Note: In this post, I discuss the fate of the hotel my family owned for three generations in Ratibor [today: Racibórz, Poland]. Largely intact following the cessation of hostilities after WWII, it appears to have been demolished for a combination of reasons, including geopolitical ones and the Soviet Union’s desire to remove historical traces of German connections to Silesia.
Regular readers know I periodically revisit topics or people I’ve talked about to amplify new findings. Since the process of learning rarely follows a linear path, one is often left to reevaluate previous findings or conclusions considering more recently uncovered evidence.
The family establishment in Ratibor [today: Racibórz, Poland], the Bruck’s “Prinz Von Preußen” Hotel, was owned for what I estimate are roughly three generations, from the early 1850s to around the mid-1920s. (Figures 1-2) A historic police file found at the “State Archives in Katowice Branch in Racibórz” indicates the business was sold in around 1926, and subsequently went through a series of owners. (Figure 3)
I thought I had previously laid to rest the issue of why the building does not stand today. It would be reasonable to assume the structure was destroyed during World War II, by Allied bombing of the city prior to its capture or in the waning days of the war when the Soviets encircled and seized the city. However, a post-WWII photo given to me by a curator at the Muzeum w Raciborzu proves the structure was largely intact possibly apart from the roof; the photo, while of high resolution, is taken at too great a distance to ascertain how badly the roof was damaged. (Figure 4)
Realizing the Bruck’s “Prinz Von Preußen” Hotel, which oddly retained its name throughout its existence despite its Jewish origins, outlasted the cataclysmic events of WWII, I sought another explanation for why it might not have survived. This was provided, so I thought, by Mr. Paul Newerla (Figure 5), my friend from Racibórz, a retired lawyer who now researches and writes extensively about the history of Silesia and Ratibor. Paul sent me a copy of a letter he found in the Racibórz Archives dated the 27th of March 1950 from the so-called Racibórz Municipal Board to the Municipal National Council in Racibórz (Figure 6); in essence, the letter states that damaged buildings in the town had been evaluated for their “historic character” and found lacking, so that parts of or all a structure could be dismantled to provide 5,000,000 bricks needed for the reconstruction of Warsaw.
Indicative of the method used to clear burned and destroyed houses and buildings in Racibórz, Paul found another letter dated the 12th of January 1948 sent from the Konservator of the Voivodeship, essentially the province, to the Technical Department of Racibórz’s Municipal Department. (Figure 7) The province was reminding the Municipal Board that the use of explosives to clear these damaged structures in the vicinity of historic edifices such as the Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Racibórz was prohibited. It is safe to assume that explosives were similarly used to take down the Bruck’s Hotel.
Why the city of Racibórz would have agreed to or recommended the dismantling of perfectly functional structures like the former family hotel probably requiring only minor reconstruction at a time when housing was likely in short supply seems to defy logic. Paul jumped to my assistance to explain broader geopolitical factors that apparently dictated why the former family establishment was torn down. I will attempt to explain this to readers.
The address for the Bruck’s “Prinz Von Preußen” Hotel was Oderstraße 16 (Figure 8); the hotel was located on an east-west street that terminated along the west bank of the Oder River [Polish: Odra]. (Figure 9) The historic walled city of Ratibor lay along the west side of the Oder River, as does much of the current central part of Racibórz. The location of the hotel along the west side of the Oder River is significant, as I will demonstrate. Spoiler alert. The destruction of the Bruck’s Hotel may be partially related to the anticipated location of the German-Polish frontier following the end of WWII.
The subject of Poland’s western frontier was brought up by the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin as early as late 1943 at the Tehrān Conference; this was a meeting between U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin held in Tehrān between November 28–December 1, 1943. The chief discussion centered on the opening of a “second front” in western Europe. Stalin agreed to an eastern offensive to coincide with the forthcoming Western Front. On the Polish question, the western Allies and the Soviet Union were at sharp odds. While the Americans were not interested in discussing any border changes during the Tehrān Conference, Roosevelt agreed in principle that Poland’s western border should be extended west to the Oder River.
At the Yalta Conference, during the second of the Big Three conferences between Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin held in February 1945, American and British officials agreed on the basics of Poland’s future borders. In the east, the British agreed to the Curzon line, the proposed demarcation line between the Second Polish Republic and the Soviet Union, two new states emerging after World War I; this line was first proposed in 1919. The British acknowledged that the Americans might push for Lwów, current-day Lviv in western Ukraine, to be included in post-war Poland. It was generally agreed that Poland should receive part of East Prussia, Danzig, the eastern part of Pomerania, and Upper Silesia; for reference Ratibor, present-day Racibórz, was in Upper Silesia.
In terms of this blog post, the following observation in Wikipedia is relevant: “With respect to Poland’s western frontiers, Stalin noted that the Polish Prime Minister in exile, Stanisław Mikołajczyk, had been pleased when Stalin had told him Poland would be granted Stettin/Szczecin and the German territories east of the Western Neisse [River]. Yalta was the first time the Soviets openly declared support for a German-Polish frontier on the Western as opposed to the Eastern Neisse. Churchill objected to the Western Neisse frontier, saying ‘it would be a pity to stuff the Polish goose so full of German food that it got indigestion.’ He added that many Germans would be shocked if such large numbers of Germans were driven out of these areas, to which Stalin responded that ‘many Germans’ had ‘already fled before the Red Army.’” The question of Poland’s western border was ultimately left to be decided at the Potsdam Conference.
Let me digress briefly to give readers a sense of geography regarding the whereabouts of the Western and Eastern Neisse Rivers in relationship to the location of Racibórz. The Neisse River, in Polish Nysa, is two rivers in present-day southwestern Poland. The better-known Nysa Łużycka, or Lusatian Neisse, is the more westerly and longer of the two rivers running 157 miles or 252 km; the Nysa Kłodzka, or Glatzer Leisse or Neisse of the city of Kłodzko (Glatz), is the shorter is 113 miles or 182 km and lies entirely within Poland. Both rivers rise in the Sudeten Mountains, flow northward, and empty into the Oder River. (Figure 10) Near the village of Ratzdorf, the Lusatian Neisse discharges into the Oder River.
Görlitz, located on the more westerly Lusatian Neisse River, is the easternmost town in Germany (easternmost village is Zentendorf), and lies opposite the Polish town of Zgorzelec. Görlitz is slightly less than 200 miles west-northwest of Racibórz (Figure 11), while Kłodzko along the Eastern Neisse is only about 90 miles to the west-northwest of Racibórz. (Figure 12)
As readers can easily discern for themselves, the Soviet proposal to establish Poland’s western frontier along either the Western Neisse or Eastern Neisse would have resulted and did ultimately result in considerably more land being included within Poland. However, at the time of the Yalta Conference, the precise location of Poland’s western border was still an open question. The western Allies accepted in general that the Oder River into which both the eastern and western Neisse rivers emptied would be the western border of Poland in that area. Still in doubt at the time was whether the border would follow the eastern or western Neisse. The western Allies sought to place the border on the eastern Neisse closer to Breslau [today: Wrocław, Poland]. Suggestions of a border on the Bóbr River (Bober) were also supposedly rejected by the Soviets.
At the latitude at which Racibórz is located, the eastern and western Neisse are situated much further to the west of the Oder River. In none of the materials I’ve read have I seen any mention that the Allies were seriously considering establishing the border between Germany and Poland along the Oder at this latitude; as mentioned above, the discussion always revolved around establishing the western frontier along the Neisse rivers or conceivably along the Bober River. (see Figure 10) While this may be true, as far as the local authorities in Racibórz may have been concerned, there may have been sufficient uncertainty as to where the final frontier would be established. Thus, to hedge their bets, the Communist authorities may have decided to dismantle the Bruck’s Hotel and salvage the bricks fearing it would remain on the German side of the border.
A recent citation sent to me by Paul Newerla sheds additional light on how the Bruck’s Hotel was destroyed. On page 69 of a book entitled in Polish “Od Joannitow Do Ratownikow–Czyli Dzieje Strazakow Ziemi Raciborskiej,” translated roughly as “From the Joanites to the rescuers or the history of firefighters of the Racibórz Land,” there is an eyewitness account by a former firefighter who worked for the fire brigade in Racibórz. (Figures 13a-c)
“One day (it was 1945, without further date) the fire brigade was alerted and ordered to the fire of the Hotel Bruck on the corner of Oderstraße and Bollwerkstraße (now Reymonta-Straße). The hotel was in unusually good condition after the war. When the firefighters appeared with their firefighting trailer in front of the burning hotel, they met Russian soldiers equipped with weapons. They refused to have the hotel deleted [sic]. The Polish administration was also powerless. So the beautiful hotel burned.”
It would appear, based on this account, that perhaps an evening of drunken debauchery by occupying Russian soldiers “accidentally” led to the Bruck’s Hotel being set on fire and to the establishment’s ultimate destruction; clearly, the soldiers had no interest in seeing the fire extinguished when the firefighters showed up. Depending on the intensity of the fire, it’s likely the bricks would still have been usable and likely salvaged.
Time and again through history, we have seen foreign invaders attempting to destroy traces of earlier history and culture in places they occupy, to rewrite the past, so to speak. The Nazis sought to eradicate Jewish culture. Currently, we are witnessing in the Ukraine Russians plundering museums in places like Kherson and Mariupol, because, above all, according to Putin’s propaganda, “Ukraine as a country doesn’t exist, it’s part of Russia—so they can grab anything they want.” Thus, like today, it’s probable the orders to wipe out evidence of earlier cultures in Racibórz following WWII were coming from someone high in the Kremlin, likely Stalin himself. Later, during the Communist Era, the headstones in the former Jewish Cemetery in Ratibor were removed and sold off because again, after all, Jews were never considered a part of the cultural fabric of the city.
In closing, let me make a few observations about the frontier between Germany and Poland, and the territorial losses that both suffered because of WWII. The Potsdam Agreement between the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union concluded on the 2nd of August 1945, in anticipation of a final peace treaty, placed the German territories east of the Oder-Neisse line under Polish administration. All Germans remaining in the old and new Poland, it was decided, should be expelled. The Oder-Neisse line marked the border between the former East Germany and Poland from 1950 to 1990. The then-two Communist governments agreed to the border in 1950, while then-West Germany, after a period of refusal, conceded with reservations in 1970. Notwithstanding West Germany’s misgivings about this frontier, with the reunification of Germany, they eventually agreed to it when the German-Polish Border Treaty was signed on the 14th of November 1990.
Ultimately, Poland for its loss to the Soviet Union of 72,000 sq. miles (187,000 sq. km.) of lands east of the Curzon line was compensated with 43,000 sq. miles (112,000 sq. km.) of former German territory. The final borders resulted in Germany’s loss to Poland of most of Silesia, half of Pomerania, the eastern portion of Brandenburg, a small part of Saxony, and part of East Prussia. The northern part of East Prussia, including Königsberg [today: Kaliningrad, Russia], was annexed by the Soviet Union, while Memelland became part of the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic, today Lithuania. (Figure 14)
Thus, while we may wish to believe frontiers and borders are immutable, as we’ve seen in just the past nine years since Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula, they are ever-changing and much more fluid than we would expect.
REFERENCES
Dafoe, Taylor. “Before Retreating from Kherson, Russian Troops Emptied One of Ukraine’s Top Museum of Nearly 15,000 Objects.” Artnet News, 14 Nov. 2022, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/russian-troops-loot-kherson-museum-2209777
Geanous, Jacob. “Russian art curators have reportedly helped loot dozens of Ukraine museums.” New York Post, 4 Feb. 2023, https://flipboard.com/article/russian-art-curators-have-reportedly-helped-loot-dozens-of-ukraine-museums/f-1f12bf14a5%2Fnypost.com
Grutchot, Katarzyna (ed.) “Od Joannitow Do Ratownikow—Czyli Dzieje Strazakow Ziemi Raciborskiej.” (“From the Joanites to the rescuers or the history of firefighters of the Racibórz Land”). Nowiny Publishing House.
Note: The Blog post is about Berlin’s Jewish Community Hospital that inexplicably outlasted the Nazis, and its wartime Director, Dr. Walter Lustig, born in Ratibor, Germany, the same town where my father was born.
This post has to do with my family only insofar as Dr. Walter Lustig, the man at the center of this story, was born in Ratibor [today: Racibórz, Poland], the town in Upper Silesia where my father and many of his family were born. From around 1942 until shortly after WWII ended in April 1945 Dr. Lustig was the Director of Berlin’s Krankenhaus der Jüdischen Gemeinde, the Hospital of the Jewish Community, a Jewish institution that miraculously withstood the Nazi onslaught.
This assault on German Jews left only between 5,000 and 6,000 Jews alive in Germany by the end of the war, compared to 500,000 Jews living there towards the end of the Weimar Republic in 1933 when the Nazis seized power. By the time WWII started in 1939 two-thirds of these Jews had emigrated, though there still remained roughly 167,000 Jews in Germany in 1941, most of whom would be murdered.
Berlin’s Jewish Hospital is 265 years old. It was originally built in 1756 on Oranienburger Strasse near the Jewish cemetery in Berlin. Then, during Berlin’s mid-nineteenth century economic expansion that was due in large measure to its entrepreneurial Jewish population, the Jewish community built the city’s first general hospital, one of the largest of its kind, on Auguststrasse; it was built primarily to serve the needs of the Jewish population. As the years passed, even this structure proved inadequate, so in 1913, the current hospital along Iranischestrasse opened on the site it occupies today (Figure 1); there were seven principal buildings, together with ancillary structures. Presently, the hospital is located in the Wedding locality in the borough of “Berlin-Mitte” (Figure 2), which prior to 2001 was a separate borough in the northwestern part of Berlin.
