documenting his results. In August 1936, my father attended an International Tennis Tournament in Zoppot, Germany (today: Sopot, Poland), located a mere 32 miles from Tiegenhof. During his attendance there, he photographed the great German tennis player, Heinrich Ernst Otto “Henner” Henkel (Figure 7), whose biggest success was his singles title at the 1937 French Championships. Interestingly, Henkel learned to play tennis at the “Rot-Weiss” Tennis Club in Berlin. My father was a member of the “Schwarz-Weiss” Tennis Club in Berlin, so perhaps my father and Henner played one another and were acquainted. Henner Henkel was killed in action during WWII on the Eastern Front at Voronezh during the Battle of Stalingrad while serving in the Wehrmacht, the German Army.

 

Figure 7. The famous German tennis player, Henner Henkel, in August 1936 at the International Tennis Tournament in Zoppot, Germany

 

As I mentioned above, my father left Germany for good in March 1938. He was headed to stay with his sister Susanne and brother-in-law, then living in Fiesole, a small Tuscan town outside Florence, Italy. During his sojourn in Italy, before eventually joining the French Foreign Legion later in 1938, my father visited some of the tourist attractions in Italy, including the Colosseum in Rome. One of the images that my father took there has always stood out to me because of the paucity of people around what is today a very crowded and visited venue. (Figure 8)

 

Figure 8. The Colosseum in Rome in August 1938

 

My father’s collection of photos number in the hundreds but I’ve chosen to highlight only certain ones because they illustrate a few personages or places that may be known to readers. My father’s collection is merely one among several caches of images I was able to track down through family and acquaintances. I want to call attention to a few pictures of family members that grabbed my attention from these other hoards.

In Post 33, I explained to readers how I tracked down the grandchildren of my grandfather’s brother, Wilhelm “Willy” Bruck (1872-1952). Based on family correspondence, I knew my great-uncle Willy wound up in Barcelona after escaping Germany in the 1930’s and theorized his children and grandchildren may have continued to live there. Official vital documents I procured during a visit there convinced me otherwise, that at least his son returned to Germany after WWII. I was eventually able to track down both of my great-uncle’s grandchildren, that’s to say my second cousins Margarita and Antonio Bruck, to outside of Munich, Germany. (Figure 9) I have met both, and they’ve shared their family pictures, which again number in the hundreds.

 

Figure 9. My second cousins Margarita and Antonio Bruck from near Munich, Germany in May 2022, source of many family photos

 

The cache included many images of family members, but there are two pictures I was particularly thrilled to obtain copies of. My uncle Dr. Fedor Bruck (1895-1982), previously discussed, fought in WWI on the Eastern Front. (Figure 10) Among the family memorabilia I retain is a postcard he sent to his aunt Franziska Bruck on the 3rd of September 1916 coincidentally from the Ukraine announcing his promotion to Sergeant. (Figures 11a-b) The ongoing conflict between the Ukraine and Russia makes me realize how long the Ukraine has been a staging area for wars.

 

Figure 10. My uncle Dr. Fedor Bruck in his WWI uniform

 

Figure 11a. The front side of a postcard my uncle Fedor mailed to his aunt Franziska Bruck during WWI from the Eastern Front in Ukraine on the 3rd of September 1916

 

Figure 11b. The backside of the postcard my uncle mailed from the Ukraine on the 3rd of September 1916

 

Regular readers may recall that my father was born in Ratibor, Germany (today: Racibórz, Poland), in Upper Silesia. The family hotel there, owned through three generations between roughly 1850 and the early 1920’s, was known as the Bruck’s “Prinz von Preußen” Hotel. Among my second cousins’ photos is a rare image of the entrance to this hotel, which no longer stands. (Figure 12)

 

Figure 12. The entrance to the family hotel in Ratibor, Germany (today: Racibórz, Poland), Bruck’s “Prinz von Preußen” Hotel circa. 1914. The hotel is no longer standing

 

I introduced readers to two of my grandfather’s renowned sisters, my great-aunts Franziska and Elsbeth Bruck, way back in Post 15. Their surviving personal papers are archived at the Stadtmuseum in Spandau, the westernmost of the twelve boroughs of Berlin; these files have been another source of family photographs. Franziska Bruck was an eminent florist, and it is reputed that one of her clients was the last German Kaiser, Wilhelm II (1859-1941). One undated photograph taken in my great-aunt’s flower shop shows Duchess Cecilie Auguste Marie of Mecklenburg-Schwerin (1886-1954), the last Crown Princess of Germany and Prussia, who was married to Kaiser Wilhelm II’s son, Wilhelm, the German Crown Prince. (Figure 13)

 

Figure 13. Duchess Cecilie Auguste Marie of Mecklenburg-Schwerin (1886-1954), the last Crown Princess of Germany and Prussia, married to Kaiser Wilhelm II’s son, visiting my great-aunt Franziska Bruck’s flower school in Berlin

 

My second cousins Margarita and Antonio Bruck introduced me to one of my third cousins, Andreas “Andi” Pauly, also living part-time in Munich, Germany. (Figure 14) The Pauly branch of my extended family, which originally hailed from Posen, Germany (today: Poznan, Poland) has been the subject of multiple blog posts, including Post 45 on Pauly family Holocaust victims and reflections in Post 56 by the paterfamilias, Dr. Josef Pauly (1843-1916), Andi Pauly’s great-grandfather. Josef Pauly and his wife Rosalie Pauly née Mockrauer (1844-1927) had eight daughters and one son born between 1870 and 1885; thanks to photos provided by Andi Pauly, not only was I able to obtain images of all nine children but also some of Pauly cousins I knew of by name.

 

Figure 14. My third cousin Andreas “Andi” Pauly, source of many family photos

 

Again, it is not my intention to boggle readers’ minds by showing all these photos but I want to focus on one particular picture I originally obtained from Andi Pauly that was the subject of Post 65. The photo was taken in Doorn, Netherlands on the 28th of May 1926, and shows a then-unknown Bruck family member standing amidst a group that includes the last German Kaiser, Wilhelm II, his second wife, Princess Hermine Reuss of Greiz (1887-1947), and her youngest daughter by her first marriage, Princess Henriette of Schönaich-Carolath (1918-1972), and the Royal Family’s entourage. (Figure 15) At the time I wrote Post 65, I was unable to determine who the Bruck family member was, nor whom the initials “W.B.” stood for.

 

Figure 15. Postcard of the last German Emperor Wilhelm II, his second wife Princess Hermine Reuss of Greiz (1887-1947), and her youngest daughter by her first marriage, Princess Henriette of Schönaich-Carolath (1918-1972), taken in 1926 in Doorn, the Netherlands. A then-unknown member of the Bruck family is surrounded by the Royal Family’s entourage

 

Fast forward. In early 2021, I was astonished to receive an email from a Dr. Tilo Wahl, a doctor from Köpenick in Berlin, who stumbled upon my Blog and contacted me. He shared copies of the extensive collection of personal papers and photographs he had copied from the grandson of one of my esteemed ancestors, Dr. Walter Bruck (1872-1937), from Breslau, Germany (today: Wrocław, Poland) Again, this relative and my findings related to Dr. Walter Bruck have been chronicled in multiple earlier posts. The very same image discussed in the previous paragraph I had obtained from Andi Pauly was included among Dr. Bruck’s images. It was then I realized the unidentified Bruck family member standing with Kaiser Wilhelm II, his family, and his entourage was none other than Dr. Bruck’s second wife, Johanna Elisabeth Margarethe Gräbsch (1884-1963). (Figure 16) I discussed these findings in Post 100.

 

Figure 16. Same photograph as Figure 15 that Dr. Walter Bruck took of his wife Johanna and the Kaiser’s entourage in September 1925 with identifications (photo courtesy of Dr. Tilo Wahl)

 

Dr. Walter Bruck’s collection of papers and photos yielded images of multiple family members about whom I was aware, including one of Dr. Walter Bruck’s three siblings. However, one that stands out amongst all these photos was the one of Dr. Walter Bruck’s grandfather Dr. Jonas Julius Bruck (1813-1883). (Figure 17) Dr. Jonas Bruck is buried along with his son, Dr. Julius Bruck, in the restored tombs at the Old Jewish Cemetery in Wrocław, Poland. (Figure 18) Dr. Jonas Bruck was a brother of my great-great-grandfather Samuel Bruck (1808-1863), the original owner of the Bruck’s “Prinz von Preußen” Hotel in Ratibor, Germany (today: Racibórz, Poland) I previously discussed.

 

Figure 17. Dr. Walter Bruck’s grandfather, Dr. Jonas Julius Bruck (1813-1883)

 

Figure 18. The restored gravestones of Dr. Jonas Julius Bruck, his son Dr. Julius Bruck, and their respective wives interred in the Old Jewish Cemetery in Wrocław, Poland

 

In various places, I found fleeting references that Dr. Walter Bruck and Johanna Elisabeth Margarethe Gräbsch had both previously been married. I eventually found historic documents, my gold standard, confirming this. Using educating guesses based on incomplete captions and estimating the timeframe a few pictures in Dr. Walter Bruck’s collection were taken, that’s to say during WWI and before, I was even able to find pictures of both of their previous spouses among his photos.

Dr. Walter Bruck’s album also contain multiple pictures of his daughter, Renate Bruck (1926-2013). She was married three times, with images of two of her husbands included. Thanks to Post 99 Renate’s twin daughters, whom I knew about but had no expectation of ever finding since they’d left England years ago, instead found me. From this, I learned that Walter Bruck’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren live in Sydney, Australia.

I suspect the story I’m about to relate may resonate with some readers, the topic of missing or incomplete captions on pictures of one’s ancestors. Let me provide some context. During the time that my uncle Dr. Fedor Bruck was a dentist in Liegnitz, Germany he carried on an illicit affair with a married non-Jewish woman, Irmgard Lutze (Figure 19), with whom he had two children, my first cousins Wolfgang (Figure 20) and Wera Lutze. During the Nazi era time when it was prohibited and dangerous for an Aryan to have an affair with a Jew, the cuckolded husband nonetheless raised the children as his own. Therefore, they had the Lutze rather than the Bruck surname.

I knew both first cousins well, though both are now deceased. In any case, included among my cousin’s photographs was one that left me perplexed. It showed three generations, the eldest of whom was identified as “Tante Grete Brauer (mother’s sister).” (Figures 21a-b) The “Brauer” surname reverberated only because when perusing my great-aunt Elsbeth Bruck’s papers at the Stadtmuseum I discovered multiple letters written by Brauers. At the time I had no idea this represented another branch of my extended family.

 

Figure 19. My uncle Dr. Fedor Bruck standing next to Irmgard Lutze, the married Aryan woman with whom he fathered two children

 

Figure 20. My uncle Dr. Fedor Bruck’s now-deceased son and my first cousin, Wolfgang Lutze (1928-2014), in Hurghada, Egypt in October 2005

 

Figure 21a. Photo found among my first cousin’s pictures of my grandmother’s sister, Margarethe Brauer née Berliner (1872-1942) who was murdered in the Holocaust

 

Figure 21b. Caption on backside of Figure 21a.

 

As I discussed in Post 34, I would eventually work out that “Tante Grete Brauer” was my grandmother Else Bruck née Berliner’s sister, Margarethe Brauer née Berliner (1872-1942) who was murdered in the Holocaust. Prior to finding this isolated picture of my great-aunt, I was completely unaware of her existence. I’ve repeatedly told readers that my father had scant interest in family and rarely spoke of them to me growing up, so I was not surprised by this discovery.

I will give readers one last example of caches of family photos I’ve been able to recover by mentioning my third cousin once-removed, Larry Leyser (Figure 22), who very sadly passed away in 2021 due to complications from Covid. Over the years, Larry and I often shared family documents and photos. Several years ago, he borrowed and scanned a large collection of photos from one of his cousins named Michael Maleckar which he shared with me. As with any such trove, I found a few gems, including one of my own parents at a party they attended in Manhattan the early 1950’s. My father literally “robbed the cradle” when he married my mother as she was 22 years younger than him. This age difference is particularly pronounced in the one picture I show here. (Figure 23)

 

Figure 22. My third cousin once-removed, Larry Leyser, another source of many family photos

 

Figure 23. From left to right, my father (Dr. Otto Bruck), my mother (Paulette Bruck), my uncle (Dr. Fedor Bruck), and one of father’s cousins (Franz Kayser) at a party in Manhattan in the early 1950’s

 

I will merely say, in closing, that I am aware of other caches of family photos that unfortunately I have been unable to lay my hands on. I completely understand that some of my cousins are busy leading their lives and don’t share my passion for family history, so they are excused. One other thought. The longer I work on my family’s history, the more I realize how much I regret not talking with my relatives when they were alive about some of our ancestors as my stories would be broader and would then be grounded in truths rather veiled in so much conjecture.

 

 

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

Sussman, Jeffrey. Holocaust Fighters: Boxers, Resisters, and Avengers. Roman & Littlefield, 2021.

 

 

POST 110: DR. WALTER LUSTIG, DIRECTOR OF BERLIN’S “KRANKENHAUS DER JÜDISCHEN GEMEINDE” (HOSPITAL OF THE JEWISH COMMUNITY) THAT SURVIVED THE NAZIS

 

Note: The Blog post is about Berlin’s Jewish Community Hospital that inexplicably outlasted the Nazis, and its wartime Director, Dr. Walter Lustig, born in Ratibor, Germany, the same town where my father was born.

Related Posts:

POST 13, POSTSCRIPT: THE FORMER JEWISH CEMETERY IN RATIBOR (RACIBÓRZ)

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

POST 49: GUIDE TO THE “LANDESARCHIV BERLIN” (BERLIN STATE ARCHIVE) CIVIL REGISTRY RECORDS

POST 107: HARRO WUNDSCH (HARRY POWELL), A “DUNERA BOY” INTERNED IN THE AUSTRALIAN OUTBACK

 

This post has to do with my family only insofar as Dr. Walter Lustig, the man at the center of this story, was born in Ratibor [today: Racibórz, Poland], the town in Upper Silesia where my father and many of his family were born. From around 1942 until shortly after WWII ended in April 1945 Dr. Lustig was the Director of Berlin’s Krankenhaus der Jüdischen Gemeinde, the Hospital of the Jewish Community, a Jewish institution that miraculously withstood the Nazi onslaught.

This assault on German Jews left only between 5,000 and 6,000 Jews alive in Germany by the end of the war, compared to 500,000 Jews living there towards the end of the Weimar Republic in 1933 when the Nazis seized power. By the time WWII started in 1939 two-thirds of these Jews had emigrated, though there still remained roughly 167,000 Jews in Germany in 1941, most of whom would be murdered.

Berlin’s Jewish Hospital is 265 years old. It was originally built in 1756 on Oranienburger Strasse near the Jewish cemetery in Berlin. Then, during Berlin’s mid-nineteenth century economic expansion that was due in large measure to its entrepreneurial Jewish population, the Jewish community built the city’s first general hospital, one of the largest of its kind, on Auguststrasse; it was built primarily to serve the needs of the Jewish population. As the years passed, even this structure proved inadequate, so in 1913, the current hospital along Iranischestrasse opened on the site it occupies today (Figure 1); there were seven principal buildings, together with ancillary structures. Presently, the hospital is located in the Wedding locality in the borough of “Berlin-Mitte” (Figure 2), which prior to 2001 was a separate borough in the northwestern part of Berlin.

 

Figure 1. The main building of the “Krankenhaus Der Jüdischen Gemeinde” (Hospital of The Jewish Community) that opened in 1914 along Iranischestrasse

 

Figure 2. Map of Berlin’s 12 existing Boroughs and the neighborhoods in each, with Berlin-Mitte circled including the neighborhood of “Wedding” where Berlin’s Jewish Hospital is situated today

 

I have briefly mentioned Berlin’s Jewish Hospital in connection with three previous Blog posts. In Posts 48 and 49, I related the story of how one of my distant relatives, Dr. Ernst Neisser, was taken there on the morning of October 1, 1942, following his attempted suicide after being told to report to an “old age transport,” a euphemism for deportation to a concentration camp; fortunately, he survived only three days until October 4th before succumbing to his trauma. I say “fortunately” because the fear among Jews who attempted suicide is they would be resuscitated only to then be shipped to a concentration camp and gassed there.

According to a Jerusalem Post article by Judy Siegel-Itzkovich, published on June 23, 2007, entitled “A hospital with history,” numerous Berlin Jews, like Dr. Ernst Neisser, who attempted suicide with gas or sleeping pills in the face of deportations ended up in Berlin’s Jewish Hospital for treatment, the only hospital that would still treat Jews during the Nazi era. According to this article, upwards of 7,000 Berlin Jews killed themselves before the Nazi dictatorship fell. Although Jews committed suicide in all sorts of ways, by far the most common method involved the ingestion of a poison such as potassium cyanide or an overdose of an opiate or sedative, usually Veronal.

Then, in Post 107, I mentioned an English lady named Kathy York, whose grandmother Maria Wundsch née Pauly (Figure 3), a distant relative of mine, worked at Berlin’s Jewish Hospital during WWII when Dr. Lustig was the Director there. Kathy tells me letters written about her grandmother’s fraught time working at the hospital exist, but these have yet to surface.

 

Figure 3. Dr. Maria Wundsch née Pauly with her husband Dr. Hans Helmut Wundsch as a young married couple; Maria Wundsch, a full Jew, worked at Berlin’s during the war and likely survived because she was in a mixed marriage (photo courtesy of Kathy York)

 

I previously also told readers about Daniel B. Silver’s book about the hospital, entitled, “Refuge in Hell: How Berlin’s Jewish Hospital Outlasted the Nazis.” I have relied heavily on this book in describing Dr. Lustig’s tenure as Director of the hospital and the hospital’s situation during the war. It is not my intention here to thoroughly review what interested followers can easily read for themselves, but rather to bring to light a few findings and connections I made on my own that add a little to the story. This said, some background about Dr. Walter Lustig and his wartime administration of the hospital are warranted.

After fierce street-to-street fighting against entrenched remnants of Hitler’s SS, on April 24, 1945, Russian soldiers had finally succeeded in wresting control from the Nazis of a stretch of Iranischestrasse that included the battle-scarred buildings of the “Krankenhaus Der Jüdischen Gemeinde” (Hospital of The Jewish Community). There they found hundreds of people including doctors, nurses, patients, workmen, and others who claimed to be Jewish. The Russians did not initially give credence to their assertions believing Joseph Goebbels’ 1943 declaration, chief propagandist for the Nazi party, that Berlin was “Judenrein,” or “Judenfrei,” meaning “cleansed (or free) of Jews,” according to National Socialist terminology applied in the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.” Eventually the survivors convinced their Russian liberators they were Jews who had inexplicably outlasted the Nazis.

At the time of liberation, three of the hospital’s seven main buildings were no longer a part of the hospital. In late 1942, the German Army, the Wehrmacht, had expropriated the nurses’ residence, the Schwesterheim, as well as buildings that had housed the gynecology and infectious disease departments, for use as a military hospital, the Lazarett. Then, in 1944, the Gestapo appropriated and fenced off the hospital’s pathology laboratory and an adjacent gatehouse to use as a Sammellager, a collection camp for Jewish deportees. By 1944, most of Berlin’s remaining Jews had already been deported so a single, smaller holding facility now sufficed.

