Note: In this post, I present photos of Josef and Rosalie Pauly’s nine children, my great-great-uncle and aunt’s offspring, showing them as young children, adolescents, young adults, middle aged, and elderly. Naturally, there are gaps in the photo sequences for some of the children.
I have often thought to myself that upon one’s birth, one is metaphorically handed an hourglass measuring the sands of time slowly or rapidly draining out. Regular readers may recall that in Post 89, I discussed my great-great-great-grandparents, Wilhelm Wolf Marle and his wife Rosalie (“Reisel”) Marle née Grätzer, whose headstones survive in the former Jewish Cemetery in Pless, Germany [today: Pszczyna, Poland]. (Figures 1-2) Given my musings about the passage of time, I was mildly surprised to see that an hourglass is carved into Rosalie Marle’s headstone signifying how quickly time passes. (Figure 2) Clearly, I can take no credit for the originality of this metaphor.
Josef Pauly (Figure 3) and Rosalie Pauly née Mockrauer (Figures 4-5), my great-great-uncle and aunt, had nine children all born in Posen, Germany [today: Poznan, Poland] between 1871 and 1885. (Figure 6) In perusing my digital collection of photographs, I realized I have photos of all of them capturing how they looked through the years. Not unexpectedly, there are gaps in the photo sequences for some of the children, which my third cousin, Andi Pauly, more closely aligned to this branch of my family, was partially able to fill. I think it is unusual to have a “continuous” sequence of photos for one’s relatives who were born in the 19th century and died in the 20th century, and for this reason I thought I would array these photos for readers to see. I certainly find it to be true that I can recognize photos of some of my ancestors from specific periods in their lives but not necessarily from other intervals in their lives; interestingly, I occasionally even find this to be true of photos of myself.
Below, readers will find a table with the vital statistics of Josef and Rosalie Pauly’s nine children. This is followed by the sequence of photos I have for each of them showing how differently they looked at various stages of their lives. The second-born child, Paula Pincus née Pauly, died youngest at age 49, while the last born, Therese Sandler née Pauly, was the longest lived at age 84. Three of the daughters, Helene Guttentag née Pauly, Elisabeth Herrnstadt née Pauly, and Margarethe Neisser née Pauly, died during the Holocaust, two by their own hands.
VITAL STATISTICS FOR JOSEF & ROSALIE PAULY’S CHILDREN
Note: This post is about the Kantorowicz branch of my family, many of whom originated in Posen, Prussia [today: Poznan, Poland], some of whom made their way to America or South America prior to WWII. It tiers off the previous post and delves into that part of the Kantorowicz family tree I reconstructed using photographs provided by Bettina Basanow née Meyer, discussed in Post 90, and her third cousin to whom she introduced me, Enid Sperber née Kent.
At the risk of immediately disengaging some readers by discussing a branch of my extended family that is of no interest to them, I encourage people to focus less on the specific individuals and more on the process by which I was able to reconstruct a part of the Kantorowicz family tree; these are steps fellow travelers may be able to replicate in researching their own families.
Let me provide some brief orientation. The Kantorowicz family, like the Pauly family I have often written about, both originated in Posen, Prussia [today: Poznan, Poland]. The patriarch of the Pauly family, Dr. Josef Pauly (1843-1916) (Figure 1) was married to Rosalie Mockrauer (1844-1927) (Figure 2), and together they had nine children, all of whom I have also written about. Josef Pauly’s sister was Rosalinde Pauly (1854-1916) (Figure 3), who was married to Max Kantorowicz (1843-1904). (Figure 4) I first came across Max and Rosalinde Kantorowicz in a group picture showing them attending the 1901 marriage of Josef and Rosalie Pauly’s daughter, Maria Pauly. (Figure 5) Using the Pauly Stammbaum, family tree, I was able to visualize connections between their families and my own, all of us related by marriage.
In Post 90, I told readers how my third cousin, Andi Pauly, gave a me copy of a letter his father Klaus had received in 1989 from Porto Alegre, Brazil from a Gertrud “Traute” Meyer née Milch (Figure 6), who was the granddaughter of Max Kantorowicz; attached to this letter were poor quality xerox photos of Max and his extended family. I also explained that through the auspices of my social media-savvy cousin, Danny Alejandro Sandler, I was eventually able to establish contact with Traute Meyer’s daughter, Bettina Basanow née Meyer (Figure 7), who has lived in Denver for the past 50 years.
Upon establishing contact with Bettina, I quickly asked her if she could send me higher quality examples of photos her mother had sent Klaus Pauly in 1989. Bettina graciously obliged and even included supplementary photos. One low resolution photo she sent shows five of Max Kantorowicz’s siblings, each identified by name. (Figure 8) While I made a mental note of the picture, I did not fully appreciate its significance at the time.
Fast forward. As I have mentioned on multiple occasions, I add people to my family tree primarily to orient myself to those I write about in my blog. As I was updating my tree and contemplating writing about the Kantorowicz branch, I checked both ancestry.com, and MyHeritage for Max’s siblings. Imagine my surprise when I came across a very high-resolution copy of the identical picture Bettina Basanow had sent of Max’s five siblings (Figure 9); unlike Bettina’s picture, however, the version on MyHeritage did not identify them by name. With a nice photo in hand and named relatives, I decided to add Max’s siblings to my tree. While I thought this would be the end of things, in fact it turned out to be merely the beginning.
I sent Bettina the better picture of Max Kantorowicz’s siblings, thinking she might be interested. At the same time, I also mentioned having once searched for descendants of Max Kantorowicz’s granddaughter, Vera Peters née Kantorowicz (1907-1994) (Figure 10), in California, to no avail. This prompted Bettina to suggest I contact a lifelong friend of hers, Enid Sperber née Kent, living in Los Angeles, who she thought might have had some contact with this branch of the family. Bettina explained that Enid was the daughter of William “Bill” Kent and Irene Tedrow, neither whose names resonated. In time, this would change, and I would make many more connections, and learn that Bettina and Enid are more than just friends, they are third cousins. But I am getting ahead of myself.
When Bettina suggested I contact Enid Sperber, she mentioned in passing that Enid had been an actress, her most famous role being as Nurse Bigelow in “M*A*S*H” (Figure 11) Her mother, Irene Tedrow, was also a well-known American character actress in stage, film, television, and radio. (Figure 12) Not being a “stargazer,” I merely made a mental note of this interesting fact while vaguely remembering there exists an ancestral program that allows interested genealogists to determine how many degrees of separation exist between them and people of fame. I am uncertain the specifics of how this program works, having never personally used it.
I was easily able to retrieve through a casual Google query a detailed history about the prominent Kantorowicz family from Posen and the liqueur factory established there in 1823 by a 17-year old Hartwig Kantorowicz. I downloaded and shared this history with Enid. Much has been written and can be found on the Kantorowicz family at this link, which it is not my intention to repeat here. What I was able to learn from the in-depth history, however, is that Hartwig Kantorowicz (1806-1871) who established the liqueur factory and his wife, Sophie Asch (1815-1863), supposedly had 13 children, 12 sons, only seven of whom survived. Based on what I have been able to learn, I think eight rather than seven survived into adulthood. More on this below.
Shortly after Enid and I began emailing, she sent pictures of paintings of Hartwig Kantorowicz’s parents, Joachim B. Kantorowicz (1783-1846) (Figure 13) and Rebecca Korach (1783-1873). (Figure 14) I considered myself exceptionally fortunate to obtain images of Jewish ancestors born in the late 18th Century. Given that their son Hartwig established a family business in Posen and was so prominent, surprisingly, I have so far been unable to find a photo of him. I even asked the Archiwum Państwowe w Poznaniu, The State Archives in Poznań, and they too have none.
Enid’s ancestral lineage was not entirely clear to me until she sent more pictures and provided more names. Like many other immigrants, the family’s name was Americanized upon their arrival here. Her father, born “Wilhelm Eduard Kantorowicz” (Figure 15) in Posen, changed his name to “William Edward Kent (1901-1974),” while her uncle, “Peter Curt Kantorowicz” (Figure 16), with his Hollywood good looks, was known as “Peter Curt Kent (1905-1969).” Enid also sent a picture of her grandfather, Hans Kantorowicz (1867-1934), with his two sons, Wilhelm and Peter. (Figure 17)
However, it was a picture Enid sent of her great-grandfather, Wilhelm Kantorowicz (1836-1894), with an unknown man named Siegfried (Figure 18), taken in 1860, that, in combination with a detailed family tree (Figure 19a) she provided, made it possible to ultimately work out her ancestry. It turns out, Siegfried and Wilhelm Kantorowicz were older brothers of the Max Kantorowicz previously discussed. I draw readers attention to the highlighted section of Figure 19a where their three names, along with the names of five other siblings shown in Figure 8 are all listed. (Figure 19b) From various sources, I now have pictures of all eight of Hartwig Kantorowicz and Sophie Asch’s children shown on the family tree.
The tree and pictures also allowed me to work out the ancestral connection between Enid and Bettina. Initially, Enid was under the impression that she and Bettina were not related to one another but had established a bond because both their families had escaped the Nazis. While, Bettina thought they were second cousins once removed. As the following schematic table shows, they are in fact third cousins.
Enid Sperber née Kent (b. 1945)
Bettina Bassanow née Meyer (b. 1940)
Father:
William Edward Kent (1901-1974)
(born Wilhelm Eduard Kantorowicz)
Mother:
Gertrud Meyer née Milch (1911-2010)
Grandfather:
Hans Kantorowicz (1867-1934)
Grandmother:
Else Milch née Kantorowicz (1875-1963)
Great-Grandfather:
Wilhelm Kantorowicz (1836-1894)
Great-Grandfather:
Max Kantorowicz (1843-1904)
Great-Great-Grandfather:
Hartwig Kantorowicz (1806-1871)
I am grateful for some intimate family photos Enid sent that she has given me permission to use, three of which I share with readers in this post. One is a heart-warming picture of Enid and her younger brother Roger Kent (1949-2018) as children standing with her parents in front of the paintings of Enid’s great-great-great-grandparents, Joachim B. Kantorowicz and Rebecca Korach. (Figure 20) And, the other two are throwbacks to a much simpler time that, as a former archaeologist, very much appeal to me. One shows Enid’s uncle Peter Curt Kent standing in front of his gas station, “‘Pete’ Kent,” in Cahuenga Pass (Figure 21a) and, the third, the gas station itself (Figure 21b), where the Hollywood Freeway now runs. In sharing this image, Enid noted that her Uncle Peter was never known to her or her brother as “Pete.”
Let me switch directions now. As previously mentioned, Hartwig Kantorowicz’s wife was Sophie Asch. In sharing her detailed family tree, Enid drew my attention to her great-great-grandmother’s links to a Sephardic Jew named Joseph Kalahora, purportedly born around 1495 in Kalahora, Spain. (Figure 22) A point of clarification. The narrow definition ethnically of a Sephardic Jew is a Jew descended from the Jews who lived in the Iberian Peninsula in the late 15th century, immediately prior to the issuance of the Alhambra Decree of 1492 by order of the Catholic Monarchs in Spain, and the decree of 1496 in Portugal by order of King Manuel I; as students of history know, these orders resulted in the expulsion of most Jews from the region in the late 15th Century.