I have briefly mentioned Berlin’s Jewish Hospital in connection with three previous Blog posts. In Posts 48 and 49, I related the story of how one of my distant relatives, Dr. Ernst Neisser, was taken there on the morning of October 1, 1942, following his attempted suicide after being told to report to an “old age transport,” a euphemism for deportation to a concentration camp; fortunately, he survived only three days until October 4th before succumbing to his trauma. I say “fortunately” because the fear among Jews who attempted suicide is they would be resuscitated only to then be shipped to a concentration camp and gassed there.
According to a Jerusalem Post article by Judy Siegel-Itzkovich, published on June 23, 2007, entitled “A hospital with history,” numerous Berlin Jews, like Dr. Ernst Neisser, who attempted suicide with gas or sleeping pills in the face of deportations ended up in Berlin’s Jewish Hospital for treatment, the only hospital that would still treat Jews during the Nazi era. According to this article, upwards of 7,000 Berlin Jews killed themselves before the Nazi dictatorship fell. Although Jews committed suicide in all sorts of ways, by far the most common method involved the ingestion of a poison such as potassium cyanide or an overdose of an opiate or sedative, usually Veronal.
Then, in Post 107, I mentioned an English lady named Kathy York, whose grandmother Maria Wundsch née Pauly (Figure 3), a distant relative of mine, worked at Berlin’s Jewish Hospital during WWII when Dr. Lustig was the Director there. Kathy tells me letters written about her grandmother’s fraught time working at the hospital exist, but these have yet to surface.
I previously also told readers about Daniel B. Silver’s book about the hospital, entitled, “Refuge in Hell: How Berlin’s Jewish Hospital Outlasted the Nazis.” I have relied heavily on this book in describing Dr. Lustig’s tenure as Director of the hospital and the hospital’s situation during the war. It is not my intention here to thoroughly review what interested followers can easily read for themselves, but rather to bring to light a few findings and connections I made on my own that add a little to the story. This said, some background about Dr. Walter Lustig and his wartime administration of the hospital are warranted.
After fierce street-to-street fighting against entrenched remnants of Hitler’s SS, on April 24, 1945, Russian soldiers had finally succeeded in wresting control from the Nazis of a stretch of Iranischestrasse that included the battle-scarred buildings of the “Krankenhaus Der Jüdischen Gemeinde” (Hospital of The Jewish Community). There they found hundreds of people including doctors, nurses, patients, workmen, and others who claimed to be Jewish. The Russians did not initially give credence to their assertions believing Joseph Goebbels’ 1943 declaration, chief propagandist for the Nazi party, that Berlin was “Judenrein,” or “Judenfrei,” meaning “cleansed (or free) of Jews,” according to National Socialist terminology applied in the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.” Eventually the survivors convinced their Russian liberators they were Jews who had inexplicably outlasted the Nazis.
At the time of liberation, three of the hospital’s seven main buildings were no longer a part of the hospital. In late 1942, the German Army, the Wehrmacht, had expropriated the nurses’ residence, the Schwesterheim, as well as buildings that had housed the gynecology and infectious disease departments, for use as a military hospital, the Lazarett. Then, in 1944, the Gestapo appropriated and fenced off the hospital’s pathology laboratory and an adjacent gatehouse to use as a Sammellager, a collection camp for Jewish deportees. By 1944, most of Berlin’s remaining Jews had already been deported so a single, smaller holding facility now sufficed.
According to Daniel B. Silver, several published sources report the hospital’s population at the time of liberation at around 800. However, Hilda Kahan, Dr. Lustig’s secretary throughout his tenure as Director of the Jewish Community Hospital, states in a videotaped interview that the number was closer 500. Regardless of the precise number, they represented a large proportion of Germany’s identifiable Jews as they were defined by the Nazis. Statistics a young Jewish woman was compelled to maintain for the Gestapo on a monthly basis indicate only 6,284 known Jews remained in Berlin on February 28, 1945. (Silver, 2003, p. 2)
Included in the final number of Jews found at the Hospital upon its liberation, according to Daniel Silver “. . .were patients and members of the medical, nursing, and support staff who had taken up residence in the hospital at various times, either because they had been bombed out or evicted as Jews from their former homes or because they were slave laborers assigned to work at the hospital. Also on hand were the remnants of groups of Jews who had been transferred to the hospital when the Nazis closed other Jewish institutions in Germany, such as orphanages and old age homes. Most of these unfortunates had been deported before the war ended, but some remained in April 1945. Among them were a handful of abandoned children who were suspected of being fully Jewish but whose ‘racial’ status had not been definitively determined. The Nazis had used the hospital as a kind of ghetto to which they consigned Jews who had nowhere else to live or whose status was ambiguous. These included Jews of foreign nationality and Jews who were being held there as potential bargaining chips in negotiating exchanges for German nationals captured in Palestine. The authorities also used the hospital to house Jews who had been brought to Berlin from other cities in Germany as part of a Nazi effort to separate them from their Aryan spouses. This was intended as a first step in overcoming the political and legal barriers to the deportation of Jewish men who lived in mixed marriages and whose Aryan spouses refused to divorce them despite Gestapo pressure to do so.” (2003, p. 8) As Winter further notes, “Most of the hospital population were half-Jews or spouses of Aryans. As such, they had been protected by Nazi rules that everyone knew could be changed at any time.” (2003, p. 12)
Also included among the “patients” were several Jews not receiving medical treatment who were protected from deportation by one or another prominent Nazi; this may have included Jews who had illicit affairs with well-placed Nazis, childhood friends of important Nazis who sought to protect them, Jews who had bribed high-ranking Nazis, or other cases whose reasons can only be guessed. A “lucky” group of survivors included Jews who had been incarcerated in the hospital’s auxiliary police ward, the so-called Polizeistation. These were Jews who fell ill while already in the hands of the police, Gestapo, or SS who for unknown reasons the Nazis sought to restore to health before killing them. Unbelievable!
My family’s remote association to Berlin’s Jewish Community Hospital and its miraculous survival through WWII, in addition to the hospital’s wartime Director’s connection to Ratibor, the same town in Upper Silesia where my father was born, drew my interest in writing this Blog post. Hoping I might be able to add a little to what has already been written and is known about Dr. Walter Lustig, I contacted Mr. Paul Newerla (Figure 4), my retired lawyer friend from Racibórz who now researches and writes about the history of the town and Silesia and asked whether he could track down a copy of Dr. Walter Lustig’s birth certificate at the archive. Paul graciously agreed to help. He not only was able to locate Dr. Lustig’s birth certificate, but the Racibórz archives also provided a legal document related to Dr. Walter Lustig’s father, Bernhard Lustig, dated the 22nd of March 1939. I will discuss this in further detail below.
First, let me tell readers a little about Walter Lustig. He was born as Walter Simon Lustig on the 10th of August 1891 in Ratibor, the son of the merchant Bernhard Lustig and his wife Regina Lustig née Besser. He graduated from the local gymnasium in March 1910 and enrolled at the University of Breslau in October of the same year. He studied medicine, specializing in surgery, and received his medical degree and license in the spring of 1915. He was drafted during WWI and served as a military doctor. During his wartime stint, he obtained a Ph.D., also in medicine. His military service was performed in Breslau, where he treated casualties from the eastern front. After the war he worked in public administration while maintaining a private medical practice; he spent most of his career as a medical administrator. He wrote prolifically on medical subjects.
Clearly driven to advance professionally, in 1927 he relocated to Berlin. His move there coincided with two changes that had far-reaching consequences. He married a non-Jewish physician, Dr. Annemarie Preuss, and took a job with the Berlin police department where he became acquainted with Fritz Wöhrn and Rolf Günther who eventually became Adolf Eichmann’s key aides in overseeing the hospital. It was Adolf Eichmann’s department in the Reichssicherbeitshauptamt (RSHA), the Reich Security Main Office, that had formal jurisdiction over the Jewish hospital.
According to Daniel Silver, Lustig “. . .advanced within the police hierarchy until in 1929 he was appointed to the position of director of the Police Presidium’s medical affairs department. He held the prestigious bureaucratic titles of Oberregierungsrat (chief administrative counselor) and Obermedizinalrat (chief medical counselor).” (2003, p. 24-25) The police department had broad administrative responsibilities that extended beyond criminal matters, and included overseeing health matters in schools, institutions, and group care facilities, and conducting occupational training for medical personnel; suffice it to say, this brought Lustig into contact with many senior government officials and leaders in the medical community.
In October 1933, Lustig lost his job because of the issuance of the Nazis’ Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service (“Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums”). This law initially exempted veterans of WWI such as Lustig but because he had been stationed in Breslau and not on the eastern front, the exemption did not apply to him, and he lost his position. At some time, between 1933 and 1935 Lustig was employed by the health department of the Berlin Jewish Gemeinde, or community (more on this below). According to Daniel Silver, when exactly Lustig was employed by the Gemeinde, and what his exact duties were are unknown, though he apparently became active in matters relating to the Jewish hospital around this time. Regardless, Lustig proved as adept at rising in the official Jewish bureaucracy at the Gemeinde as he had rising through the ranks of the Berlin police department.
Without overwhelming readers with the tangled structure of the Jewish community, it is still worth reviewing the hospital’s situation following the events of Kristallnacht that took place on the 9-10 November 1938 to provide context for Dr. Lustig’s powerful administrative position during the war. In a structure that prevailed before the Nazis came to power and still exists today, every religious denomination was organized into a Gemeinde, depending on context, roughly translated as community, municipality, congregation, or parish. Prior to the Nazis seizing power in 1933, the Gemeinde in smaller cities resisted the formation of a central Jewish organization fearing it would be dominated by the Berlin Gemende. Eventually the reality of the Nazi takeover overtook regional concerns, and a central organization called the Reichsvertretung der deutschen Juden, or Central Representation of German Jews, was formed. It was renamed after 1935 to “Jews in Germany,” a significant distinction meant to signal that Jews were no longer to be considered Germans.
As the remaining German Jews became more concentrated in Berlin over time, the distinction between the Berlin Gemeinde and the Reichsvertretung became blurrier with many officials holding parallel positions in both organizations. After Kristallnacht, the Reichsvertretung was dissolved by the Nazis, only to be resurrected when the Nazis realized this organization facilitated emigration, which at the time the Nazis were encouraging. Consequently, a new Jewish central organization was organized, substituting the word Reichsvereinigung (central organization) for Reichsvertretung (central representation). Membership in this organization was compulsory for every Jew, which was created to better discriminate against and control the Jewish population. It was under tight Gestapo supervision.
Daniel Silver summarizes the hospital’s situation by 1941: “So it was that by 1941 the hospital functioned under the organization umbrella of the Reichsvereiningung, although, through the Gemeinde health department, it still maintained a formal relationship to the Berlin Gemeinde. The most important aspect of the new arrangements that began in 1938 was that, through the Reichsvereiningung, the hospital was placed under the direct supervision of Department IV B 4 of the RSHA. Originally this had been the department in charge of ‘Jewish emigration and evacuation.’ By 1941 it had become the department for ‘Jewish affairs and evacuation,’ emigration having been largely abandoned as a Nazi objective. Its head was Adolf Eichmann, the bureaucratic mastermind of the Final Solution.” (2003, p. 40)
Measures taken against Jewish professionals which began in 1933 with passage of the Nuremberg racial laws that pushed Jewish doctors out of jobs in non-Jewish clinics had a profound effect on the makeup of the Jewish hospital’s professional staff as it stood in 1941. Things came to a head with the decree of July 25, 1938, when all Jewish physicians, of which there were about 3,000 at the time in the Reich, were stripped of their medical licenses. By September, a limit of 700 Jewish physicians, referred to by the degrading title of Krankenbehandler, or “carer for the sick,” were restricted to treating Jewish patients or working in Jewish institutions.
Ironically, one of the beneficiaries of this provision was Walter Lustig. While many of Lustig’s contemporaries had by 1938 decided to emigrate, he consciously decided not to do so. Whether this was hubris or his marriage to an Aryan that he thought afforded him some protection or his previous relationship with Nazis during his days in the Berlin police department, Lustig benefited from others’ departures to rise in the Jewish hierarchy. Daniel Silver describes it as follows: “When his boss in the Gemeinde/Reichsvereinigung health department, Erich Seligmann, left Germany for the United States in 1939, Lustig took over his position. In July 1939, the Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt (Jewish chronicle) described him as the person who henceforth would be responsible for health matters within the Reichsvereinigung. In that capacity, he played a key role in filling vacancies that opened up at the hospital because of the emigration of members of the medical staff. At some point in 1940 or 1941 (exactly when is unclear), he was appointed as the Gesundheitsdesernent, or chief of the health department (of the Gemeinde), and thus became a member of the governing board of the Reichsvereinigung.” (2003, p. 43)
Eventually in around October 1942, Walter Lustig became the hospital’s director after the previous director Dr. Schoenfeld and his wife killed themselves; they had been among 100 Gemeinde and Reichsvereinigung officials handpicked in the second major deportation of communal officials, a selection Lustig was compelled to participate in after initially demurring. From 1942 onward, he was repeatedly forced to aid in the selection of hospital staff for deportation, and according to Daniel Silver was “. . .arguably the most powerful figure of German Jewry and the absolute master of the hospital.”
Again, quoting Daniel Silver, “For many, Lustig’s name evokes predominantly negative feelings. According to one source, ‘The name Walter Lustig awakens even today vigorous aversion among Jewish witnesses of the events.’ Yet even his detractors give grudging credit to his talents and to his accomplishment in keeping the hospital open through the final years of the Nazi regime. His contemporaries describe him in wildly differing terms—turncoat and Gestapo collaborator; savior of the hospital; the man who sent hundreds of Jews to their death; the man who saved hundreds of Jews from the camps; a protector of children; a lecher.” (2003, p. 26) Further complicating how Lustig is viewed in hindsight is the criticism that he was unsympathetic to the plight of his fellow Jews and that he was a Jewish anti-Semite, and that his mistresses may have influenced the people he selected for deportation. More on his purported anti-Semitism below.