According to Daniel B. Silver, several published sources report the hospital’s population at the time of liberation at around 800. However, Hilda Kahan, Dr. Lustig’s secretary throughout his tenure as Director of the Jewish Community Hospital, states in a videotaped interview that the number was closer 500. Regardless of the precise number, they represented a large proportion of Germany’s identifiable Jews as they were defined by the Nazis. Statistics a young Jewish woman was compelled to maintain for the Gestapo on a monthly basis indicate only 6,284 known Jews remained in Berlin on February 28, 1945. (Silver, 2003, p. 2)

Included in the final number of Jews found at the Hospital upon its liberation, according to Daniel Silver “. . .were patients and members of the medical, nursing, and support staff who had taken up residence in the hospital at various times, either because they had been bombed out or evicted as Jews from their former homes or because they were slave laborers assigned to work at the hospital. Also on hand were the remnants of groups of Jews who had been transferred to the hospital when the Nazis closed other Jewish institutions in Germany, such as orphanages and old age homes. Most of these unfortunates had been deported before the war ended, but some remained in April 1945. Among them were a handful of abandoned children who were suspected of being fully Jewish but whose ‘racial’ status had not been definitively determined. The Nazis had used the hospital as a kind of ghetto to which they consigned Jews who had nowhere else to live or whose status was ambiguous. These included Jews of foreign nationality and Jews who were being held there as potential bargaining chips in negotiating exchanges for German nationals captured in Palestine. The authorities also used the hospital to house Jews who had been brought to Berlin from other cities in Germany as part of a Nazi effort to separate them from their Aryan spouses. This was intended as a first step in overcoming the political and legal barriers to the deportation of Jewish men who lived in mixed marriages and whose Aryan spouses refused to divorce them despite Gestapo pressure to do so.” (2003, p. 8) As Winter further notes, “Most of the hospital population were half-Jews or spouses of Aryans. As such, they had been protected by Nazi rules that everyone knew could be changed at any time.” (2003, p. 12)

Also included among the “patients” were several Jews not receiving medical treatment who were protected from deportation by one or another prominent Nazi; this may have included Jews who had illicit affairs with well-placed Nazis, childhood friends of important Nazis who sought to protect them, Jews who had bribed high-ranking Nazis, or other cases whose reasons can only be guessed. A “lucky” group of survivors included Jews who had been incarcerated in the hospital’s auxiliary police ward, the so-called Polizeistation. These were Jews who fell ill while already in the hands of the police, Gestapo, or SS who for unknown reasons the Nazis sought to restore to health before killing them. Unbelievable!

My family’s remote association to Berlin’s Jewish Community Hospital and its miraculous survival through WWII, in addition to the hospital’s wartime Director’s connection to Ratibor, the same town in Upper Silesia where my father was born, drew my interest in writing this Blog post. Hoping I might be able to add a little to what has already been written and is known about Dr. Walter Lustig, I contacted Mr. Paul Newerla (Figure 4), my retired lawyer friend from Racibórz who now researches and writes about the history of the town and Silesia and asked whether he could track down a copy of Dr. Walter Lustig’s birth certificate at the archive. Paul graciously agreed to help. He not only was able to locate Dr. Lustig’s birth certificate, but the Racibórz archives also provided a legal document related to Dr. Walter Lustig’s father, Bernhard Lustig, dated the 22nd of March 1939. I will discuss this in further detail below.

 

Figure 4. With my friend Paul Newerla, retired lawyer and Silesian historian, standing by the statue of John of Nepomuk, located in middle of a parking lot in Racibórz

 

First, let me tell readers a little about Walter Lustig. He was born as Walter Simon Lustig on the 10th of August 1891 in Ratibor, the son of the merchant Bernhard Lustig and his wife Regina Lustig née Besser. He graduated from the local gymnasium in March 1910 and enrolled at the University of Breslau in October of the same year. He studied medicine, specializing in surgery, and received his medical degree and license in the spring of 1915. He was drafted during WWI and served as a military doctor. During his wartime stint, he obtained a Ph.D., also in medicine. His military service was performed in Breslau, where he treated casualties from the eastern front. After the war he worked in public administration while maintaining a private medical practice; he spent most of his career as a medical administrator. He wrote prolifically on medical subjects.

Clearly driven to advance professionally, in 1927 he relocated to Berlin. His move there coincided with two changes that had far-reaching consequences. He married a non-Jewish physician, Dr. Annemarie Preuss, and took a job with the Berlin police department where he became acquainted with Fritz Wöhrn and Rolf Günther who eventually became Adolf Eichmann’s key aides in overseeing the hospital. It was Adolf Eichmann’s department in the Reichssicherbeitshauptamt (RSHA), the Reich Security Main Office, that had formal jurisdiction over the Jewish hospital.

According to Daniel Silver, Lustig “. . .advanced within the police hierarchy until in 1929 he was appointed to the position of director of the Police Presidium’s medical affairs department. He held the prestigious bureaucratic titles of Oberregierungsrat (chief administrative counselor) and Obermedizinalrat (chief medical counselor).” (2003, p. 24-25) The police department had broad administrative responsibilities that extended beyond criminal matters, and included overseeing health matters in schools, institutions, and group care facilities, and conducting occupational training for medical personnel; suffice it to say, this brought Lustig into contact with many senior government officials and leaders in the medical community.

In October 1933, Lustig lost his job because of the issuance of the Nazis’ Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service (“Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums”). This law initially exempted veterans of WWI such as Lustig but because he had been stationed in Breslau and not on the eastern front, the exemption did not apply to him, and he lost his position. At some time, between 1933 and 1935 Lustig was employed by the health department of the Berlin Jewish Gemeinde, or community (more on this below). According to Daniel Silver, when exactly Lustig was employed by the Gemeinde, and what his exact duties were are unknown, though he apparently became active in matters relating to the Jewish hospital around this time. Regardless, Lustig proved as adept at rising in the official Jewish bureaucracy at the Gemeinde as he had rising through the ranks of the Berlin police department.

Without overwhelming readers with the tangled structure of the Jewish community, it is still worth reviewing the hospital’s situation following the events of Kristallnacht that took place on the 9-10 November 1938 to provide context for Dr. Lustig’s powerful administrative position during the war. In a structure that prevailed before the Nazis came to power and still exists today, every religious denomination was organized into a Gemeinde, depending on context, roughly translated as community, municipality, congregation, or parish. Prior to the Nazis seizing power in 1933, the Gemeinde in smaller cities resisted the formation of a central Jewish organization fearing it would be dominated by the Berlin Gemende. Eventually the reality of the Nazi takeover overtook regional concerns, and a central organization called the Reichsvertretung der deutschen Juden, or Central Representation of German Jews, was formed. It was renamed after 1935 to “Jews in Germany,” a significant distinction meant to signal that Jews were no longer to be considered Germans.

As the remaining German Jews became more concentrated in Berlin over time, the distinction between the Berlin Gemeinde and the Reichsvertretung became blurrier with many officials holding parallel positions in both organizations. After Kristallnacht, the Reichsvertretung was dissolved by the Nazis, only to be resurrected when the Nazis realized this organization facilitated emigration, which at the time the Nazis were encouraging. Consequently, a new Jewish central organization was organized, substituting the word Reichsvereinigung (central organization) for Reichsvertretung (central representation). Membership in this organization was compulsory for every Jew, which was created to better discriminate against and control the Jewish population. It was under tight Gestapo supervision.

Daniel Silver summarizes the hospital’s situation by 1941: “So it was that by 1941 the hospital functioned under the organization umbrella of the Reichsvereiningung, although, through the Gemeinde health department, it still maintained a formal relationship to the Berlin Gemeinde. The most important aspect of the new arrangements that began in 1938 was that, through the Reichsvereiningung, the hospital was placed under the direct supervision of Department IV B 4 of the RSHA. Originally this had been the department in charge of ‘Jewish emigration and evacuation.’ By 1941 it had become the department for ‘Jewish affairs and evacuation,’ emigration having been largely abandoned as a Nazi objective. Its head was Adolf Eichmann, the bureaucratic mastermind of the Final Solution.” (2003, p. 40)

Measures taken against Jewish professionals which began in 1933 with passage of the Nuremberg racial laws that pushed Jewish doctors out of jobs in non-Jewish clinics had a profound effect on the makeup of the Jewish hospital’s professional staff as it stood in 1941. Things came to a head with the decree of July 25, 1938, when all Jewish physicians, of which there were about 3,000 at the time in the Reich, were stripped of their medical licenses. By September, a limit of 700 Jewish physicians, referred to by the degrading title of Krankenbehandler, or “carer for the sick,” were restricted to treating Jewish patients or working in Jewish institutions.

Ironically, one of the beneficiaries of this provision was Walter Lustig. While many of Lustig’s contemporaries had by 1938 decided to emigrate, he consciously decided not to do so. Whether this was hubris or his marriage to an Aryan that he thought afforded him some protection or his previous relationship with Nazis during his days in the Berlin police department, Lustig benefited from others’ departures to rise in the Jewish hierarchy. Daniel Silver describes it as follows: “When his boss in the Gemeinde/Reichsvereinigung health department, Erich Seligmann, left Germany for the United States in 1939, Lustig took over his position. In July 1939, the Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt (Jewish chronicle) described him as the person who henceforth would be responsible for health matters within the Reichsvereinigung. In that capacity, he played a key role in filling vacancies that opened up at the hospital because of the emigration of members of the medical staff. At some point in 1940 or 1941 (exactly when is unclear), he was appointed as the Gesundheitsdesernent, or chief of the health department (of the Gemeinde), and thus became a member of the governing board of the Reichsvereinigung.” (2003, p. 43)

Eventually in around October 1942, Walter Lustig became the hospital’s director after the previous director Dr. Schoenfeld and his wife killed themselves; they had been among 100 Gemeinde and Reichsvereinigung officials handpicked in the second major deportation of communal officials, a selection Lustig was compelled to participate in after initially demurring. From 1942 onward, he was repeatedly forced to aid in the selection of hospital staff for deportation, and according to Daniel Silver was “. . .arguably the most powerful figure of German Jewry and the absolute master of the hospital.”

Again, quoting Daniel Silver, “For many, Lustig’s name evokes predominantly negative feelings. According to one source, ‘The name Walter Lustig awakens even today vigorous aversion among Jewish witnesses of the events.’ Yet even his detractors give grudging credit to his talents and to his accomplishment in keeping the hospital open through the final years of the Nazi regime. His contemporaries describe him in wildly differing terms—turncoat and Gestapo collaborator; savior of the hospital; the man who sent hundreds of Jews to their death; the man who saved hundreds of Jews from the camps; a protector of children; a lecher.” (2003, p. 26) Further complicating how Lustig is viewed in hindsight is the criticism that he was unsympathetic to the plight of his fellow Jews and that he was a Jewish anti-Semite, and that his mistresses may have influenced the people he selected for deportation. More on his purported anti-Semitism below.

At the time Mr. Winter published his book in 2003, he stated there were no known pictures of Walter Lustig. (2003, p. 26) While writing this Blog post, I was able to establish email contact with Daniel Winter, who formerly served as the general counsel to the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Service. He mentioned that following the publication of his book students from the University of Potsdam, outside Berlin, found a picture of Walter Lustig while developing a traveling exhibit about Berlin’s Jewish Hospital. Unable to locate his copy of this image, I have separately contacted the University of Potsdam hoping they might find and send me one. I’m optimistic about sharing it with readers in the future.

Figure 5. Mr. Roger Lustig, expert on Jewish families of Prussian Poland, whose father Ernst Lustig was a distant cousin of Dr. Walter Lustig, the wartime Director of Berlin’s Jewish Hospital

Relatedly, about ten years ago, I attended a talk sponsored by the Los Angeles Jewish Genealogical Society given by a Mr. Roger Lustig (Figure 5), who specializes in research on Jewish families of Prussian Poland, and is a top expert on general German Jewish research. This talk was given just before my planned 13-week trip to Europe to follow in the footsteps of my Jewish family’s diaspora. I contacted Roger asking whether he might be able to refer me to someone in Racibórz who could help me. Because Roger also has ancestors from there, he was happy to assist. Over the years, we’ve periodically stayed in touch. Naturally assuming that Roger might in some way be related to Walter Lustig because of the common surname and their respective connections to Ratibor, while writing this Blog post, I asked him whether he might have Walter’s photograph. He was unable to help explaining that because Dr. Lustig was a short man, about 5’2”, he was self-conscious about being photographed. This comports with how informants described Lustig to Daniel Silver, namely, that he was small. (2003, p. 26) Others added that he was a “small, delicate person” and that he had “cold stabbing eyes—terrible eyes.” Another informant reported that Lustig was very Germanic in appearance, a man who “‘looked like a major from the First World War,’ with spectacles and a big moustache.” (2003, p. 26)

Roger Lustig pointed out something interesting to me during our recent exchange that speaks to whether Walter was anti-Semite. While writing his book, Silver coincidentally interviewed Roger Lustig’s father, Ernst Lustig, who addressed this question (i.e., Ernst Lustig’s great-great-grandfather was the brother of Walter Lustig’s great-grandfather (2003, p. 176)): “The characterization of Lustig as a Jewish anti-Semite is at odds with the reaction of his distant cousin Ernst Lustig. In a brief and anguished commentary on the judgment in the Wöhrn trial, Ernst Lustig expresses surprise and shock at the unfavorable way Walter Lustig is described. ‘What is difficult for me to comprehend,’ he writes, ‘is how this man could develop such a horrible attitude toward Jews when he himself was a flawless Jew.’ He remembers his cousin as a man who maintained friendly relations with his Jewish relatives, a man whom he knew as ‘Uncle Walter,’ and a man who once provided Ernst’s father with a genealogical sketch of the family that descended from Dr. Lustig’s great-grandfather Abraham, who had lived in the town of Adamowitz. This seems out of character with the picture of Walter Lustig as a man who took no interest in his Jewish roots, although it is true that the time in question, 1937-38, was already after the date when Walter Lustig decided to throw his lot in with the Jewish community to which the Nazis in any event had irrevocably assigned him.” (2003, p. 215)

It is difficult to reconcile the differing judgements of Walter Lustig. On the one hand, there is the man who selected colleagues and fellow employees for deportation, while on the other was a man who occasionally came to the rescue of assistants who’d been arrested by the Nazis. Then, in March 1943, the Gestapo showed up with trucks in front of the administrative building prepared to deport the entire establishment, patients, doctors, nurses, and all other employees; it was only Lustig’s call to Adolf Eichmann that forced the Gestapo to stand down, though it resulted in fully half of Lustig’s workmates being arrested. As Silver asks, “Did Lustig originate this Faustian bargain, offering up fully half of the total number of his professional colleagues and employees as the price for saving the hospital, and thereby himself and his job? Or was this decision imposed on him in circumstances over he which he had no control whatsoever? It is unlikely that anyone will ever know.” (2003, p. 143)

It is worth noting that while the RSHA and the Gestapo were technically part of the same organization and under the authority of the same leader, SS Führer Heinrich Himmler, the German bureaucracy was teeming with internal rivalries and tensions (2003, p. 141), a situation which may partially explain why the Jewish hospital survived the war. For all of Lustig’s purported influence with the Gestapo, he was unable to save his own father from being deported to Theresienstadt in 1943. (2003, p. 173 & p. 221)

Longtime followers of my Blog may recall the postscript to Post 13 about the former Jewish Cemetery in Ratibor. In that post, I explained the role a Polish gentleman named Mr. Kazimierz Świetliński played in photographing all the headstones of the graves before the cemetery was demolished during Poland’s Communist Era. At a time when purchasing film and processing black-and-white negatives cost a lot, Kazimierz photographed, developed, created a portfolio with a site plan, and donated all his work to the Muzeum Raciborzu to be archived. After learning about these images, I arranged to photograph all the images in 2015. Recalling these and the accompanying Excel database, I scrolled through them and discovered they include a photo of Walter Lustig’s mother’s headstone, Regina Lustig née Besser. (Figure 6) As mentioned above, Walter’s father, Bernhard Lustig, was deported to Theresienstadt where he died, so obviously no picture of his gravestone exists.

 

Figure 6. The headstone of Dr. Walter Lustig’s mother, Regina Lustig née Besser (1866-1914), interred in the former Jewish Cemetery in Racibórz (photo courtesy of Kazimierz Świetliński)

 

Walter’s birth certificate, which my dear friend Mr. Paul Newerla was able to obtain from the Racibórz archives confirmed Walter’s date of birth, the 10th of August 1891, and his parentage. (Figures 7a-b) As I mentioned above, while Paul was searching for Walter Lustig’s birth certificate, the archives stumbled upon a legal document related to Bernhard Lustig dated the 22nd of March 1939. (Figures 8a-g) At the time Bernhard was 82 years of age indicating he’d been born in 1857; I would later learn he was born on the 6th of February 1857. Because he was in frail health at the time, Bernhard Lustig had requested that a Mr. Arthur “Israel” Stein be appointed as his guardian, which the courts granted. Despite his failing health, four years later the Nazis deported him to Theresienstadt, where he perished. One can only imagine the cruel circumstances under which Bernhard died.

 

Figure 7a. Copy of Walter Simon Lustig’s Ratibor birth certificate, Certificate No. 391, showing he was born on the 10th of August 1891 to Bernhard Lustig and Regina Besser née Besser, and that he was given the added name “Israel” on the 1st of January 1939

 

Figure 7b. Transcription & translation of Walter Lustig’s birth certificate

 

Figure 8a. Page 1 of a legal document dated the 22nd of March 1939 regarding Dr. Walter Lustig’s father, the merchant Bernhard Lustig

 

Figure 8b. Page 2 of the legal document related to Bernhard Lustig

 

Figure 8c. Page 3 of the legal document related to Bernhard Lustig

 

Figure 8d. Page 4 of the legal document related to Bernhard Lustig

 

Figure 8e. Page 5 of the legal document related to Bernhard Lustig

 

Figure 8f. Transcription of the first two pages of the legal document regarding Bernhard Lustig

 

Figure 8g. Translation of the first two pages of the legal document regarding Bernhard Lustig

 

Interestingly, the legal document Bernhard submitted to the court also requested that he be allowed to submit a corrected declaration of value for assets he’d mistakenly overvalued; this resulted in overpayment of the “Jewish expiation tax,” for which he sought reimbursement. It seems unlikely the courts ever acted upon this request.

From 1945 to the present, most people have expressed incredulity that the Nazis permitted an identifiable Jewish institution to continue to exist in Berlin, a city Goebbels had declared in 1943 “cleansed of Jews.” Mr. Silver offers possible explanations: 1) the Nazis saw the hospital as playing a useful role in the large-scale deportations during a time when all other Jewish organizations and institutions had been eliminated (2003, p. 62); 2) earlier in the war, before the large-scale deportation of most Jews, it is possible the Nazis allowed the hospital to survive to provide for the treatment of Jews who could spread epidemics to the general Aryan population (2003, p. 235-6); 3) for bureaucratic convenience, that’s to say, as a place in which the Gestapo could establish a kind of ghetto (2003, p. 237); and 4) for reasons of ambition, Adolf Eichmann may have stage-managed the transfer of the land and buildings the hospital occupied to a small powerless agency, the Academy of Youth Medicine, which he could easily control and thereby preserve the hospital and the site he coveted. (2003, p. 238)

Let me end this lengthy post by briefly discussing what is known about Walter Lustig’s fate. Following the war, the hospital fell into the Soviet-administered zone of Berlin. By then, Lustig had been appointed by the occupation-controlled local government as the director of health services for the Wedding district and had turned over the administration of the hospital to his aide Ehrich Zwilsky. Incredibly, Lustig had remained head of the Reichsvereinigung and had even petitioned the Soviet authorities to have it converted to the new Jewish Gemeinde, with himself as the head. His ambition clearly clouded his judgement; a more prudent course might have compelled him to flee, given the overall negative verdict by many who worked with him and thought he was a turncoat and Gestapo collaborator. Regardless, in June 1945, according to Ruth Bileski, a young Jewish woman sent in 1943 as a forced laborer to work in Lustig’s office, he was taken away accompanied by two uniformed Soviet officers, never to be seen again. Some claim he may have stage-managed his own disappearance to avoid being tried, although the likelier outcome is that he was killed by the Soviets.

REFERENCES

Siegel-Itzkovich, Judy. “A hospital with history.” Jerusalem Post, June 23, 2007, https://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=Siegel-Itzkovich%2c+Judy.+%e2%80%9cA+hospital+with+history&d=4898311699633967&mkt=en-US&setlang=en-US&w=KvOBC3e8wZezfu1SQux0Q8WOOLP6t1uU

Silver, Daniel B. Refuge in Hell: How Berlin’s Jewish Hospital Outlasted the Nazis. Houghton Mifflin, 2003.