Curious as to the possible linkage between Sephardic Jews and Eastern Europe, I did a Google query. I landed upon several articles discussing the origins of the Calahor(r)a (Kalahora) Family, including a post by Joel W. Davidi, an independent research historian and genealogist, writing in 2009 on his blog, “The Jewish History Channel (now known as Channeling Jewish History),” about this remarkable family in Poland. Below is a summary of what I learned.
The Calahora-Kalahora were a family of physicians, pharmacists, community leaders and Jewish scholars in Poland from the second half of the 16th Century until the 20th Century. The first known member of the family, Dr. Solomon Kalahora, was purportedly a pupil of the physician Brasavola in Ferrara, Italy, who settled in Kracow, Poland [also written as Kraków or Crakow] in the 16th century. Around 1570, he was appointed the court physician to the Polish King Sygmund August (1520-1572), an appointment that was continued by the subsequent King Stephen Bathory (1533-1586) in 1578. The Kalahora name would undergo many transformations, including Kolhari, Kolchor, Kolchory, Kalifari, Calaforra, Kalvari, Landsberg Posner, Zweigenbaul, Rabowsky, Olschwitz and Milsky. Though the Kalahoras came to Poland from Italy, the name reflects their Iberian roots, the Spanish town of Calahorra, where the family originated.
The patriarch Solomon Kalahora had six sons; one of them, Israel Solomon (1560-1640), the Rabbi of Lenchista, founded the Poznan branch of the family. One of Israel Samuel’s sons was Matityahu Calahora, who according to the contemporary Polish historian, Wespazjan Kochowski (1630-1700), was a “well-known physician with an extensive practice in Christian and even clerical circles.” Matityahu’s life came to a violent end when he became embroiled in a religious dispute with a Dominican friar named Havlin. The Russian-Jewish historian Simon Dubnow describes the event, gruesome in its details:
“The priest invited Calahora to a disputation in the cloister, but the Jew declined, promising to expound his views in writing. A few days later the priest found on his chair in the church a statement written in German and containing a violent arraignment of the cult of the Immaculate Virgin. It is not impossible that the statement was composed and placed in the church by an adherent of the ‘Reformation or the Arian heresy’ both of which were then the object of persecution in Poland. However, the Dominican decided that Calahora was the author, and brought the charge of blasphemy against him. The Court of the Royal Castle cross-examined the defendant under torture, without being able to obtain a confession. Witnesses testified that Calahora was not even able to write German. Being a native of Italy, he used the Italian language in his conversations with the Dominican. Despite all this evidence, the unfortunate Calahora was sentenced to be burned at the stake. The alarmed Jewish community raised a protest, and the case was accordingly transferred to the highest court in Piotrkov. The accused was sent in chains to Piotrkov, together with the plaintiff and the witnesses. But the arch-Catholic tribunal confirmed the verdict of the lower court, ordering that the sentence be executed in the following barbarous sequence: first the lips of the ” blasphemer ” to be cut off ; next his hand that had held the fateful statement to be burned; then the tongue, which had spoken against the Christian religion, to be excised; finally the body to be burned at the stake, and the ashes of the victim to be loaded into a cannon and discharged into the air. This cannibal ceremonial was faithfully carried out on December 13, 1663, on the marketplace of Piotrkov. For two centuries the Jews of Cracow followed the custom of reciting, on the fourteenth of Kislev, in the old synagogue of that city, a memorial prayer for the soul of the martyr Calahora.”
The grandson of Matiyahu’s brother Solomon was Aryeh Leib Kalifari (Figure 22); he was a preacher in Posen and the founder of the Landsberg and Posner families. After the son of a prominent citizen from a village near Posen was murdered around 1735, the Christian population there at once charged Jews with the crime, including Aryeh Leib. He became the second member of his family to be martyred when he was arrested and tortured by Catholic authorities during a blood libel. He died in prison after rebuffing an offer to spare his life if he converted.
While difficult to discern, the above names all appear in the family chart Enid Kent shared with me showing her great-great-great-grandmother’s ancestral links to the Sephardic Kalahora family. (Figure 22)
One final thing of note I came across. There exists a large mural painting by Julius Knorr (1810-1860) that is on permanent display today in Poznan’s Town Hall. Entitled “Marktplatz in Posen,” a section of this mural depicts a Rabbi Akiva Eger who is flanked on his left by Rabbi Yaakov Kalvari (originally Calahora), a member of his Rabbinic court and a descendant of the Calahora Sephardic family, The painting was done during the lifetime of Rabbi Akiva Eger and was first displayed in 1838. (Figure 23)
Davidi, Joel W. “Calahora, a remarkable Sephardic family in Poland.” The Jewish History Channel now known as Channeling Jewish History.15 January 2009. <https://ha-historion.blogspot.com/2009/01/>
Dubnow, Simon Markovich. History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Pinnacle Press, 2017
Nawrocki, Stanisław. “History of Kantorowicz Family and their Factory.” Chronicle of the City of Poznan. No.4/ 1996
Note: In this brief post, I relate the story of tracking down with the help of a distant cousin the descendants of relatives who immigrated to Brazil in the leadup to WWII.
This story begins in 2016 when I first met my third cousin, Andreas “Andi” Pauly, in Munich. (Figure 1) By this time, I already had a hard copy of the Pauly family tree that his father, Klaus Pauly (Figure 2), had developed. Given the enormous amount of information recorded in this densely packed tree, it would be some time before I would work out and understand all the connections, and augment and make corrections to it.
Klaus Pauly developed the tree before email was widely available and before it was possible to create trees using online computer applications. For family members who had escaped the Holocaust and emigrated from Germany before WWII, Klaus was relegated to exchanging letters with faraway surviving relatives and waiting weeks for a reply. During our initial meeting in 2016, Andi Pauly brought along a letter his father had received in 1989 from a relative living in Porto Alegre, Brazil outlining her lineage and including poor quality xerox photos of her ancestors and descendants. It was only months later that I thought to ask Andi for a copy of the letter. I have my own tree on ancestry.com that I use primarily to visualize connections to people whom I write about in my Blog. When possible, I like to attach photos to people in my tree. Ergo, my request for a copy of the 1989 letter with the embedded photos.
With the correspondence, xerox photos, and family tree in hand, along with the copy of the envelope and mailing address showing where the letter had originated, I determined it had been sent by a woman named Gertrud “Traute” Meyer née Milch (1911-2010). (Figures 3-5) Using Klaus Pauly’s Stammbaum, family tree, I determined she was the granddaughter of Rosalinde Kantorowicz née Pauly, sister of Josef Pauly. Regular readers will recognize the Pauly family name as I have often written about them. Josef Pauly (1843-1916) (Figure 6), the patriarch and Andi’s great-grandfather, was married to Rosalie Pauly née Mockrauer (1844-1927) (Figure 7), and together they had nine children, eight of them daughters.
Because the Pauly and Meyer families had long ago lost contact, I was on my own trying to find Traute Meyer’s descendants. Initially, I sent a letter to the Meyer family at the Porto Alegre, Brazil address appearing on the 1989 letter hoping in vain the home might still be family-owned. After months of no reply, I turned to Facebook using my wife’s little-used account. I came across a few possible descendants but received no replies from any I tried to contact. Neither my wife or I are users of social media, so my efforts were half-hearted and eventually I desisted. My approach to doing forensic genealogy is to take the path of least resistance setting aside gnarly issues for another day in the hopes of ultimately obtaining more information. In earlier posts, I have mentioned to readers the difficulty in learning about Jewish families who relocated to South America since few records from there have been digitized.
Fast forward. In time, I would turn my attention to determining the fates and destinations of Josef and Rosalie Pauly’s nine children. The youngest of them, Therese “Tussy” Sandler née Pauly (1885-1969), was one of the last of their children whose destinies I was able to work out. (Figure 8) After traveling to Buenos Aires, Argentina in August 1937, then returning to Germany in November of that year, Tussy, her husband Ernst, and their two boys departed Germany for good in the nick of time in September 1938, settling in Buenos Aires. This is all I could learn from ancestry and MyHeritage, and Andi Pauly could add nothing to what might have happened to his great-aunt and her family following their arrival in South America.
When I launched my family history Blog in April 2017, I communicated a desire not only to relate tales of some of my Jewish ancestors who lived through interesting or noteworthy times, but also expressed the hope that relatives or descendants of the people I had written about might discover my Blog. In this latter regard, I have been rewarded on several occasions.
In April 2019, I had the good fortune of being contacted by Tussy Sandler’s grandson, Pedro Sandler (Figure 9), and great-grandson, Danny Alejandro Sandler (Figure 10), who had stumbled upon my Blog. Both now live in Florida, having immigrated there years ago. At first, my exchanges with Tussy’s descendants involved learning when and where their relatives lived and died and sharing what I have learned about their family and putting them in touch with Andi Pauly. The relationship quickly evolved into sharing family documents and photos (Figures 11-14) and enlisting my and Andi’s help with identifications. As an aside, of Josef and Rosalie Pauly’s nine children, only Therese Pauly’s descendants practice Judaism today.
Though Therese’s descendants originally hail from Argentina, one day I asked Pedro Sandler whether he knows anyone in the Jewish community in Brazil. Pedro had mentioned in passing that both his father and uncle had been very involved in Jewish life in Buenos Aires, so I was hoping he might know someone in the Jewish community in Brazil. My question was akin to encountering a visitor in a foreign land, telling them I come from San Diego, and having them ask me whether I know their friend from there. Clearly, there was no logic to my question. But as far-fetched as my query seems, Pedro in fact has a good friend living in Brazil whose wife’s parents knew Traute Meyer! The coincidence was remarkable.
Many months passed, then one day I asked Danny Sandler whether he or his father had ever managed to locate any of Traute Meyer’s offspring, and he told me that he had. I was surprised. Soon thereafter, Danny put me in touch with Bettina Basanow née Meyer (Figure 15), one of Traute Meyer’s four children. (Figure 16) While I had spent my time looking for her family in Brazil, Bettina has lived in the Denver area for more than 50 years, although her three siblings stayed in Brazil. (Figures 17-18) It should be noted that, unlike myself, Danny is active on social media so tracking down Bettina was relatively straight-forward.
I quickly got in touch with Bettina, and we have established a warm rapport. Regular readers know that finding distant relatives brings me pleasure not only for the stories they tell but also for old family photographs they send. Bettina shared some interesting family anecdotes and copies of some of the same pictures her mother had sent Klaus Pauly in 1989, completing a circle so to speak, but also sent new images as well. (Figures 19-20)
In the ensuing post, I will tell readers the story of Bettina’s third cousin to whom she introduced me and to whom I’m also distantly related. Bettina’s cousin also generously shared family photos and pictures of paintings of distant ancestors. This has led to expanding my family tree in most interesting ways, as readers will learn.
In closing I would say that while telling the tale of finding Traute Meyer’s descendants appears rather linear, I would never have located them without numerous intermediate steps and the help of a younger cousin better versed in social media.