At the time Mr. Winter published his book in 2003, he stated there were no known pictures of Walter Lustig. (2003, p. 26) While writing this Blog post, I was able to establish email contact with Daniel Winter, who formerly served as the general counsel to the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Service. He mentioned that following the publication of his book students from the University of Potsdam, outside Berlin, found a picture of Walter Lustig while developing a traveling exhibit about Berlin’s Jewish Hospital. Unable to locate his copy of this image, I have separately contacted the University of Potsdam hoping they might find and send me one. I’m optimistic about sharing it with readers in the future.
Relatedly, about ten years ago, I attended a talk sponsored by the Los Angeles Jewish Genealogical Society given by a Mr. Roger Lustig (Figure 5), who specializes in research on Jewish families of Prussian Poland, and is a top expert on general German Jewish research. This talk was given just before my planned 13-week trip to Europe to follow in the footsteps of my Jewish family’s diaspora. I contacted Roger asking whether he might be able to refer me to someone in Racibórz who could help me. Because Roger also has ancestors from there, he was happy to assist. Over the years, we’ve periodically stayed in touch. Naturally assuming that Roger might in some way be related to Walter Lustig because of the common surname and their respective connections to Ratibor, while writing this Blog post, I asked him whether he might have Walter’s photograph. He was unable to help explaining that because Dr. Lustig was a short man, about 5’2”, he was self-conscious about being photographed. This comports with how informants described Lustig to Daniel Silver, namely, that he was small. (2003, p. 26) Others added that he was a “small, delicate person” and that he had “cold stabbing eyes—terrible eyes.” Another informant reported that Lustig was very Germanic in appearance, a man who “‘looked like a major from the First World War,’ with spectacles and a big moustache.” (2003, p. 26)
Roger Lustig pointed out something interesting to me during our recent exchange that speaks to whether Walter was anti-Semite. While writing his book, Silver coincidentally interviewed Roger Lustig’s father, Ernst Lustig, who addressed this question (i.e., Ernst Lustig’s great-great-grandfather was the brother of Walter Lustig’s great-grandfather (2003, p. 176)): “The characterization of Lustig as a Jewish anti-Semite is at odds with the reaction of his distant cousin Ernst Lustig. In a brief and anguished commentary on the judgment in the Wöhrn trial, Ernst Lustig expresses surprise and shock at the unfavorable way Walter Lustig is described. ‘What is difficult for me to comprehend,’ he writes, ‘is how this man could develop such a horrible attitude toward Jews when he himself was a flawless Jew.’ He remembers his cousin as a man who maintained friendly relations with his Jewish relatives, a man whom he knew as ‘Uncle Walter,’ and a man who once provided Ernst’s father with a genealogical sketch of the family that descended from Dr. Lustig’s great-grandfather Abraham, who had lived in the town of Adamowitz. This seems out of character with the picture of Walter Lustig as a man who took no interest in his Jewish roots, although it is true that the time in question, 1937-38, was already after the date when Walter Lustig decided to throw his lot in with the Jewish community to which the Nazis in any event had irrevocably assigned him.” (2003, p. 215)
It is difficult to reconcile the differing judgements of Walter Lustig. On the one hand, there is the man who selected colleagues and fellow employees for deportation, while on the other was a man who occasionally came to the rescue of assistants who’d been arrested by the Nazis. Then, in March 1943, the Gestapo showed up with trucks in front of the administrative building prepared to deport the entire establishment, patients, doctors, nurses, and all other employees; it was only Lustig’s call to Adolf Eichmann that forced the Gestapo to stand down, though it resulted in fully half of Lustig’s workmates being arrested. As Silver asks, “Did Lustig originate this Faustian bargain, offering up fully half of the total number of his professional colleagues and employees as the price for saving the hospital, and thereby himself and his job? Or was this decision imposed on him in circumstances over he which he had no control whatsoever? It is unlikely that anyone will ever know.” (2003, p. 143)
It is worth noting that while the RSHA and the Gestapo were technically part of the same organization and under the authority of the same leader, SS Führer Heinrich Himmler, the German bureaucracy was teeming with internal rivalries and tensions (2003, p. 141), a situation which may partially explain why the Jewish hospital survived the war. For all of Lustig’s purported influence with the Gestapo, he was unable to save his own father from being deported to Theresienstadt in 1943. (2003, p. 173 & p. 221)
Longtime followers of my Blog may recall the postscript to Post 13 about the former Jewish Cemetery in Ratibor. In that post, I explained the role a Polish gentleman named Mr. Kazimierz Świetliński played in photographing all the headstones of the graves before the cemetery was demolished during Poland’s Communist Era. At a time when purchasing film and processing black-and-white negatives cost a lot,Kazimierz photographed, developed, created a portfolio with a site plan, and donated all his work to the Muzeum Raciborzu to be archived. After learning about these images, I arranged to photograph all the images in 2015. Recalling these and the accompanying Excel database, I scrolled through them and discovered they include a photo of Walter Lustig’s mother’s headstone, Regina Lustig née Besser. (Figure 6) As mentioned above, Walter’s father, Bernhard Lustig, was deported to Theresienstadt where he died, so obviously no picture of his gravestone exists.
Walter’s birth certificate, which my dear friend Mr. Paul Newerla was able to obtain from the Racibórz archives confirmed Walter’s date of birth, the 10th of August 1891, and his parentage. (Figures 7a-b) As I mentioned above, while Paul was searching for Walter Lustig’s birth certificate, the archives stumbled upon a legal document related to Bernhard Lustig dated the 22nd of March 1939. (Figures 8a-g) At the time Bernhard was 82 years of age indicating he’d been born in 1857; I would later learn he was born on the 6th of February 1857. Because he was in frail health at the time, Bernhard Lustig had requested that a Mr. Arthur “Israel” Stein be appointed as his guardian, which the courts granted. Despite his failing health, four years later the Nazis deported him to Theresienstadt, where he perished. One can only imagine the cruel circumstances under which Bernhard died.
Interestingly, the legal document Bernhard submitted to the court also requested that he be allowed to submit a corrected declaration of value for assets he’d mistakenly overvalued; this resulted in overpayment of the “Jewish expiation tax,” for which he sought reimbursement. It seems unlikely the courts ever acted upon this request.
From 1945 to the present, most people have expressed incredulity that the Nazis permitted an identifiable Jewish institution to continue to exist in Berlin, a city Goebbels had declared in 1943 “cleansed of Jews.” Mr. Silver offers possible explanations: 1) the Nazis saw the hospital as playing a useful role in the large-scale deportations during a time when all other Jewish organizations and institutions had been eliminated (2003, p. 62); 2) earlier in the war, before the large-scale deportation of most Jews, it is possible the Nazis allowed the hospital to survive to provide for the treatment of Jews who could spread epidemics to the general Aryan population (2003, p. 235-6); 3) for bureaucratic convenience, that’s to say, as a place in which the Gestapo could establish a kind of ghetto (2003, p. 237); and 4) for reasons of ambition, Adolf Eichmann may have stage-managed the transfer of the land and buildings the hospital occupied to a small powerless agency, the Academy of Youth Medicine, which he could easily control and thereby preserve the hospital and the site he coveted. (2003, p. 238)
Let me end this lengthy post by briefly discussing what is known about Walter Lustig’s fate. Following the war, the hospital fell into the Soviet-administered zone of Berlin. By then, Lustig had been appointed by the occupation-controlled local government as the director of health services for the Wedding district and had turned over the administration of the hospital to his aide Ehrich Zwilsky. Incredibly, Lustig had remained head of the Reichsvereinigung and had even petitioned the Soviet authorities to have it converted to the new Jewish Gemeinde, with himself as the head. His ambition clearly clouded his judgement; a more prudent course might have compelled him to flee, given the overall negative verdict by many who worked with him and thought he was a turncoat and Gestapo collaborator. Regardless, in June 1945, according to Ruth Bileski, a young Jewish woman sent in 1943 as a forced laborer to work in Lustig’s office, he was taken away accompanied by two uniformed Soviet officers, never to be seen again. Some claim he may have stage-managed his own disappearance to avoid being tried, although the likelier outcome is that he was killed by the Soviets.
REFERENCES
Siegel-Itzkovich, Judy. “A hospital with history.” Jerusalem Post, June 23, 2007, https://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=Siegel-Itzkovich%2c+Judy.+%e2%80%9cA+hospital+with+history&d=4898311699633967&mkt=en-US&setlang=en-US&w=KvOBC3e8wZezfu1SQux0Q8WOOLP6t1uU
Silver, Daniel B. Refuge in Hell: How Berlin’s Jewish Hospital Outlasted the Nazis. Houghton Mifflin, 2003.
Note: In what I anticipate will be the last installment about the Woinowitz Zuckerfabrik (Sugar Factory) located outside Ratibor, Germany, the town where my father Dr. Otto Bruck was born in 1907, I review the background and explore the German law that resulted in compensation being denied to descendants of the original co-owners of the factory. Readers will be disappointed because I am unable to clearly explain this. I will end this sequence of articles about the Woinowitz Zuckerfabrik with a series of questions that remain unanswered. This post allows readers to understand the twisted path sometimes involved in retrieving and reconstructing ancestral information for one’s family, resulting in both satisfactory and unsatisfactory outcomes.
At the outset, I need to apologize to readers for the exhaustive background of how the heirs of Adolph Schück (1840-1916) (Figure 1) and his brother-in-law Sigmund Hirsch (1848-1920) (Figure 2), the original co-owners of the Woinowitz Zuckerfabrik (Figure 3), attempted to obtain compensation from the German government for the forced sale of the plant by the Nazis in 1936. Regular readers know I am not only a stickler for accuracy but also for sourcing my information. Unfortunately, this sometimes leads to tedious detail.
In Post 25, I discussed the fate of one of my father’s first cousins, Fritz Goldenring, who perished in the Shanghai Ghetto on the 15th of December 1943. As I explained to readers at the time, I contacted one of the Chabad centers in Shanghai hoping to obtain a copy of Mr. Goldenring’s death certificate; Chabad is one of the largest Hasidic groups and Jewish religious organizations in the worldpromoting Judaism and providing daily Torah lectures and Jewish insights. Almost immediately after sending emails to three centers, I received a reply from Rabbi Shalom Greenberg. He had forwarded my request to Mr. Dvir Bar-Gal, who leads “Tours of Jewish Shanghai” and has become known as Shanghai’s “gravestone sleuth” because of his tireless work tracking down Jewish tombstones scattered around the city’s outlying villages following the demolition of the Jewish cemeteries there.
While unable to provide a death certificate for Mr. Goldenring, Mr. Bar-Gal offered useful information. He told me that before being expelled from Germany, Fritz had last worked in Darmstadt, Germany as a journalist. He suggested I contact the Rathaus (City Hall) there by email. My question to them about Fritz Goldenring was forwarded to the Stadtarchiv, or City Archive, in Darmstadt, and in October 2017 they responded. They too could not find his death certificate nor evidence Fritz Goldenring had lived in Darmstadt, but they did provide a valuable clue to an on-line directory mentioning him kept at the Hessisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, the Hesse Central State Archive, in Wiesbaden. They also told me Fritz had been born in Berlin, and I was subsequently able to locate his birth certificate showing he was born there on the 11th of September 1902. (Figure 4)
Based on what the Stadtarchiv in Darmstadt told me, I next contacted the Hessisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, hoping to finally obtain Mr. Goldenring’s death certificate there. While they too were unable to track it down, the archivist told me about an Entschädigungsakte, a claim for compensation file, submitted by his mother Helene Goldenring née Hirsch (Figure 5), as the heir of her son’s estate. Presumably, this was the document the Stadtarchiv in Darmstadt found mention of. After paying a fee, I was able to obtain a copy of this 160-page file, a document that ultimately filled in some holes.
The review above provides the necessary context for where this led me in March of this year. While working on a Blog post unrelated to the Woinowitz Zuckerfabrik, I took the opportunity to reexamine the 160-page file the Hessisches Hauptstaatsarchiv had sent me in December 2017. Something I had previously deemed inconsequential caught my attention this time, namely, a reference to a file about the sugar factory numbered “Reg. Nr. 40 672.” (Figure 6)
Having no idea what this might contain or where to obtain a copy, I asked Mr. Achim Stavenhagen-Bucher, a Swiss acquaintance with greater familiarity deciphering German documents, if he could help. He suggested I contact the “Bezirksregierung Düsseldorf.” Achim explained this office was responsible for handling claims from Nazi victims of the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia as well as those regions that belonged to Germany until the 31st of December 1937, based on the Bundesentschädigungsgesetz (BEG), the Federal Compensation Act; this Act encompasses three separate German laws that were adopted in 1953, 1956, and 1965. I will return to these later as it gets to the heart of why the lineal heirs of the owners of the Woinowitz Zuckerfabrik were denied compensation for the forced sale by the Nazis of the sugar factory in 1936.
As the source of Helene Goldenring née Hirsch’s original 160-page compensation package, I again contacted the Hessisches Hauptstaatsarchiv asking them how I might obtain the Woinowitz Zuckerfabrik file. They referred me to the Landesarchiv Berlin, though the response from the Bezirksregierung Düsseldorf is ultimately how I tracked down and obtained the document. They told me to contact the Landesamt für Bürger- und Organisationsangelegenheiten (LABO)in Berlin, specifically their Compensation Office, the Entschädigungsbehörde. Their website describes their function:
“The compensation authority in the State Office for Citizens’ and Regulatory Affairs implements the Federal Law on Compensation for Victims of National Socialist Persecution (BEG), the Law on Compensation for Victims of National Socialism (BerlEG), the Law on the Recognition and Provision for Victims of Political, Racial or Religious Persecution under National Socialism (PrVG) as part of its responsibility for the State of Berlin.