 

POST 98, PART 2 (DOCUMENTS): THE WOINOWITZ ZUCKERFABRIK (SUGAR FACTORY) OUTSIDE RATIBOR (PART V-CHILEAN DESCENDANTS)

 

Note: In the second installment of Post 98, I will briefly tell readers about some of the historic vital event documents I found related to Roberto Hirsch’s ancestors, focusing on ones from the mid-to-early 19th century that allowed me to trace Roberto’s ancestry seven generations back to the mid 18th century. As readers will see, some of these records are challenging to decipher.

Related Post:

Post 98, Part 1 (Stories): The Woinowitz Zuckerfabrik (Sugar Factory) Outside Ratibor (Part V-Chilean Descendants)

 

Figure 1. Roberto Hirsch with his father Fritz Hirsch (1908-2006) in Santiago, Chile in 1998 (photo courtesy of Roberto Hirsch)

 

Roberto Hirsch (Figure 1), to remind readers, is the great grandnephew of Sigmund Hirsch (Figure 2), former co-owner of the Woinowitz Zuckerfabrik. As I discussed in part 1 of this post, Roberto contacted me through Webmail and filled in details on a few of his ancestors I have previously written about. He gave me enough details to uncover vital event documents on some, which I supplemented by finding records on others Roberto did not know about.

 

Figure 2. Sigmund Hirsch (1848-1920)

 

As discussed in part 1, Roberto’s grandparents, Hermann Hirsch (1876-1943) and Ida Hirsch née Sollinger (1874-1944) (Figure 3), were murdered in Theresienstadt during the Holocaust. Roberto thought his grandfather had only two siblings, Sofie Hirsch (b. 1875) (Figure 4) and Karl Hirsch (b. 1879) (Figure 5) and knew Karl like his parents had been murdered in the Shoah; according to Yad Vashem, tragically, Sofie was also killed during the Holocaust. (Figure 6) Additionally, it turns out Hermann Hirsch had yet another sibling Roberto was unaware of, Bernhard Hirsch (b. 1877). (Figure 7) I suspect this sibling may have died at a young age but have not found proof of this.

 

Figure 3. Roberto’s grandparents, Hermann Hirsch (1876-1943) and Ida Hirsch née Sollinger (1874-1944) in 1935 in Bonn, Germany; both later died in Theresienstadt (photo courtesy of Roberto Hirsch)

 

Figure 4. Roberto’s great aunt Sophie Hirsch (1875~1944) in 1918 in Bonn (photo courtesy of Roberto Hirsch)
Figure 5. Roberto’s great uncle Karl Hirsch (1879-1944) in Colmar, Alsace in 1906 when Colmar was still a part of Germany

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 6. “Page of Testimony” about Sophie Hirsch from Yad Vashem Victims’ Database
Figure 7. Screenshot with birth information on Bernhard Hirsch, born to Jakob & Auguste Hirsch on the 7th of December 1877 in Karlsruhe, the great uncle Roberto was unaware of; his fate remains unknown

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Roberto obviously knew of his great-grandfather Jakob Hirsch (1842-1905) (Figure 8) and great granduncle Sigmund Hirsch (1848-1920). Again, Jakob and Sigmund had a third sibling Roberto did not know of, also named Bernhard Hirsch (1836-1888). (Figure 9)

 

Figure 8. Jakob Hirsch (1842-1905) (photo courtesy of Roberto Hirsch)
Figure 9. Screenshot with death information on an earlier generation Bernhard Hirsch, born to Emanuel & Henriette Hirsch in Karlsruhe 1836 who died there in 1888; this is another ancestor Roberto was unaware of

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I was able to establish a connection between Roberto’s ancestors and the city of Karlsruhe in the German state of Baden-Württemberg through records I initially found for Ratibor, Germany [today: Racibórz, Poland] rather than for Karlsruhe. Let me explain.

 

Prior to being contacted by Roberto Hirsch, I knew when Sigmund Hirsch had died and even have a picture of his headstone from the former Jewish Cemetery in Ratibor. (Figure 10) One of the Ratibor microfilms available through familysearch.org, the Mormon Library’s online database, Family History Library (FHL) microfilm 1184448 records his date of death as the 15th of October 1920. (Figure 11) It took me a while to realize the death register is organized according to the Hebrew calendar. Thus, the page with Sigmund Hirsch’s name is entitled “Marcheschwan,” which is “Heshvan,” covering the months of October-November. This comports with Sigmund’s known death inscribed on his headstone as the 14th of October 1920. Similarly, for Sigmund’s wife, Selma Hirsch née Braun, who I knew from the same headstone died on the 11th of July 1916, I found her name under the Jewish month of “Tamus” or “Tammuz” (Figure 12), encompassing the months of June-July. Below, I discuss another surprising discovery I made on FHL microfilm 1184448.

 

Figure 10. Selma & Sigmund Hirsch’s headstone from the former Jewish Cemetery in Ratibor

 

 

Figure 11. Sigmund Hirsch’s death register listing from Ratibor FHL microfilm 1184448 under the Jewish month of “Marcheschwan” (October-November) showing he died on the 15th of October 1920
Figure 12. Selma Hirsch née Braun’s death register listing from Ratibor FHL microfilm 1184448 under the Jewish month of “Tamus” (June-July) showing she died on the 11th of July 1916

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The key to unraveling Roberto Hirsch’s lineage was discovering his great-grandparents’ marriage certificate on ancestry.com. Jakob Hirsch (Sigmund’s brother) and his wife, Auguste Hirsch née Hirsch from a different branch of the Hirsch family, were married in Karlsruhe, Baden-Württemberg, Germany on the 30th of July 1874. (Figure 13) German marriage certificates typically provide a wealth of information, including the age and the date and place of birth of the espoused, along with the names of the parents, including the maiden names of the mothers. While I cannot read or speak German, the handwriting is crisp enough that I could make out the key vital information.

 

Figure 13. Jakob Hirsch & Auguste Hirsch’s 1874 marriage certificate that was the key to unraveling Roberto Hirsch’s ancestry; though written in German most of the vital data is decipherable

 

 

Jakob Hirsch, I learned, was 31 years of age at the time of his marriage, was born in Carlsruhe (former spelling of Karlsruhe), and his parents were Emanuel Hirsch and Jette (short for Henriette) née Ettlinger. Jakob’s wife, Auguste, was 25 when she married, was born in Ilvesheim, Baden-Württemberg, Germany, and her parents were Löb Hirsch II and Johanna née Herz. Armed with this new information, I quickly found Emanuel Hirsch’s death certificate showing he died on the 25th of March 1880 in Karlsruhe.

Jakob’s 1874 marriage certificate was the first solid evidence I found for his father’s full name, Emanuel Hirsch. As a related aside, Roberto shared an 1879 letter written in the old German script “Sütterlin,” signed by “E. Hirsch,” with separate sections addressed to his other son Sigmund and daughter-in-law Selma Hirsch née Braun. What makes this letter so quaint is that Sigmund married Selma without introducing her to his parents. This meant he did not have permission to marry her, in those days a big affront in Jewish families. Regardless, Emanuel Hirsch’s 1879 letter graciously welcomed Selma to the family.

Initially uncertain what might have happened to Sigmund and Jakob’s parents, Emanuel Hirsch and Henriette Hirsch née Ettlinger, I re-examined FHL microfilm 1184448, thinking they might have died in Ratibor. What I discovered surprised me. Under the Jewish month of “Nissan” or “Nisan,” covering March-April, I found both their names in Ratibor’s death register. (Figure 14) Under the column titled “Beerdigungsort,” or burial place, they are both shown however to have been buried in Karlsruhe. In Emanuel’s case, his listing under March comports with the month of his death; however, in the case of Emanuel’s wife Henriette, from her death certificate which I also found, she is known to have died in August. Why both names are listed in the Ratibor death register when they are known to have died in Karlsruhe is a bit of a mystery; I assume it is because their son Sigmund was connected to Ratibor. These towns are more than 575 miles apart.

 

 

Figure 14. Emanuel and Henriette Hirsch’s death register listings from Ratibor FHL microfilm 1184448 under the Jewish month of “Nissan” (March-April), showing they were buried in Karlsruhe, Baden-Württemberg; Emanuel died in March, making his listing accurate, but his wife died in August making her listing here puzzling

 

Regardless, the findings discussed firmly established a link to Karlsruhe and Ilvesheim in Baden-Württemberg, Germany for Roberto Hirsch’s family. I returned to familysearch.org, hoping to find Jewish microfilm for one town or the other, and was rewarded in both instances. Finding these records was the ultimate step to documenting Roberto’s lineage.

As previously mentioned, Emanuel and Henriette Hirsch’s three sons, Bernhard, Jakob, and Sigmund were born, respectively, in 1836, 1842, and 1848. These dates narrowed the “window” to search for birth records in Karlsruhe. From their death records, I knew Bernhard and Jakob were born in Karlsruhe, and assumed Sigmund had also been born there.

Bernhard (Figures 15a-b), Jakob (Figures 16a-b), and Sigmund’s (Figures 17a-b) birth register listings are all found on FHL microfilm 1256447 for Karlsruhe. Without knowing beforehand their actual or approximate years of birth, it is quite unlikely I would have located their listings. Given how indecipherable the text is, as readers can see for themselves, knowing what to search for was the key to finding the listings. At a minimum, birth registers give the name and date of birth of the newborn and the names of the parents. 

 

Figure 15a. Bernhard Hirsch’s (1836-1888) birth register listing from Karlsruhe FHL microfilm 1256447 showing he was born on the 26th of August 1836

 

Figure 15b. Transcription & translation of Bernhard Hirsch’s birth register listing

 

Figure 16a. Jakob Hirsch’s (1842-1905) birth register listing from Karlsruhe FHL microfilm 1256447 showing he was born on the 8th of November 1842

 

Figure 16b. Transcription & translation of Jakob Hirsch’s birth register listing

 

Figure 17a. Sigmund Hirsch’s (1848-1920) birth register listing from Karlsruhe FHL microfilm 1256447 showing he was born on the 18th of November 1848

 

Figure 17b. Transcription & translation of Sigmund Hirsch’s birth register listing

 

The most challenging listing to read was that of Bernhard Hirsch. Literally, I thought I could read four words out of five lines, namely, “Mutter Jette geb. Ettlinger” (circled) translated as “Mother Jette née Ettlinger.” The surname “Hirsch” written in the margin (circled), though now recognizable to me, was initially indiscernible. My go-to German friend, Peter Hanke, transcribed and translated all three birth register listings for me, along with the other documents illustrated and discussed below.

Having confirmed Bernhard was born in 1836, I turned my attention to finding his parents’ marriage register listing in Karlsruhe. While they might possibly have gotten married after Bernhard’s birth, I assumed they would have married before 1836. Again, after much hunting, I eventually found Emanuel Hirsch and Jette Ettlinger got married on the 27th of May 1834. (Figures 18a-b) Both Emanuel and Jette’s parents were named on this document, information that allowed me to track Roberto’s maternal ancestors yet another two generations as the table below illustrates.

 

Figure 18a. Emanuel Hirsch and Jette Ettlinger’s marriage register listing from Karlsruhe FHL microfilm 1256447 showing they married on the 27th of May 1834

 

Figure 18b. Transcription & translation of Emanuel Hirsch and Jette Ettlinger’s marriage register listing

 

Having gleaned what I could from the birth and marriage register listings for Karlsruhe, I next turned my attention to FHL microfilm 1271220 containing Jewish records for Ilvesheim, in Baden-Württemberg, Germany. Located approximately 39 miles north of Karlsruhe, this is where Roberto’s great-grandmother Auguste Hirsch née Hirsch was born around 1849 according to her 1874 marriage certificate (discussed above). Again, after much scrutiny, I found her birth register listing showing “Gustel,” short form for Auguste, was born on the 14th of January 1849. (Figures 19a-b) As readers can see from the translation, Auguste’s parents are identified, Löw Hirsch and Jeannette née Herz, which gave me further names to check out.

 

Figure 19a. Auguste “Gustel” Hirsch’s birth register listing from Ilvesheim FHL microfilm 1271220 showing she was born on the 14th of January 1849

 

Figure 19b. Transcription & translation of Auguste “Gustel” Hirsch’s birth register listing

 

As mentioned in the first installment of Post 98, Roberto Hirsch, while born in 1944 in Santiago, Chile has lived in Bonn, Germany for the last 50 years. Prior to WWII, his grandfather Hermann Hirsch owned a well-known department store in Bonn shown in part 1 of this post. When Roberto reached out to me, he told me he thought Hermann had been born in Freiburg im Breisgau, Baden-Württemberg, Germany, about 85 miles south-southeast of Karlsruhe. From Hermann’s birth certificate, I ascertained he was actually born in Karlsruhe. (Figure 20)

 

Figure 20. Screenshot with birth information on Hermann Hirsch (1876-1943), Roberto’s grandfather who committed suicide in Theresienstadt, showing he was born in Karlsruhe rather than Freiburg im Breisgau

 

 

Roberto confirmed his family’s association with both cities. He accessed and sent me address books for Karlsruhe from 1840 (Figure 21), 1855 (Figure 22), and 1874 (Figure 23), and one from Freiburg from 1887 (Figure 24) with listings for his family. The 1840 and 1855 Karlsruhe address books identify his great-great-grandfather Emanuel Hirsch as a “schneider,” a tailor. The 1874 Karlsruhe address book by then lists Emanuel as a “partikulier,” a ship owner who works for larger shipping companies, and his son Sigmund as a “kaufman,” a tradesman; clearly, at some point, Sigmund Hirsch moved to Ratibor and became co-owner of the Woinowitz Zuckerfabrik there. The 1887 Freiburg address book lists Roberto’s great-grandfather Jakob Hirsch also as a “kaufman.”

 

Figure 21. Page from 1840 Karlsruhe Address Book listing Roberto’s great-great-grandfather Emanuel Hirsch as a “schneider,” a tailor
Figure 22. Page from 1855 Karlsruhe Address Book again listing Emanuel Hirsch as a “schneider,” a tailor

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 23. Page from 1874 Karlsruhe Address Book now listing Emanuel Hirsch as a “partikulier,” a ship owner who works for larger shipping companies, and his son Sigmund as a “kaufman,” a tradesman
Figure 24. Page from 1887 Freiburg Address Book listing Roberto’s great-grandfather Jakob Hirsch as a “kaufman,” a tradesman

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As regular readers may have noticed, I have started including a table of vital statistics for the people discussed in my posts sourcing the vital data. This may seem unimportant, but I consider it relevant given all the erroneous data found on ancestral trees. As an example, in the case of Roberto Hirsch’s great-grandfather, I found a family tree stating Jakob Hirsch was born around 1843. I located the birth register listing for this Jakob, and it is clear to me this was a different person with the same name. While generally dismissive of trees with basic errors, after studying the inscrutable vital records for Karlsruhe and Ilvesheim, I can easily understand how genealogists might make honest mistakes. Naturally, this assumes researchers have tried to track down primary source documents, my benchmark for accuracy.

 

 

 

ROBERTO HIRSCH’S SIMPLIFIED FAMILY “TREE” BACK SEVEN GENERATIONS

 

GENERATION PATERNAL LINE PATERNAL LINE SPOUSE MATERNAL LINE MATERNAL LINE SPOUSE
GEN. 0 Roberto Hirsch (self) (b. 1944)      
GEN. 1 Fritz Hirsch (father) (1908-2006)   Margarete Janzen (mother)

(1914-1992)

 
GEN. 2 Hermann Hirsch (grandfather) (1876-1943)   Ida Sollinger (grandmother)

(1874-1944)

 
GEN. 3 Jakob Hirsch (g-grandfather)

(1842-1905)

  Auguste Hirsch (g-grandmother)

(1849-1935)

 
GEN. 4 Emanuel “Nathan” Hirsch g-g-grandfather) (1805-1880)   Henriette “Jette” Ettlinger (g-g-grandmother) (1808-1882)  
GEN. 5 Nathan Hirsch (g-g-g-grandfather) Sara Mandel (g-g-g-grandmother) (1763-1839) Bernard Ettlinger (g-g-g-grandfather) (1777-1847) Therese Levi (g-g-g-grandmother)
GEN. 6     Seligmann Ettlinger (g-g-g-g-grandfather)

(unk.-1805)

Rachel Weinheimer (g-g-g-g-grandmother) (1739-1817)
GEN. 7     UNKNOWN ETTLINGER Malka (unk. maiden name) (g-g-g-g-g-grandmother (unk.-1770)

 

 

POST 95: DISCOVERING THE FATE OF MY GREAT-GRANDFATHER’S NIECE, CHARLOTTE BRUCK

Note:  In this post, I discuss the sad fate of Charlotte Bruck, my great-grandfather Fedor Bruck’s niece, a victim in this case not of the Holocaust but of a psychiatric disorder.

Related Post:

Post 11: Ratibor & Bruck’s “Prinz Von Preußen“ Hotel

 

Figure 1. My great-great-grandfather Samuel Bruck (1808-1863), first generation owner of the Bruck’s “Prinz von Preußen” Hotel in Ratibor, Germany [today: Racibórz, Poland]
Figure 2. My great-great-grandmother Charlotte Bruck née Marle (1809-1861)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My great-grandfather, Fedor Bruck (1834-1892), was one of at least nine offspring of Samuel Bruck (1808-1863) (Figure 1) and Charlotte Bruck née Marle (1809-1861). (Figure 2) For context, Samuel Bruck and Fedor Bruck (Figure 3) were, respectively the first- and second-generation owners of the Bruck family hotel in Ratibor, Germany [today: Racibórz, Poland], the Bruck’s “Prinz von Preußen” Hotel. (Figure 4) The youngest of Samuel and Charlotte Bruck’s children and Fedor Bruck’s youngest sibling was Wilhelm Bruck (1849-1907). (Figure 5)

 

Figure 3. My great-grandfather Fedor Bruck (1834-1892), second generation owner of the Bruck’s “Prinz von Preußen” Hotel
Figure 4. Front entrance to the Bruck’s “Prinz von Preußen” Hotel around 1920-1930

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 5. My great-granduncle Wilhelm Bruck (1849-1907), youngest sibling of Fedor Bruck, married to the baroness Margarethe “Grete” Mathilde von Koschembahr (1860-1946) whose surname he took
Figure 6. Baroness Margarethe “Grete” Mathilde von Koschembahr (1860-1946)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wilhelm married a baroness named Margarete “Grete” Mathilde von Koschembahr (Figure 6), and because of the prestige the von Koschembahr name endowed, he adopted her surname, initially in hyphenated manner as Bruck-von Koschembahr; eventually upon some family members arrival in America the Bruck surname was dropped. Wilhelm Bruck and Margarete von Koschembahr had five children, including Charlotte “Lotte” Bruck (Figure 7), niece of my great-grandfather Fedor Bruck and subject of this post.

 

Figure 7. Charlotte Bruck (1886-1974), daughter of Wilhelm Bruck and Margarete “Grete” Mathilde von Koschembahr, in 1914 or 1915 (photo courtesy of Jay Dunn née Lorenzen)

 

As a brief aside, Charlotte’s older brother and the oldest of Wilhelm and Margarete’s children was Gerhard Bruck von Koschembahr (1885-1961) (Figure 8), who emigrated to America in October 1938 with his wife and ten of their thirteen children (Figure 9), one of whom is still living. While I am in contact with descendants of virtually all other branches of my family whom I have written about in my family history blog, I have not yet established contact with this wing of my extended family. If precedent is any indication, descendants of the von Koschembahrs may in time stumble upon my blog and contact me.