Note: In this post, I discuss a postcard given to me showing the last German Emperor, Wilhelm II, taken in Doorn in the Netherlands in May 1926, following Wilhelm’s abdication from the throne after Germany’s defeat in WWI, with an unknown member of my extended family standing amidst the Royal family.
Among my father Dr. Otto Bruck’s surviving collection of pre-WWII photos are several unique ones of historic interest. These include a small number replicated in Post 8 showing Field Marshall Hermann Wilhelm Göring, one of the most powerful figures in the Nazi Party, taken in 1935 in Tiegenhof, Free State of Danzig [today: Nowy Dwór Gdański, Poland]; at the time, Göring was participating in a campaign event in support of the slate of Nazi candidates running for office there, and an election parade passed just below the office building in which my father had his dental practice.
An equally fascinating photo, illustrated in Post 17, shows a young Käthe Heusermann, who at the time was working as a dental assistant for my uncle, Dr. Fedor Bruck, in Liegnitz, Germany [today: Legnica, Poland]. In 1933, after my uncle was forced by the Nazi overlords to shutter his dental practice, Käthe relocated to Berlin and was hired by Hitler’s dentist, Dr. Hugo Blaschke, as his dental assistant. Following the end of the war, Käthe Heusermann, was instrumental in helping the Russians identify Hitler’s dental remains, although, as discussed in Post 31, it would be many years before this fact was publicly acknowledged by the Russians. Because Käthe had always attended Hitler’s dental treatments, she was well-positioned to recognize Blaschke’s distinct and outdated periodontal work.
And, apropos of this post with a photo of the last German Emperor Wilhelm II, in Post 15 one of my father’s surviving photos illustrates the Kaiser’s daughter-in-law, the last Crown Princess of Germany and Prussia, Princess Cecilie. (Figures 1-2) She is touring my renowned great-aunt Franziska Bruck’s flower school and shop in Berlin. Duchess Cecilie of Mecklenburg-Schwerin (Cecilie Auguste Marie; 20 September 1886 – 6 May 1954) was the last German Crown Princess and Crown Princess of Prussia as the wife of German Crown Prince Wilhelm, the son of German Emperor Wilhelm II.
The current post is about an intriguing, captioned family photo that was given to me by one of my third cousins (Figures 3a-b), Andreas “Andi” Pauly, whom regular readers will recognize from earlier posts. The photo was part of a collection of family pictures I obtained, so I only came to realize its significance after I had the message translated. (Figure 4) The photo was turned into a postcard, and obviously mailed in a stamped envelope because the postcard has no stamp and address on the flip side, but unfortunately the envelope has not survived so the sender is unknown.
I didn’t comprehend who the people in the photo were until I did an Internet query on “Doorn.” I discovered this is in the Netherlands and is where Germany’s former Emperor, Wilhelm II, went into exile after he abdicated the throne following Germany’s defeat in WWI. I had no reason to recognize Wilhelm II but mention of Royalty led me to ask one of my German cousins who is a historian whether he recognized anyone in the photo, and he confirmed it was Germany’s last Kaiser. My cousin was quite excited by this discovery because it reinforced his belief in our family’s connection to the upper echelons of Prussian society.
The message on the card pinpoints only a young princess, “Carolath,” and the postcard-sender’s wife standing behind her without a hat, with no name given. (Figure 5) Comparing the postcard to known photos of the Royal family, we can identify in the front row, the German Emperor’s second wife, Princess Hermine Reuss of Greiz (1887-1947); her youngest daughter by her first marriage, Princess Henriette of Schönaich-Carolath (1918-1972); and the former German Emperor, Wilhelm II. The writer tells us among the rest of the entourage are some of Princess Hermine’s older daughters, as well as some of the Emperor’s former generals. I’ve not positively been able to identify by name any of Princess Hermine’s other children, nor any of the Kaiser’s generals, although I was able to find a picture on the Internet with only Princess Hermine, Wilhelm II, and Princess Henriette (Carolath) taken at Doorn at about the same time. (Figure 6)
What I’ve also been able to learn is that after Princess Henriette’s father died in 1920, her mother, Princess Hermine, remarried in 1922 the former German Emperor, Wilhelm II. Hermine had five young children, but it was decided that only the youngest, Princess Henriette, would come with her mother to live at Doorn. Wilhelm II generally kept out of his stepchildren’s affairs apart from Henriette. He had a genuine affection for her, and when she got engaged to the Emperor’s own grandson, Prince Karl Franz of Prussia, on the 6th of August 1940 at Doorn, Wilhelm II made the official announcement.
The message on the postcard provides clues as to who mailed it and to whom it was mailed and was an obvious starting point for trying to unravel the sender and receiver of the card. Faintly visible at the bottom is the date the postcard was written, the 28th of May 1926. My intimate familiarity with my extended family tree and the fact the photo was given to me by a member of the Pauly family clearly led both Andi and me to conclude the card had been sent to my great-great-aunt, Rosalie “Salchen” Pauly née Mockrauer (1844-1927). (Figures 7-8) Rosalie Pauly was the only one of her Pauly generation still alive in 1926, although she would die the following year.
Having rather quickly satisfied myself as to the receiver of the postcard, I then tackled the much more challenging task of trying to resolve who sent the card to Rosalie Pauly. Readers will immediately notice the sender only signed his initials, “W.B.,” who, at first, I thought might be a member of my Bruck family; I quickly discarded this theory because the writer tells us that on the 28th of May 1926 his wife is due to give birth in about eight days, thus in early June 1926, and I know of no Bruck offspring related to Rosalie Pauly born in that timeframe.
We know the postcard-writer was male because, as previously mentioned, he identifies his wife in the picture standing behind Wilhelm II’s stepdaughter, Carolath, as he refers to her. It’s not clear whether “Carolath” was a diminutive intended as an affectionate nickname to be used only by close family and friends, or how she was known publicly. It seems odd that a member of my extended family would be photographed amidst the former Royal family in a seemingly intimate setting if they were not readily acquainted in some way. More on this later.
The writer of the postcard tells my great-great-aunt Rosalie that the visit of her grandson reminded him to send her the photograph of the Royal couple; Walter Rothholz senior (1893-1978) (Figure 9), mentioned by name a few lines further down, was Rosalie’s eldest grandson and would have been 33 years of age at the time the card was written.
I have a theory as to the sender of the postcard, so far unprovable but conceivable. Walter Rothholz senior was married to a Norwegian woman, Else Marie “Elsemai” Bølling (1915-1976). (Figure 10) Initially, I considered the possibility that one of Else Marie’s brothers had a prename beginning with the initial “W.” I located a Bølling family tree on Geni.com naming Else Marie’s siblings but none begin with this letter. However, I discovered on this family tree that Else Marie’s father had a brother born in Kristiania (Oslo, Norway) named Wilhelm Henning Bølling (1891-1930), that’s to say her uncle, who would have been the right age to have a young family in 1926; he would have been only two years older than Walter Rothholz. If Wilhelm Bølling was the writer of the postcard, his wife is the one pictured. Her prename was “Ingrid,” although no surname is provided. While the Bølling family tree includes multiple photos of family members, including one of Wilhelm Bølling (Figure 11), none of Ingrid are included making it impossible to compare against the woman on the postcard.
According to the Bølling family trees on Geni, Wilhelm and Ingrid had a daughter named Wivi Aase Bølling, but no vital data is provided nor is any photo included.
Wilhelm Bølling is known to Walter Rothholz’s living son, also named Walter; Wilhelm was a very wealthy shipowner who transported coal. According to Walter, he committed suicide. (Figure 12) Given Wilhelm’s connection to the coal trade and its importance to Germany at the time, it’s imaginable he may have been a business associate of and socialized with the German Emperor during and after his rule. Pending the discovery of a photo of Wilhelm Bølling’s wife or a date for the birth of his daughter Wivi Aase, the question of which family member stands amidst Germany’s last Royal family remains a mystery.
Note: In this post, I recall through a series of sometimes poignant and touching images some of my ancestors, several of whom were murdered in the Shoah. The photos embedded in this post originate with my 92-year old third cousin who knew and was intimately acquainted with these individuals as a young child growing up in Germany before and during the Nazi Era.
I first introduced readers to my third cousin Agnes Stieda née Vogel in Blog Post 46. (Figure 1) Our respective great-grandmothers were sisters, Rosalie Pauly née Mockrauer (1844-1927) (Figure 2), and Friederike Bruck née Mockrauer (1836-1924). (Figure 3) I first learned about Agnes from another third cousin who, tired of incessant questions on family matters he couldn’t answer, referred me to her. We became acquainted in February of this year, and ever since we’ve engaged in a very active and lively email correspondence. I wrote about Agnes in Post 46. What’s made our exchanges so fascinating is that Agnes lived through historic events and was close to a few of the people I’ve researched and written about, including some who perished in the Holocaust. This post provides an opportunity to remember through photographs a few of these people seen in the throes of life before they knew what tragedy awaited them, and their lives were abruptly ended.
Agnes, I learned, lives in a retirement community in Victoria on Vancouver Island, about an hour-and-a-half west of Vancouver by ferry. Prior to meeting Agnes, my wife and I had already planned a cruise to Alaska departing from Vancouver to see the glaciers before climate-change deniers ensure their disappearance. After months of communication, it was only natural that Agnes and I should get together. (Figure 4) We arranged to meet in person at her eldest daughter Nicki Stieda’s home in Vancouver. (Figure 5) Nicki is the curator of her mother’s personal papers and photos, so upon learning of my upcoming visit, she organized all the items for my convenience. (Figure 6) Given that I neither speak nor read German, I focused on taking pictures of Agnes’s photos. Additionally, thanks to her perfect recall of the people in the images, we spent several enthralling hours talking about Agnes’s memories of them.
Let me provide a little more context. Agnes is the granddaughter of Dr. Ernst Neisser and Margareth “Gretl” Neisser née Pauly, both victims of the Holocaust who committed suicide in Berlin, respectively, in 1941 and 1942; this was the subject of Post 48. Gretl Neisser was one of nine children of Dr. Josef and Rosalie Pauly, all of whom have been discussed in earlier posts and all whose fates I’ve now worked out. Ernst and Gretl Neisser had two children, Agnes’s mother Susanne Dorothea Vogel née Niesser (1899-1984) and Agnes’s uncle Peter Heinrich Neisser (1906-1929).
Dr. Ernst Neisser was a medical doctor in Stettin, Germany [today: Szczecin, Poland], who delivered Agnes. (Figure 7) Another Pauly daughter, Edith “Dietchen” Riezler née Pauly (Figure 8) also lived in Stettin with her husband, Dr. Walter Riezler (Figure 9), who was the Director of the Muzeum Narodowe w Szczecinie, the National Museum, Szczecin; Walter and Edith Riezler were the subjects of Post 53. In writing that post, I communicated with curators at the museum to try and procure photos of Dr. Riezler; I eventually obtained some from my third cousin Andi Pauly that I shared with the museum since they had none at the time. Among Agnes’s photos were yet more of Dr. Reizler that I’ve also sent them.