According to the will of the federal legislature, initial applications under the BEG for recognition and provision of National Socialist injustice have not been admissible since 1969. Persons recognized as victims of persecution generally receive monthly pension benefits and ongoing, case-by-case health care benefits (curative proceedings) for established health damage because of National Socialist injustice. Each western federal state has its own compensation authority. Section 185 of the Federal Compensation Act regulates which of the compensation authorities is responsible in each individual case.
All benefits are granted only upon application. The exclusion of compensation benefits to former members of the NSDAP [National Socialist German Workers’ Party] or one of its branches goes without saying.”
I contacted LABO and had the good fortune to land upon a very helpful lady, Ms. Angela Sponholz, who sent me “Reg. Nr. 40 672” related to the Woinowitz Zuckerfabrik at no charge. I will get into some of the contents of this file below.
At this point, let me briefly digress and identify Adolph Schück’s and Sigmund Hirsch’s heirs and provide some observations as to their rights to shares of the sugar factory. Except as noted below, the following analysis assumes that, upon the death of an individual, his or her share goes to the individual’s spouse; if there is no spouse upon death, it would be divided among the individual’s children; and if there is no spouse and there are no children, it would be divided among the individual’s siblings. The analysis assumes this order of distribution either under applicable intestacy laws or under the provisions of any applicable wills or trusts.
ADOLPH SCHÜCK AND SIGMUND HIRSCH’S HEIRS
POST-1920 OWNERS
FIRST TIER HEIRS
SECOND TIER HEIRS
THIRD TIER HEIRS **
Auguste Leyser née Schück (1872-1943) (1/6th) (Adolph Schück’s daughter)
Friedrich Leyser (1898-1959) (1/12th) (Auguste Schück’s son)
Alfred Mamlok (1874-~1960) (1/12th) (Frieda Mamlok née Hirsch’s husband)
Hans Walter Mamlok (1908-1956) (1/24th) (Frieda Mamlok née Hirsch’s son) ++
Erich Mamlok (1913-1991) (1/24th) (Frieda Mamlok née Hirsch’s son)
Erich Mamlok (1913-1991) (1/48th) (Hans Mamlok’s brother)
Helene Goldenring née Hirsch (1880-1968) (1/72nd) (Hans Mamlok’s aunt) ##
Alfred Mamlok (1874-~1960) (1/144th) Hans Mamlok’s father)
** Only those third-tier heirs who are known to have received “damages” from the German government in connection with the Woinowitz Zuckerfabrik are shown.
++ When Hans Mamlok died in 1956, he left ½ of his shares to his brother Erich Mamlok, 1/3rd to his aunt Helene Goldenring née Hirsch, and 1/6th to his father Alfred Mamlok
## Helene Goldenring née Hirsch was an owner in her own right, as well as a first-tier heir as inheritor of a one-half interest in her brother’s 1/6th share in the sugar factory, as well as a second-tier heir of 1/3rd of her nephew Hans Mamlok’s 1/24th share
A few observations.
Adolph Schück (Figure 7) and Sigmund Hirsch (Figures 8-9) each had three children, each of whom was a shareholder with a 1/6th share of the sugar factory. Assuming the German government paid compensation or damages, each owner would have been eligible for 1/6th of the amount paid out.
In the case of Frieda Mamlok née Hirsch who pre-deceased her husband Dr. Alfred Mamlok, I would later learn ½ of her 1/6th share went to her husband while each of her two sons, Hans and Erich, received one-quarter of her 1/6th share. Hans pre-deceased both his brother and his father, and he divided what amounted to his 1/24th share among his brother (one-half), his aunt (one-third), and his father (one-sixth). My apologies if I’ve confused readers.
Figure 10 is a screen shot from my family tree on ancestry.com with Erich and Hedwig Schück née Jendricke and their heirs.
Readers can see on Figure 6 there is another file at LABO with a different number, namely, “Reg. Nr. 160 800,” for Robert Hirsch (Figure 11), one of the six heirs of the sugar factory. I would later learn there exist multiple files with unique identifiers for the various claimants.
In Post 55, I discussed at length the documentation I received from Mr. Allan Grutt Hansen, a gentleman from Denmark related to the wife of Dr. Erich Schück (1878-1938) (Figure 12), Hedwig Schück née Jendricke. (Figure 13) I refer readers to that post for details. Suffice it to say that according to the documentation I received from Mr. Hansen, several of Hedwig’s relatives in fact received some monies from the German government in connection with sale of the Woinowitz Zuckerfabrik in 1966. Figure 14 gives their names and their presumed inherited ownership shares of the sugar factory.
Anna Johannsen née Brügge and Sophia Dalstrand née Brügge were Hedwig Schück’s half-sisters, Christian Brügge II was her half-brother, and Christian Brügge III and Helmuth Brügge were his sons. None of the documents I’ve obtained show Hedwig’s half-brother receiving any monies in connection with the sale of the sugar factory, so he may have been deceased by 1966. The names in red text in the table above are the four heirs who each were awarded damages through their kinship to Hedwig Schück. In the aggregate, Hedwig Schück’s heirs should have inherited her 1/6th share in the sugar factory but according to the figures shown in Figure 14, the amounts total 1/4th (i.e., 1/12th + 1/12th + 1/24th +1/24th =6/24th), so something is amiss.
I naturally assumed that if Hedwig Schück’s heirs had received damages for the forced sale of the sugar factory, so too had heirs of the other shareholders. To date, I have not been able to confirm from third- or fourth-tier heirs that this ever occurred.
Readers will note in the table above that one of Sigmund Hirsch’s daughters is Helene Goldenring née Hirsch, the very same person who did receive compensation from the German government because of her son’s premature death in the Shanghai Ghetto. This was indirectly a result of Nazi pressure on the Japanese to eliminate Jews living in this occupied part of China. Rather than exterminate them, however, the Japanese incarcerated them in a ghetto under deplorable living conditions causing many to die.
Hoping to round out my understanding of how the reparations claims were handled by the then West German government, I contacted Dr. Robert Mamlok (Figure 15), the grandson of Dr. Alfred Mamlok (1874-~1960) (Figure 16), the spouse of one of the six original shareholders. Robert generously shared copies of numerous letters penned by his grandfather, the other heirs, and the multiple attorneys involved in the compensation case. Most usefully, Robert sent me a summary in English of the contents of the various documents, which precluded my having to tediously retype and translate the original German documents. With this synopsis, I came away with a much more in-depth and nuanced understanding of the years-long effort undertaken by the various claimants to obtain compensation for the forced sale of the Woinowitz Zuckerfabrik.
I cannot do justice to all that is contained in the correspondence Robert Mamlok shared, but I want to highlight a few things. There were some administrative challenges faced by the claimants. As alluded to above, the Berlin Compensation Office, the Entschädigungsamt Berlin, assigned unique case numbers to each claim. Each claimant had their own attorney, at times interfering or working at cross-purposes to one another. Several attorneys died over the course of the multi-year effort requiring aging and ailing litigants to begin anew with different lawyers. The claimants themselves could not agree on the amount of lost income they’d incurred because of the forced sale of the sugar factory; widely divergent estimates of annual proceeds were proffered by the shareholders (i.e., ranging between 20,000 Reichmark (RM) and 100,000 RM annually with a RM having an estimated nominal exchange rate during WWII of $2.50). Without surviving documents to bolster claims of lost income, including the sales documents of the Woinowitz Zuckerfabrik, lawyers repeatedly questioned the estimates and asked for less inflated figures. This further delayed the adjudication process and allowed claimants to be played off against each another. There were seemingly endless requests for supporting evidence such as powers of attorney, proof of Jewish origins, proof of residency, attestations of one’s professional practice, estimates on the value of the business and the annual profits, etc., some of which could only be recreated from fading memories.
From a cursory examination of the summary papers forwarded by Robert Mamlok, the requests for compensation were based on several considerations, namely, forced sale of the sugar factory at less than fair market value (taking into account “goodwill”); loss of professional wages; and loss of income based on the boycotting of the Jewish-owned Zuckerfabrik. (Goodwill is a marketplace advantage of customer patronage and loyalty developed with continuous business under the same name over a period. It may be bought and sold in connection with a business, and the valuation is a subjective one.) Interestingly, yet another recompense that could be claimed was the travel costs of being forced to flee Germany.
At some point, it appears lawyers representing some of the claimants made the decision it would be easier to argue loss of income due to the boycott of the Jewish-owned sugar factory by Aryan-owned businesses rather than the losses due to forced sale of the business at a discounted price. Possibly, the lawyers felt it would be easier to compare the decline in the estimated annual profits from before to after the boycott was implemented than estimate the fair market value of the business in 1936.
While the compensation claim based on the forced sale of the sugar factory continued, this was never successfully adjudicated by any of Adolph Schück or Sigmund Hirsch’s heirs. Dr. Alfred Mamlok eventually did receive some recompense for professional damages in connection with the loss of his medical practice in Gleiwitz, Germany [today: Gliwice, Poland], including possibly for the loss of goodwill, as well as payment for his costs to flee Germany. However, Dr. Mamlok did not receive payments for the loss of goodwill in connection with the sugar factory. Additionally, Dr. Mamlok, his son Erich Mamlok, and his sister-in-law Helene Goldenring received monies in 1957 but the basis for these payments is also unclear.
The summary sent to me by Robert Mamlok provided further background on the sale of the Woinowitz Zuckerfabrik. Following Hitler’s attainment of power in March 1933, the responsibility for oversight of businesses like the sugar factory was transferred from the Reich Ministry of Economics to the auspices of the more stringent Reich Ministry of Food and Agriculture, making ownership and management of exclusively Jewish-owned enterprises more difficult.
Additionally, according to Dr. Alfred Mamlok’s correspondence, Upper Silesia, where the factory, was located was deemed to be an “animal welfare area.” This is a particularly interesting provision I needed to ask one of my German cousins about since I could not understand how animal welfare related to the Woinowitz Zuckerfabrik. On page 256 of the 1997 German edition of the book entitled “German-Jewish History in Modern Times, vol. 4: Renewal and Destruction, 1918-1945,” my cousin found the following explanation:
“Only in Upper Silesia, on the basis of a German-Polish agreement of 1922, did the approximately 10,000 Jews living there succeed in securing special status of a protected religious and ‘racial’ minority under the protection of the League of Nations Commission until July 1937. This was the only case in which a Jewish representative body, the Upper Silesian Synagogue Association, concluded agreements with the German government in open negotiations and before an international body. As a result, discriminatory measures against Jewish gainful employment or against kosher slaughter were not implemented here until July 14, 1937.”
Thus, ostensibly under the guise of safeguarding animal welfare, the Nazis were really targeting kosher slaughter of farm animals, and limiting, where possible, Jewish economic activities including at the sugar factory. Not only did the Nazis strive to expel Jews and deprive them of their economic existence, but according to their twisted logic expropriation of Jewish businesses served animal welfare. However, it is not apparent to this author the connection between animal welfare and the manufacture and sale of sugar.
As to the sale of the sugar factory, the owners eventually found a buyer in the form of an East German sugar company which obtained the necessary approvals clandestinely. The sale papers were presented to the Reich Ministry of Agriculture when key officials there attended a congress in Nuremberg in 1936, making it easier for the buyers to obtain approval. According to one letter found among Dr. Alfred Mamlok’s papers, the sugar factory was sold for approximately 800,000 RM though the writer estimates the fair market value of the business was several million RM. As a quick aside, this figure does not comport with the number I found in the papers sent to me by Allan Hansen which based damages on a sales price of 450,000 RM.
Let me turn now to a discussion of the act which guided the compensation claims for the Woinowitz Zuckerfabrik. Compensation for the victims of National Socialist injustice was governed in principle by the Federal Act for the Compensation of the Victims of National Socialist Persecution (Bundesentschädigungsgesetz or BEG) as amended by the Final Federal Compensation Act of the 14th of September 1965.
Below is a succinct description of this act from the Wollheim Memorial (www.wollheim-memorial.de/de/bundesentschaedigungsgesetz_1956):
“In July 1953, using the term Bundesergänzungsgesetz (Federal Supplementary Law), the German Bundestag passed the first national-level compensation law for people who were forced to undergo expropriation, forced labor, deportation, and imprisonment in camps during the Nazi era. In 1956, it was amended and renamed the Bundesentschädigungsgesetz (BEG, Federal Compensation Law), owing to numerous interventions by the Western Allies and the Claims Conference, which were directed primarily at the meagerness of the benefits intended for victims of the Nazis and at the exclusion of foreign victims of Nazi persecution. But the BEG held fast to the so-called subjective and personal territoriality principle, according to which benefits could be claimed only by victims of the Nazis who were residents of the FRG [Federal Republic of Germany] or West Berlin on the effective date of December 31, 1952 (originally, January 1, 1947), or had lived within the 1937 borders of the German Reich and taken up residence in the FRG or West Berlin by the effective date. From the outset, therefore, the provisions excluded from compensation all those people in the countries occupied by Germany during World War II who had been hunted by the death squads of the Wehrmacht and the SS and had not left their home countries.”
The Claims Conference refers to the Conference of Jewish Material Claims Against Germany founded in 1951 as a coalition of several Jewish organizations to represent the compensation claims of Jewish victims of National Socialism and Holocaust survivors.