 

Figure 8. Gerhard Bruck von Koschembahr (1885-1961) & his wife Hilda née von Zeidlitz and Neukirch (1891-1954) with their thirteen children in Lugano, Switzerland in the 1930’s; Gerhard was the oldest of Charlotte Bruck’s siblings who dropped the “Bruck” portion of his surname prior to arriving in America

 

Figure 9. New York Times article dated October 2, 1938 mentioning Gerhard von Koschembahr’s arrival in America with his wife and ten of their thirteen children

 

With upwards of 900 people in my family tree, which I use primarily to orient myself to the people whom I discuss in my Blog, I have never previously written about Wilhelm Bruck (von Koschembahr). Still, because Charlotte Bruck is in my tree, one genealogist stumbled upon her name and contacted me asking whether I know the fate of Charlotte’s first husband, Walter Edward Stavenhagen. The inquiry, it so happens, came from Charlotte’s granddaughter, Brenda Jay Dunn née Lorenzen (Figure 10), and I explained I have been unable to discover Walter’s fate. Not unexpectedly, Jay told me much more about Charlotte’s family than I could tell her and provided family photographs, which is always immensely satisfying.

 

Figure 10. Jay Dunn née Lorenzen, Charlotte Bruck and her first husband Walter Edward Stavenhagen’s granddaughter, in 2018 in La Jolla, California

 

 

Prior to being contacted by Jay Dunn through ancestry on June 24, 2018, I had already uncovered multiple documents related to Charlotte Bruck, although my understanding of her three marriages and life was rather disjointed. Rather than try and inaccurately reconstruct what I already knew at the time, let me briefly highlight major events in her life.

Charlotte (Lottchen, Lotte, Lottel) Bruck got married for the first time on the 3rd of May 1906 in Berlin to the Protestant landowner Walter Edward Stavenhagen (Figures 11a-b) who owned an estate in Eichwerder in the district of Soldin, Germany [today: Myślibórz, Poland]. Though both of Charlotte’s parents were of Jewish descent, on her wedding certificate, Charlotte is identified as Protestant, indicating she and/or her parents had converted. Following her marriage to Walter at age 19, they moved to Soldin, and Charlotte gave birth to two sons there: Frederick Wilhelm Stavenhagen (1907-1997) and Hans Joachim Stavenhagen (1909-1947). (Figures 12-13a-b)

Figure 11a. Page 1 of Charlotte Bruck and Walter Edward Stavenhagen’s May 3rd, 1906 marriage certificate indicating they were married in Berlin and were Protestant
Figure 11b. Page 2 of Charlotte Bruck and Walter Edward Stavenhagen’s May 3rd, 1906 marriage certificate with Charlotte and Walter’s original signatures

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 12. Charlotte and Walter’s two young sons, Frederick Wilhelm Stavenhagen (1907-1997) and Hans Joachim Stavenhagen (1909-1947) (photo courtesy of Jay Dunn née Lorenzen)

 

Figure 13a. Birth certificate of Hans Joachim Stavenhagen, Jay Dunn née Lorenzen’s father, showing he was born on the 13th of February 1909 in Soldin, Germany [today: Myślibórz, Poland] (document courtesy of Jay Dunn née Lorenzen)
Figure 13b. Translation of Han’s Joachim Stavenhagen’s birth certificate (document courtesy of Jay Dunn née Lorenzen)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Charlotte first became ill following the birth of her second son, possibly the result of postpartum depression or a bi-polar disorder. Charlotte’s mother, Margarethe von Koschembahr Bruck (Figure 14), came and removed her from Walter Stavenhagen’s estate in 1909, whereupon she was briefly hospitalized in Schierke, located in the Harz Mountains of northern Germany. In a diary entry dated the 19th of November 1909, Charlotte’s maternal grandmother, Amalie Mockrauer von Koschembahr (1834-1918) (Figures 15-16), describes her granddaughter’s circumstances at the time:

 

Figure 14. Charlotte Stavenhagen née Bruck’s mother, Margarete “Grete” Mathilde von Koschembahr, in 1938 at age 78

 

Figure 15. Charlotte Stavenhagen née Bruck’s grandmother, Amalie von Koschembahr née Mockrauer, with Charlotte’s mother, Margarete “Grete” Mathilde von Koschembahr, in 1863
Figure 16. Charlotte Stavenhagen née Bruck’s grandmother, Amalie von Koschembahr née Mockrauer, around 1904 at age 70

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

GERMAN ENTRY

“Ich bin furchtbar traurig über das Fehlschlagen von Lottchens Friedensversuch. Nachdem sie in Eichwerder (nördlich Mysliborz) mit den besten Vorsätzen und mit festem Muthe eintraf, sich in ihr Schicksal und ihre Pflichten zu fügen, benahm sich Walter abermals unglaublich lieblos, rücksichtslos und roh, so, daß es nach kurzer Zeit für Lotte unmöglich war Stand zu halten. Soweit mir berichtet wurde, ist alles geschehen, um es dem Mann leicht zu machen in Frieden zu leben, allein es war vergeblich. Krank und gebrochen mußte meine arme Lottel ihre Heimath für immer verlassen, nur begleitet von ihrem kleinen Fritzchen, den armen kleinen Hans gab der Mann nicht heraus. Mein armes Gretchen holte ihr Kind, Marianne und Kurt, die von großer Liebe und Treue sind, begleiteten sie. Lotte flüchtete nach Schierke (Ort im Harz), wohin ihr Gretchen nachfolgen mußte, da Lotte sehr krank ist. Welcher Schmerz ist es doch schon wegen der kleinen mutterbedürftigen Kinder! Welche große Sünde hat der bösartige Mann auf sich geladen! Mein lieber allmächtiger Gott hilf uns in dieser Noth!

Das alles muß ich so still für mich mittragen, denn mit Tilla kann ich mich nicht aussprechen – sie hat eine andere Anschauung vom Unglück der Menschen – sie kann froh darüber sein, während ich zwar ergeben aus Gottes Hand alles nehme, aber tief traurig an meine unglücklichen Kinder denke. Seitdem Martha von Schmidt der Tod von uns genommen hat, habe ich Niemanden, mit dem ich ein tröstliches Wort austauschen kann. Ach, wieviel Schwaches giebt es auf der Welt – der Kampf hört hier nicht auf und so sehnt man sich nach der ewigen Reise. –Mit Tilchen kann ich mich darüber deshalb nicht verstehen, weil sie glaubt das Unglück, welches der Herr schickt, soll die Menschen bessern und seine Gnade und Liebe erkennen lassen.”

 

ENGLISH TRANSLATION

 

“I am terribly saddened by the failure of Lottchen’s attempt at peace. After she arrived in Eichwerder (today north of Myślibórz, Poland) with the best of intentions and with firm courage to submit to her fate and duties, Walter again behaved in an unbelievably unloving, inconsiderate, and crude manner, so that after a short time it was impossible for Lotte to stand firm. As far as I was told, everything was done to make it easy for the man to live in peace, but it was in vain. Sick and broken, my poor Lottel had to leave her home forever, accompanied only by her little Fritzchen (Note: Charlotte’s older son Frederick); poor little Hans was not released by the man. My poor Gretchen (Note: Charlotte’s mother, Margarethe von Koschembahr) fetched her child, and Marianne and Kurt (Note: Charlotte’s younger sister and brother-in-law, Marianne & Kurt Polborn), who are of great love and loyalty, accompanied her. Lotte fled to Schierke (a place in the Harz Mountains in northern Germany), where Gretchen had to follow her, since Lotte was very ill. What a pain it is already because of the little children in need of a mother! What a great sin the wicked man has brought upon himself! My dear Almighty God help us in this distress!

 

I have to bear all this so quietly for myself, because I cannot talk to Tilla (Note: Tilla, Tilchen, was Margarethe von Koschembahr’s sister, Mathilde von Koschembahr) – she has a different view of people’s misfortune – she can be happy about it, while I humbly take everything from God’s hand, but think deeply sad about my unhappy children. Since death took Martha von Schmidt (Note: a friend of Amalie von Koschembahr, Charlotte’s grandmother) from us, I have no one with whom I can exchange a comforting word. Oh, how much weakness there is in the world – the struggle does not end here and so one longs for the eternal journey. I can’t get along with Tilchen because she believes that the misfortune the Lord sends should make people better and recognize His grace and love.”

 

Walter and Charlotte’s marriage certificate has a notation in the upper right-hand corner confirming they were divorced in Berlin on the 19th of May 1910. (Figure 17) Atypical of the time, Charlotte was granted custody of both of her boys because spousal abuse was suspected, as the diary entry above suggests.

Figure 17. German notation in the upper right-hand corner of Charlotte and Walter Stavenhagen’s marriage certificate noting they got divorced on the 19th of May 1910

 

According to family history, following her hospitalization in the Harz Mountains, Charlotte lived with her mother in Dresden, Germany until she remarried Karl Eduard Michaelis in 1913, a marriage which lasted only two years. At around this time, Charlotte again showed signs of mental illness, so her family sent her to America in 1915, to a hospital located in Minnesota; her two sons accompanied her to America. Her stay there was relatively brief because she soon moved to New Haven, Connecticut, where she met her third husband, Ernest Gustav Lorenzen (1876-1951), through the German Society there, whom she married around 1916. Ernest Lorenzen was a law professor at Yale University; he would eventually adopt both of Charlotte’s sons by Walter Stavenhagen, and they would take the Lorenzen surname. The 1920 U.S. Federal Census indicates Ernest and Charlotte living with her two sons in New Haven, Connecticut, (Figures 18-19) although by 1930, only Ernest and Charlotte’s older son Frederick lived together. (Figure 20) By 1940, Frederick was married with two daughters and his younger brother was living with them. (Figure 21)

 

Figure 18. 1920 U.S. Federal Census showing Ernest Gustav Lorenzen living in New Haven, Connecticut with his wife Charlotte and his two adopted sons, Frederick and Hans

 

Figure 19. Charlotte Bruck with her two sons, Frederick and Hans (photo courtesy of Jay Dunn née Lorenzen)

 

Figure 20. By 1930 the U.S. Federal Census shows Ernest Gustav Lorenzen living only with his older adopted son, Frederick

 

Figure 21. The 1940 U.S. Federal Census indicates that Frederick Lorenzen has established his own household in Stamford, Connecticut with his wife and two daughters, and that his younger brother Hans (John) is living with them

 

Jay Dunn shared a remarkable letter with me dated 1940 written by the Superintendent of the Fairfield State Hospital in Connecticut where Charlotte Lorenzen née Bruck was permanently institutionalized as of around April 1939 until her death in June 1974. To me, this letter is noteworthy for two reasons. One, it is incredibly detailed as to Charlotte’s mental condition and institutionalization over the years, information I would assume would be confidential. And two, the letter was written at the request of Charlotte’s younger son, Hans Joachim Lorenzen, known in America as John Jay Lorenzen; it seems that John’s future father-in-law, William Sweet, sought a medical opinion as to the possibility of Charlotte’s mental condition being hereditary prior to his daughter Brenda’s marriage to John.

According to the 1940 letter, following Charlotte’s treatment in Minnesota and her relocation to New Haven, she appears to have been well until around 1921, then suffered another relapse from which she again improved by 1922; after 1925, however, she was institutionalized through the remainder of her life. While originally diagnosed with Manic Depressive Psychosis by 1928 she had become delusional. Over time, Charlotte’s original diagnosis was altered to Dementia Praecox, Paranoid Type, whose prognosis was not as good. Today, Dementia Praecox would more generally be referred to as schizophrenia. The Superintendent from the Fairfield State Hospital concluded as follows in his response to John Jay Lorenzen: 

“Summing it up then in another manner I might say that if you consider yourself a normal individual in good physical health with no emotional problems which cannot be readily solved, I would not hesitate to contemplate marriage and would not entertain any undue fears that my children might inherit the illness of my parent. Unless one can definitely assure oneself that his heredity is too heavily tainted, I think one would do himself an injustice if he did not make every reasonable effort to live the kind of normal life to which everyone of us is certainly entitled.”

 

Ernst Lorenzen divorced Charlotte sometime after she was permanently institutionalized, and eventually got remarried. Charlotte’s older son Frederick (Figure 22-23) became a successful lawyer in New York and paid for his mother’s care throughout her life. Jay Dunn’s father, John Jay Lorenzen (Figure 24), obtained an MBA from Harvard around 1933, worked for a time as a stock broker for Smith Barney, then started a cola company called Zimba Kola (Figures 25-26) with a college friend. He was drafted in 1943, became an officer in the Navy (Figure 27), and was sent to the Pacific where he fought valiantly alongside General MacArthur in the battles of Okinawa and Leyte Gulf. He survived the war, only to commit suicide in 1947, likely from depression caused by PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. Though Charlotte Bruck and her sons came to America well before Hitler rose to power, her fate and that of her younger son were indeed sad tales.

Figure 22. Frederick Lorenzen as a teenager (photo courtesy of Jay Dunn née Lorenzen)
Figure 23. Frederick Lorenzen at his brother’s wedding on the 26th of September 1940 (photo courtesy of Jay Dunn née Lorenzen)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 24. Hans Joachim Lorenzen, known in America as John Jay Lorenzen, on his wedding day on the 26th of September 1940 (photo courtesy of Jay Dunn née Lorenzen)
Figure 25. Zimba Kola bottle from the cola company John Jay Lorenzen established

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 26. Jay Dunn as a three-year-old child holding a bottle of Zimba Kola (photo courtesy of Jay Dunn née Lorenzen)
Figure 27. John Jay Lorenzen in his Navy uniform at age 33 (photo courtesy of Jay Dunn née Lorenzen)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One final fascinating anecdote. Gerhard Bruck von Koschembahr, Charlotte’s oldest brother mentioned above, like his father, also married a baroness, Hilda Alexandra von Zeidlitz and Neukirch (1891-1954). (Figures 28-29) Hilda’s mother, Cornelia Carnochan Roosevelt, married on the 3rd of February 1889 to Baron Clement Zeidlitz, was a distant relative of President Theodore Roosevelt. (see Figure 9) It is likely that Gerhard Bruck von Koschembahr was able to “disguise” his Jewish ancestry by dropping the Bruck surname. Thus, because of Gerhard’s wife’s connection to the Roosevelts, they sponsored Gerhard’s entrance into America in 1938 with his family at a time when many Jewish families trying to reach America by ship were turned away. The most notorious ship turned away from landing in the United States in the lead up to WWII was the German liner St. Louis carrying 937 passengers, almost all Jewish; the ship was forced to return to Europe, and more than a quarter of the refuges died in the Holocaust.

Figure 28. Wedding photo of Gerhard Bruck von Koschembahr and Hilda Alexandra von Zeidlitz, married on the 21st of March 1914 (photo courtesy of Kurt Polborn)

 

Figure 29. Headstone of William C. Roosevelt, alongside which Gerhard (Bruck) von Koschembahr and his wife Hilda Roosevelt von Koschembahr are interred

 

VITAL STATISTICS FOR CHARLOTTE BRUCK & HER IMMEDIATE FAMILY

 

 

NAME EVENT DATE PLACE SOURCE
         
Charlotte Bruck (self) Birth 17 August 1886 Berlin, Germany Marriage Certificate
Marriage to Walter Edward Stavenhagen 3 May 1906 Berlin, Germany Marriage Certificate
Divorce from Walter Edward Stavenhagen 19 May 1910 Berlin, Germany Notation on marriage certificate
Marriage to Karl Eduard Michaelis 20 August 1913 Dresden, Germany Marriage Certificate
Divorce from Karl Eduard Michaelis ~1915 Dresden, Germany “Stavenhagen-Bruck-Von Koschembahr Family History” (Jay Dunn)
Marriage to Ernest Gustav Lorenzen ~1916   1940 letter from Fairfield State Hospital in Connecticut describing Charlotte’s mental history
Death 5 June 1974 Stamford, Connecticut Connecticut Death Index
Wilhelm Bruck (father) Birth 23 February 1949 Ratibor, Germany [today: Racibórz, Poland] Berlin marriage certificate
Marriage 14 September 1884 Berlin, Germany Berlin marriage certificate
Death 15 February 1907 Berlin, Germany Berlin death certificate
Margarethe Mathilde von Koschembahr (mother) Birth 28 November 1860 Lissa, Posen, Germany [today: Poznan, Poland] von Koschembahr family tree
Marriage 14 September 1884 Berlin, Germany Berlin marriage certificate
Death 19 October 1946 Boston, Massachusetts von Koschembahr family tree
Amalie Mockrauer (grandmother) Birth 9 September 1834 Leschnitz, Germany [today: Leśnica, Poland] 15 April 1855 Baptism Certificate
Marriage (to Leopold von Koschembahr) 26 September 1855 London, England England & Wales Civil Registration Marriage Index
Death 5 August 1918 Dresden, Germany Dresden death certificate
Walter Edward Stavenhagen (first husband) Birth 1 September 1876 Calais, France 1900 Mecklenburg-Schwerin, Germany Census
Marriage 3 May 1906 Berlin, Germany Marriage Certificate
Karl Eduard Michaelis (second husband) Birth 4 January 1884 Berlin, Germany Birth Certificate
Marriage 20 August 1913 Dresden, Germany Marriage Certificate
Death (died as Carl Edward Midgard) 12 October 1953 Seattle, Washington Washington Death Certificate
Ernest Gustav Lorenzen (third husband) Birth 21 April 1876 Kiel, Germany US Passport Application
Marriage ~1916   1940 letter from Fairfield State Hospital in Connecticut describing Charlotte’s mental history
Death 12 February 1951 San Francisco, California California Death Index
Frederick Wilhelm Stavenhagen (son) Birth 28 February 1907 Soldin, Germany [today: Myślibórz, Poland] US Social Security Death Index
Marriage (to Dorothy P. Walker) 30 June 1931 Portland, Maine Maine Marriage Index
Death (died as Frederick W. Lorenzen) 30 December 1997 Stamford, Connecticut US Social Security Death Index
Hans Joachim Stavenhagen (son) Birth 13 February 1909 Soldin, Germany [today: Myślibórz, Poland] Soldin, Germany Birth Certificate
Marriage (to Brenda Sweet) 17 September 1940 Staten Island, New York New York Marriage License Index
Death (died as John Jay Lorenzen) 24 Jun 1947 Greenwich, Connecticut Connecticut Death Record

POST 93: GUIDE TO THE MORMON CHURCH’S FAMILIAL MICROFILMS: USING THEM TO UNRAVEL MY GREAT-GRANDFATHER’S LINEAGE

Note: This post tiers off the previous one where I discussed a Hermann Berliner with links to Ratibor, Germany [today: Racibórz, Poland], like my identically named great-grandfather; Ratibor is where my father was born and where many of my Jewish Silesian ancestors hail from. In trying to initially determine whether I was dealing with the same person, I accessed the Mormon Church’s online Jewish microfilm records found at familysearch.org to work out the solution. This post, thus, allows me to provide readers with a brief guide on how to access these records, as well as point out that even among primary source documents, which for me are the “gold standard,” errors can be found.

Related Posts:

Post 12: “State Archives in Katowice Branch in Racibórz (Ratibor)”

Post 92: Beware Identical Ancestral Names, The Case of My Maternal Great-Grandfather Hermann Berliner

 

Genealogists today have the advantage of being able to access online from the comfort of home many microfilm records from towns across the globe that once could only be ordered, paid for, and have mailed to a local Mormon Family History Library. These microfilms can be accessed for free by registering and creating a personal account at “familysearch.org.” (Figure 1)

 

Figure 1. “FamilySearch.org” page where free account is created

 

I will walk readers through the simple steps for retrieving these digital records, using Ratibor, Germany [today: Racibórz, Poland] as an example, the town in Upper Silesia where my father and many of his relatives were born and/or lived. After readers have created their free ancestry account, they should go to the portal page for “familysearch.org.” On the pulldown menu under “Search,” readers should select “Catalog” (Figure 2) which will take them to a page entitled “FamilySearch Catalog.” (Figure 3) Under “Place,” readers should type the name of the town they are seeking records from. In my case, I typed in Ratibor, although if I type in the current Polish name of the town, “Racibórz,” the results on the next screen will be slightly different. My suggestion, at least when researching towns formerly in Germany, is to type the former German town name as well as the current Polish town name; a simple Google search will give you the name of towns over time.