Because of Agnes’s family ties to Stettin following her birth in 1927, many of her photos date from this period. They illustrate in intimate fashion the close bond Agnes grandparents had with one another (Figure 10) and with their granddaughter (Figures 11-13). Several also show the deep affection between Agnes and her great-aunt Dietchen Riezler (Figures 14-15); Agnes has particularly fond memories of all three. There are multiple images of Agnes as a child at the beach along the Baltic Ocean, which is about 100km or 60 miles north of Szczecin. This series naturally includes photos of her parents Hans and Suse Vogel. (Figure 16)
Dr. Hans Vogel (Figure 17) will be the feature of an upcoming post. Suffice it for now to note that Dr. Vogel was, among other things, an art historian, and, like Dr. Walter Riezler, also the Director of a museum, the Hessisches Landesmuseum in Kassel, Germany. (Figure 18) In anticipation of writing a future post about Dr. Vogel, I’ve also communicated and shared images of him with them.
One photo hanging in Nicki Stieda’s home is of her grandparents’ wedding in 1926 in Berlin. (Figure 19) Having learned from a tribute Suse Vogel née Neisser, Agnes’s mother, had written in honor of her father (Dr. Ernst Neisser) that she and Hans had gotten married in the Charlottenburg Borough of Berlin, I was able to track down and order from the Landesarchiv Berlin the original certificate. (Figures 20a-b) Finding a photo linked to a marriage certificate I’d obtained from a completely foreign source is one thing that makes doing forensic genealogy so entertaining.
Particularly poignant images included among Agnes’s papers are some of her uncle Peter Neisser, who died prematurely of septicemia at 23 years of age in 1929 in Heidelberg, Germany as he was training to become a doctor. Photos of Peter span from when he was a toddler (Figures 21-22) to an adult (Figures 23-24), probably shortly before he died; one shows him with his grandmother, Julie Neisser née Sabersky (1841-1927). (Figure 25) I don’t expect readers to remember but I included one picture in Post 45 of a Pauly family get-together, reproduced here (Figure 26), estimated to have taken place around 1895, that included Julie Neisser. In examining Neisser family trees on ancestry.com, I came upon one that used as a profile image a painting of Julie Neisser, the original of which interestingly is in the possession of Agnes’s daughter Nicki Stieda. (Figure 27) This is yet another serendipitous connection.
Another of Josef and Rosalie Pauly’s daughters with a connection to Stettin was Elizabeth “Ellchen” Herrnstadt née Pauly who was married to Arthur Herrnstadt (1865-1912); they had two daughters, Aenne Herrnstadt (1896-1942) and Ilse Herrnstadt (1897-1943). While Arthur died in Stettin well before the Nazis ascended to power, his wife and two daughters were all murdered in the Holocaust, at Theresienstadt. (Figure 28) Aenne Herrnstadt, it turns out, was Agnes’s godmother, and several photos survive (Figures 29-30), including the two of them together when Agnes was a toddler. Interestingly, while Aenne and Ilse were only a year apart, Agnes has no recollection of Ilse, and thinks she may have been institutionalized for unknown reasons.
There exists a picture among Agnes photos reproduced here, showing Ellchen Herrnstadt, her daughter Aenne, and Agnes’s mother, Suse Vogel, taken between 1916 and 1918. (Figure 31)
Helene Guttentag née Pauly was yet another of Josef and Rosalie Pauly’s daughters who, along with her husband Dr. Adolf Guttentag, committed suicide in Berlin in 1942 after being told to report for deportation. I told their story in Post 50. They had one son, Otto Guttentag, who escaped to America, served in the U.S. Army during the war, was stationed in Europe for a time after the war, and eventually became a doctor in California. While stationed in Europe, Agnes and Otto Guttentag met (Figure 32); they were first cousins once removed. (Figure 33)
In closing, I concede this post (Figures 34-35) will be of limited interest to many, though I would only add that what may resonate with readers is the process by which they may pursue their own genealogical investigations to track down images and stories of their own ancestors. Admittedly, this can be a challenging though not insurmountable problem.
REMARK: My apologies to readers who may have thought I too disappeared. I’ve spent the last few weeks updating my family tree on ancestry.com to better visualize my connection to people I’ve researched and written about. My tree is by no means comprehensive in terms of all the relatives I could conceivably include. The greatest pleasure I derive in having a tree, which numbers a modest 750 individuals, is attaching pictures or portraits of family, although it’s also a place where I can consolidate for easy retrieval all historic documents, information, stories and photographs related to those kinsmen. The tree also provides a visual cue on which branches of the family I’ve explored and where other intriguing stories may emanate from.
Note: This brief post is about Maria Pohlmann née Pauly, my great-great uncle and aunt Dr. Josef and Rosalie Pauly’s sixth-born daughter, and my frustration in being able to discover her fate even though she was married to a very public figure.
Regular readers are now reasonably well-versed in the fact that my great-great-uncle and aunt, Dr. Josef Pauly (Figure 1) and his wife Rosalie Pauly née Mockrauer (Figure 2), had nine children born between 1870 and 1885, eight of whom were daughters. I’ve systematically told their stories, sometimes in their own words, including relating the sad fate that befell some daughters, husbands and grandchildren at the hands of the National Socialists on account of their Jewish heritage. I’ve stressed the irony of this given that the paterfamilias Dr. Josef Pauly was brought up as a Protestant. Still, as students of history know only too well, Dr. Pauly’s surviving family members were deemed “racially Jewish” and targeted for extermination by the Nazis.
With the grateful assistance of one of Dr. Pauly’s great-grandchildren, the oft-mentioned Andi Pauly (Figure 3), I’ve worked out the fate of eight of Josef’s children. The only daughter whose destiny remains unknown is that of his sixth-born daughter, Maria Ulrike Pauly, born in 1877. (Figure 4) In this post I will share with readers the little I’ve been able to uncover about her, although most of what I’ve learned relates to her husband, Alexander “Axel” Pohlmann, a very public figure. As followers will read in the next post regarding Josef and Rosalie’s youngest daughter, Therese “Tussy” Pauly, I hope publication of this current post may provoke a response from a casual visitor that may shed light on Maria’s fate.
Among the family photos given to me by Andi Pauly are several of his great-aunt Maria where I judge she was between 17 and 24 years of age, pictured either at a large family gathering (Figure 5) or in the company of her parents and some of her siblings (Figures 6-7); from another source, I obtained the picture of Maria as a young girl. (Figure 4) Included among the pictures of Maria is one with her husband Alexander Pohlmann taken at their marriage, surrounded by the entire wedding party (Figure 8a-c); the marriage is incorrectly identified as having taken place in 1902, although I determined from the “Posen Einwohnermeldekarte,” Posen residential registration cards, they were actually wed on the 30th September 1901. (Figure 9) Along the margins of the wedding picture, many attendees were identified by name by Klaus Pauly, Andi Pauly’s father. The identifications, I later discovered, were provided by one of Maria Pohlmann née Pauly’s nieces, Susanne Vogel née Neisser. Given my intimate familiarity with the Pauly family tree, I was able to identify additional people by cross-referencing other photos given to me by Andi where some of the same people had been named.
In contrast to all of Josef and Rosalie Pauly’s other children, Andi was unable to provide any insights on what happened to his great-aunt Maria nor where she might have wound up. I was unable to discover a single reference to her on ancestry.com. I also checked the Yad Vashem Victims Database but, fortunately, there is no suggestion she was murdered in the Holocaust, unlike other members of her family.
Having failed to uncover direct evidence of Maria’s fate, I researched her husband. I knew his name from their wedding picture, as well as from information provided by Andi. I found German Address Book listings for Alexander Pohlmann when he lived both in Magdeburg (Figure 10) and Freiburg im Breisgau (Figure 11), and what I initially thought were listings for him in Berlin, but later discovered were a false trail. I did a Google query, and nothing materialized. In such instances, I often turn to Wikipedia.de, the German version, since many of the people I’m researching are of German origin. Information on Maria’s husband immediately surfaced.
Alexander Pohlmann, I learned had been a very public figure. He was born on the 10th September 1865 in the town of Graudenz, Prussia [today: Grudziądz, Poland], son of the Lord Mayor of that town. After graduating from school in Freiburg in Breisgau, he studied law and administrative sciences in Breslau, Leipzig, and Berlin. From 1896 until 1898 he worked in the city administration of Frankfurt on the Main, and then until 1903 as a full-time city councilman in Posen [today: Poznan, Poland], where he likely met Maria Pauly. Between 1903 and 1920, Alexander Pohlmann was the Oberbürgermeister, the Lord Mayor of Kattowitz, Prussia [today: Katowice, Poland], thus beginning shortly after his marriage to Maria in 1901.
From 1904 until about 1912, Pohlmann was a member of the Oberschlesischen Provinziallandtages, the Upper Silesian Provincial Assembly, then between 1912 and 1918, belonged to the Preußischen Abgeordnetenhaus, the Prussian Chamber of Deputies.
In November 1918, Alexander Pohlmann participated in the founding of the Deutsche Demokratische Partei (DDP) (Figures 12-13), the German Democratic Party, along with former leaders of the Progressive People’s Party to whom he’d belonged. The DDP was committed to maintaining a democratic republican form of government. Its base consisted of middle-class entrepreneurs, civil servants, teachers, scientists and craftsmen. It considered itself a decidedly nationalistic party that opposed the Treaty of Versailles, yet, understood the need for international collaboration and protection of ethnic minorities. The party was the one voted for by most Jews, and was, therefore, referred to as the “party of Jews and professors.”
In 1919-20, Pohlmann was a member of the Weimarer Nationalversammlung, the Weimar National Assembly, and from 1920 to 1922, a member of the Reichstagsabgeordneter, the Reichstag. After Upper Silesia was separated from Germany, Pohlmann lost his position in the Reichstag. Following his tenure as Lord Mayor of Kattowitz, until his retirement in 1930, Pohlmann was the Regierungspräsident des Regierungsbezirks Magdeburg, the President of the Government of Magdeburg in the German state of Saxony. Pohlmann passed away in 1952 in Freiburg im Breisgau (German state of Baden-Württemberg).
The only point in detailing Alexander Pohlmann’s governmental positions is to highlight the lengthy and very public nature of his career. For this reason, it seems odd no trace of his wife’s fate has so far come to light. Hoping to learn something about Maria via her husband, I contacted the Muzeum Historii Katowic, the Museum of History of Katowice, to inquire about her but the Museum could add nothing to what I already know. I await responses from both the State Archives in Katowice (Poland) and the State Archive Magdeburg (Germany) regarding any additional information they may have on Alexander Pohlmann, respectively his wife. Watch this space for future updates.
Note: In this post, I present some of my great-great-uncle Dr. Josef Pauly’s observations on his life and family. I also discuss the challenges of relating an ancestor’s story even when their written words are available.
Some years ago, my third cousin Andi Pauly sent me a 17-page memoir by Dr. Josef Pauly (Figure 1), his great-grandfather, written by his ancestor on his 25th wedding anniversary, the 8th of June 1894. Dr. Pauly’s reflections were neatly handwritten in German Kurrent (Figures 2a-b), an old form of German-language handwriting based on late medieval cursive writing, also known as Kurrentschrift. Given the fact that many modern-day Germans can’t even read this old script, I had scant hope I would learn what Dr. Pauly had to say about his life and family.