A 2009 paper prepared by Germany’s Federal Ministry of Finance, entitled “Compensation for National Socialist Injustice,” provides more detail:
“The first compensation act covering the entire [German] Federation was the Additional Federal Compensation Act which was adopted on 18 September 1953 (Federal Law Gazette I p. 1,387) and entered into force on 1 October 1953. Although this was much more than an addition to the Act on the Treatment of the Victims of National Socialist Persecution in the Area of Social Security and in particular created legal equality and security on federal territory, its provisions also proved inadequate. Following very detailed and careful preparation, the Federal Compensation Act (Federal Law Gazette I p. 562) was adopted on 29 June 1956 and entered into force with retroactive effect from 1 October 1953. This Act fundamentally changed compensation for the victims of National Socialism and introduced a number of amendments improving their situation. At the outset, the Federal Compensation Act only provided for applications to be submitted until 1 April 1958.”
The Act on the Treatment of the Victims of National Socialist Persecution in the Area of Social Security was an act adopted by the Southern German Länder Council for all Allied occupation zones. This was promulgated by Land laws in Bavaria, Bremen, Baden-Württemberg, and Hesse in August 1949.
The Federal Compensation Act was amended in 1965. Quoting again from the paper by the Ministry of Finance:
“In applying the Federal Compensation Act, further need for amendment became clear. There was an awareness that the new piece of legislation would not be able to take account of all the demands of those eligible for compensation and that, given the high number of settled cases, these could not be re-opened. The amendment was thus to constitute the final piece of legislation in this field. After four years of intense negotiations in the competent committees of the German Bundestag and Bundesrat, the Final Federal Compensation Act was adopted on 14 September 1965 (Federal Law Gazette I p. 1,315), its very name emphasizing that it was to be the last.”
A few comments.
The Final Federal Compensation Act extended the original deadline of the 1st of April 1958, though no claims could be filed after the 31st of December 1969.
Numerous provisions of the Federal Compensation Act were complicated. One decisive criterion was the residence requirement. Those eligible to apply were persecutees of the Nazi regime who had resided in the Federal Republic of Germany or West Berlin by December 31, 1952 (previously January 1, 1947), or who had lived there prior to their deaths or emigrations. Except for Dr. Alfred Mamlok, who was a doctor in Gleiwitz in Upper Silesia, all the other heirs had lived in Berlin or what became the Federal Republic of Germany prior to emigrating or being murdered, so this would not seem to have been an exclusionary criterion for receiving compensation.
As an aside, for people persecuted because of so-called “antisocial” behavior, including the Sinti and Roma, “. . .the latter, the Federal Supreme Court (BGH) claimed in a decision in principle on January 7, 1956, had been persecuted not for ‘reasons of race, religious belief, or worldview’ (§ 1 BEG) but for their ‘antisocial traits.’ The BEG believed race-based persecution occurred only from 1943 on, when the Sinti and Roma began to be sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp.”
Communists also could not receive compensation because they were perceived as alleged enemies of the “liberal-democratic basic order.” Homosexuality was a criminal offense in the Federal Republic of Germany until 1973 so for this reason persecuted homosexuals similarly were ineligible to receive payments.
After the enormity of the crimes the National Socialists had perpetrated against humanity came into the public eye and shocked the world, the willingness of Germans to accept political and moral responsibility waned. Over time, and against the backdrop of post-war reconstruction, the Cold War, and the suffering the Germans had also experienced during and after the war, many began to see themselves as the victims. Feeling they had been manipulated and terrorized by the Nazis and Adolf Hitler allowed many Germans to displace any complicity in Nazi crimes. Consequently, as German Wikiwand notes: “People began to offset their own suffering against the persecution of Nazi victims—the cliché of well-off Nazi victims became a kind of political myth—and along with the integration of former Nazi officials into postwar German society, it was not the perpetrators but the victims who were perceived as a burden on the new society.” How rich.
Given the complexity of the Federal Compensation Law, it is not clear that if the compensation cases were being adjudicated today the decisions would be rendered any differently. But readers should know that many claims were being handled by former Nazi officials, such as judges and district attorneys, who had been integrated back into German society following WWII, officials who seemingly had little interest in compensating Jews they had once so avidly been an integral part of persecuting.
File Reg. Nr. 40 672 obtained from LABO was the restitution claim refiled for the Woinowitz Zuckerfabrik by Dr. Alfred Mamlok’s lawyers, Dr. Hans Zilesch and Ms. Gisela Maresch-Zilesch, for him as an individual. Contained within this file is a decision letter dated the 30th of January 1962 to his lawyers, ostensibly from the Berlin Compensation Office, laying out the reason his compensation claim vis a vis the sugar factory was denied. Followers can read the original and translated versions of this 1962 letter below. (Figures 17a-b)
In citing § 143 and § 146 of the BEG, the Berlin Compensation Office makes it abundantly clear that the claims were rejected because the Woinowitz Zuckerfabrik had its registered office in Woinowitz in Upper Silesia in an area they declared was decidedly outside the scope of the BEG. I include the language of both subsections below:
§ 143
(1) The right to compensation exists only if the legal person, establishment, or association of persons
1. on 31 December 1952 had its seat within the scope of this Act or the place of its administration was situated there,
2.before 31 December 1952, for the reasons of persecution under § 1, had transferred its seat or its administration from the territory of the Reich to a foreign country in accordance with the state of 31 December 1937 or the territory of the Free City of Gdansk.
(2) If a legal person, institution or association of persons no longer exists, the claim for compensation shall only exist if it had its registered office or the place of its administration in the territory of the Reich in accordance with the status on 31 December 1937 or in the territory of the Free City of Gdansk and if the registered office or the place of administration of a legal successor or successor to a purpose was in the area of application of this Act on 31 December 1952.
§ 146
(1) The right to compensation exists only for damage to property and for damage to property and only to the extent that the damage occurred within the scope of this Act. In the case of non-legally capable commercial companies whose all partners were natural persons at the time of the persecution, the claim for compensation also exists if the damage to property or assets in the Reich territory occurred as of 31 December 1937 or in the territory of the Free City of Gdansk.
(2) Communities which are institutions of or recognized by religious communities and whose members have undertaken to acquire through their work not for themselves but for the community may also claim as damage to property the damage caused to the community by the loss of the working activities of their members. A Community national shall not be entitled to compensation for loss of professional progress in respect of any work carried out by him on behalf of the Community if the Community has received compensation in accordance with the first sentence.
(3) No compensation shall be paid for losses of contributions, donations, and similar income.
Woinowitz was part of the German Reich in 1937. In a referendum held in Upper Silesia on the 20th of March 1921, people there voted to remain part of the German Reich. On this basis, I would have assumed that Woinowitz met the seat requirements under BEG as of 31 December 1937. Whether its location inside Poland by 31 December 1952 is relevant is not clear. Regardless of my understanding of the provisions and exclusions of the complicated Federal Compensation Law, the Berlin Compensation Office determined the Woinowitz Zuckerfabrik was outside the seat requirements of the act and for this reason denied compensation to heirs of the shareholders.
A separate page in File Reg. Nr. 40 672, dated the 27th of January 1964, gives the Berlin Compensation Office claim number, “Reg. Nr. 21 879,” for Erich and Hedwig Schück’s heirs, identifying them by name. (Figure 18) Attached to this cover page is the decision letter rendered by this office. Like the one sent to Dr. Alfred Mamlok’s attorneys it comes to the same conclusion, namely, that the Woinowitz Zuckerfabrik is outside the seat requirements of the Federal Compensation Law. This letter came as a surprise to me. Whereas I had assumed the monies Hedwig Schück’s heirs had received were the result of a different decision rendered by the Berlin Compensation Office under the authority of the Federal Compensation Law, this letter made clear this was not so.
With this new information in hand, I returned to the eight pages sent to me by Mr. Hansen for his ancestors discussing monies paid out to them in 1966. After translating these documents, I realized there was no mention of the Federal Compensation Law and instead payments made in 1966 to Hedwig Schück’s heirs were for “damages” paid out under what I eventually learned was the “Equalisation of Burdens Act (Lastenausgleichsgesetz)” of 1952 and decided by an order from a Federal Administrative Court. Suffice it to say, at the risk of further overwhelming readers with more detail, that the difference between what Dr. Erich Schück received from the September 1936 forced sale of the sugar factory, estimated to be 75,000 RM (i.e., calculated by the Ratibor Tax Office for each 100 RM of share capital at 190 RM, thus totaling 140,000 RM), and what he should have received (i.e., 142,500 RM), his wife’s heirs were in aggregate eligible for only 2,500 RM or whatever the 1966 equivalent was in German Marks. (Figures 19a-b)
At long last, I conclude my series on the Woinowitz Zuckerfabrik saga with some questions or issues still unresolved:
1). While I assume ALL six shareholders received equal portions of the 450,000 RM (i.e., 75,000 RM each) for which the sugar factory sold for in 1936, no documentation survives to know whether this was the case.
2). While we know that Hedwig Schück’s four heirs in the aggregate divided 2,500 RM in damages in 1966, we don’t know whether the heirs of the other shareholders received equal amounts. The office in Lübeck, Germany that handled the case has no documentation on file to answer this question.
3) And, finally, given that Woinowitz was part of the German Reich in 1937, why was it deemed that it was outside the scope of the Federal Compensation Act?
REFERENCES
Barkai, Avahram, Paul Mendes-Flohr, and Steven M. Lowenstein. German-Jewish History in Modern Times. Vierter Band 1918-1945. Munich, 1997.
Federal Ministry of Finance (Germany), Public Relations Division. Compensation for National Socialist Injustice. 2009, canada.diplo.de/blob/1106528/becf2995e860c6348a1efe7b3367ce51/information-on-compensation-federalministryoffinance-download-data.pdf
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.”
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
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.
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.
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)
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)
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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)
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)
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)
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.
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.
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!
Note: In this post, I discuss how I’m related to two living Brucks I’ve known for half-a-dozen years, and how I inadvertently stumbled on the answer and responded to their question, “Where’s the smoking gun?”
This story begins in 1951. Soon after I was born, my parents received a congratulatory note from my father’s uncle, Wilhelm “Willy” Bruck, then living in Barcelona, Spain. (Figure 1) As a boy, I would later meet my great-uncle’s daughter Eva in New York when she came to visit the family but never realized who she was. (Figure 2) Though I met her only once, I remember her fondly because she gave me an old silver coin I still cherish (i.e., readers will recall I’ve been a lifelong coin collector). Because of my father’s rather dismissive attitude towards family, except for his beloved sister Susanne murdered in Auschwitz, naturally he lost contact with most of his relatives. Thus, when I began my forensic investigations into my family, I was left to reconstruct and find family descendants on my own, years after my father was gone and might have helped.
Aware some family members had wound up in Barcelona, I began my search there vaguely cognizant my great-uncle Willy may have had grandchildren. To remind readers, I discussed the search for my great-uncle and his descendants in Posts 32 and 33. Since this remains one of my all-time favorite family quests, I will briefly remind readers how I met the two Brucks, first cousins to one another, as what can only be characterized as serendipity. I thought perhaps my great-uncle’s grandchildren, my second cousins that’s to say, might live in Barcelona. I started by checking the White Pages for Barcelona and found nary any Brucks there. I expanded my search to all of Spain and discovered 14 listings. I immediately did the calculus, and said to myself, “No problem, I’ll write to all of them!” And, this is in fact what I did in late 2013.
Many weeks passed with no responses. Then, early one Saturday morning, I received a call from a gentleman in Haifa, Israel by the name of “Michael Bruck.” I had no known relatives there so was intrigued why this namesake was calling. He quickly explained I’d written to his first cousin Ronny Bruck in Alicante, Spain inquiring about my great-uncle Willy. Aha! Michael is the family genealogist, so Ronny forwarded him my letter, ergo his call. I must share one other alluring aspect of this story that corroborates what Branch Rickey, the brainy former General Manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers, once said: “Luck is the residue of design.” That’s to say, luck doesn’t just happen, you create the circumstances to get lucky. For those who may be familiar with the postal service in Spain, they’ll know it’s notoriously unreliable. The letter I sent to Ronny inquiring about my great-uncle Willy not only arrived safely, but it arrived in his mailbox on his 65th birthday, making him believe some unknown cousin from America was sending him well-wishes! The stars were obviously properly aligned.
All my letters to the Brucks residing in Spain had included a photo of my great-uncle, and Michael immediately noted the family resemblance (Figure 3), even though he’d never come across Wilhelm Bruck’s name in connection with his own research. In 2014, my wife and I had already planned to spend 13 weeks in Europe visiting places associated with my family from northeastern Poland to southern Spain, so I suggested we all meet in Spain. Meeting there was not possible, so Ronny suggested Germany instead, and Michael and his wife joined us from Israel. Thus, in 2014, we met in person at the home of my first cousin. (Figures 4-5) Despite our in-depth respective knowledge of our family trees, over the years, Michael and I could never pinpoint how closely or distantly we are related.
Fast forward to the present. My previous post told the story about obtaining the complete roster of students who were enrolled in the Ratibor Gymnasium, high school, between its opening in 1819 and 1849; Ratibor is the town in Upper Silesia where my father was born in 1907, and where many Brucks hail from. Among the first-year students who attended the Ratibor Gymnasium upon its opening were two brothers, Isaac and Samuel Bruck. (Figures 6a-b) As I told readers in Post 73, Samuel Bruck is my great-great-grandfather, and is known to me. (Figure 7) His brother Isaac was completely unfamiliar to me, so I casually checked on ancestry.com and MyHeritage, to no avail. Not expecting to find anything through a Google search, I nonetheless checked Isaac’s name there. Imagine my surprise, then, when I was “kicked” into a query that had been posted by Michael Bruck in 2012 on Genealogy.com inquiring about him. (Figure 8)
As followers can read, Michael asked the genealogical community for information on Isaac Bruck and his wife Caroline Stolz from Ratibor; he went on to say that their daughter Marie Friederike Bruck married David Isaac there on the 29th of June 1857, and that Friederike was Michael’s great-great-grandmother. Upon seeing Michael’s message, it immediately became clear how we’re likely related. While I qualify the previous statement, there is absolutely no question in my mind how Michael, Ronny, and I are related. We are fourth cousins once removed. Let me briefly review the evidence, again by reference to primary source documents as in the previous post.