 

Figure 2. “FamilySearch.org” portal page with pull-down “Search” menu

 

Figure 3. “FamilySearch Catalog” page where “Place” one is searching is entered

 

The “Catalog Print List” enumerates the records available for the town you have selected. For Ratibor, I was interested in “Jewish Records,” which yields “Matrikel, 1814-1940,” birth, marriage, and death registers for Ratibor from between 1814 and 1940. (Figure 4) A few things should be noted. First, the “Matrikel” are simply registers maintained by the Jewish synagogues. Second, they do not give you access to the underlying birth, marriage, and death certificates, assuming these still exist. Third, the “Matrikel” are not a complete register of all Jewish births, marriage, and deaths between 1814 and 1940. Because of the “Kulturkampf,” discussed in Post 12, after the early 1870’s, most birth, marriages, and deaths were no longer registered by religious denominations in Germany but were recorded as civil events. Oddly, the names of Jews who died following the “Kulturkampf” and were interred in the former Jewish cemetery in Ratibor or elsewhere in Germany are registered both in the Jewish microfilm records as well as in the civil ledgers.

 

Figure 4. Search Results for Ratibor listing Jewish records, “Matrikel, 1814-1940”

 

Selecting “Matrikel, 1814-1940” yields a list of available digital films, in the case of Ratibor, LDS microfilms 1184447, 1184448, and 1184449. (Figure 5) On the far right, readers should see a camera icon on which they should click to be taken to the digital film. If a microfilm reel icon or key shows up above the camera icon, the microfilm is not generally available online and can only be viewed at the Mormon Family History Library in Salt Lake City.

 

Figure 5. “Matrikel, 1814-1940” Microfilms for Ratibor, numbered 1184447 (“Friedhofsusrkunden 1888-1940” (Cemetery Documents)), 1184448 (“Tote 1865-1930) (Deaths)), and 1184449 (“Geburten 1815-1874 Heiraten 1814-1862” (Births & Marriages))

 

I first accessed the microfilms for Ratibor, Germany [today: Racibórz, Poland] almost 40 years ago on a visit to the Family History Library in Salt Lake City. Years later, I would order and pay for these films to be sent to a local Mormon Family History Library, so I could leisurely examine and take notes on them. I created a table summarizing what I had found on births, deaths, and marriages for members of my extended family. However, given that the registers were handwritten in German and often indecipherable, my log was incomplete. Only more recently have I made the effort to have a German relative or friend translate previously unreadable words or phrases. This is considerably easier since individual microfilm pages can now easily be downloaded from the Mormon Church’s website for closer study. (Figure 6) Thus, I am constantly refining and learning new things from these microfilm, as I will illustrate below.

 

Figure 6. “FamilySearch Catalog” print list for Ratibor Microfilm 1184449 containing births (1815-1874) and marriages (1814-1862)

 

My maternal great-grandfather Hermann Berliner (1840-1910) is known to me through a single picture I have of him. (Figure 7) He was married to Olga Berliner née Braun (1852-1920), and the two were interred together in the former Jewish Cemetery in Ratibor. Together they had three children, my grandmother Else Bruck née Berliner (1873-1957), her older sister Margareth Braun née Berliner (1872-1942), who was murdered in the Holocaust, and a younger brother Alfred Max Berliner (1875-1921), who died young in Ratibor.

 

Figure 7. My maternal great-grandfather Hermann Berliner (1840-1910)

 

The Hermann Berliner who was the subject of Post 92 had a son, Ernst Berliner, born in 1878, which initially confused me into thinking my great-grandfather sired another child with a different woman, Sara Riesenfeld, although I eventually concluded they were two different Hermann Berliners. My great-grandfather was a “brauereimeister,” a master brewer (Figure 8), and likely inherited the brewery business from his father-in-law, Markus Braun, while the “other” Hermann Berliner was a Bank Director.

 

Figure 8. Page from an 1889 Ratibor Address Book listing my great-grandfather Hermann Berliner and identifying him as a “brauereimeister,” a master brewer

 

The birth register for Ratibor records the occupation or profession of the father. Even though I consider these registers primary source documents, my “gold standard” so to speak, they are not error-free. Consider the birth register listing for my grandmother Else Berliner. Her father is misidentified as a “maurermeister,” a master mason (Figure 9), when I know him to have been a master brewer. My German friend offered a possible explanation for this error. Upon my grandmother’s birth, her father’s profession may have been conveyed verbally, and the recorder may have misunderstood or incorrectly recorded what was said.

 

Figure 9. My grandmother’s birth register listing from Family History Library (FHL) Ratibor Microfilm 1184449 showing she was born on 3 March 1873, and misidentifying her father’s profession as “Maurermeister,” master mason

 

I discussed in Post 92 the process I followed in determining I was dealing with two different Hermann Berliners. Throughout the remainder of this post, I will focus on my great-grandfather, and how I figured out who his parents were. While this information was always in hand, it was only recently that a German friend translated a few key words that enabled me to understand what I had in hand.

Ratibor LDS microfilm roll 1184448 contains the death register for my great-grandfather Hermann Berliner, his wife and son, and his parents. The column headers and titles from the death register are italicized in German and translated in the table below; included is the information for Hermann (Figure 10) and his wife, Olga Berliner (Figure 11); Hermann’s father, Abraham Berliner (Figure 12); Hermann’s mother, Philippine Berliner (Figure 13); and Hermann’s son, Alfred Berliner (Figure 14):

 

Sterbmonat

ev. Jahr

Sterbetag. Namen Beerdigungsort Angehörige Bemer-

kungen

Month of death

Protestant Year

Day of death Name Place of burial Relative Remarks (relationship of deceased)
1868   Abr. Berliner Neisse Stadtrath Berliner Vater
1868   Abr. (Abraham) Berliner Neisse

[today: Nysa, Poland]

City councilor Berliner Father
1907 März 31 Philippine Berliner Leobschütz Stadtr. Berliner Mutter
1907 March 31 Philippine Berliner (née Glogauer) Leobschütz

[today: Głubczyce, Poland]

City councilor Berliner Mother
3 September 1910 Hermann Berliner

(Name in Hebrew)

Ratibor Alfred Berliner

Frau Bruck

Frau Berliner

Vater

                          “

Gatte

1910 September 3 Hermann Berliner Ratibor

[today: Racibórz, Poland]

Alfred Berliner

Else Bruck née Berliner

Olga Berliner (née Braun)

Father

                          “

 

Husband

1920/5680 August 23 Frau Olga Berliner Ratibor Frau Herm. Zweig

Fr. Else Bruck

Alfred Berliner

Schwester

                Mutter

1920 August

[5680 Hebrew year]

23 Mrs. Olga Berliner (née Braun) Ratibor

[today: Racibórz, Poland]

Mrs. Hermine Zweig née Braun

Mrs. Else Bruck (née Berliner)

Alfred Berliner

Sister

 

             Mother

 

1921/5680

Februar

19 Alfred Berliner

(Name in Hebrew)

Ratibor Frau Lotte Berliner Gatte
1921 February

[5680 Hebrew year]

19 Alfred Berliner

 

Ratibor

[today: Racibórz, Poland]

Mrs. Lotte Berliner (née Rothe) Husband

 

Figure 10. Hermann Berliner’s death register listing from FHL Microfilm 1184448 (Ratibor) showing he died on 3 September 1910 in Ratibor

 

Figure 11. Olga Berliner’s death register listing from FHL Microfilm 1184448 (Ratibor) showing she died on 23 August 1920 in Ratibor
Figure 12. Hermann Berliner’s father, Abraham Berliner, death register listing from FHL Microfilm 1184448 (Ratibor) showing he died in Ratibor, supposedly in 1868, but was buried in Neisse [today: Nysa, Poland]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 13. Hermann Berliner’s mother, Philippine Berliner, death register listing from FHL Microfilm 1184448 (Ratibor) showing she died on 31 March 1907 in Ratibor but was buried in Leobschütz
Figure 14. Hermann Berliner’s son, Alfred Berliner, death register listing from FHL Microfilm 1184448 (Ratibor) showing he died on 19 February 1921 in Ratibor

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A few comments on the table above. Part of my difficulty in recognizing Hermann Berliner’s parents is that his forename was not recorded in the death register. Instead, he was identified as “Stadtrath Berliner,” City Councilor Berliner, clearly a prominent citizen of Ratibor. “Frau Bruck,” that is to say “Else Bruck,” was my grandmother. Finally, because the relationship of the witnesses to the deceased was identified in the last column, I was eventually able to work out all their names and, in the case of wives, figure out their maiden names.

 

From the death register, I know that Hermann and Olga Berliner, and their son Alfred Berliner all died and were interred in Ratibor. In the case of Hermann’s parents, however, I learned his father Abraham Berliner was buried in Neisse (Figure 12), Germany [today: Nysa, Poland] and his mother Philippine Berliner was interred in Leobschütz, Germany [today: Głubczyce, Poland]. (Figure 13) Consequently, I next turned my attention to the LDS microfilm rolls, respectively, for Neisse and Leobschütz to see if I could learn anything more about Hermann’s parents.

LDS microfilm 1184444 includes the Jewish deaths in Neisse, Germany for the period when Abraham Berliner died. Given that Abraham died in Ratibor, supposedly in 1868, I had no reason to think his death was also registered in Neisse, yet it was. The only Abraham Berliner listed in the Neisse index of deaths died on the 21st of June 1858 (Figure 15), NOT in 1868 as LDS Microfilm Roll 1184448 indicates. Given the precise death date in the Neisse register, I am inclined to believe 1858 is the correct year of Abraham’s death and this is in fact Hermann Berliner’s father. Readers may wonder why the Neisse death register is typed rather than handwritten. Occasionally, original registers are degraded so that for the data to be preserved, the original information must be transcribed.

 

Figure 15. Hermann Berliner’s father, Abraham Berliner, death register listing from FHL Microfilm 1184444 (Neisse) showing he died not in 1868 but on 21 June 1858

 

In 2018, when I visited the archives in Ratibor for the third time, where the civil birth, marriage, and death records are stored from the time of the “Kulturkampf,” I found Hermann Berliner’s death certificate. (Figure 16) This not only confirmed his death date, but also showed where he was born in 1840, the town of Zülz, Germany [today: Biała Prudnicka, Poland]. So, along with Neisse and Leobschütz, this provided yet a third venue to search for microfilms. (Figure 17)

 

Figure 16. Hermann Berliner’s death certificate from the “State Archives in Katowice Branch in Racibórz (Ratibor)” showing he died on 3 September 1910; that he was born in Zülz, Germany; that his wife was born “Philippine née Glogauer”; and that his father was named “Ismar Berliner”

 

Figure 17. 1893 map of Silesia with the towns mentioned in the text of Ratibor, Germany (today: Racibórz, Poland); Leobschütz, Germany (today: Głubczyce, Poland); Neisse, Germany (today: Nysa, Poland); and Zülz, Germany (today: Biała, Poland) circled

 

Hermann’s death certificate also gives his mother’s maiden name, Philippine Glogauer. As previously noted, she was buried in Leobschütz, Germany [today: Głubczyce, Poland]. Like her husband, Abraham Berliner, whose death was recorded in both Ratibor and Neisse, Philippine Berliner’s death was registered in both Ratibor and Leobschütz. Unlike vital records from Ratibor, some from Leobschütz have been digitized and are available on ancestry.com; I was able to find Philippine Berliner’s death certificate here. (Figure 17) Suffice it to say, her death certificate “pushes” Hermann Berliner’s lineage back yet another generation, naming his father-in-law as Isaac Glogauer. Philippine’s death certificate shows that like her husband and son she too was born in Zülz, Germany [today: Biała Prudnicka, Poland]. Family History Library Zülz Microfilm 1271493 registers births for all three of them, as well as the birth of one of Hermann Berliner’s younger siblings Julchen Berliner in 1842; Hermann Berliner had additional younger siblings, but they were born elsewhere in Silesia.

 

Figure 18. Hermann Berliner’s mother, Philippine Berliner née Glogauer, death certificate showing she supposedly died on 31 March 1907 in Leobschütz at age 93 (she actually died in Ratibor but was interred in Leobschütz)

 

In closing, I would urge readers to focus not on the names of my family members whom I discuss but rather on the process of how I recovered data on their vital events, Readers may be able to follow a similar path to extract comparable information for their ancestors. As you do so, you too may discover that primary source documents are not without errors but that they may still be an improvement over vital data found in family trees developed by genealogists who copy and perpetuate inaccurate information.

 

 

 

VITAL STATISTICS FOR HERMANN BERLINER & HIS IMMEDIATE RELATIVES

 

NAME

(relationship)

VITAL EVENT DATE PLACE SOURCE OF DATA
         
Hermann Berliner (self) Birth 28 May 1840 Zülz, Germany [today: Biała Prudnicka, Poland] Family History Library (FHL) Zülz Microfilm 1271493 (births)

(FIGURE 19)

Death 3 September 1910 Ratibor, Germany [today: Racibórz, Poland] State Archives in Katowice Branch in Raciborz death certificate (FIGURE 16); FHL Ratibor Microfilms 1184447 (burials) (FIGURE 20) & 1184448 (deaths) (FIGURE 10); tombstone from former Jewish Cemetery in Ratibor
Olga Braun (wife) Birth 23 July 1852 Ratibor, Germany [today: Racibórz, Poland] FHL Ratibor Microfilm 1184449 (births)
Death 23 August 1920 Ratibor, Germany [today: Racibórz, Poland] FHL Ratibor Microfilms 1184447 (burials) (FIGURE 20) & 1184448 (deaths) (FIGURE 11); tombstone from former Jewish Cemetery in Ratibor
Margareth Berliner (daughter) Birth 19 March 1872 Ratibor, Germany [today: Racibórz, Poland] FHL Ratibor Microfilm 1184449 (births)
Marriage (to Siegfried Brauer) 14 July 1891 Ratibor, Germany [today: Racibórz, Poland] State Archives in Katowice Branch in Raciborz marriage certificate
Death 24 November 1942 Theresienstadt Ghetto, Czechoslovakia Yad Vashem Victims’ Database
Else Berliner (daughter) Birth 3 March 1873 Ratibor, Germany [today: Racibórz, Poland] FHL Ratibor Microfilm 1184449 (births) (FIGURE 9)
Marriage (to Felix Bruck) 11 February 1894 Ratibor, Germany [today: Racibórz, Poland] State Archives in Katowice Branch in Raciborz marriage certificate
Death 18 February 1957 Manhattan, New York New York, Hebrew Burial Records (HFBA), Silver Lake and Mount Richmond Cemeteries, 1899-1991
Alfred Max Berliner (son) Birth 6 November 1875 Ratibor, Germany [today: Racibórz, Poland] State Archives in Katowice Branch in Raciborz marriage certificate; tombstone from former Jewish Cemetery in Ratibor
Marriage (to Charlotte Rothe) 17 January 1909 Meseritz, Germany [today:

Międzyrzecz, Poland]

Meseritz, Germany marriage certificate from ancestry.com
Death 19 February 1921 Ratibor, Germany [today: Racibórz, Poland] FHL Ratibor Microfilm 1184448 (deaths); Ratibor death notice (FIGURE 21); tombstone from former Jewish Cemetery in Ratibor
Abraham Berliner (father) Birth 8 June 1818 Zülz, Germany [today: Biała Prudnicka, Poland] FHL Zülz Microfilm 1271493 (births) (FIGURE 22)
Death 21 June 1858 Ratibor, Germany [today: Racibórz, Poland FHL Ratibor Microfilm 1184448 (deaths) (FIGURE 12); FHL Neisse Microfilm 1184444 (deaths) (FIGURE 15)
Burial 1858 Neisse, Germany [today: Nysa, Poland] FHL Neisse Microfilm 1184444 (deaths)
Philippine “Zipperle” Glogauer (mother) Birth 25 March 1814 Zülz, Germany [today: Biała Prudnicka, Poland] FHL Zülz Microfilm 1271493 (births) (FIGURE 23); FHL Leobschütz Microfilm 1184434 (deaths) (FIGURE 24); Leobschütz death certificate from ancestry.com (FIGURE 17)
Death 31 March 1907 Ratibor, Germany [today: Racibórz, Poland FHL Ratibor Microfilm 1184448 (deaths) (FIGURE 13); FHL Leobschütz Microfilm 1184434 (deaths) (FIGURE 23); Leobschütz death certificate from ancestry.com (FIGURE 18)
Burial 1907 Leobschütz, Germany [today: Głubczyce, Poland] FHL Ratibor Microfilm 1184448 (deaths) (FIGURE 13); Leobschütz death certificate from ancestry.com (FIGURE 18)
         
         

 

Figure 19. Hermann Berliner’s birth register listing from FHL Microfilm 1271493 (Zülz) showing he was born on the 18 May 1840, that his father was Abraham Berliner, and that he was married to Philippine née Glogauer

 

Figure 20. Olga & Hermann Berliner’s cemetery records listing from Microfilm 1184447 (Ratibor) showing, respectively, they were buried three days after their deaths

 

Figure 21. Alfred Berliner’s “Death Notice” confirming he died in Ratibor on 19 February 1921

 

Figure 22. Abraham Berliner’s birth register listing from FHL Microfilm 1271493 (Zülz) indicating he was born on 8 June 1818

 

Figure 23. Hermann Berliner’s mother, Philippine Glogauer, birth register listing from FHL Microfilm 1271493 (Zülz) showing she was born on 25 March 1814 as “Zipperle” and that her father was named Isaac Glogauer, matching the name shown on her 1907 death certificate

 

Figure 24. Hermann Berliner’s mother, Philippine Berliner née Glogauer, death register listing from FHL Microfilm 1184434 (Leobschütz) showing she supposedly died on 31 March 1907 in Leobschütz at age 93 (she actually died in Ratibor but was interred in Leobschütz)

 

 

 

 

POST 92: BEWARE IDENTICAL ANCESTRAL NAMES, THE CASE OF MY MATERNAL GREAT-GRANDFATHER HERMANN BERLINER

Note: In this post, I discuss a man named Ernst Berliner born in 1878 in Ratibor, Germany to a Hermann Berliner, coincidentally the same name as my great-grandfather. Initially I thought Ernst might be a previously unknown great-uncle, a younger brother of my grandmother, Else Bruck née Berliner.  

Related Post:

Post 34: Margareth Berliner, Wraith or Being?

Post 34, Postscript: Margareth Berliner, Wraith or Being? Death in Theresienstadt

Post 34, Postscript 2: Margareth Berliner, Wraith or Being? More Discoveries

 

Figure 1. In the early 1950’s in New York City, my father Dr. Otto Bruck holding me in his lap, seated next to his mother Else Bruck née Berliner, and brother, Dr. Fedor Bruck

 

This story started simply when I queried ancestry.com for the surname “Berliner.” This was my grandmother Else Bruck’s maiden name, who was born on the 3rd of March 1873 in Ratibor, Germany [today: Racibórz, Poland]. I knew her as a child growing up in New York City, although she died when I was only six years old. (Figure 1) Not surprisingly, she never spoke to me about her siblings and ancestors. Had she done so, I would not in any case have remembered since none of my relatives ever reinforced this knowledge.