Still, as regular readers know, I’ve learned never to say “never” as, occasionally, an unexpected opportunity presents itself to further my ancestral research. In previous posts, I’ve mentioned Mr. Paul Newerla, my elderly Polish friend from Racibórz, Poland, the town where my father was born when Upper Silesia was still German (Figure 3); Paul first contacted me through my Blog and has been enormously generous in sharing documents, maps, and photographs and educating me about the history of Silesia, a topic on which he’s an expert. Knowing Paul is fluent in German, I became curious whether Dr. Pauly’s handwriting was even legible, so I sent him the first two pages of the document asking whether he could decipher them. Paul returned a German transcription of these pages, telling me the text was quite readable but was deeply philosophical and not easily translated (Paul does not speak English). With great hesitancy, I asked Paul whether he’d be willing to transcribe the entire 17 pages of Dr. Pauly’s memoirs, and he graciously agreed to do this. I will readily admit to readers that, at times, I’m unabashedly shameless when it comes to requesting help with transcriptions or translations. The result was a neatly typed German transcription. Notwithstanding Paul’s admonition that the memoirs were profound, I naively assumed I could get the gist of them using Google Translate; suffice it to say, this was not the case.
Realizing I was part way to understanding what Dr. Pauly had written, I next brazenly approached my distant cousin, Ronny Bruck (Figure 4), asking whether he could translate the typed transcription into English. Much to his regret, he agreed to my request and some weeks later, after many late evenings and much agonizing, Ronny produced the translation I present below, promising never again to undertake such a difficult translation.
It goes without saying that without Paul and Ronny’s gracious and generous assistance, this post would not be possible. I was interested in a translation of Dr. Pauly’s memoirs for what he might have to say about his family. While the memoir told me told me less about Dr. Pauly’s kin than I’d hoped, it revealed a lot about his personal character and human values he esteemed.
I’ve tightened up the English reading of my cousin Ronny’s translation; my friend Paul’s transcription is included here for any German readers who wish to determine whether I’ve done justice to Dr. Pauly’s original remarks. I’ve taken some liberties conveying what Dr. Pauly may have been trying to communicate; I acknowledge I may have misinterpreted the meaning of certain colloquialisms.
Given my familiarity with Dr. Pauly’s lineage, I was not only able to identify all the family members he mentioned by name, but I was also able to find pictures or portraits of all of them. Dr. Pauly’s words are included in their entirety below in Italics, with some capitalized identifications in brackets. There are a few breaks in the italicized text where I provide some brief commentary, although for the most part Dr. Pauly’s words speak for themselves.
On Dr. Josef Pauly’s 25th wedding anniversary on 8th June 1894, he delivered prepared remarks to his gathered friends and family. In 1916, one of his daughters, Helene Guttentag née Pauly (Figure 5), resurrected his comments from 22 years earlier for the first Christmas family gathering following Josef Pauly’s death the previous month.
Memories of our father Dr. Josef Pauly Born: 10th August 1843 in Tost, Germany [today: Toszek, Poland] Died: 7th November 1916 in Posen, Germany [today: Poznan, Poland]
a sisterly greeting Christmas 1916 from Helene Guttentag née Pauly
Written by Josef Pauly
On our silver wedding anniversary on the 8th of June 1894
Festive days in the family, especially those we celebrate in the autumn of our lives, give reason for backward contemplation, and then you thankfully wonder how everything began. I am thinking of my parents’ home in the little Upper Silesian village [TOST, GERMANY, Figure 3]. There life was given to me, there I saw the father [DR. ZADIG PAULY, Figure 6] whom I am similar to in disposition, even though I consider him morally superior to me. There was also the temperamental and undemanding and imaginative mother [ANTONIE MARLE, Figure 7]. Both were in truth assiduous in nature. From there, from the house of my step-great aunt [THERESE GRÄTZER NÉE MOCKRAUER, Figures 8a-b], separated at an early age from my good father, I got my wife. Religious feelings, sympathy for Catholicism, poetry and romance, and finally for the monarchy, all come from the family home and the Upper Silesian village.
Dr. Pauly was clearly raised Catholic, so the irony that multiple of his “racially Jewish” daughters, sons-in-law, and grandchildren, whom I’ve written about in earlier Blog posts, were murdered or committed suicide during the Nazi era is not lost on me. Josef’s reference to Therese Grätzer née Mockrauer as his “step-great aunt” is puzzling since my knowledge of the Pauly lineage suggests she was a full-fledged great-aunt.
I left my parents’ home at the age of 9 ½, too early for such an impressionable one. After an unhappy, unmonitored youth and high school days, I also came too early to the University of Breslau, and, later, after a few semesters, to the military academy in Berlin. The latter, however, was my luck. It was an encouragement for my fantastic nature. Thankfully I remember my teachers, especially Traubes. The bedside, not science, healed me of confusion. I lacked the peace, rules and concentration to be truly scientific in nature. Fresh from my exams, I went to war via Glatz [GLATZ, GERMANY, Figure 3]. A certain demeanor, brashness, and good nature made me useful in the various circumstances of life; but irritable to the point of exaltation, I did not find mental and physical security until I got married. This was luck again. I have three persons to thank besides God: my wife [ROSALIE PAULY NÉE MOCKRAUER, Figure 9]; her guardian and uncle Geheimrat Grätzer [PRIVY COUNCILLOR DR. MED. JONAS GRÄTZER, Figure 10], whose personality seems more and more respectable to me the older I get, because he has always proven himself wise and honorable; and, professor W.A. Freund [DR. WILHELM ALEXANDER FREUND, Figure 11] from Strassburg [STRASBOURG, FRANCE], who was intellectually far superior to me, the doctor of my body and soul, the latter more valuable.
Josef Pauly left home as a lad and attended the University of Breslau when he was still young, suggesting he was very precocious. He ultimately turned what he characterized as unhappy days to his advantage after his time in a Berlin military academy and the army.
Josef identifies the three most influential people in his life, including his wife and her uncle, whom he refers to only as “Geheimrat Grätzer.” I discovered I had his portrait before learning his full name, Privy Councillor Dr. Med. Jonas Grätzer. Use of the term “Geheimrat” was confusing. I was initially under the impression that it referred to a trusted advisor, perhaps in a governmental position, until Andi Pauly explained that it is an abbreviation for “Geheimer Sanitätsrat,” a honorary title for merited doctors in Prussia.
One of Josef’s professors and mentors was a well-known German gynecologist, Dr. Wilhelm Alexander Freund (1833-1917), who earned his degree at the University of Breslau, and afterwards practiced gynecology in the same city. In 1879 he relocated to Strasbourg, France, where he served as a professor of gynecology and obstetrics.
In 1868, I came to Posen, and in 1869 I got married. All the other things you know already, partly from us, partly from uncle Max [MAX KANTOROWICZ, Figure 12] and aunt Rosa [ROSALINDE PAULY, Figure 13], and partly because you have experienced it. You will agree, if I confess gratefully, that until now the good has prevailed, luck was not lacking. Illness and errors have been overcome as far as possible, good will better than one dared hope for. Distress has never knocked on our door, and, so, I would like to say the following as my confession today:
I believe in God as the creative force of the universe, in an immanent consciousness, in a moral world order; to the invisible God of the world, as first revealed by the Jewish religion, whose goodness is identical with the eternal laws.
I believe that human nature has a propensity for evil and an instinct for good, that it is up to education and the family to lead the latter to victory over the former, so the conscience prevails.
I consider the family to be the natural group in the necessary struggle for existence, which must co-exist however different their civic designs are.
I think parents are the first officials of the family. Everything that man possesses is entrusted to him for administration.
Death is a necessity; suicide is a mortal sin, more seldomly a disease.
I don´t think the earth is a vale of tears but a workplace with occasional and not too abundant leisure, and I don´t think people are angels, however, amongst a few there is no good to be found. A statistic of the good qualities of men would give salvation. I firmly believe, given the enormous capacity of human nature to develop and adapt, that good can be developed through favorable influences. Distress, illness and misery can democratize people. I think it is my duty and that of every wealthy person that they help alleviate these social difficulties, which have been exacerbated by modern conditions, and I measure my respect for rich people according to how much of their wealth they give away to others.
I believe everything has its history, and that being aware that one is living in a certain time is important. I believe that nothing is lost in this world, and that humanity progresses slowly in a zigzagging way. I strive out of war and storm to hear the sounds of peace and recovery from sickness and madness. I try to understand the tasks of the present time with my weak power of insight, and understand it as follows: the current education is real, you must protect the body and the soul. One directs the child’s gaze towards nature; one teaches not only beauty but also lawfulness; one must fill children’s souls with the joy that in toto there exists a body of goodness for everybody. But because everything that a man does is buried in the tablets of his brain, and because one’s own ego only feels at ease in the coexistence of another man’s ego, one must exercise the power of self-control and the power to forget oneself. For that is and remains the greatest glory for man: respect for the connection with the whole. Therefore, the highest pleasure of serving the whole is forgetting oneself.
Whether you conceive of man as a single entity or view body and mind separately is immaterial to me. The individual is the soulful body with natural necessity and happiness. One must differentiate between higher and lower impulses; culture is based on controlling baser impulses to have them serve the greater good.
Between the individual’s own ego and the other’s ego, the individual man steers his frail boat; even though the urge may be dark, man is always conscious of the right path.
I consider work to be the most important part of oneself. Self-knowledge and self-criticism are paramount. Every person can learn it, it does not help to lie to yourself.
It’s wrong to accept one’s innate temperament. Just as a sculptor chisels the hard marble, everyone must form his own temperament. This is not the realm of education but rather religion. It can be awakened in every human being. Within the family dissolves the contrast between one’s necessary selfishness and the necessary sublimation of one’s interest. Just as a mother’s love is the highest revelation (epiphany) of nature so is the love between relatives the highest of culture. When I personally experience the good that happens to my brother or sister, that sensation satisfies me, so I am a happy and fulfilled person.
The parents, whose children have such a prevailing attitude, don´t believe this is rare. You know about the three sisters who renounced their own ambitions for the sake of their brother’s study [WILHELM PAULY, Figure 14]. The beautiful fire of such a sacrifice raises the hearth of the family like an inviolable sanctuary. Such an attitude can be educational, if one is honest. How terrible it would be if every intemperate remark uttered within the family went unpunished, so that instead of contributing to the greater good, personal considerations and selfishness prevailed, rather than striving to do right by one’s blood relatives in material and non-material ways.
Here, Dr. Josef Pauly highlights the sacrifice that three of his unnamed daughters made for the benefit of the only one of his nine children who was a male, namely, Wilhelm Pauly. For Josef, renouncing personal aspirations for the benefit of family exemplified the most high-minded ideal.
In a thoughtful bourgeois family, the older sister who raises her brother seeks to influence the younger sibling spiritually as a matter of course. This duty, which is not difficult to practice and understand, creates the most beautiful and secure relationship.