To remind readers what I said in Post 73, in the Ratibor Gymnasium Album, the names “Isaac Bruck and Samuel Bruck” occur in succession and are “bracketed” together with their unnamed father’s profession identically described as “Arrendator,” leaseholder. (Figures 6a-b) From a condensed family tree developed by my uncle Dr. Fedor Bruck reproduced here (Figure 9), I know that Samuel’s father was Jacob Nathan Bruck and that by association, so too is Isaac’s father. To me, the names in association with one another and their father’s profession being the same is “the smoking gun,” the answer to the question Michael and Ronny once posed.
The marriage register listing of Michael’s great-great-grandmother Marie Friederike Bruck to David Isaak dated the 19th of June 1857 survives and can be found on LDS Microfilm Roll 1184449. (Figure 10)
Below is a transcription and a translation of the marriage register listing for Isaac(k) Bruck’s daughter and her husband.
Register No.
Datum
1857
Vor & Zuname
Bräutigam
Gewerbe
Wohnhaft
Name der Braut
& ihrer Eltern
Gewerbe
Wohnhaft
(Register Number)
(Date
1857)
(First & last name of the groom)
(Occupation,
Residence)
(Name of the bride)
(& her parents’ occupation & residence)
GERMAN
113
29.6
David ISAAK, 32 Jahre, Sohn d[es] zu Wrirtzen verstorb[enen] Handelsmanns Hirsch ISAAK & der dort lebenden Ehefrau Cheinchen geb. CASPER
Handlungskommis, Berlin
Marie Friederike BRUCK, Ratibor, 24 Jahre
zu Altendorf verstorb[ener] Sattlermeister / p. Kaufm[ann] Isaak BRUCK & Ehefrau Caroline geb. STOLZ, Ratibor
ENGLISH
113
29 June
David ISAAK, 32 years old, son of the merchant Hirsch ISAAK, who died in Wrietzen, and his wife Cheinchen née CASPER, who lives there
Clerk, assistant or commercial employee, Berlin
Marie Friederike BRUCK, Ratibor, 24 years old
Died in Altendorf, master saddler / p. businessman Isaak BRUCK & wife Caroline née STOLZ, Ratibor
As readers can see, in the far-right column, Marie Friederike’s parents are identified, Isaak (spelled with a “k”) Bruck and Caroline Stolz, with a notation that Isaak died in Altendorf, a suburb of Ratibor (Figure 11), obviously before his daughter got married in 1857.
The town where the groom comes from is incorrectly spelled “Wrietzen,” when it should have read “Wriezen.” It’s a town in the district Märkisch-Oderland, in Brandenburg, Germany.
One final point. Some may wonder, as I did, why Michael and Ronny’s surnames are Bruck when this originates in their matrilineal line. (Figure 12) Michael explained that some of David and Marie Friederike Isaac’s children were in the clothing business in Berlin and owned several shops there in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; on account of persistent anti-Semitism, they started to use their mother’s maiden name. One of David and Marie Friederike’s sons, Max Isaac and his wife, formally applied to the Berlin authorities to use the Bruck name permanently on the 3rd of November 1919, evidence of which survives. (Figure 13)
It’s satisfying to have figured out how Michael, Ronny, and I are related, albeit in the scheme of things, it’s not seemingly a near ancestral link. That said, I maintain close ties with Michael and Ronny, and we regularly communicate. Furthermore, Ronny, by dint of his familiarity with Sütterlin, the German saw-toothed script briefly taught in schools there, has translated numerous family documents penned in this writing. This has enormously furthered my family research.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Note: This post is about two of my father’s former friends, non-Jews, from his time living in the Free State of Danzig in the 1930’s, and information I recently uncovered about their peculiar deaths.
My father, Dr, Otto Bruck, received his dental accreditation from the University of Berlin’s Zahnheilkunde Institut, Dentistry Institute, on the 31st of May 1930. This was followed by two brief dental apprenticeships, first in Königsbrück, in the Free State of Saxony, Germany, then in Allenstein, Germany [today: Olsztyn, Poland]. These lasted until about mid-August 1930 according to letters of recommendation written by the two respective dentists. My father did not open his own dental practice in Tiegenhof, Free State of Danzig [today: Nowy Dwór Gdański, Poland] until April 1932, so inasmuch as I can surmise from surviving letters and photos, my father spent the intervening period apprenticing in the Free City of Danzig. (Figures 1-2) He may have been mentored by a Dr. Fritz Bertram, a dentist whom he took pictures of (Figure 3) and who is identified by name in his surviving pocket calendar (Figure 4), the subject of Post 6.
As a brief aside, my father’s decision to relocate to Danzig from Berlin may have been prompted by the fact he had an aunt and uncle who lived there, and that he was close to at least two of their three children (Figures 5-6), who interestingly I met when I was a young boy.
In any case, a gentleman whom my father befriended in Danzig was named Gerhard Hoppe. (Figure 7) As I discussed in Post 6, I learned from a 1934 Danzig Address Book that, like my father, he too was a dentist, in the adjacent town of Neuteich, Free State of Danzig [today: Nowy Staw, Poland] (Figure 8), 8.8 miles southwest of Tiegenhof. Possibly, Gerhard, who appears from pictures to have been about the same age as my father, may also have been a dental apprentice when he and my father became friends. (Figure 9)
Gerhard and his girlfriend Ilse (Figure 10) are among a group of my father’s former friends whose fates I’ve so far been unable to determine; pictures exist of all of them in my father’s surviving photo albums. These friends were non-Jewish, and I refer to them as “former” friends since during the Nazi era they would have been under enormous pressure to disassociate themselves from any Jews and any businesses they might have run. So, in the case of my father, I know that while he still had a few non-Jewish friends who whom he socialized, he no longer had any dental clients by the time he shuttered his practice and left Tiegenhof for good in 1937. The relationship he had with these erstwhile friends may have been more nuanced, but I don’t know this for a fact. Judging from the dates on my father’s pictures, after mid-1936, his circle of friends had narrowed considerably.
I’ve told readers that I periodically recheck these one-time friends’ names in ancestry.com and other ancestral databases. I recently did this again with Gerhard and Ilse, and, astoundingly, uncovered historic documents related to both. I tell myself I should perhaps be less surprised I discover new documents, and more bewildered I did not find them during earlier searches. Regardless, my recent finds have allowed me to sadly put to rest the fate of Gerhard and Ilse Hoppe. But, like most of the mysteries I seemingly resolve, they are like the mythological hydra, lop off one head and two grow in its place.
The search parameters I entered in ancestry.com were simply Gerhard’s first and last name, a place he might have lived, Danzig in this case, and the year I estimated he was born, so 1907, the same year my father was born. I immediately discovered his marriage certificate (Figures 11a-c), and the marriage register with he and his wife’s names, and their respective parents’ names. (Figure 12a-b)
The two-page marriage certificate, among other things, provides Gerhard’s complete name: “Gerhard Ludwig Rudolf Otto Hoppe”; his date of birth: 18th of February 1908; the date and place he was married: 30th of July 1932, Marienburg [today: Malbork, Poland] (Figure 13); his wife’s complete birth name: “Frida Charlotte Ilse Grabowsky” (also ending in “i” in some documents); his wife’s date of birth: 3rd of August 1907; and Gerhard’s profession: “Zahnarzt,” dentist. Three things instantly confirmed I had found the “right” Gerhard Hoppe: his date of birth off by one day from the date listed in my father’s pocket calendar (Figure 14), his wife’s name, Ilse, and his profession, dentist. Very likely, my father would have attended Gerhard and Ilse’s 1932 wedding. The second page of German marriage certificates typically list witnesses, but unfortunately my father’s name is not among them.
I would eventually locate documents for three generations of Gerhard and Ilse’s ancestors.
Now, here’s where things began to seriously stray from my preconceived notion of Gerhard and Ilse’s fates. With Ilse’s maiden name in hand, “Grabowsky,” I was now able to search entries for her. The first document I found for her was her death certificate showing she’d died on the 15th of April 1940 in the Langfuhr borough of Danzig (Figures 15a-b), known today as Gdansk-Wrzeszcz, the most upscale of Danzig’s boroughs, then and now. This document shows she died at less than 33 years of age, somewhat surprising but perhaps not so unusual given wartime realities. Shortly after discovering Ilse’s death certificate, I found Gerhard’s death record, showing he’d died on the 27th of July 1941 (Figures 16a-b), a little more than a year after his wife, also in Danzig-Langfuhr; at the time of his death he was 33, only slightly older than his wife had been. To say I was stupefied learning Ilse and Gerhard Hoppe had died so young, so soon after one another, and outside the theater of war would be an understatement.
Immediately curious as to whether the death certificates listed their causes of death, I turned to Mr. Peter Hanke. He is a German gentleman from “forum.danzig.de” with whom I’m in touch and who’d recently offered to ask the Polish archive in Malbork, Poland for death certificates for some of my father’s former friends, including Gerhard and Ilse Hoppe. I wanted to let him know I’d found their death certificates and ask if the records stated how they died. The answer left both of us horrified and saddened.
Ilse Hoppe’s cause of death was listed as:
“Todesursache: Durchschneiden der Halsschlagader (Selbstmord)” (Figure 15b)
Cause of death: cutting through the carotid artery (suicide)
And, Gerhard Hoppe’s death was caused by:
“Todesursache: Schädelbruch und komplizierter Oberschenkelbruch links- und rechtsseitig” (Figure 16b)
Cause of death: skull fracture and complicated thigh fracture on the left and right sides
Gerhard and Ilse Hoppe’s deaths leave us with more questions than answers given their extreme violence; they seem more like murders than suicides or health-related deaths.
According to Peter Hanke, an implausible but not impossible explanation as to the cause of Gerhard’s death may relate to the location of his apartment. I mentioned above that a 1934 Danzig Address Book indicates Gerhard was a dentist in Neuteich, Free State of Danzig, although by 1940-1941, a Danzig Address Book shows he’d relocated to Danzig proper and lived at Karrenwall 5 (Figure 17); he is not listed in the 1939 Address Book (Figure 18), suggesting he moved to Danzig in 1940 before Ilse’s death (i.e., Ilse commits suicide in Danzig, not Neuteich). Old German Address Books list people alphabetically as well as by street address and occupation, and, interestingly, in 1940-1941, Karrenwall 5 shows that not only did Gerhard Hoppe reside there but so too did numerous bureaus of the Nazi Party, the NSDAP (Figure 19), a trend that continues into 1942. (Figure 20) Could it be that the Nazi Party wanted Gerhard’s apartment, and was not squeamish about asserting its interests? We may never know. Unfortunately, contemporary Danzig newspapers have not yet been digitized, although by 1941 the news outlets were most assuredly controlled by the Nazis and are not likely to provide an accurate portrayal of what might have happened to Gerhard.
There exists a database of displaced Germans refugees from the former province of Danzig-Westpreußen, Germany, now Gdańsk and Bydgoszcz provinces in Poland, referred to as “Heimatortskartei, (HOK)” that include images of a civil register (handwritten and printed works); more than 20 million persons are included in these card files arranged by the town of origin. I discussed this database in Post 38. Peter Hanke checked the name “Hoppe” for Danzig, and, incredibly found HOK cards for Gerhard and Ilse’s daughter, Gisela Hoppe, born on the 24th of November 1939 in Danzig (Figure 21), and for Gerhard Hoppe’s parents, Otto Hoppe and Anna Hoppe née Birkholz (Figures 22a-b), who raised Gisela after her parents’ deaths. The timing of Ilse Hoppe’s supposed suicide less than a year after her daughter’s birth makes the cause of her death even more suspicious.
Gisela is shown living in Bad Harzburg, Germany in May 1958. As I prepare to publish this post, just this morning I learned that Gisela, who is about to turn 80 years of age towards the end of November, is still alive. As we speak, I’m trying to establish contact with her and share the multiple images I have of her parents. (Figures 23-24) Watch this space for Part II of the story!
Note: In this Blog post I detail the extensive efforts I’ve undertaken trying to uncover information on one of my father’s first cousins, a man named Heinz Berliner. In connection with this quest, I’ve communicated with individuals or accessed documents and databases in Poland, Germany, Argentina, Bolivia and Australia, as well as domestically in California, New York and Ohio.
Berliner was the maiden name of my father’s mother, that’s to say my grandmother, Else Bruck née Berliner (1873-1957). (Figure 1) She had a younger brother, Alfred Max Berliner (1875-1921), who had three children, Peter Hermann Berliner (1910-1977) (Figure 2), Pauline Ilse Berliner (1911-1981) (Figure 3), and another son named Heinz Berliner whose existence I learned about only in 2011. His name was mentioned in a document given to me by my third cousin once-removed, Larry Leyser, written by his grandmother, Kate Leyser née Rosenthal (1903-1992) (Figure 4), discussing various family members; with respect to Heinz, Kate only recorded he’d committed suicide in South America, no year nor place specified.
Heinz’s siblings, Peter and Ilse, I’d known about since I was a child, as my parents had infrequent contact with them in New York where they lived; I was easily able to find information on both in ancestry.com, and eventually even located some of their descendants. Regarding Heinz I found nothing, although, in retrospect, knowing he’d wound up in South America, I’m not entirely surprised. I’d hoped that if he’d made his way to the southern hemisphere via New York, there would be some record of this, but such was not the case. To cover myself, I checked the Yad Vashem Victims’ Database, but fortunately there was no indication he’d perished in the Holocaust.