My search yielded an intriguing result, the name “Ernst Berliner.” This was an unexpected discovery because according to ancestry.com he was born on the 7th of March 1878 in Ratibor, where many of my father’s family were born. Given my familiarity with Berliners living there at around this time, I was uncertain whether or how he might be related to my grandmother. While Ernst Berliner’s birth certificate was not available online, from the records I could locate, it showed he had lived in Frankfurt am Main before WWII; had been a Bank Director there prior to the war; emigrated to England; had his German nationality annulled following his departure from Germany (Figure 2) and was registered in England as a World War II Alien Internee upon his arrival there (Figure 3); was registered as a “German Persecutee” in 1950 (Figure 4); died in Willesden, Middlesex, England on the 15th of February 1956; and according to the “Index of Wills and Administration” from the National Probate Calendar had his estate administered on the 29th of May 1956. (Figure 5) He left his personal effects to a married woman named Barbara Friedlaender, a domestic helper. The England Death Register only shows that Ernst died in the first quarter of 1956 but provides specific information in which English register his death certificate can be found. (Figure 6)

 

Figure 2. Evidence of the Nazi Regime’s annulment of Ernst Berliner’s German nationality, showing he was born on the 7th of March 1878 in Ratibor, that he was a Bank Director, and last lived in Frankfurt (Main) prior to leaving Germany
Figure 3. England’s “Alien Exemption from Internment” card for Ernst Berliner dated the 8th of November 1939, showing his date and place of birth and occupation

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 4. Frankfurt, Germany “Registration of Foreigner and German Persecutee, 1939-1947,” dated the 4th of May 1950, listing Ernst Berliner
Figure 5. Page from England’s “National Probate Calendar (Index of Wills and Administration)” showing Ernst Berliner died in Willesden, London, England on the 25th of February 1956, had his will administered on the 29th of May 1956, and left his personal effects to Barbara Friedlaender

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 6. Page from England’s “Civil Registration Death Index,” showing Ernst Berliner died in the first quarter of 1956, and indicating the register where his death certificate can be found

 

With this data in hand, I turned to the United Kingdom’s (UK) General Register Office online database and ordered Ernst Berliner’s death record in April 2020. Previous UK death certificates I have ordered sometimes name the father, and I was hoping this would again be the case. During these Covid-19 times, it took more than three months for the official document to arrive. But, when it arrived, I realized it included negligible new information and named neither his father nor any next-of-kin. (Figure 7) The person who caused Ernst Berliner’s body to be cremated, identified as Erica Weiss, I later learned was someone who probably worked in his household as a domestic helper.

 

Figure 7. Ernst Berliner’s death certificate obtained from the United Kingdom’s “General Register Office,” confirming he died on the 25th of February 1956 in Willesden, London, England

 

 

Realizing there was little to be learned from the “backend” of Ernst’s life, I turned my attention to obtaining his birth certificate. Given Ernst’s year of birth in 1878, I knew the record would be among the civil records found at “Archiwum Państwowe w Katowicach Oddział w Raciborzu,” State Archives in Katowice Branch in Raciborz. I asked my historian friend from Racibórz, Poland, Mr. Paul Newerla, whether he could obtain a copy of Ernst Berliner’s birth certificate. Even though the State Archives is currently shuttered to the public on account of the Covid pandemic, Paul was able to contact their office and quickly obtain a copy of the document in question. (Figures 8a-b) The record identified Ernst’s father as Hermann Berliner, and, initially, I was stunned and excited by the discovery, thinking I had uncovered a previously unknown sibling of my grandmother. This would not have been unprecedented. In Post 34 and the postscripts, I discussed my grandmother’s older sister, Margareth “Grete” Brauer née Berliner, who I learned about from a single picture of her found among my cousin’s collection of family photographs (Figure 9); my great-aunt Grete Brauer was murdered in the Theresienstadt Ghetto on the 24th of November 1942 and was never mentioned to me growing up so I naturally assumed the same might have been true of a previously unknown great-uncle.

 

Figure 8a. Ernst Berliner’s birth certificate obtained from the “State Archives in Katowice Branch in Raciborz,” proving he was born on the 7th of March 1878 in Ratibor to a Herman Berliner, coincidentally the same name as my great-grandfather
Figure 8b. Translation of Ernst Berliner’s birth certificate

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 9. My great-aunt Margareth “Grete” Brauer née Berliner (1872-1942), murdered in the Theresienstadt Ghetto in 1942

 

My grandmother was born in 1873, her older sister Grete in 1872, and her younger brother Alfred Max Berliner in 1875; the timing of Ernst’s birth in 1878 would not have been illogical. However, upon obtaining a translation of Ernst Berliner’s birth certificate, I discovered that his mother had not been my great-grandmother Olga Berliner née Braun but had instead been a Sara Riesenfeld.

I was next left to contemplate whether my great-grandfather Hermann Berliner (Figure 10) might have divorced his first wife and remarried this Sara. I swiftly concluded based on two pieces of evidence this was unlikely to have occurred. The Hermann Berliner who was married to Sara Riesenfeld was identified on their child’s birth certificate as a “hausierer,” an old-fashioned professional title meaning “street vendor,” or “door-to-door salesman.” I know that my great-grandfather was a “brauereimeister,” a master brewer, although I considered the possibility he might have changed professions after 1878. The more compelling evidence that I was looking at two different Hermann Berliners is that my great-grandparents Hermann and Olga were once interred together in the now destroyed Jewish Cemetery in Ratibor; I have a picture of their former headstone. (Figure 11)

 

Figure 10. My great-grandfather Hermann Berliner (1840-1910)
Figure 11. Headstone from the former Jewish Cemetery in Ratibor for my great-grandparents, Hermann Berliner and Olga Berliner née Braun (1852-1920)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Not entirely satisfied with the evidence I had mustered, I continued to look for further proof I was dealing with two different people by the same name. An 1889 Ratibor Address Book lists only one Hermann Berliner (Figure 12), so this was inconclusive.

 

Figure 12. Page from an 1889 Ratibor Address Book listing my great-grandfather Hermann Berliner and his mother Pauline Berliner, identifying her as “Witwe,” a widow

 

I returned my attention to Ernst Berlin, and ultimately found in MyHeritage a “1939 Register of England and Wales,” with his name and the members of his household then residing in London. (Figure 13) His wife “Grete” (i.e., misidentified as “?Rete”) and her date of birth, 6th of June 1880 (i.e., she was actually born in July), were listed. I quickly discovered she was born in Breslau, Germany [today: Wrocław, Poland] as Grete Moskowicz. Like her husband and many other Jews, she had her German nationality annulled following her departure from Germany (Figure 14) and was registered in the United Kingdom as a World War II Alien Internee upon her arrival there. She died in London on the 7th of April 1940, and her probate hearing was held on the 25th of July 1940 (Figure 15); Ernst, shown to be a retired bank director, inherited. I have found no evidence that Ernst and Grete had any children.

 

Figure 13. “1939 Register of England and Wales” for Ernst Berliner and his household members, listing his wife and domestic helpers, and their dates of birth
Figure 14. Evidence of the Nazi Regime’s annulment of Grete Berliner née Moskowicz’s German nationality, showing she was born on the 6th of June 1880 (July is the correct month) in Breslau and last lived in Frankfurt (Main) prior to leaving Germany

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 15. Page from England’s “National Probate Calendar (Index of Wills and Administration)” showing Grete Berliner died in Willesden, London, England on the 4th of April 1940, had her will administered on the 25th of July 1940, and left her personal effects to her husband Ernst Berliner, a retired banker

 

I next turned my attention to family trees on ancestry.com and MyHeritage. With respect to these, I have often expressed my deep-seated concern that because these are not typically based on primary source documents, the data contained within them is often wrong. Compounding the problem is that genealogists developing their own trees often replicate errors from earlier trees. Still, I have begun to apply a principle I have learned from listening to an investment service to which I am subscribed that maintains the statistical data cited for stocks and companies may be “directionally correct but precisely wrong.” Applied to ancestral data, this means that while vital data of people included in trees may not always be precisely accurate, the relationship among the people may be correct.

Having had limited success finding additional information on Hermann Berliner, I turned my attention to his wife Sara Riesenfeld. Indirectly, I found a surprising amount of information on both in one family tree developed by a “Peter Lax,” confirming Ernst’s father was indeed a different Hermann Berliner than my great-grandfather (Figure 16); this tree identifies another of Hermann and Sara’s sons named Hans born on the 17th of February 1891 in Breslau. I also found the 1913 marriage certificate for a third son, Arthur Berliner, born on the 8th of September 1880, also in Breslau. (Figure 17a-b) According to Yad Vashem, both Arthur and Hans were murdered in the Shoah. There is quite a time span between the birth of Hermann and Sara Berliner’s three sons, 1878 to 1891, so the possibility of additional children exists. Still, based on the information in hand, it seems only Ernst survived the Holocaust.

 

Figure 16. Screen shot of Peter Lax’s family tree with information on Sara Riesenfeld (Ernst Berliner’s mother); circled is the incorrect date of her birth, shown as the 12th of January 1949 when it is in fact the 1st of December 1849, and the name of her father, “Israel Jacob Riesenfeld”

 

Figure 17a. Ancestry.com cover page for the marriage of Ernst Berliner’s younger brother Arthur Berliner to Amalie Luise Bernhardt on the 30th of April 1913 in Breslau, Germany
Figure 17b. Arthur Berliner’s 1913 marriage certificate with the names of his parents, Hermann Berliner and Sara Riesenfeld, circled

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Peter Lax’s tree, with more than 100,000 names in it, allows me to illustrate the point I was alluding to above that even the seemingly best documented trees contain errors. Case in point, Mr. Lax’s tree indicates Sara Riesenfeld was born on the 12th of January 1849 in Biała, Opolskie, Poland [formerly: Zülz, Germany], and identifies her father as “Israel Jacob Riesenfled (181601860).” (Figure 16) Consulting the Family History Library Microfilm Roll No. 1271493, found online at familysearch.org, with Jewish birth records from Zülz, Germany (Figure 18) for January of 1849, I could not initially locate Sara’s birth register listing. However, I eventually found her birth register listing under December of 1849. (Figure 19) Inadvertently, Peter Lax transposed “1/12/1849” (i.e., European designated date of 1st of December 1849) as “12/1/1849” (i.e., English designated date of the 12th of January 1849). This is another cautionary tale of consulting primary source documents where they exist to verify vital data.

 

Figure 18. 1893 map of Silesia with the towns of Ratibor, Germany (today: Racibórz, Poland); Beuthen, Germany (today: Bytom, Poland); and Zülz, Germany (today: Biała, Poland) circled

 

Figure 19. Birth register listing for Sara Riesenfeld circled identifying her father as Israel Riesenfeld and her date of birth as “1/12” (i.e., 1st of December 1849) (Source: Family History Library’s microfilm roll 1271493 for Zülz, Germany, pages 80 and 231 of 380 pages on this roll)

 

One specific piece of information included in Peter Lax’s family tree was the purported place and date of birth of Ernst Berliner’s father, Hermann, on the 1st of June 1852 in Beuthen, Silesia [today: Bytom, Poland]. (Figure 20) I again turned to the Family History Library online microfilms to confirm this, and successfully found and had transcribed and translated Hermann Berliner’s birth register listing. (Figures 21a-b) Hermann’s birth register listing includes the names of his parents, Hirschel Berliner and Jalünder Rohel née Silbermann, both of whom I later found in the “Jewish Records Indexing-Poland” and “JewishGen Worldwide Burial Registry,” “JOWBR.” This allowed me to “push back” their ancestral tree another generation.

 

Figure 20. Screen shot of Peter Lax’s family tree with information on Hermann Berliner (Ernst Berliner’s father), showing his date and place of birth, the 1st of June 1852 in Bytom, Poland (formerly: Beuthen, Germany)

 

Figure 21a. Birth register entry for Hermann Berliner circled, identifying his parents as Hirschel Berliner and Jalünder Rohel née Silbermann and his date of birth as 1st of June 1852 (Source: Family History Library microfilm roll 1335074 for Beuthen, Germany, page 31 of 476 pages on this roll)
Figure 21b. German transcription and English translation of Hermann Berliner’s birth register entry

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Having confirmed that Hermann Berliner, father of Ernst Berliner born on the 7th of March 1878 in Ratibor, was not my grandmother’s father prompted me to trace my great-grandfather’s lineage with reference to primary source documents. In the ensuing post, I will present this information. Regular readers know that without primary source documents in hand, I am most hesitant to accept ancestral and vital data found on other trees. Regarding my ancestral tree, I am much more interested in having well-sourced data and pictures on fewer people than unproven information going back multiple generations. While I assume there exists an ancestral connection between my grandmother Else Bruck née Berliner and Ernst Berliner and his ancestors, I have not yet ferreted out this relationship.

 

 

VITAL STATISTICS FOR ERNST BERLINER & HIS IMMEDIATE RELATIVES

 

NAME

(relationship)

VITAL EVENT DATE PLACE SOURCE OF DATA
         
Ernst Berliner (self) Birth 7 March 1878 Ratibor, Germany [today: Racibórz, Poland] Ancestry.com;

State Archives in Katowice Branch in Raciborz birth certificate

Death 25 February 1956 Willesden, Middlesex, England UK “Index of Wills and Administration, National Probate Calendar”;

UK General Register Office death certificate

Grete Moskowicz (wife) Birth 6 July 1880 Breslau, Germany [today: Wrocław, Poland] Multiple ancestry.com documents
Death 7 April 1940 Willesden, Middlesex, England UK “Index of Wills and Administration, National Probate Calendar”
Hermann Berliner (father) Birth 1 June 1852 Beuthen, Germany [today: Bytom, Poland] Family History Library Microfilm Roll 1335074 (Beuthen, Germany)
Death   Kattowitz, Germany [today: Katowice, Poland] Peter Lax Family Tree
Sara Riesenfeld (mother) Birth 1 December 1849 Zülz, Germany [today: Biała, Poland] Family History Library Microfilm Roll 1271493 (Zülz, Germany)
Marriage 5 February 1876 Breslau, Germany [today: Wrocław, Poland] Peter Lax Family Tree
Death   Kattowitz, Germany [today: Katowice, Poland] Peter Lax Family Tree
Arthur Berliner (brother) Birth 8 September 1880 Breslau, Germany [today: Wrocław, Poland] Eastern Prussian Provinces marriage certificate
Marriage (to Amalie Luise Bernhardt) 30 April 1913 Breslau, Germany [today: Wrocław, Poland] Eastern Prussian Provinces marriage certificate
Death 29 November 1941 Fort IX, Kaunas, Lithuania Yad Vashem
Hans Berliner (brother) Birth 17 February 1891 Breslau, Germany [today: Wrocław, Poland] Peter Lax Family Tree
Death Between 1941 and 1944 Minsk Ghetto, Belarus Yad Vashem; Peter Lax Family Tree

POST 85: FURTHER EVIDENCE OF MY UNCLE WALTER BRUCK’S DEATH IN INFANCY

Note: In this post I relate the story of how in the process of helping a reader whose grandmother died in 1940 in Ratibor, the birthplace of my father, I improbably discovered information on some of my own ancestors.

Related Posts:

Post 12: “State Archives in Katowice Branch in Racibórz (Ratibor)”

Post 13: The Former Jewish Cemetery in Ratibor (Racibórz)

Post 13, Postscript: The Former Jewish Cemetery in Ratibor (Racibórz)

 

Figure 1. 1903 Ratibor postcard of the “Oderbrücke,” the bridge over the River Oder dividing the town

 

Ratibor [today: Racibórz, Poland] (Figure 1), the town in the Prussian province of Upper Silesia where my father, Dr. Otto Bruck, was born in 1907 was one of the largest municipalities in the region. Periodically, readers who are descended from former inhabitants of Ratibor will contact me through my Blog asking for information I have or may have come across related to their ancestors. Often, their relatives are entirely unknown to me but seeing what, if anything, I can uncover about them becomes an extension of my own forensic genealogical endeavors. And, the pleasure I derive in helping others is sometimes magnified when I learn something about my own ancestors in the process. The inspiration for the current post stems from precisely such a situation.

 

Figure 2. Mr. Kazimierz Świetliński, the gentleman from Racibórz responsible for photographing and documenting all the headstones in the former Jewish Cemetery in Ratibor

 

One reader, Dan Ward, recently contacted me after perusing Post 13 and Post 13, Postscript, and learning the “Muzeum w Raciborzu” in Racibórz had given me an Excel spreadsheet with the names of the Jews that had once been interred in the former Jewish Cemetery in Ratibor, requesting a copy of this database. This cemetery was demolished in the 1960’s during Poland’s Communist era to further expunge evidence of German residency in the area. Fortunately, before the stout headstones were torn down and sold off locally, a Polish gentleman whom I wrote about in Post 13, Postscript, Mr. Kazimierz Świetliński (Figure 2), had the foresight to photograph all the gravestones; these images served as the basis for the creation of the Excel database, with the Racibórz Museum staff gleaning as much vital information as possible from the high-quality snapshots. Despite the sharp and fine details on the photos, not all the data is discernible. More on this below.

Dan Ward contacted me seeking information on the tombstone and burial location of his grandmother, Rosa Wartenberger née Perl, who according to records he found was buried on the 29th of March 1940 in the Jüdischer Friedhof Ratibor, Jewish Cemetery in Ratibor, in Plot 153; she died or committed suicide before she was scheduled to be deported to a concentration camp. As a quick aside, the “Ward” surname is clearly the Anglicized version of the “Wartenberger” family name. Dan sent me screen shots with the source of this information, Jewish Gen. As readers can see, Rosa Wartenberger’s name was misspelled as “Risa Wortenberger,” although the transcriber obviously had trouble deciphering the script. (Figure 3)

 

Figure 3. Screen shot from “JewishGen” with information on Rosa Wartenberger, misspelled as “Risa Wortenberger,” showing she was interred on the 29th of March 1940 in the “Jüdischer Friedhof Ratibor” in Plot 153

 

Armed with the information Dan sent me, I immediately began my own research. The first thing I checked was the Excel spreadsheet with the names of Jews formerly buried in the Jewish Cemetery in Ratibor, and Rosa Wartenberg is not listed. Dan would later tell me his grandmother’s maiden name was “Perl,” and I found four individuals with this surname once interred in the Jewish graveyard, but being unfamiliar with Dan’s family tree, I am not sure how they might have been related to her.

Next, I checked address books and phone directories for Ratibor. I have previously told readers about a database on ancestry.com, entitled “Germany and Surrounding Areas, Address Books, 1815-1974 (Adressbücher aus Deutschland und Umgebung, 1815-1974),” with address books for Germany, Poland, and other neighboring countries. In the only address book in this database for Ratibor for the year 1938, I found a single “Wartenberger.” It was for a man named “Kurt Wartenberger,” identified as a “gastwirt,” innkeeper, shown living at “Breite Straße 54.” (Figure 4)

 

Figure 4. Page from 1938 Ratibor Address Book listing “Kurt Wartenberger,” an innkeeper, shown living at “Breite Straße 54”

 

I asked my friend Mr. Paul Newerla from Racibórz, a retired lawyer whom regular readers have often heard me mention, who now researches and writes about the history of Silesia, whether the surname “Wartenberger” is familiar to him. It is not, but in a 1926 Ratibor Address Book not included among the “Germany and Surrounding Areas” directories, he too found “Kurt Wartenberger” listed, identified then as a “destillateur,” distiller, living at “Brunken 54.” (Figure 5) Other than finding Kurt Wartenberger’s name in the 1926 Ratibor directory, Paul could add nothing more.

 

Figure 5. Section from 1926 Ratibor Address Book listing “Kurt Wartenberger,” then a distiller, shown living at “Brunken 54”

 

 

I found it odd the address number “54” was identical in 1926 and 1938 but that the street names were different. Paul Newerla explained that “Brunken” was a connecting street to what is referred to as the Altendorf district, that’s to say, a little “outside” of Ratibor along the main road towards Oppeln [today: Opole, Poland] and Leobschutz [today: Głubczyce, Poland]. I located this street, respectively, on plan maps of Ratibor from 1927-28 (Figure 6) and 1933 (Figure 7), although a plan map from 1914 names it “Große-Vorstadt.” (Figure 8) In tiny print on all three plan maps, readers can see the number “54,” confirming it was the same corner lot with different street names over time.