“What you have inherited from your fathers, acquire it to own it.”
Ennoble the blood relationship by making a sacrifice for the other, strive for spiritual influence on one another, then you will be closer together and you will permanently ally yourselves.
I hear only partially this sentiment at this social event which you have dedicated to us today. With gratitude to the Almighty, I see you all gathered here, blood relatives by birth and by fortune; many but not excellently talented, but all sufficiently gifted for the good and simple.
And so I should like to hear, above all else, a quiet vow from this event, of humor and casual mood, that you want to be mindful not only of the vicissitudes of life, but also in everyday life by the commitment placed on you by God and nature which the dying Johannis and his great interpreter Gotthold Ephraim Lessing [Figure 15] summed up in the words:
“Children, love each other with that pure love which is a ray of God´s love”
Given the moral turpitude I see among some of my contemporaries, I find great comfort in reminding myself this was not always so. Many of Dr. Josef Pauly’s words and beliefs resonate with me though I recognize his values are not always congruent with my own nor relevant to the modern age. Despite the steps involved in bringing Dr. Josef’s words to light, first transcribing the German text, then translating them into English, and finally rewriting his words to try and capture their “true” meaning, highlights the challenge a biographer faces even when the subject’s own words are available to them. Still, where a subject’s words are available, it is preferable to presenting them to readers even if in a slightly distorted manner and even if the meaning is not always entirely obvious.
Note: In this post, I discuss Wilhelm Pauly, the only son of Josef and Rosalie Pauly. The account of his survival during WWII provides some insight into the relationship between Germans of Jewish heritage and the German nation.
I’ve recently been writing about the fate of some of my great-great-uncle and aunt Josef Pauly and Rosalie Pauly née Mockrauer’s nine children, several of whom were victims of the Holocaust. Their only son, Wilhelm “Willy” Pauly (Figure 1), eighth born, survived the war and I became curious how he managed this. I asked one of his grandchildren, Andi Pauly, whose name readers may recall, and his response led in an unexpected direction.
Willy Pauly (Figure 2) was a trained agronomist, and a veteran of WWI. Apparently, when it became clear his Jewish ancestry might eventually lead to his deportation to a concentration camp, he sought the help of his military comrades from WWI; they were instrumental in having him assigned to an agricultural research facility near the small town of Felgentreu, 34 miles SW of Berlin, that for inexplicable reasons was off-limits to the Gestapo.
Felgentreu (Figure 3) is only a short distance northwest of the military training ground once located at Jüterbog, referred to in German as Truppenübungsplatz Jüterborg. Beginning in the 1860’s, the German military began acquiring property around Jüterbog so that by the 1930’s this was the largest military training facility in Germany, more than 27,000 acres in size. By 1936, most inhabitants of Felgentreu had been displaced by the military facility and forced to relinquish their homes. Following the reunification of Germany in 1989, this military training ground, which had been used by the Soviet and German militaries after WWII, was converted to civilian use. Today, it is a nature reserve, although contaminated remains abound.
Whether the intercession of Willy Pauly’s military colleagues was enough to have him stationed in Felgentreu is unclear. It was suggested that a man named Erhard Milch may also have played a role in protecting Willy Pauly. Suffice it for now to say the Pauly and Milch families are related by marriage, a topic I’ll return to below. However, the mention of Erhard Milch’s name is where this story takes an unexpected twist.
Erhard Milch (Figure 4), I learned, was a German field marshal who oversaw the development of the Luftwaffe as part of the re-armament of Nazi Germany following WWI. He was supposedly the son of Anton Milch, a Jewish pharmacist, and a Clara Milch née Vetter, and was investigated in 1935 by the Gestapo on account of his Jewish heritage. When Hermann Wilhelm Göring, who was Erhard Milch’s mentor and personal friend, got wind of this ongoing investigation, he put a halt to it; Göring produced a signed affidavit he’d apparently forced Milch’s mother to sign stating that his actual father was her uncle, making her guilty of adultery and incest.
Regardless, with the signed affidavit in hand Hitler then issued Milch a “German Blood Certificate” (German: Deutschblütigkeitserklärung). Basically, this was a document provided by Hitler to people with partial Jewish heritage, termed Mischlinge, declaring them deutschblütig, of German blood, and exempting them from most of Germany’s racial laws. Such events were apparently the backdrop for Göring’s cynical claim, “I decide who is a Jew.” Though widely attributed to him, the statement apparently originated with Karl Lueger (Figure 5), Mayor of Vienna, Austria from 1897 until his death in 1910. Karl Lueger, founder of Austria’s Christian Social Party, exploited prevalent antisemitic and nationalistic currents for political gain. This is particularly interesting because Hitler moved to Vienna in 1908 when Lueger was at the apex of his power there; Hitler clearly approved of Lueger’s methods and praised his charisma and popular appeal in Mein Kampf and elsewhere. Some claim the populist and antisemitic politics of Lueger’s Christian Social Party were the model for Adolf Hitler’s Nazism, though their brands of anti-Semitism differed.
In any case, the issue of Jews serving in the German military during the Nazi era is what I found intriguing. I discovered a 2002 book on the subject by Cambridge University researcher Bryan Mark Rigg, entitled “Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers, the Untold Story of Nazi Racial Laws and Men of Jewish Descent in the German Military.” Rigg’s book was the first study of its kind to document the history of Jews and Mischlinge who fought in the German armed forces during WWII, a number estimated to have been as high as 150,000 that included more than 1,200 officers; the author provides demonstrable evidence that Hitler played a central role in allowing Mischlinge to serve in the armed forces. The “half-Jew” Field Marshall Erhard Milch was the highest-ranking officer found to be of Jewish parentage.
Willy Pauly may also have wanted his two sons, Klaus and Peter (Figure 6), to pursue a military career to increase their odds of survival and facilitate upward mobility. According to a story Andi’s father told him, Willy enrolled his two sons in an elite military training school in Potsdam, a town bordering Berlin. When Hitler came to power, the school was transformed into a “NaPolA,” Nationalpolitische Erziehungsanstalten, officially abbreviated NPEA, or a National Political Institute of Education, a secondary boarding school for the elite in Nazi Germany. Students were required to provide proof of their Aryan descent, something Willy could not provide for his sons, so both were forced to leave the academy. Interestingly, they ended up in a boarding school in Niesky, Germany, which was run by the Herrnhuter Brüdergemeinde, a Christian fraternity.
Some brief history. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 were the anti-Semitic laws introduced in Germany following the takeover of power by Hitler in 1933. It defined a “Jew” not as someone with specific religious beliefs but, instead, as anyone with three or four Jewish grandparents regardless of whether the person self-identified as a Jew or belonged to the Jewish religious community. Germans who had long ago given up practicing Judaism or converted, or even those whose grandparents had converted to Christianity, were nonetheless “racially” categorized as Jewish and victimized by the Nazis. Two additional “racial” categories were created with the passage of the Nuremberg Laws: the “half-Jew” (Jewish Mischling first degree), and the “quarter-Jew” (Jewish Mischling second degree); a half-Jew had two Jewish grandparents, and a quarter-Jew one.
The sudden grouping of Mischlinge with Jews, seemingly, should have created a bond and mutual sympathy. It did not. Most Mischlinge did not consider themselves to be Jewish, and many had grown up as baptized Christians. And, in some cases, the Mischlinge were themselves deeply anti-Semitic. Ethnically, Mischlinge thought of themselves as Germans based on their language, their culture, and their schooling which had all been in German. Speaking to this issue, Bryan Rigg quotes from a letter written in 1940 by the “half-Jew,” Unteroffizier (Sergeant or Staff Sergeant) W. Dieter Bergman (Figure 7), to his Jewish grandmother, Elly Landsberg née Mockrauer, interestingly one of my relatives:
“Don’t you realize how much I’m with my whole being rooted in Germany. My life would be very sad without my homeland, without the wonderful German art, without the belief in Germany’s powerful past and the powerful future that awaits Germany. Do you think that I can tear that all out of my heart?. . .Don’t I also have an obligation to my parents, to my brother who showed his love to our Fatherland by dying a hero’s death on the battlefield. . .Someday, I want to be a German amongst Germans and no longer a second-class citizen only because my wonderful mother is Jewish.” (Rigg, p. 28)
To remind readers, Elly Landsberg née Mockrauer (Figure 8) was the niece of Rosalie Pauly née Mockrauer; Elly Landsberg’s father was Josef Mockrauer (Figure 9), brother of Rosalie Pauly née Mockrauer. (Figure 10)
Historically, one way for Jews to prove themselves to be good, loyal Germans was to fight for their country. Many Jews served in the German army during WWI, as this provided a way for them to gain greater acceptance and opportunity and prove their loyalty to the Vaterland. With Germany’s rearmament following Hitler’s ascension to power, Mischlinge faced a paradox, join the military to regain some of their lost pride and protect their families with the realization they would be serving Hitler. For those who were able to join, knowing they were trying to convince their comrades, officers and Nazi overlords to accept them as “normal” Germans, many fought with unparalleled bravery. The last thing a Mischling wanted was to be considered a “feiger Jude,” a cowardly Jew.
Because Mischlinge status obviously impeded upward mobility in German society and the army, such individuals sought to be recognized as German; one method was to obtain a legal waiver, Genehmigung, an official toleration of their standing as Mischling on account of their service and benefit to the Reich. The most sought-after designation was the one conferred on Field Marshall Erhard Milch, Deutschblütigkeitserklärung, a determination of pure German blood. Contrary to Göring’s assertion that he decided who was a Jew or not, in reality, this decision could only be granted by Hitler. Germany’s defeat was a fortunate outcome for Mischlinge because Hitler had planned to exterminate them all had Germany prevailed, completely cleansing the German blood line.
Josef and Rosalie Pauly’s only son, Willy Pauly, was born in 1883, and, as mentioned, served in the German army during WWI. Erhard Milch, born nine years later in 1892, also fought for Germany during the first world war. While I was able to find Erhard Milch’s WWI Personnel Register (Figure 11) on ancestry.com, I was unable to track down a similar document for Willy Pauly. Though both Willy and Erhard fought for Germany in WWI, likely on the Eastern Front, I can’t place them in the same theater during the war proving they met then.
Knowing that Pauly and Milch family members are related by marriage, I turned to ancestry.com to try and ascertain the possible relationship between Willy Pauly and Erhard Milch. Unfortunately, none of the ancestral documents nor family trees I located there contained enough detail to establish a connection.
Then, I remembered a Stammbaum, a family tree, for the Milch family Andi Pauly had found among his father’s surviving papers and sent me. Given the enormous detail in the Pauly Stammbaum, it was clear Klaus Pauly, Andi’s father, had communicated with an extensive network of near and distant relatives to create his tree. One such person was Dr. H.P. Kent from Saskatoon, Canada, who’d asked himself the same question developing his family tree in 1990 I was now asking myself, namely, “how exactly is Erhard Milch related to the Pauly family?” I found the answer in Dr. Kent’s tree (Figures 12a-b)—Erhard Milch is the second cousin once removed of a Ludwig Milch (Figure 13), the husband of one of Rosalie Pauly’s nieces. Theoretically, Erhard and Willy could have known or been aware of one another and their ancestral ties. Whether this would have been reason enough for Erhard to intercede on Willy’s behalf to shield him during WWII may never be known.