Having established contact with Peter and Ilse Berliner’s offspring, naturally, I asked them if they had any letters, pictures, family lore, etc. that might suggest where Heinz Berliner wound up in South America. The only piece of physical evidence the family ultimately found in February 2018 was a playbill or theatre program with Heinz Berliner handwritten above the stage name he’d apparently used, “Enry Berloc,” showing he performed as a dancer at the “Teatro Municipal” on the 19th of March 1948 (Figure 5); the Teatro Municipal is located in Buenos Aires, Argentina, as it turns out. I’ll return to this later.
Knowing Heinz Berliner had a connection to Argentina, I turned my attention to try and find someone in the Jewish community there who might be able to track down evidence of his immigration or death in that country. I started by contacting the Argentine Consulate, then two governmental entities to whom they’d referred me, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs & Worship of the Argentine Republic (http://mrecic.gov.ar/en), and the Dirección Nacional de Migraciones (Immigration Office in Argentina) (https://Argentina.gob.ar). Next, I emailed Jewish Buenos Aires (contact@JewishBuenosAires.com), who referred me to AMIA (www.amia.org.ar), which is the main institution of the Jewish community in Argentina. Beyond learning from the Immigration Office in Argentina that records through 1953 show no evidence Heinz Berliner ever registered there, the other contacts bore no fruit.
Aware Heinz Berliner, or at least his alter-ego Enry Berloc, had been involved in the arts, I stumbled upon a website developed by Argentina’s Ministry of Culture of the Nation called “El Sur del Sur: Argentina el Pais su Cultura y su Gente,” “The Southernmost South: Argentina, the country, its culture and its people” (https://surdelsur.com/en/sections/people/). I was hoping the staff might point me to a cultural organization that maintains records of past cultural events. While the staff there proved to be exceptionally helpful, going so far as to check the database of the “Centro de Estudios Migratorios Latinoamericanos” (http://cemla.com.buscador) for any Berliners who’d immigrated to Argentina, ultimately this too proved futile. Thus, ended with no positive results around March 2018 my initial flurry of activity trying to track down Heinz Berliner in Argentina.
I resumed my quest again in October 2018 by asking Madeleine Isenberg, my contact at the Los Angeles Jewish Genealogical Society (LAJGS), of which I’m a member, for suggestions on how to proceed. Madeleine suggested I post a message to the Latin-American SIG, https://www.jewishgen.org/InfoFiles/LatAmSIG.html, which is precisely what I did. JewishGen hosts web pages for several “Special Interest Groups” (SIGs), whose interest is a geographic region of origin, or special topic. While Latin-American SIG was able to refer me to a few Berliners living in Buenos Aires, none of them had any known relationship to Heinz Berliner.
In addition to JewishGen hosting Special Interest Groups, they also have the “Family Tree of the Jewish People (FJTP),” where they centralize the collection of Jewish family trees. As of March 2017, they had collected 7,310,620 records from 6,266 family trees. I was able to locate a Berliner family tree, and contacted the family tree manager, who happens to live in Australia. After explaining what I was looking for, the tree manager put me in touch with yet another Berliner living in Buenos Aires, but, again, to no avail.
Let me switch gears for a moment. As readers can ascertain, the discussion above has been focused on my efforts to ascertain where Heinz Berliner emigrated in South America during or following WWII and when he might have died or killed himself. As frustrating as that search turns out to have been, trying to learn when and where Heinz Berliner was born, has been equally challenging.
As mentioned above, Peter, Ilse and Heinz Berliner’s father was Alfred Max Berliner, who died in 1921 in Ratibor and was interred in the former Jewish Cemetery there (Figure 6); Alfred’s wife, Charlotte Berliner née Rothe, was murdered in the Holocaust in 1943. I talked about her in Post 18. On ancestry.com, I found Alfred and Charlotte Berliner’s marriage certificate (Figures 7a-c) and discovered they were married the 17th of January 1909, not in Ratibor, Germany, where they lived, but rather in a place called Meseritz, Germany [today: Międzyrzecz, Poland]. In 2015, I found the birth certificates for Alfred and Charlotte’s two eldest children, Peter (Figure 8) and Ilse (Figure 9), among the vital records at the Archiwum Państwowe W Katowicach Oddzial W Raciborzu (“State Archives in Katowice Branch in Racibórz”); these certificates show Peter was born in Ratibor on the 8th of November 1910, and Ilse on the 1st of October 1911, thus about eleven months apart. Oddly, I was never able to locate Heinz’s birth certificate, though I assumed he too had been born in Ratibor.
Fast forward. I revisited the State Archives in Racibórz in 2018, and double-checked for Heinz’s birth certificate, with equally disappointing results. Following my visit, Paul Newerla, the Silesian historian from Racibórz who occasionally helps me out, also systematically re-examined the birth records for Ratibor from 1897 through 1918 and likewise came up empty-handed. It became evident Heinz may have been born elsewhere, perhaps in the town of Meseritz where his parents were married in January 1909. Aware this might have happened, I sent an email to Międzyrzecz, Poland, formerly Meseritz, asking whether they could search their archives for Heinz’s birth certificate. They responded telling me their vital records are archived in Gorzów Wielkoplski, Poland [German: Landsberg an der Warthe], and are accessible on-line. Paul and I immediately checked the database and again could not locate any record of Heinz’s birth.
To remind readers, birth records in Poland and Germany are not generally available until approximately 110 years after a person’s birth; at present, birth records for Meseritz are only available through 1907. Even if Heinz was born in 1908 before his parents married, his birth record will not be on-line until 2020. At the time, other possibilities came to mind. Perhaps, Heinz’s father was not Alfred, in which case he would have his mother’s maiden name, Rothe, or alternatively he was born in a place other than Meseritz or Ratibor. Paul and I decided then to wait until 2020 to again check the on-line vital records for Meseritz.
In the course of scrolling through the vital records for Meseritz, I made a mildly interesting discovery. As previously mentioned, I originally found Alfred and Charlotte Berliner’s marriage record in ancestry.com. (Figures 7a-b) Knowing when they got married, I searched for this exact record to test my ability to use the Gorzów database and had no trouble finding it. (Figures 10a-b) However, in comparing the two hand-written versions of the marriage record, I discovered they are slightly different though written by the same hand. I asked Paul Newerla about this. He explained the registration office, Meseritz in the case of the marriage between Alfred Berliner and Charlotte Rothe, kept the original certificate. As a precaution, the registration office was compelled to create a duplicate, which was submitted at the end of the year to the court, likely one in the Berlin borough of Köpenick with jurisdiction over Meseritz. The same thing was true of Ratibor; often original certificates in the registration offices have been destroyed and only copies survive, upon which a note is made to this effect.
Hal Bookbinder, former President of JGSLA, recently emailed members reminding them they have free access to MyHeritage, explaining they’ve recently strengthened ship manifest searches to allow queries not only for the names of passengers but for where they were headed. I’ve rarely accessed this database, erroneously assuming it replicates information found in ancestry.com, but decided to run a test using Heinz Berliner’s name. I was utterly astonished, when after all this time searching for him, a page entitled “German Minority Census, 1939” listed a man by the name of Heinz Ludwig Berliner born on the 24th of September 1916 in Ratibor. (Figure 11) While this Heinz was born where I would have expected, two things gave me pause. First, Berliner was not an uncommon surname in Silesia, and, second, neither Paul Newerla nor I had previously found Heinz Berliner’s birth record in the State Archives in Racibórz. Nonetheless, I relayed this information to Paul and armed with a precise date of birth for this Heinz Ludwig Berliner, he offered to reexamine the Ratibor birth records. Yet again, Paul could not initially find Heinz’s name in the register of births, but suspecting something might be amiss, he requested the book with the actual birth certificates. And, there it was, Heinz’s birth certificate confirming his parents were Alfred and Charlotte Berliner and that he’d indeed been born in the same town as his two siblings. (Figure 12)
This has been a long exhaustive search that has not ended with the discovery of Heinz Ludwig Berliner’s birth certificate. Besides providing Heinz’s date and place of birth, the German Minority Census, 1939 report included his middle name and two other previously unknown bits of information; it shows that in 1939 Heinz was living in the Charlottenburg Borough of Berlin and that he emigrated to Bolivia. Thus, began my most recent flurry of activity trying to track down when and where Heinz might have died.
First, I checked the 1939 Berlin Address Book for Heinz Berliner, as well as for his mother and two siblings, operating under the assumption they may all have been forced to live together in this increasingly risky period. Nothing showed up.
Next, I again turned to Ms. Madeline Isenberg, my contact at JGSLA, asking if she could refer me to anyone in the Jewish community in Bolivia, a South American country where I’ve never previously sought any relatives. She suggested I contact the Bolivian affiliate of the World Jewish Congress, Circulo Israelita De La Paz (https://www.worldjewishcongress.org/en/about/communities/BO), which I promptly did. The latter bureau sent a very gracious reply unfortunately informing me that Bolivia does not maintain any immigration records, suggesting I contact AMIA in Argentina, which readers will recall I had previously done. Circulo Israelita also checked Jewish death records for La Paz and Cochabamba, Bolivia, but nothing showed up.
When I again contacted AMIA, they referred me to Agrupación de Genealogía Judeo-Argentina (AGJA), which among other things, “facilitates the linking of the genealogical and historical roots of the Argentine Jewish Community with the global community, facilitating the reunification of disconnected families.” AGJA referred me to multiple websites and organizations, many of which I’d previously checked and reexamined, once more with negative results.
As readers can attest, with the information currently in hand, I’ve taken the search in South America for the fate of my father’s first cousin as far as I can.
I mentioned above the August 1948 dance recital in Buenos Aires in which Heinz Berliner, using the stage name Enry Berloc, performed. I searched for his co-performers, actress and dancer Witha Herm and pianist Kurt Kohn, hoping Heinz might have participated in other recitals with them. I was unable to locate any information on Kurt Kohn. However, Witha Herm (Figures 13-14), also a stage name, died and is interred in North Hollywood, California as Herma Wittmann (1907-1992). Her small claim to fame may be that in 1919, she acted in a German movie, Im Schatten des Glücks, which also starred Marlene Dietrich.
There are several take-aways for me from this exhaustive search for Heinz Ludwig Berliner. Because information is constantly being added to the ancestral databases, it is worth checking back every few months or once a year to see whether anything new shows up. Don’t assume, as I mistakenly did, that MyHeritage and ancestry.com replicate information. Searching for one’s Jewish ancestors who wound up in South America will be challenging, time-consuming, and often unproductive. And, the biggest admonition to myself, using a German word Mr. Paul Newerla, my Polish friend, taught me, “don’t act like a ‘besserwisser,’ a know-it-all,” just because you’ve been doing ancestral research for years!
Note: In this post, I explore some of the information Mr. Paul Newerla, the Racibórz historian, was able to find related to the Woinowitz Zuckerfabrik (Sugar Factory) in what is called the “Grundbuch,” or land register, discuss where this information currently resides, and how it rounds out my understanding of the history and ownership of the sugar plant over the years. I also explain to readers that even had I been able to access the land register and backup files on my own, I would have been hard-pressed to make much sense of the materials without the intercession of a lawyer familiar with German real estate law. Mr. Newerla happens to be a retired Polish lawyer who, by virtue of his profession and current study of Silesian history, is well versed in such matters.
Mr. Paul Newerla, my friend from Racibórz, Poland, is a retired lawyer who now specializes in studying and writing about the history of Silesia. Regular readers will recognize his name as I’ve mentioned him in numerous posts related to Ratibor, Germany, the town in Upper Silesia where my father was born in 1907. Perhaps, one of the biggest unintended benefits of having a family history Blog is that Paul stumbled upon it in the course of doing research and reached out to me through Webmail to offer supplementary historical information on the Bruck’s “Prinz von Preußen” Hotel which I’d written about. This family establishment was owned through what I’ve determined to be three generations, from roughly the mid-19th Century through the early 1920’s. Our initial exchanges involved the Bruck’s Hotel but have far transcended this subject.
I had the pleasure of personally meeting Paul in 2018 on a visit to Racibórz. (Figure 1) As an aside, I realize many fellow genealogists may never have the opportunity nor resources to visit the places one’s ancestors hail from, but I can’t emphasize enough the value of “having boots on the ground,” so to speak, to further one’s ancestral investigations, as this post will illustrate. It’s worth mentioning that Paul does not speak English, nor do I speak German, so we are compelled to use a few on-line translators to communicate, which presents its own challenges but is far better than nothing.
As I began to research the Woinowitz Zuckerfabrik (Figure 2), I naturally turned to Paul to ask him about the sugar plant’s history. He sent me numerous maps and visuals and provided valuable context for understanding the extent of the sugar industry in Silesia and its influence on the development of railroads; I’ve discussed these topics in earlier posts on the Woinowitz Zuckerfabrik. I was specifically interested in what Paul might be able to tell me about the sale by or confiscation of the Woinowitz Zuckerfabrik from its Jewish owners, the timing, the names of the sellers, and the price for which the business was sold. While he knew little about these matters, coincidentally, during his lawyering days, Paul had handled the legal sale of the former Woinowitz Zuckerfabrik between Polish parties. For this reason, he knew that while the sale of the sugar plant may well have been compelled by the Nazis, the later Polish owners had valid legal rights. Likely, the Nazi overlords wanted to handle the forced sale with a veneer of “legality” by paying the Jewish owners something for their business, even if that payment was vastly below fair market value.