 

Figure 6. 1927-28 Ratibor Plan Map with “Brunken” and number “54” circled

 

Figure 7. 1933 Ratibor Plan Map with “Brunken” and number “54” circled

 

Figure 8. 1914 Ratibor Plan Map with “Große-Vorstadt” and number “54” circled

 

I passed along what Paul and I had found to Dan Ward. He confirmed that Kurt had owned a tavern and that family papers in his possession place Kurt’s business at “Große-Vorstadt 54,” papers which must clearly pre-date 1927-28, by which time the street was known as “Brunken.” By 1938, the street had been renamed yet again because it was then called “Breite Straße.” According to Dan, Kurt Wartenberger was murdered in the Shoah in Buchenwald, and, indeed, Yad Vashem lists him as a victim of the Holocaust. (Figure 9)

 

Figure 9. Page from Yad Vashem confirming Kurt Wartenberger, born in 1884, was murdered during the Shoah

 

Next, I retraced Dan Ward’s steps to track down the source of the information on his grandmother, misspelled as mentioned above as “Risa Wortenberger.” The data, as I previously also said, originates from JewishGen, and relocating it was straight-forward. Here, however, is where things took an interesting turn. The source documentation for the data in JewishGen comes from elsewhere, namely, from the Church of Latter-Day Saints’ (LDS) “Family History Library International Film 1184447, Item 2” (Figure 10), which is one of three microfilm rolls with data on the former Jewish inhabitants of Ratibor. While I had last examined this microfilm many years ago, when it was still necessary to order films from the LDS Church in Salt Lake City and have hard copies sent to a local Family History Library for viewing, I clearly remembered this roll as having limited or, at least, confusing information. Now that the Ratibor records are accessible online through familysearch.org, I decided to reexamine film 1184447.

 

Figure 10. Source of information on Rosa Wartenberger circled, namely, the Church of Latter-Day Saints’ (LDS) “Family History Library International Film 1184447, Item 2”

 

For anyone interested in seeking similar information from familysearch.org for towns they are researching, they can replicate these steps:

1) Go to familysearch.org (you can create a free account);​

2) Under the “Search” button, scroll down to “Catalog,” click enter, and go to the following page;​

3) Next, type in “Raciborz” under “Place,” or whatever town you are seeking records for (i.e., different spellings yield different results, so for towns that are now located in different countries than they once were, you may need to try alternate spellings);

4) Scroll down to “Poland, Opole, Racibórz (Racibórz),” then hit “Search”;​

5) Select “Poland, Opole, Racibórz (Racibórz) – Jewish records (1),” hit enter;​

6) Next select “Matrikel, 1814-1940”;​

7) On the next screen select “1184447, Item 2” (select the camera icon all the way to the right; if there is a key above a camera icon, the microfilm is unavailable online).

There are 342 pages on Microfilm 1184447 but only pages 220 through 338, referred to as “Item 2,” specifically deal with Ratibor. The film contains “Friedhofsurkunden 1888-1940” for Ratibor, which Peter Hanke, my German friend who helps me with translations and making sense of German records, tells me is more aptly referred to as “Friedhofsdokumente,” or cemetery documents. The cemetery administration would use these files to see which tombs were unused; which ones could be reused after 25 or 30 years if descendants stopped paying to keep their ancestors interred; which tombs were reserved in perpetuity for so-called “family graves”; or simply to help visitors locate specific graves. These files often contain useful information for genealogists, as I illustrate below.

Let me digress for a moment. Given the disparate sources of ancestral information I have accessed over the years, including in this current post, I am often reminded of the American television game show “Concentration” that aired from 1958 until 1991. Basically, the game was based on the children’s memory game of the same name. Players had to match cards which represented prizes they could win. As matching pairs of cards were gradually removed from the board, it would slowly reveal a rebus puzzle that contestants had to solve to win a match. The similarity I see with genealogical research is not so much solving the rebus, but matching pairs of cards. Often years pass before a “genealogical card” I newly discover can be “matched” to one or more I found earlier in my investigations. The challenge, particularly as I get older, is retrieving the earlier “card” from my memory. Such is the case with connections to Microfilm 1184447, Item 2.

I downloaded, saved, and studied all 119 pages from this film, and made several interesting discoveries and connections. Of immediate interest, I found Rosa Wartenberger’s name in an index (Figure 11); as readers can discern from what I have circled in Figure 11, the number “46” appears to the right of Rosa’s name; this refers to the page number in the “Friedhofsdokumente,” on which Rosa’s name and interment date appear. Initially, I found only one page 46, not realizing there was a left page-right page pair.

 

Figure 11. Page 69 from Ratibor’s Cemetery Records with Rosa Wartenberger’s name circled, showing that her specific information can be found on page 46 of this register

 

Let me briefly explain. When the LDS Church originally photographed vital records for Ratibor and other places, they typically started by photographing the left-side pages from the front to the back of the register, then in reverse order from the back to the front photographed the right-side pages; thus, the left page-right page pairs, either identically numbered or consecutively numbered, from any register will not be found on consecutive microfilm images. Thus, while Rosa’s name does not appear on the left-hand page 46, it is found on the right-hand page 46; for reader’s ease, I have “grafted” the two pages in one (Figure 12), and translated, using a different grafted left-right pair of pages, the headers for each column. (Figure 13)

 

Figure 12. Left and right-hand sides of page 46 “grafted” together

 

Figure 13. The column headers translated for a left-right pair of pages containing information on what are called “Erbbegräbnisse,” multi-generational “hereditary graves”

 

As readers can see, by “Grabnummer,” grave number, 153, the date of Rosa’s interment is shown, the 29th of March 1940, which matches the information in JewishGen. The column titled “Belegt” translates to “occupied,” and signifies when a person was interred, rather than when they died.

Once a researcher understands the organizational “structure” of microfilms with cemetery documents, they are easy though tedious to use. On one left-right pair of pages, I was able to find both sets of great-grandparents on my father’s side. (Figure 14) Oddly, the names of Fedor Bruck (Figure 15) and his wife, Friederike Bruck née Mockrauer (Figure 16), are not found in the Excel spreadsheet at the Muzeum w Raciborzu, meaning no photo of their headstone was taken. However, Hermann Berliner (Figure 17) and Olga Berliner née Braun’s names do appear in the Excel spreadsheet indicating a picture of their gravestone exists. (Figure 18)

 

Figure 14. Index in “Family History Library International Film 1184447, Item 2” with the names of both sets of my great-grandparents on my father’s side circled, Fedor Bruck and his wife, “Frau F. Bruck” (Friederike Bruck née Mockrauer), and Olga Berliner née Braun and her husband, Hermann Berliner

 

Figure 15. One of my great-grandfathers, Fedor Bruck (1834-1892)
Figure 16. My great-grandfather Fedor Bruck’s wife, Friederike Bruck née Mockrauer (1836-1924), who died in Berlin but was interred in Ratibor

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 17. Another of my great-grandfathers, Hermann Berliner (1840-1910)
Figure 18. Headstone for my great-grandparents, Olga and Hermann Berliner, once interred in the “Jüdischer Friedhof Ratibor”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I know from a family tree in the Pinkus Family Collection at the Leo Baeck Institute that my great-grandmother Friederike Bruck née Mockrauer died in Berlin on the 29th of February 1924 (Figure 19), though she was not buried there. From Microfilm 1184447, I learned she was instead interred on the 11th of May 1924 in Ratibor, almost 10 weeks later, presumably alongside her husband. Jews are typically interred within two to three days after they die, so a 10-week delay is very unusual. (Figure 20)

 

Figure 19. Family tree in the Pinkus Family Collection at the Leo Baeck Institute showing my great-grandmother Friederike Bruck née Mockrauer died in Berlin on the 29th of February 1924

 

Figure 20. Page 7 from Ratibor’s Cemetery Records showing Friederike Bruck was interred in the Jewish Cemetery on the 11th of May 1924, more than 10 weeks after she died in Berlin

 

On Microfilm 1184447, I also found a single page mentioning one of my father’s older brothers who died in infancy, Walter Bruck. (Figure 21) His name is found on a page entitled “Kleiner Kinderfriedhof,” small children’s cemetery. This is further proof of his existence. A brief explanation. After I began immersing myself in family history and creating a family tree years ago, I started to wonder why there was a nine-year age difference between my father’s oldest brother, Fedor Bruck, born in 1895, and my father’s older sister, Susanne Bruck, born in 1904, in an era where families were large. I eventually learned in 2014 when I visited the “Archiwum Państwowe w Katowicach Oddział w Raciborzu” (“State Archives in Katowice Branch in Raciborz”) that another sibling had been born in 1900 (Figure 22) who died in infancy the next year (Figure 23), named Walter Bruck. I was able to retrieve both his birth and death certificates among the civil records archived at the Archiwum Państwowe. Thus, the discovery of Walter Bruck’s name on Microfilm 1184447 was confirmation he was once buried in the Jüdischer Friedhof Ratibor.

 

Figure 21. Page 30 of Ratibor’s Cemetery Records with my Uncle Walter Bruck’s name, interred in the “Kleiner Kinderfriedhof,” small children’s cemetery

 

Figure 22. My uncle Walter Bruck’s birth certificate showing he was born on the 15th of August 1900 in Ratibor
Figure 23. My uncle Walter Bruck’s death certificate showing he died on the 11th of April 1901

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Among the photos that Mr. Kazimierz Świetliński took at the former Jewish Cemetery in Ratibor before it was demolished is one showing the “Kindergräber,” children’s graves. (Figure 24) As readers can see, the children’s names on some of the headstones can be made out, though most are indecipherable. Interestingly, there is a separate index on Microfilm 1184447, entitled “Großer kinderfriedhof,” big children’s cemetery (Figure 25), with the names of older children buried in the Jewish Cemetery. Infants may have been interred in graves identified only by number, as I discovered in the Weißensee Jewish Cemetery in Berlin.

 

Figure 24. Mr. Kazimierz Świetliński’s photo of the “Kindergräber,” children’s graves, the section in the former Jewish Cemetery in Ratibor where infants and young children were interred

 

Figure 25. Separate index on Microfilm 1184447, entitled “Großer kinderfriedhof,” big children’s cemetery, with the names of older children who died and were buried in Ratibor

 

As a tedious exercise for another day, which I started while researching and writing this post, is cross-checking the names on Microfilm 1184447 with those on the Excel spreadsheet. Some names on Microfilm 1184447 are not in the Excel database, while others are found in both. Preliminarily, I was able to amend death dates or years in the Excel directory, which, as previously mentioned, was compiled from photos, some of which are indistinct.

In closing, I would say one final thing. Based on the Excel index I obtained years ago, I mistakenly concluded then that none of my Bruck relatives had ever been interred in the Jewish Cemetery in Ratibor, even though I knew some died there when the cemetery was still in use. However, with the benefit of the information I recently acquired from the Jewish records on Microfilm 1184447, I am certain that at least three relatives with the Bruck surname were once buried there. And, this discovery was spurred by helping a reader learn about one of his relatives, a case of helping yourself by aiding others, a most satisfying outcome!

POST 73: RATIBOR GYMNASIUM (HIGH SCHOOL) STUDENT REGISTER, 1819-1849—MORE CLUES ABOUT MY BRUCK FAMILY

Note: In this post, I discuss a recently obtained list of students who attended Ratibor’s Gymnasium, or high school, between its opening in 1819 and 1849, and facts I’ve gleaned from this registry. While I expected a linear unfolding of the ledger’s contents and information, in some ways it has turned into a game of three-dimensional chess, as I’ll explain. This post also provides an opportunity to lay out the exacting approach I try and take to make a case for ancestral connections relying on primary source documents.

Related Post:

Post 60: 200 Years of the Royal Evangelical High School & A Clue to the Bruck Family

Post 68: Dr. Julius Bruck and His Influence on Modern Endoscopy

 

One of the most exciting moments doing forensic genealogy occurs when you discover a copy or original historic document with the names of your ancestors, particularly when the names are those of your oldest known relatives. As a former archaeologist, this is analogous to unearthing an artifact that was last handled by a human hundreds if not thousands of years ago. The context in which an artifact or document is found is key to properly interpreting its significance.

 

Figure 1. Cover of the 1820 publication by Dr. Carl Linge, first director of Ratibor’s Gymnasium, entitled (translated) “Memorandum on the solemn opening of the Royal Evangelical High School in Ratibor on June 2, 1819”

 

Last year, Mr. Paul Newerla, my friend from Ratibor, retired lawyer and current writer of Silesian history, mentioned that 2019 marked the bicentennial of Ratibor’s Gymnasium, or high school, still used today as a commercial school. To remind readers, Ratibor is the town where my father, Dr. Otto Bruck, was born in 1907. In Post 60, using background information provided by Mr. Newerla, I discussed the high school’s history and a publication Paul found archived at the British Museum written by the school’s first director, Dr. Carl Linge, entitled “Denkschrift über die feierliche Eröffnung des Königl. Evangel. Gymnasium zu Ratibor am 2. Juni 1819. . .,” “Memorandum on the solemn opening of the Royal Evangelical High School in Ratibor on June 2, 1819. . .” (Figure 1) This publication, printed in 1820, included a list of names of all first-year attendees, including two members of my Bruck family with only the initials of their forenames written in elaborate Gothic script, read by Paul as “S. Bruck” and J. Bruck.” (Figure 2) Based on the intimate knowledge of my family tree, I concluded these stood for Samuel Bruck (1808-1863) and Jonas Bruck (1813-1883), brothers who are shown as the children of Jacob Bruck in an abridged typed family tree developed by my Uncle Dr. Fedor Bruck. (Figure 3)

Figure 2. Page from Dr. Linge’s 1820 publication with the names of my ancestors “J. Bruck” and S. Bruck” shown as enrolled in Ratibor’s Gymnasium when the school first opened in 1819

 

Figure 3. Copy of a condensed family tree developed by my uncle Dr. Fedor Bruck showing Samuel and Jonas Bruck as the sons of Jacob Bruck and Maria Aufrecht

 

Typically, attendance at Gymnasiums begins between the ages of 10 and 12, give or take a year, so Samuel’s attendance in 1819 when he would have been 11 years old makes sense. However, his brother Jonas’s attendance in 1819, when he was only six years old seems implausible, unless he was exceptionally precocious. Absent any other incontrovertible evidence, however, this is the preliminary conclusion I came to in Post 60, namely, that Jonas Bruck had attended the Ratibor Gymnasium at a very early age.

 

Figure 4. The former Ratibor Gymnasium as it looks today

 

Naturally, I became curious whether the original ledger of student names upon which Dr. Linge’s publication was based still exists, whether it is in the Polish State Archives in Racibórz or possibly curated by the Muzeum Racibórzu. Paul explained that because an existing commercial school now occupies the buildings of the former high school (Figure 4), some of the original records are retained there. In the recent past, there had apparently been some discussion about transferring the remaining ledgers to the archive or museum but for unknown reasons these negotiations ended acrimoniously.

Paul offered to contact the commercial school and inquire about the student ledgers, which he knew to have existed at one time because a colleague had shared some pictures of the “Album,” as it is referred to. Paul was recently granted access to the Gymnasium’s records. This turned out to be a frustrating exercise because the school was unable to initially locate the Album of student names for the period 1819 to 1849, even presented with irrefutable evidence of its existence in the form of pictures; Paul even checked the school’s archives, to no avail. Dispiritedly, Paul left his name and number, and asked them to call him if the Album was ever found.

Paul was not optimistic the ledger would turn up. He’s related some horror stories how nearby Polish and Czech Republic parishes have on occasion burned Kirchenbücher, church books, Kirchenmatrikeln, the roll or register of parishioners, and Pfarrmatrikel, parish matriculations, related to former German occupants of the area simply because none of their descendants live locally anymore. To use another archaeological analogy, it’s like pillaging a cultural site, ripping a page from prehistory, so to speak. So, it came as a pleasant surprise when several weeks after Paul’s visit to the former Ratibor Gymnasium he received a call telling him they’d finally located the Album in question. Paul promptly visited the commercial school and took pictures of the entire ledger of students covering the period 1819 through 1849, roughly 90 pages worth of material, which he sent me. (Figure 5)

Figure 5. Cover of the Ratibor Gymnasium “Album” with the complete list of students who were enrolled at the high school between the 11th of May 1819 and the 13th of April 1849, 2024 names

 

I’ve been a coin collector much of my life and going through all the pages of the Ratibor Gymnasium Album was comparable to sorting through a cache of pennies in search of pre-1959 wheat chaff coppers. While the names of family members I discovered were relatively few, the information corresponding to each ancestor has provided multiple avenues for further investigation. The challenge is making sense of ancestral connections for people who lived 170 to 200 years ago in the context of what was a very large Bruck family at the time. As I mentioned at the outset, it’s a bit like playing three-dimensional chess

In the table below, I summarize the family data I gleaned from the Ratibor student ledger. Then, I examine using available primary source documents how or whether these people are or may be related.

 

SUMMARY OF FAMILY NAMES FROM RATIBOR GYMNASIUM ALBUM, 1819-1849

  

Year/

Date of Admission

Line Number/Name Where From Father’s Profession

(German & English)

Age or Date of Birth of Student
1819

 

Isaac Bruck

Samuel Bruck

Ratibor Arrendator

Leaseholder

13

10

4 April 1823

 

402. Heimann Bruck Ratibor Destillateur

Distiller

11
21 April 1824

 

440. Jonas Bruck Ratibor Destillateur

Distiller

10 ½

 

19 May 1829

 

1829. Marcus Braun Ratibor Wirth

Innkeeper

12 ½

 

22 May 1845

 

1752. Oscar Bruck Ratibor Kaufmann

Merchant

8 October 1832
3 January 1846 1772. Heimann Bruck Ratibor Sattlermeister

Saddler

26 December 1833
27 April 1848

 

1961. Fedor Bruck Ratibor Kaufmann

Merchant

30 September 1834
     

 

Samuel Bruck (Figures 6a-b)

 

Figure 6a. Page from the Ratibor Gymnasium “Album” 1819-1849 listing Isaac Bruck and Samuel Bruck’s names, in succession, “bracketed” together, with the profession of their dad, “arrendator,” leaseholder, noted
Figure 6b. Page from the Ratibor Gymnasium “Album” 1819-1849 showing Isaac Bruck and Samuel Bruck’s ages at the time they were enrolled in the Ratibor Gymnasium in 1819

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Readers will note that Isaac and Samuel Bruck’s names are listed in succession and bracketed, and the profession of their father is identical, an “Arrendator,” a leaseholder (i.e., holding property by lease). Thus, I assume they were brothers, although I had no prior knowledge of Isaac. Samuel Bruck (1808-1863) (Figure 7) was my great-great-grandfather, and I have photos of both he and his wife, Charlotte Bruck née Marle (1809-1861), later in life. Samuel purchased the family hotel in Ratibor, the Bruck’s “Prinz von Preußen” Hotel, around the middle of the 19th Century, following a career as a wood merchant.

Figure 7. My great-great-grandfather Samuel Bruck (1808-1863)

 

 

My uncle Dr. Fedor Bruck produced an abbreviated typed family tree (Figure 3) that includes the names of Samuel Bruck and his brother Jonas (more on him later), shown to be the sons of Jacob Bruck and his wife Maria Aufrecht. From primary source documents, Jacob (Jakob) Nathan Bruck, his complete name, and Maria Aufrecht are known to have had other children. LDS microfilm roll 1184449 for Ratibor documents the birth of a daughter named Rebecka on the 10th of January 1815. (Figure 8) The same microfilm roll also documents the marriages of three of Jacob’s daughters, Wilhelmina, Dorothea, and Fanny, respectively, in 1814, 1817, and 1822 (Figure 9); the mother is not identified but I presume is Maria Aufrecht. And, yet another primary source document identifies Jacob Nathan Bruck as the father of a son named Marcus Moritz Bruck who married Nanette von Aldersthal in 1836 in Berlin at the age of 36 (Figure 10); again the mother is not named but I presume is Maria. So, from various sources, I can reasonably document that Jacob Nathan Bruck likely had at least eight children (i.e., Wilhelmina, Dorothea, Fanny, Marcus Moritz, Isaac, Samuel, Jonas, and Rebecka).