In addition to Erhard Milch’s WWI Personnel Register, I was also able to find in ancestry.com a copy of his certificate of marriage to Käthe Patschke (Figures 14a-b), showing they were married on the 8th March 1917 in Berlin-Grunewald. The significance of these documents is that both specifically name Erhard Milch’s “racially” Jewish father, Anton Milch; obviously, at the time there was no anticipating the coming of Hitler barely 15 years later that would require “masking” one’s Jewish ancestry. The major takeaway is that because of the existence of such historic documents, the only sure way Göring could conceal his protégé’s “half-Jewish” status, make it go away that is, was to force Erhard’s mother to “claim” that his true father was her Aryan uncle, even if that made her guilty of incest and adultery.
One final note of interest. While I’ve been unable to uncover the specific name of the agricultural research station in Felgentreu to which Willy Pauly was assigned during WWII, Andi provided a copy of one letter sent to his grandfather dated the 6th October 1945 (Figure 15); Felgentreu would eventually become part of the German Democratic Republic, but at the time was administered by the Soviet Military Administration. The Soviets approved the action outlined in this letter. It ordered Willy Pauly to hand over control of the research station to a Dr. Reinhold von Sengbusch, who was being transferred from the Kaiser Wilhelm Society for the Advancement of Science, later the Max Planck Society, to take over Willy’s responsibilities.
Following his dismissal, Willy turned to a man he knew, Mr. Rudolf Ersterer, who was the Director of the Bayerischen Verwaltung der staatlichen Schlösser, Bavarian Administration of State Castles; Mr Ersterer would eventually play an important role in rebuilding Munich after WWII. Following the war, it was difficult to find able German administrators who had not been members of the Nazi Party, but because Willy had not Ersterer appointed him to manage the world-renowned castle of Ludwig II, Herrenchiemsee (Figure 16), located on Herreninsel, the largest island in the Chiemsee lake, in southern Bavaria.
During Willy’s time on Herreninsel, the Constitutional Convention at Herrenchiemsee (German: Verfassungskonvent auf Herrenchiemsee) convened there. This was a meeting of constitutional experts nominated by the minister-presidents of the Western States of Germany, held in August 1948, as part of the process of drafting and adopting the current German constitution.
Ms. Anita Bunyan, a fellow at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, referencing Bryan Rigg’s book “Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers,” concludes that a significant number of Mischlinge appear to have been protected by fellow soldiers and superiors. While Rigg found many Aryan officers clearly motivated by racist ideology and ambition to turn them in, “. . .the discovery of a significant number of ‘sympathetic’ soldiers in the German army casts an interesting light on the relationship between ‘ordinary Germans’ and the Third Reich.” And, the apparent large number of Mischlinge and Jews in the German army would seem to support the notion the military may have afforded them some level of protection. Perhaps, this was the German army’s version of “Don’t ask, don’t tell”?
REFERENCES
Bergman, W. Dieter 1995 Between Two Benches. California Publishing Co., San Francisco
Bunyan, Anita 2003 Half-Shadows of the Reich, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers. Queen’s University, Belfast
Klinger, Jerry 2011 Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers. The Jewish Magazine, September 2011
Rigg, Bryan Mark 2002 Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers, the Untold Story of Nazi Racial Laws and Men of Jewish Descent in the German Military. U. of Kansas, Lawrence, KS
REMARK: What started out as an attempt to remember relatives and friends of Dr. Josef Pauly’s branch of my family who perished in the Holocaust became more involved the deeper I got into writing. I uncovered two new third cousins, including an elderly relative who personally knew some of the victims; I discovered a diary written by one of the Holocaust victims, translated into English, describing the final wrenching months of he and his wife’s lives before they killed themselves; I found a second, lengthier account, in German, written by the daughter of another victim, describing her father’s final two years before he too committed suicide; I learned about a Polish on-line database with inhabitant information from Posen, Germany [today: Poznań, Poland] (Figure 1), the community where Dr. Pauly lived and where all nine of his children were born. And, to top it all off, I just uncovered another collection at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York/Berlin, the John H. Richter Collection, an enormous cache of materials referencing, among other ancestors, the family of one of Josef’s son-in-laws, the Neissers. None of these discoveries alone have changed the trajectory of this post, but together they were cause for distraction. That said, these recent finds allow me to tell a more complete story.
Note: In this post, I remember members of my Pauly family and their close friends who perished in the Holocaust.
Holocaust Memorial Day takes place annually on different days across the globe and marks the date on which remaining prisoners at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi concentration camp, were liberated in 1945. This is a day for everyone to remember the millions of people murdered in the Holocaust, under Nazi Persecution, and in subsequent genocides which followed in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur. With each passing month, unhappily, I learn about more members of my extended family and their friends who perished at the hands of the National Socialists. To coincide with this day of remembrance, I want to recall and memorialize the multiple victims among the Pauly branch of my family along with a few of their close friends.
Regular readers may recollect that Post 40 post was about Elisabeth “Lisa” Pauly née Krüger, one of my Uncle Dr. Fedor Bruck’s “silent heroes,” who hid him in Berlin during WWII for periods of his 30-month survival “underground.” Most of the Pauly family members mentioned in this post were aunts, uncles, and cousins of Lisa Pauly. Briefly, let me provide more context on how this family is related to me.
In Post 44, I mentioned two siblings, my great-grandmother, Friederike Mockrauer (Figure 2), and her brother, my great-great-uncle, Josef Mockrauer (Figure 3); I was already aware of their existence but found more information on their children in the “Pinkus Family Collection” archived at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York/Berlin. Friederike and Josef had other siblings, including a sister Rosalie Mockrauer (1844-1927) (Figure 4) who married Dr. Josef Pauly (1843-1916) (Figure 5) from Posen, Germany [today: Poznań, Poland]; together they had eight daughters and one son, all of whom survived to adulthood. Ancestrally-speaking, these nine children would be my first cousins twice-removed.
The only son from Josef and Rosalie Pauly’s union was named Wilhelm Pauly (Figure 6), and through steps I detailed in earlier posts, I was able to track down two of Wilhelm’s grandsons, Peter Pauly and Andreas “Andi” Pauly, living in Germany; Peter and Andi are my third cousins. Both have been enormously helpful in the course of my ancestral research. Not only have they provided a detailed, hand-drawn Stammbaum (family tree), developed by their father, Klaus Pauly, but they’ve scanned and made available copies of many family photographs.
This included a photo of a large Pauly family get-together that likely took place in Posen, Germany, probably in the mid-1890’s, judging from the estimated age of some of the individuals pictured whose dates of birth are known to me. The partial caption that accompanied this and other photos has allowed me to put names to some of the people shown, including all nine of Josef and Rosalie Mockrauer’s children. Through a laborious process of cross-comparison with other photos, including another large Pauly family get-together for the 1901 marriage of one of Josef and Rosalie’s daughters, I’ve now been able to identify 22 of the 31 individuals captured on film in this snapshot (Figure 7); as I was writing this post, an elderly third cousin from Canada who I only just learned about, Ms. Agnes Stieda née Vogel (Figure 8), helped identify two more people. Considering the age of the image and the incomplete captioning, it’s astonishing that after almost 125 years it’s still possible to put names to faces of people who lived largely “anonymous” lives. I attach the table below with names and vital data of the people (i.e., casual readers need not concern themselves with this):
NO.
NAME
EVENT
DATE
PLACE
1
Anna Rothholz née Pauly
Birth
14 March 1871
Posen, Germany
Death
21 June 1925
Stettin, Germany
Marriage
20 May 1892
Berlin, Germany
2
Josef Pauly
Birth
10 August 1843
Tost, Germany
Death
7 November 1916
Posen, Germany
Marriage
1869
3
Paula Pincus née Pauly
Birth
26 April 1872
Posen, Germany
Death
31 March 1922
Magdeburg, Saxony-Anhalt, Germany
Marriage
16 November 1891
Berlin, Germany
4
UNKNOWN WOMAN
5
Julie Neisser née Sabersky
Birth
26 February 1841
Wöllstein, Germany
Death
11 April 1927
Berlin, Germany
6
ERNST NEISSER
Birth
16 May 1863
Liegnitz, Germany
DEATH
(SUICIDE)
4 OCTOBER 1942
BERLIN, GERMANY
Marriage
5 September 1898
Stettin, Germany
7
Margarethe Neisser née Pauly
Birth
16 January 1876
Posen, Germany
Death
10 December 1941
Berlin, Germany
Marriage
5 September 1898
Stettin, Germany
8
Rosalie Pauly née Mockrauer
Birth
3 January 1844
Leschnitz, Germany
Death
28 November 1927
Berlin, Germany
Marriage
1869
Unknown
9
Rosalinde Kantorowicz née Pauly
Birth
22 January 1854
Tost, Germany
Death
3 November 1916
Frankfurt am Main, Hessen, Germany
10
UNKNOWN MAN
11
Charlotte Mockrauer née Bruck
Birth
8 December 1865
Ratibor, Germany
Death
10 January 1965
Stockholm, Sweden
Marriage
18 March 1888
Ratibor, Germany
12
UNKNOWN WOMAN
13
UNKNOWN BOY
14
Therese Sandler née Pauly
Birth
21 August 1885
Posen, Germany
Death
1969
15
GERTRUD KANTOROWICZ
“GERTRUDE PAULY (PSEUDONYM)”
Birth
9 October 1876
Posen, Germany
DEATH
(MURDERED)
20 APRIL 1945
THERESIENSTADT, CZECHOSLOVAKIA
16
Maria Pohlmann née Pauly
Birth
21 July 1877
Posen, Germany
Death
Unknown
Marriage
30 September 1901
Posen, Germany
17
GERTRUD WACHSMANN NEE POLLACK
Birth
10 July 1867
Görlitz, Saxony, Germany
DEATH
(MURDERED)
22 OCTOBER 1942
THERESIENSTADT, CZECHOSLOVAKIA
Married
17 October 1893
Görlitz, Saxony, Germany
18
Heinrich Sabersky
Birth
July 1845
Grünberg, Germany
Death
January 1929
Berlin, Germany
19
HELENE GUTTENTAG NEE PAULY
Birth
12 April 1873
Posen, Germany
DEATH
(SUICIDE)
23 OCTOBER 1942
BERLIN, GERMANY
Marriage
5 February 1898
Berlin, Germany
20
ADOLF GUTTENTAG
Birth
4 December 1868
Breslau, Germany
DEATH
(SUICIDE)
23 OCTOBER 1942
BERLIN, GERMANY
Marriage
5 February 1898
Berlin, Germany
21
Wilhelm Pauly
Birth
24 September 1883
Posen, Germany
Death
1961
Unknown
22
UNKNOWN MAN
23
ELLY LANDSBERG NEE MOCKRAUER
Birth
14 August 1873
Berlin, Germany
DEATH
(MURDERED)
15 MAY 1944
AUSCHWITZ, POLAND
Marriage
1892
Posen, Germany
24
Edith Riezler née Pauly
Birth
4 January 1880
Posen, Germany
Death
1963
Unknown
25
UNKNOWN MAN
26
UNKNOWN WOMAN
27
ELISABETH HERRNSTADT NEE PAULY
Birth
2 July 1874
Posen, Germany
DEATH
(MURDERED)
27 MAY 1943
THERESIENSTADT, CZECHOSLOVAKIA
Marriage
11 May 1895
Cunnersdorf, Germany
28
Arthur Herrnstadt
Birth
15 March 1865
Hirschberg, Germany
Death
21 October 1912
Stettin, Germany
Marriage
11 May 1895
Cunnersdorf, Germany
29
Adolf Wachsmann
Birth
3 January 1859
Ratibor, Germany
Death
Unknown
Unknown
Married
17 October 1893
Görlitz, Saxony, Germany
30
UNKNOWN MAN
31
UNKNOWN MAN
*Names italicized and in CAPS are family and friends who perished in the Holocaust. Numbers in the left-hand column correspond with the numbered, circled heads in Figure 7.