By virtue of Paul’s previous involvement with the sale of the former Woinowitz Zuckerfabrik, he knew that the “Grundbuch,” that is the land register, is archived in the Archiwum Państwowe W Katowicach Oddzial W Raciborzu (“State Archives in Katowice Branch in Racibórz”). (Figure 3) The Grundbuch in Germany, including former parts of Germany that are now within Poland, shows the names of the current and previous owners, third party rights in rem (e.g., mortgages), and the description of the property. Land registers were kept for real estate or land, and included, as will be discussed below, the buildings and structures found on the land.
The land registry is a special division of the local German district court (i.e., Grundbuchamt beim Amtsgericht), and land registers are kept in Poland’s counterpart courts even today. Changes of rights to land do not go into effect until they have been recorded in the land register, although some exceptions apply (e.g. an heir becomes owner of a property even if he or she is not registered in the land register). Unless proven otherwise, the correctness of all titles recorded in the Grundbuch is assumed and a buyer can rely on its accuracy.
The old German land registers have been continued by the Polish court, naturally in Polish, and slightly modified in concept. The basic German land register was a thick book with sections for: I. Directory of Properties, II. Owner(s), III. Rights of other persons (e.g., rights of use, real burdens), and IV. Mortgages. The land registers were kept in court in case they were needed there. The documents justifying the individual entries in the land register were in the so-called “files to the land register,” and were held in the archives of the court; notes were made in the files but in the event of a discrepancy between the land register and the files, the former took precedence. In the 1960’s, Polish land registers were introduced that were organized differently; sections I-IV above were retained except they were kept in individual volumes, and in the back of each volume, the documents justifying the entries were maintained. As a result, files to the land registers in the court archives were no longer needed there so were turned over to the State Archives after several years.
There is one other distinction Paul brought to my attention I need to mention. There is also a “Handelregister,” or commercial register, that is maintained by what are called “Registergerichten,” Commercial Register Courts, that’s to say, regional courts above district courts. The Handelregister records “legal persons” of a company, including Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung (GmbH), a limited liability company, or LLC. The name of the GmbH emphasizes the fact that the owners (Gesellschafter, also known as members) of the entity are not personally liable or responsible for the company’s debts. GmbHs are considered legal persons. The Handelregister for the Woinowitz Zuckerfabrik is not available today for reasons that are unclear.
All the above is just background information that will understandably be of scant interest to most readers. Let me continue.
Prior to my queries, Paul had tried for some time to access the land register for the Woinowitz Zuckerfabrik. He was aware that German land registers, Grundbucher, are archived at the State Archives in Racibórz. The status of these registers is they have not yet been catalogued and therefore are not available to researchers. My interest in the sugar plant renewed Paul’s attempt to gain access to the plant’s Grundbuch, and, as Paul characterizes it, he finally “was allowed into the camp” to search for it; this was only possible because of his longstanding relationship with the State Archives in Racibórz. Paul found it under the number “Woinowitz Sheet 161.” (Figure 4) Fortunately, the land register includes the supporting files or documentation turned over by the Polish court.
Paul photographed and sent me copies of the documents he deemed of greatest value and spent a good deal of time explaining their content and significance. I want to believe that in describing some of what Paul found in the Grundbuch and the auxiliary files, I’ve mostly done justice conveying this to readers, although I welcome readers’ input if I’ve failed in this regard.
Figure 5 shows the size of the Woinowitz Zuckerfabrik under the column “Größe.” It was 5.44.10 hectares in size, or 13.44 acres.
As alluded to earlier, a Grundbuch is kept for land and shows the structural components located on the property. In the case of the Woinowitz Zuckerfabrik, the extent of the property and the current value of the structural components is shown on Figure 6. The left-hand column of the table below is a German transcription of the structures listed and the right-hand column provides a rough translation and in a few instances some explanation in brackets:
1. Acker, Weide, Graben, Weg, sowie Hofraum“ – was vom Grundbuch “Polnisch Woinowitz” [der früher Ortsnamen] Blatt 60 abgezweigt wurde. Dieses Blatt 60 umfasste Grundstücke des “Dominiums Woinowitz.”
1. Field, willow, ditch, path/way, courtyard space—which were diverted from the land register “Polish Woinowitz” [the former place name] Sheet 60. [Sheet 60 included plots of land of the “Dominium Woinowitz”]
a. Zuckerfabrik mit Maschinen und Kesselhaus
a. Sugar factory with machine and boiler house
b. Gasanstalt
b. Gasworks
c. Eisenbahnwaagehaus
c. Railway scale house
d. Comptoir (Büro) mit Waagehaus
d. Office with scale house [another scale house where incoming sugar beets and outgoing processed sugar were weighed]
e. Rohproduktionshaus mit Wohnung
e. Raw production house with apartment
f. Rohproduktionshaus
f. Raw production house
g. Stall mit Remise und Werkstätten
g. Stable with drawer and workshops
The table below corresponds to the text on Figure 7, and shows the various names for the sugar factory over time, the owners, and the reason for the acquisition or name change:
1. Woinowitz’er Zuckerfabrik Adolph Schück & Comp. zu Woinowitz — Auf Grund der Auflassung vom 24-ten eingetragen am 30-ten Mai 1881
Der Name der Firma ist geändert und lautet jetzt „Woinowitz’er Zuckerfabrik Adolf Schück & Co. Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung zu Woinowitz bei Ratibor O/S.“ [O/S = Oberschlesien] — Eingetragen am 21. Oktober 1910
Nr. 2 statt Nr. 1 nach dem Rezess vom 29. Dezember 1923 eingetragen am 20. Februar 1925.
Weihendorfer Zuckerfabrik, Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung Weihendorf Kreis Ratibor — Auf Grund der Firmenänderung eingetragen am 13. August 1938.
1.Woinowitz’er Sugar Factory Adolph Schück & Comp. to Woinowitz — On the basis of the 24th injunction on 30th May 1881
The name of the company has been changed and is now “Woinowitz’er Zuckerfabrik Adolf Schück & Co. Gesellschaft with limited liability to Woinowitz near Ratibor O/S.” [O/S = Upper Silesia] — Registered on 21st October 1910 [FIGURE 8]
No. 2 instead of No. 1 registered on 20th February 1925 after the recess of 29th December 1923.
Weihendorfer Zuckerfabrik, limited liability company Weihendorf district Ratibor — Due to the change in the company registered on 13th August 1938.
2. Die Ratiborer Zuckerfabrik, Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung in Ratibor — Aufgelassen am 26. Februar 1942 und eingetragen am 25. Februar 1943.
2.The Ratibor Sugar Factory, limited liability company in Ratibor — Abandoned on 26th February 1942 and registered on 25th February 1943.
3. Die Landwirtschaftliche Warenzentrale Oberschlesien /Raiffeisen) eGmbH in Oppeln — Aufgelassen am 11 Dezember 1942 und eingetragen am 25. Februar 1943.
3. The Agricultural Goods Centre Upper Silesia /Raiffeisen) eGmbH in Opole — Abandoned on 11th December 1942 and registered on 25th February 1943.
Paul provided some additional explanation about the land register and the auxiliary files. He’d hoped to find documents there about the possible expropriation of the sugar plant from the Schück family. However, Paul discovered the files relate only to the actual entries in the land register, and because no mention of the forced sale of the plant by the Nazis is found in the original land register, therefore, no documentation exists in the land register’s backup files.
The land register recorded changes of ownership; in the case of private sales, the purchase contract would be found in the files of the land register. However, because the Zuckerfabrik was a GmbH or an LLC, changes in ownership were recorded in the Handelregister, the commercial register, and the courts notified of such changes via a letter. The change in the name of the LLC could result from new ownership or possibly new shareholders that came into a company. Regardless, a change in the company’s name in the commercial register of the GmbH (LLC) also caused a change in the name of the company in the land register.
Let me provide an example as this may be confusing to readers. If Adolph Schück individually owned a plot of land, it was recorded in the land register under his name. If, on the other hand, Mr. Schück formed a GmbH, which he eventually did and could do even as a single person, he could transfer that property as a non-cash deposit into the GmbH which would then be recorded in the Handelregister. Adolph Schück’s name was also then deleted from the Grundbuch and the GmbH registered in place of his name as the owner of the property. The obvious advantage, as previously mentioned, was that Mr. Schück was no longer personally liable or responsible for the company’s debts.
From earlier posts on the Woinowitz Zuckerfabrik, readers may recall that Sigmund Hirsch was Adolph Schück’s partner in the sugar plant. I was even able to read his name on several pages Paul sent from the State Archives in Racibórz, so asked whether he was an equal partner. Paul reminded me this information and the size of Sigmund’s investment would be found in the commercial register, which we don’t have access to. However, Paul drew my attention to a four-page document he found at the State Archives, dated the 15th of January 1908, which indirectly answers my question. (Figures 9a-d) Initially, the capital shares owned by Schück and Hirsch were unequal. According to this document, Sigmund Hirsch was obliged to use his annual dividends, which exceeded 27,000 Reichmarks (RM), to increase his capital share of the business until they were equal partners. Additionally, because there was such a large difference in the number of shares owned by the two men, Sigmund Hirsch obtained a security mortgage in the amount of 400,000 RM payable to Adolph Schück.
In addition to official partners, Paul explained there were also “silent” partners. They invested their money, presumably reaped a portion of the sugar plant’s profits, but were not recorded in the commercial register. Often, these silent partners were members of the Board of Directors or agents of the company.
Naturally, I was curious whether the land register and/or the backup files indicated in which year the Nazis forced the sale of the Zuckerfabrik and was reminded this information would also be found in the Handelregister. Yet again, however, one document from the State Archives gives an indirect clue; it shows that on the 26th of September 1938, the company name changed to “Weihendorfer Zuckerfabrik GmbH” without “Adolf Schück & Co.” (Figure 10), likely corresponding to the end of the Schück family’s stake in the sugar plant. To remind readers, less than three months later December 18, 1938, Erich Schück, Adolph’s son and probable managing director of the sugar plant, killed himself in Berlin. I don’t think the timing is coincidental.
As to the value of the sugar plant in 1938, I remarked to Paul that its value of 189,800 RM seemed low. (Figure 11) He pointed out that while a 1943 letter from the tax office used roughly this same value for that plot of land, it also showed “assets and working capital” of 2,269,351 RM minus unspecified “deductions” of 1,247,223 RM. (Figures 12a-b) To remind readers, in January 2017, a 1937 Reichsmark would have been worth approximately $4.30. Clearly, the income generated by the Zuckerfabrik was significant, and it’s very likely the Jewish owners sold at a significant loss and the heirs never adequately compensated.
Suffice it to say, at the risk of presenting information that would be of no interest to most readers, there are many more documents in the files to the land register that seemingly relate to contracts and financial matters.
I’ve previously alluded to the fact that knowing someone who is familiar with the “landscape” of archival and documentary resources available for an area one’s ancestors originated from can significantly expand one’s understanding of things. I erroneously assumed the land register for the Woinowitz Zuckerfabrik from the State Archives in Racibórz was the extent of documentary information available; what I initially failed to comprehend is that the original land register for the sugar plant still exists and is retained by the local district court in Poland.
Paul accessed the original Grundbuch and was able to glean additional information not available from the copy of the land register and files in the State Archives. He confirmed that Adolph Schück originally purchased in 1881 only arable land and meadows where the sugar plant, gas station, etc. would eventually be built. (Figure 13) The ownership titled was recorded in the land register on the 27th of March 1881 as “Woinowitzer Zuckerfabrik Adolph Schück & Comp. in Woinowitz.” (Figure 14) At the time, the Woinowitz Zuckerfabrik was not yet a GmbH or LLC. On the 21st of October 1910, the name of the company changed to “Woinowitzer Zuckerfabrik Adolph Schück & Co. Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung [Gmbh] zu Woinowitz” (Figure 14), at which time the company became an LLC. Then, on the 13th of August 1938, the Woinowitz Zuckerfabrik underwent an ownership change becoming the “Weihendorfer Zuckerfabrik, Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung Weihendorf Kreis Ratibor.” (Figure 14) Presumably, this corresponded to the time the Schück and Hirsch heirs were forced to sell the sugar plant.
Subsequent changes are also noted in the Grundbuch. On the 26th of February 1942, the factory was taken over by the “Ratiborer Zuckerfabrik GmbH in Ratibor,” and later that year, on the 11th of December 1942, the factory named changed to “Raiffeisen.” (Figure 14)
Thus, the original land register for the Woinowitz Zuckerfabrik clarifies a few things: we learn the year Adolph Schück purchased the land (1881); the fact that he purchased land and meadows with no structures on them; the year the firm became a GmbH or LLC (1910); and the date the Schück family ceased to be owners (1938).
Paul was unable to find the Grundbuch for the Woinowitz estate (i.e., “Polnisch Woinowitz“) from which Adolph Schück purchased the land in 1881, so no conclusions can be drawn about the previous property owners. Just to be crystal clear about this, Figure 6 above, the page from the files of the Woinowitz Grundbuch, indicates that Adolph Schück purchased a “field, willow, ditch, path/way, courtyard space” which was “detached” from what was referred to as the Polnisch Woinowitz and this sale was noted in the land register for that estate. Paul was unable to find the Grundbuch for this estate at the District court, although possibly it may eventually turn up at the State Archives in Racibórz.
Let me apologize to readers for the ponderous nature of this post. I’ve gone to such lengths to understand and explain the source of the data related to the Woinowitz Zuckerfabrik and the timeline for the benefit of a select audience. As explained, because the Grundbuch’s auxiliary files are not catalogued, they are basically inaccessible to the average individual. However, even if they were generally available, it would still require comprehension of German and an understanding of German land law to make sense of their contents and its significance. This said, for the few readers whose Jewish ancestors may have held property in Germany they were compelled to sell during the Nazi era, there may be a few tendrils of useful information in this post.