Figure 8. Summary page from JRI-Poland.org, drawn from the Jewish Ratibor records found on LDS microfilm roll 1184449, listing the birth of Jacob and Maria Bruck’s daughter Rebecka on the 10th of January 1815

 

Figure 9. Summary page from JRI-Poland.org, drawn from the Jewish Ratibor records found on LDS microfilm roll 1184449, listing the marriages of three of Jacob Nathan Bruck’s daughters, respectively, in 1814, 1817 and 1822

 

Figure 10. The marriage register listing for Marcus Moritz Bruck and Nanette von Adlersthal on the 16th of October 1836 in Berlin, identifying Jacob Nathan Bruck as Marcus’s father and giving Marcus’s age as 36

 

Isaac Bruck (Figures 6a-b)

Let’s move on to Isaac and consider what primary sources are available for him. With the original Ratibor Gymnasium Album for 1819-1849 in hand, and with Isaac Bruck’s full name written out, I am now certain the initial for Isaac’s forename in Dr. Carl Linge’s 1820 publication referenced above was mistakenly recorded as a “J.” rather than an “I.” This led me to initially conclude that Jonas had attended the high school at the precocious age of 6. Not the case.

Isaac’s age at the time he attended the Ratibor Gymnasium in 1819 is stated as 13. Given that the Gymnasium Ratibor Album records students’ names starting on the 11th of May 1819, I generally place Isaac’s birth in the early part of 1806, though it could certainly have been in the latter half of 1805. I discovered a family tree on MyHeritage that gives an Isaac Bruck’s exact date of birth  as the 9th of November 1805 in Breslau. However, upon locating the original birth register listing for this individual in the LDS microfilm for Breslau (LDS Roll 1184380, page 34 of 594), I found the listing is for someone named ISAAC BRUG. (Figure 11) Conceivably, an alternate spelling for “Bruck” in the early 19th Century could have been “BRUG,” but because the father is identified as “abr. Meyer Brug,” I’m dubious this is the same Isaac. I’m convinced Isaac’s father was Jacob Nathan Bruck because of his association in the student ledger with the name “Samuel Bruck,” whose father was assuredly Jacob. This is another example of something I rail about, the need to be cautious about adopting and replicating information found in other family trees without confirming the source of the data.

 

Figure 11. Page from the Jewish Breslau records, drawn from LDS microfilm roll 1184380, page 34 out of 594, listing “Isaac Brug” as the son of “abr. Meyer Brug”

 

Years ago when I did a basic Google query on Isaac Bruck, I stumbled upon an intriguing announcement in Volume 18 of the “Amtsblatt für den Regierungsbezirk Marienwerder (Official Gazette for the Marienwerder District),” dated the 26th of May 1828 about him. (Figures 12a-b) There is no question the announcement relates to my ancestor as he is said to have come from Ratibor, and his age of 22 in 1828 coincides with my estimate of how old he would have been then had he been born between 1805 and 1806. It seems, the Security Services from the West Prussian town of Graudenz issued a bulletin in May of 1828 alerting the police authorities to arrest Isaac Bruck after he had gone AWOL or escaped from the local penitentiary. He was described as Jewish, 22 years old with black and curly hair, a black beard, a normal sized mouth, having an oval chin and face, of average stature, 5 feet 2 inches, with a scar on his right forearm from a horse bite. Whether Isaac was ever brought to justice remains unknown.

 

Figure 12a. Page 213 from Volume 18 of the “Amtsblatt für den Regierungsbezirk Marienwerder (Official Gazette for the Marienwerder District),” dated the 26th of May 1828, calling for Isaac Bruck’s arrest for having gone AWOL
Figure 12b. German transcription of page 213 from Volume 18 of the “Amtsblatt für den Regierungsbezirk Marienwerder (Official Gazette for the Marienwerder District),” dated the 26th of May 1828, calling for Isaac Bruck’s arrest for having gone AWOL

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Several other primary sources from Ratibor make mention of Isaac Bruck and his wife Caroline Bruck née Stolz, who is identified as the daughter of Joachim Meyer Stolz. The birth register for Ratibor records Isaac and Caroline gave birth to a daughter named Fany on the 28th of December 1833 (Figure 13), who according to one of my cousins supposedly died in 1834. Isaac and Caroline’s divorce is recorded on the 19th of July 1835, and gives the name of Caroline’s father as “Joachim Meyer Stolz.” (Figure 14) Yet a third primary source from 1835, claiming that Caroline and Isaac are then living separately, states Isaac remarried a woman named Charlotte Leopold; this same document gives the names and dates of birth of Isaac and Caroline’s two other children, Marie born on the 27th of June 1832, and Heinrich on the 6th of January 1835. (Figure 15) Caroline Bruck née Stolz’s death certificate records her death in Berlin on the 24th of January 1875, and claims she was born in 1803 in Rawitsch [today: Rawicz, Poland]. (Figures 16a-b)

Figure 13. Ratibor birth record for Isaac Bruck and Caroline Bruck née Stolz’s daughter “Fany” on the 28th of December 1833

 

Figure 14. Register listing of Isaac Bruck and Caroline Bruck b. Stolz’s divorce on the 19th of July 1835, identifying Caroline’s father as “Joachim Meyer Stolz”
Figure 15. Primary source document with the names and dates of birth of Isaac and Caroline Bruck’s two children, Marie (born on the 27th of June 1832) and Heinrich (born on the 6th of January 1835)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 16a. Cover page from ancestry.com for Caroline Bruck b. Stolz’s death certificate (b. 1803-d. 24 Jan 1875, Berlin VIIa)
Figure 16b. Caroline Bruck b. Stolz’s death certificate (b. 1803-d. 24 Jan 1875, Berlin VIIa)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Heimann Bruck (Figure 17)

 

Figure 17. Page from the Ratibor Gymnasium “Album” 1819-1849 listing Heimann Bruck enrolled on the 4th of April 1823

 

The Ratibor Gymnasium Album records Heimann’s enrollment on the 4th of April 1823, when he was 11 years old, placing his birth around 1812. Some ancestral trees claim his full name was “Heinrich Hermann Heimann Bruck.”

The Ratibor Gymnasium Album states that Heimann’s father was a “Destillateur,” a distiller, unlike Isaac and Samuel’s father, who, as mentioned, was an “Arrendator,” a leaseholder. Given that Jacob Nathan Bruck had so many siblings, it’s possible some lived in Ratibor, and that Heimann was one of Jacob’s nephews rather than his son. There is insufficient data to conclusively determine Heimann’s relationship to Jacob Bruck.

Jonas Bruck (Figure 18)

 

Figure 18. Page from the Ratibor Gymnasium “Album” 1819-1849 listing Jonas Bruck enrolled on the 21st of April 1824

 

A Jonas Bruck, whose father was also a “Destillateur,” a distiller, was enrolled in the Ratibor Gymnasium on the 21st of April 1824, when he was 10 ½ years of age. Once again, the question of whether this Jonas was the son of Jacob Bruck or the son of one of his brothers or cousins is subject to debate. Let me explain.

The Jonas Bruck who was the son of Jacob Nathan Bruck and the father of the famed dentist Dr. Julius Bruck, discussed in Post 68, is buried in the Jewish Cemetery in Breslau; his dates of birth and death are thus known (i.e., b. 5 March 1813-d. 5 April 1883). (Figure 19) In April 1824, when Jonas was enrolled, he would already have been 11 years of age, not 10 ½ as noted. This, and the fact that the father of the Jonas who was enrolled in the Ratibor Gymnasium in April 1824 was “Destillateur” would suggest this is possibly not Jacob’s son. No way to be sure.

 

Figure 19. A closeup of Jonas Bruck’s headstone showing his birth and death dates

 

Marcus Braun (Figure 20)

 

Figure 20. Page from the Ratibor Gymnasium “Album” 1819-1849 listing Marcus Braun enrolled on the 19th of May 1829

 

Marcus (Markus) Braun was enrolled at the Ratibor Gymnasium on the 19th of May 1829 at the age of 12 ½. Marcus, my great-great-grandfather, a Brauereipachter, or tenant brewer, was the subject of Post 14. He is known to have been born in 1817, and his age in 1829 confirms this. 

Oscar Bruck (Figure 21)

 

Figure 21. Page from the Ratibor Gymnasium “Album” 1819-1849 listing Oscar Bruck enrolled on the 22nd of May 1845

 

Oscar (Oskar) Bruck was registered as a student at the Ratibor Gymnasium on the 22nd of May 1845. By this year, the precise date of birth of students rather than their age was recorded, and Oscar’s birth is noted as the 8th of October 1832, which corresponds with data available to me elsewhere (i.e., the Pinkus Family Collection at the Leo Baeck Institute). Oscar Bruck was my great-great-uncle.

Heimann Bruck (Figure 22)

 

Figure 22. Page from the Ratibor Gymnasium “Album” 1819-1849 listing Heimann Bruck enrolled on the 3rd of January 1846

 

On the 3rd of January 1846, a Heimann Bruck from another generation is enrolled at the Ratibor Gymnasium, and his father was “Sattlermeister,” or saddler. His date of birth is noted as the 26th of December 1833. It’s not clear how he’s related to Jacob Nathan Bruck. Figure 15 indicates that Isaac Bruck and Caroline Bruck née Stolz had a son named Heimann, born on the 6th of January 1835, so presumably the parents of the Heimann born on the 26th of December 1833 were someone other.

Fedor Bruck (Figure 23)

 

Figure 23. Page from the Ratibor Gymnasium “Album” 1819-1849 listing Fedor Bruck enrolled on the 27th of April 1848

 

My great-grandfather Fedor Bruck (Figure 24), brother of Oscar Bruck, was enrolled at the Ratibor Gymnasium on the 27th of April 1848. His date of birth is recorded as the 30th of September 1834, which again corresponds with data available in the Pinkus Family Collection at the Leo Baeck Institute.

 

Figure 24. My great-grandfather Fedor Bruck (1834-1892)

 

 

In preparing this Blog post, I conferred with one of my fourth cousins. He has in his possession a memoir written by his great-aunt Bertha Jacobson née Bruck, great-granddaughter of Jacob Nathan Bruck, claiming he was one of 17 children and had 12 children of his own with Maria Aufrecht!! One family tree manager, now deceased, has precise vital data on Jacob’s dates and places of birth and death (b. 18 February 1770, Pschow-d. 29 June 1832, Ratibor), as well as the birth years of a few of his children, but cites no source. Given the very precise dates and places, I’m inclined to believe they’re authentic, but I can’t independently confirm this, so I reserve judgement as to their accuracy.

Given the large number of potential ancestors Jacob Bruck may have had and the likelihood that names repeated themselves within and across generations, it’s difficult to pinpoint the relationship among all the Bruck members who attended the Ratibor Gymnasium absent more primary source documents.

In closing, I cannot emphasize strongly enough that many of the family history stories I relate on my Blog would be impossible without the generous assistance of a cadre of researchers and genealogists who offer their help free-of-charge simply because they derive a vicarious “high” from doing so. Obtaining the help of local historians and researchers, particularly native speakers, is especially valuable as they often have knowledge of historic documents, not yet automated, that an outsider, like myself, would be unaware of. The mere existence of my Blog, albeit of limited interest to most of the world, attracts enough attention by people in a position to further my ancestral investigations and allows me to relate some of my tales. To these named and unnamed people I’m eternally grateful.

POST 72: FAMILY CABINET CARDS FROM RATIBOR & BERLIN PHOTO STUDIOS

Note: In this Blog post, I discuss a few Bruck family Cabinet cards, photographic prints mounted on card stock, originating from several photo studios once located in Ratibor, Prussia, and Berlin.

The inspiration for this post came in part from a reader who inquired about the Helios photo studio in Ratibor [today: Racibórz, Poland] where her mother had worked during the 1930’s, and partially from some family photographs mounted on card stock with the names and locations of Ratibor and Berlin photo studios imprinted on the front or back.

 

Figure 1. Cabinet card from the former Józef Axmann photo studio in Ratibor

 

In time, I would learn these photographs are referred to as Cabinet cards (Figure 1), which got their name from their suitability for display in parlors—especially in cabinets. This was a style of photograph first introduced in 1863 by Windsor & Bridge in London, that was a popular medium for family portraits. The Cabinet card, 108 mm by 165 mm (4 ¼” by 6 ½”) in size, gradually superseded the smaller carte-de-visite, 64 mm by 100 mm (2 ½” by 4”), which was introduced in the 1850s. The popularity of the Cabinet card waned around the turn of the century, particularly after the introduction of the photographic postcard (Figures 2a-b), but they were still being produced right until the First World War.

 

Figure 2a. Front of a photographic postcard, showing my father Otto and his older sister Suzanne as children, that replaced Cabinet cards

 

Figure 2b. Back of photographic postcard, depicting my father Otto and Aunt Suzanne, sent by my great-aunt Franziska Bruck to her mother Olga Berliner on the 28th of April 1911

 

 

The name of the photographic studio is often imprinted on Cabinet cards under the photograph; typically a lithographic design covers most of the photo backing. Many designs incorporate attractive graphics, including medals or awards the studio supposedly won at some exposition or competition, or perhaps a medal of merit or excellence that was awarded by a European monarch. Sometimes, there is even an indication that the photographer or studio was the “official” photographer of a named monarch.

I always try to assist readers if possible, particularly if our respective ancestors originate from the same town; this sometimes presents an opportunity to learn more about the town’s history and its people, possibly obtain an alternative perspective, and often provides ideas for future Blog stories. Answering readers typically involves my consulting with more knowledgeable individuals. So, having never heard of the Helios photo studio the reader had asked about, I turned to my friend Mr. Paul Newerla, retired lawyer and current Silesian historian from Racibórz, for help. Paul sent a postcard of Langestraße, the street in Ratibor along which the Helios studio had once been located with the studio name circled (Figures 3a-b); he also included a page from a 1936 Ratibor Address Book listing existing photo studios with a larger advertisement for the “Photo-Helios.” (Figure 4) And, finally, in responding to the reader, I attached a section of a 1927 Ratibor map circling the approximate location of the studio.

Figure 3a. Postcard of Ratibor’s “Langestraße” along which “Helios” or “Photo-Helios” photo studio was located

 

Figure 3b. Pixilated closeup of the “Fotografie Helios” store sign
Figure 4. 1936 Ratibor Address Book listing existing photo studios & photographers, including “Photo-Helios”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

More recently, I’ve turned my attention to the few Cabinet cards in my collection with the names and addresses of Ratibor and Berlin photo studios. These are often the most endearing and charming photos of my nearest relatives, specifically, my grandfather (Figure 5), along with my father (Figure 6) and his two siblings. (Figures 7-9) My ancestors literally seem to leap out from the picture and come to life.

 

Figure 5. “Carte-de-Visite” from the “J.D.P. Platz” photo studio in Ratibor of my grandfather Felix Bruck (1864-1927) as a child
Figure 6. Cabinet card from the “Oskar Krispien” photo studio in Ratibor of my grandfather Felix Bruck holding my father as a baby

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 7. Cabinet card of my Aunt Suzanne (1904-1942) as a toddler
Figure 8. Cabinet card from the “Oskar Krispien” photo studio in Ratibor of my Aunt Suzanne, my father Otto, and his older brother Fedor as children

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 9. Cabinet card from “Alfred Schiersch” photo studio in Ratibor of my Aunt Suzanne and my father Otto as children

 

The Cabinet cards depicting my family originate from three Ratibor studios, “J.D.P. Platz Kunst-Institut (Art Institute)” (Figure 10); “Oskar Krispien” at Oberwallstraße 10 (Figure 11); and “Alfred Schiersch” at Wilhelmstraße 12 (Figure 12); and  two Berlin studios, “W. Höffert” with two locations, Leipziger Platz 12 and Unter der Linden 24 (Figure 13); and “V. Scheurich” at Friedrichstrasse 2017 in Berlin S.W. (Figure 14)

 

Figure 10. Backside of “Carte-de-Visite” from the “J.D.P. Platz” photo studio in Ratibor
Figure 11. Backside of a Cabinet card from the “Oskar Krispien” photo studio in Ratibor

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 12. Front side of a Cabinet card from the “Alfred Schiersch” photo studio in Ratibor
Figure 13. Backside of a Cabinet card from “W. Höffert” listing two Berlin locations, Leipziger Platz 12 and Unter der Linden 24, and six other city locations

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 14. Backside of a Cabinet card from “V. Scheurich” photo studio in Berlin

 

 

Curious whether I could learn more about these studios, I again turned to Mr. Newerla for help on the ones in Ratibor. In response to my query, Paul sent the list of existing photo studios from Ratibor Address Books for three years, 1889 (Figures 15a-b), 1923 (Figures 16a-b), and 1938. (Figures 17a-b) The 1889 directory showed J.D.P. Platz was located at Oberwallstraße 8, while the 1923 and 1938 directories indicated “Helios” or “Photo-Helios,” owned by Hans Ogermann, the studio the reader had asked me about, at Lange Straße 10. Alfred Schiersch was also listed in the 1923 and 1938 directories but shown to be at two different addresses, Oberzborstraße 8, then Eisenbahnstraße 3. None of the directories listed Oskar Krispien.

Figure 15a. Cover of 1889 Ratibor Address Book listing existing photographic studios
Figure 15b. 1889 list of existing Ratibor photo studios

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 16a. Cover of 1923 Ratibor Address Book listing existing photographic studios
Figure 16b. 1923 list of existing Ratibor photo studios

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 17a. Cover of 1938 Ratibor Address Book listing existing photographic studios
Figure 17b. 1938 list of existing Ratibor photo studios

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In addition to pages from various Ratibor Address Books, Paul sent me a link to “The Museum of Family History, Education and Research Center,” a virtual (Internet-only), multimedia, and interactive creation designed to help people learn more about modern Jewish history. Within this virtual museum is a link at “www.fotorevers.eu” to The Museum of Family History’s collection of over 3500 photos. This Polish and German language website documents by city the activities of photographers and their studios in the years 1850-1914; for Ratibor, it includes Jozef Axmann, Atelier Helios, and Platz Ph. (Figure 18), while for Berlin, W. Höffert is shown to be in multiple cities.

Figure 18. Page from “www.fotorevers.eu” website listing three Ratibor photos studios from which “The Museum of Family History, Education and Research Center” has pictures

 

 

The Cabinet card depicting my grandparents around the time they got married in 1894 was taken at the W. Höffert studio (Figure 19), which on the reverse side of the card lists locations in seven German cities though more are known. (Figure 13) A different Cabinet card picturing only my grandfather at about the same age was taken at the “V.Scheurich” studio in Berlin. (Figure 20) Possibly, both photos were made in Berlin, although the wedding picture could certainly have been taken in Breslau, closer to Ratibor. However, the fact that neither picture was taken in Ratibor made me wonder where my grandparents married. Both were born in Ratibor and owned the Bruck’s family hotel there; additionally, I have a poem written by my grandfather’s brother, Wilhelm “Willy” Bruck, in honor of his brother’s wedding on the 11th of February 1894 that was printed in Ratibor, strongly suggesting my grandparents were married there. Yet, I had not previously found their wedding certificate at the Polish State Archives in Racibórz on two previous visits.

 

Figure 19. Cabinet card from “W. Höffert” in Berlin of my grandparents, Felix & Else Bruck, when they got married in 1894
Figure 20. Cabinet card from “V. Scheurich” in Berlin of my grandfather from around the same time as he got married in 1894

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Knowing exactly the day my grandparents got married, I scoured the Landesarchiv Berlin database for their names but came up empty. Once again, I asked Paul Newerla whether he could check at the Polish State Archives in Racibórz for their wedding certificate on the off-chance I missed it, and sure enough he found it with ease. Possibly, my grandparents honeymooned in Berlin, and had their wedding photos taken there.

The reverse side of the Cabinet card from W. Höffert states: “Königlich Sächs., Königlich Preuss., Hof Photograph Sr. Königlich Hoh., Hof Photograph des Prinzen von Wales.” (i.e., Royal Saxon., Royal Preuss., Court Photographer Sr. Royal Dynasty Hohenzollern, Court Photographer of the Prince of Wales) In addition, there are three medals of merit or excellence illustrated on the Cabinet card. (Figure 13)

In the case of the Cabinet cards picturing my grandparents and their three children, since I know their vital statistics, they do not add to my knowledge of when specific events may have taken place or when they were born. However, for readers who may not have this information for their ancestors, knowing that Cabinet cards were in vogue between roughly 1866 and ca. 1914 may help narrow the window of time for which ancestral information is sought.