Having identified more than half the people in the Pauly family photo, I researched their fate using family queries, ancestry.com, and Yad Vashem; I’ve learned through experience that if I can find no other information on the fate of family, I’m compelled to check the Holocaust database. While multiple of the individuals in the photo had the relative “good fortune” to have died before the Nazis came to power, I was surprised at the number of people in the photo killed by the Nazis or who took their own lives after they were told to report for deportation. (Figure 9) What was even more sobering was discovering that children or husbands of some of the people photographed similarly perished during the Holocaust. While I’m unable to show images of all the victims, it’s important to acknowledge they once existed.
Helene Guttentag née Pauly (1873-1942) (Figure 10) was the third oldest of Josef and Rosalie Pauly’s daughters, and married Dr. Adolf Guttentag (1868-1942) (Figure 11); they had one son, Otto Guttentag (1900-1992), who immigrated to America. In the course of writing this Blog post, I found his obituary and established contact with one of Adolf and Helene Guttentag’s grandchildren, my third cousin Christoph Guttentag (Figure 12), living in North Carolina; I learned from him about the existence of a diary that Adolf Guttentag wrote for his son in the final weeks of his life before he and Helene committed suicide on October 23, 1942 in Berlin. The diary eventually made its way to their son, who donated it to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. It is available in English on their website (i.e., Christoph’s mother did the translation). My next Blog post will be about this diary, which is unquestionably one of the saddest accounts I’ve read about Jews entrapped in Germany during WWII with no means of escaping other than to kill themselves.
Dr. Hermann Rothholz (1857-1940) was married to the oldest of Josef and Rosalie’s nine children, Anna (1870-1925) (Figure 13); she died in 1925, and thereby escaped the horrors of the Holocaust. Dr. Rothholz was not so fortunate, and was transported from Stettin, Germany [today: Szczecin, Poland] to the Lublin District of Poland, and died there on October 19, 1940.
Ernst Neisser (1863-1942) (Figures 14a-b) was born in Liegnitz, Germany [today: Legnica, Poland] in 1863 to a Protestant family of Jewish descent. He was a bacteriologist, and the nephew of Alfred Neisser who in 1879 isolated the Neisseria gonorrhoeae bacteria that causes gonorrhea. Ernst Neisser became the director of the municipal hospital in Stettin, Germany in 1895, and married Margarethe Pauly (1876-1941) (Figure 15) in Stettin on September 5, 1898. After his retirement around 1931 they moved to Berlin. He and his cousin, who was named Luise Neisser (1861-1942), committed suicide together. In Adolf Guttentag’s diary, Ernst’s cousin is referred to only as “L. Neisser”; only one Neisser with the initial “L” is listed in the Shoah database who died in Berlin, “Luise,” so I reasoned this was the cousin with whom Ernst committed suicide. And, Ms. Stieda confirmed her name.
Margarethe Neisser’s name does not appear in Yad Vashem as a Holocaust victim, suggesting she died before Ernst killed himself. According to the large family tree I’ve referred to in previous posts, the “Schlesische Jüdische Familien” (Silesian Jewish Families), she died on December 10, 1942, two months after her husband. This death date made no sense to me. First, Yad Vashem suggests Ernst Neisser was a widower (Figure 16), and second, why would Margarethe wait two months to kill herself after her husband, unless they were divorced or separated and living apart, no evidence of which exists. I’ve explained to readers in the past that I rarely accept prima facie ancestral data from other trees unless I can track down the origin, even if the information is from a usually reliable source. I again contacted Ms. Elke Kehrmann, the tree manager, and asked where dates for Margarethe’s death come from; she explained she’d found them in two other trees, but upon re-examining those trees, Elke realized she’d accidentally recorded the death year as 1942 when it was really 1941! Once I learned this, the timing of Ernst Neisser’s death vis a vis his wife’s death made more sense. The cause of her death is unknown, but the fact remains she is not listed as a Shoah victim.
In the course of researching Ernst Neisser, I found a 34-page typed letter written by his daughter, Susan Vogel née Neisser, in 1947 to an American relative. It is entitled “Die letzten ebensjahre Vaters Prof. Ernst Neisser,” “The Last Two Years, Professor Ernst Neisser,” and describes the last years of her father’s life from 1939-1942. The letter concentrates on the suicide of Ernst and his cousin to escape deportation in 1942. Unfortunately, the document is written in German, so presently I can offer no insights on Dr. Neisser’s final years.
And, lastly, as mentioned at the outset under “Remarks,” I learned about the huge “John H. Richter Collection, 1904-1994” archived at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York/Berlin; suffice it to say, this collection includes an enormous amount of ancestral information, not only about the Neisser family, but even about my own Bruck ancestors.
Elizabeth Herrnstadt, Anna Herrnstadt, & Ilse Herrnstadt
Elizabeth Herrnstadt née Pauly (1874-1943) (Figure 17) was the fourth of Josef and Rosalie Pauly’s daughters. She was married to Arthur Herrnstadt (1865-1912) (Figure 18), with whom she had two daughters, Anna (“Aenne”) in 1896 (Figure 19) and Ilse in 1897. (Figure 20) Arthur died in 1912, but Elizabeth, Aenne and Ilse were all murdered in 1943 in the Theresienstadt Ghetto in Czechoslovakia. Astonishingly, Aenne Herrnstadt was the godmother of Agnes Stieda, the third cousin I mentioned above.
Gertrud Kantorowicz (1876-1945) (Figure 21), like all nine of Josef and Rosalie’s children, was born in Posen, Germany; her pseudonym was apparently “Gertrud Pauly,” suggesting a close relationship with the Pauly clan. Gertrud was one of the first women in Germany to obtain a PhD. in Humanities. She was in England in 1938 but inexplicably returned to Germany later that year. After the outbreak of war, she arranged a post at Skidmore College in the United States, but by then was unable to leave Germany legally; she was arrested trying to illegally cross into Switzerland, and sent to the Theresienstadt Ghetto in Czechoslovakia, where she died in April 1945, shortly before the end of WWII.
Gertrud Wachsmann née Pollack (1867-1942) (Figure 22) was married to Adolf Wachsmann (Figure 23), an Apotheker (pharmacist) in Posen. The detailed Pauly Stammbaum (family tree) I’ve alluded to in multiple posts, includes some Pollacks, suggesting Gertrud was a distant cousin of the Paulys. She appears to have been deported from Breslau, Germany, first to a detention camp at Grüssau in Lower Silesia, then to the Theresienstadt Ghetto in Czechoslovakia where she perished in October 1942. (Figure 24)
Elly Landsberg née Mockrauer (1873-1944) (Figure 25), was the daughter of Josef Mockrauer by his first marriage to Esther Ernestine Mockrauer née Lißner; to remind readers, Josef Mockrauer was the sister of Rosalie Pauly née Mockrauer. Josef Mockrauer’s second wife was Charlotte Mockrauer née Bruck (1865-1965) (Figure 26), my great-aunt, who was born in 1865. In a book by Elly Landsberg’s grandson, W. Dieter Bergman, entitled, “Between Two Benches,” he mentions his grandmother: “In 1891 Elly came from Berlin to the town of Posen to stay with her aunt Rosalie and with the well-known family of Dr. J. Pauly. Her widowed father had remarried a young cousin and Elly was not happy in Berlin. In Posen, however, she fitted right into the family of eight girls.” (p.11) A point of clarification. Josef Mockrauer was not in fact a widower, and his first wife Ernestine Mockrauer lived until 1934; after separating from her husband, she had an out-of-wedlock son in 1884, Georg Mockrauer, oddly given the surname of his mother’s former husband.
In 1892 in Posen, Elly married a lawyer, Adolf Landsberg (1861-1940), who came from a family of distinguished scholars and rabbis. Elly went on to become a lawyer. She lived in Naumburg Saale, Germany during the war, and was deported first to the Theresienstadt Ghetto in Czechoslovakia, then moved to Auschwitz, where she was murdered on May 15, 1944.
In response to why Maria might have survived the Holocaust when multiple members of her family did not, my cousin sent, among other things, what turned out to be an “Einwohnermeldekarte” (resident registration card) or “Einwohner-meldezettel” (resident registration form) for Maria and her husband. Having never seen one of these cards, I asked about its origin, and my cousin explained that each city historically kept these records for their residents. With recent changes in European laws, these police records must be digitized for individuals born at least 120 years ago and made available at no cost to the public. Poznan, Poland happens to be one of those jurisdictions which has automated these resident registration cards, but each city and country is moving at its own pace.
Polish databases, for me, are notoriously difficult to navigate. I had the incredibly good fortune to find detailed English instructions on how to use these digitized population records for the city of Poznań (Posen), so for any readers with ancestors born there at least 120 years ago, here is the link.
Readers may rightly wonder where some of the specific vital data included in the table above comes from, so using the digitized Posen population records, I’ll give three examples.
The resident registration card for Alexander “Axel” Pohlmann and Maria Pauly, mentioned above, records their marriage as 30th September 1901. (Figure 29) A photo given to me by Andi Pauly of Axel and Maria’s wedding is captioned with the date 1902 (Figure 30), so the resident registration card provides an opportunity to precisely date the event.
Three resident registration cards can be found among the Posen population records for Josef and Rosalie Pauly and their nine children; as readers may be able to discern, for at least some of the children, their date of birth and place and date of marriage are shown. (Figures 31a-c)
And, finally, the resident registration form for Adolf and Gertrud Wachsmann, friends of the Pauly’s, provides Adolf’s date and place of birth and their date and place of marriage, all previously unknown facts now firmly “anchored” with reference to a historic document. (Figure 32)
In conclusion, in the absence of surviving personal papers, it is very difficult to properly commemorate victims of the Holocaust who led fulfilled lives which were abruptly terminated by the Nazis. Still, I feel a need to at least speak their names, show their faces, where possible, and acknowledge their existence using what scant evidence can be found to show they were once living beings.
REFERENCE
Bergman, W. Dieter
1995 Between Two Benches. California Publishing Co. San Francisco, CA
