One of my readers questioned whether Wilhelm Prinz von Hessen-Philippsthal-Barchfeld (1905-1942), Reinhard Heydrich’s doppelgänger in the group photo taken at Castle Kamenz in Silesia (today: Kamieniec Ząbkowicki, Poland) in 1936/37, was ever a member of the Schutzstaffel or SS. The implication is that if Wilhelm von Hessen was not a member, he could not have been photographed in an SS uniform at Castle Kamenz, ergo it’s not him. Both the reader who furnished the picture as well as the reader who questioned the identification of Reinhard Heydrich agree that the person is wearing a black SS uniform.
As I very explicitly stated in Post 157, I have no expertise in German military uniforms. Even comparing them to known military outfits of the SS and the Wehrmacht, I’m unable to tell which German military service uniform Wilhelm von Hessen is wearing at the gathering at Castle Kamenz. More on this below.
As to whether Wilhelm von Hessen was a member of the SS, and, if so, when he joined, I turned to two German authorities for help. Let me explain what I’ve learned from them.
At the Berlin State Archives there exists a list of members of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSDAP), the Nazi Party, who were members of the royal houses. Wilhelm Prinz von Hessen-Philippsthal-Barchfeld’s name can be found on this roster. (Figure 1)
The unseen column headings from this list of aristocrats who were members of the Nazi Party and the information specific to Wilhelm von Hessen read as follows:
Separately, my contacts also found “Prinz von Hessen Wilh.,” as he is referred to, listed in the so-called Dienstalterslisten der SS, the SS seniority list. This is proof that he was indeed a member of the SS.
In the process of determining whether Wilhelm von Hessen belonged to the SS, I learned a trivial but astonishing fact. Of the total 648 high-ranking SS officers (i.e., from Standartenführer (colonel) upwards) in 1938, 58 of them or 8.95% were of aristocratic origin. (A Standartenführer was a Nazi Party paramilitary rank used by the SS and other Nazi paramilitary organizations who commanded a unit equivalent to an army battalion consisting of between 300 and 500 men.) This could explain why several high-ranking Nazis were photographed at Castle Kamenz in 1936/37.
Below, I attach the relevant excerpts from the Dienstalterslisten for the four years, 1934-1937, in which his name appears, and discuss and explain as best I can the information that can be gleaned, including the SS service units he served in.
Prinz von Hessen Wilhelm’s party number “1 187 621” is again shown on the SS seniority list, but in a separate column his SS member number, “52 711,” is now indicated. Wilhelm von Hessen joined the SS as a SS-Sturmführer on the 20th of April 1934. Sturmführer was a paramilitary rank of the Nazi Party which began as a title used by the Sturmabteilung (SA) in 1925 and became an actual SA rank in 1928. Translated as “storm leader or assault leader,” the origins of the rank dated to the World War I when the title of Sturmführer came to be used.
In 1934 Prinz von Hessen Wilhelm was a member of the service unit abbreviated as “F. Mo. II/27.” “F.” is short for Führer, while “Mo. Sta.” stands for “Motorstaffel,” or motorized squadron. Thus, it appears that in 1934 he was head of the motor assault team of “II Sturmbann of Standarte 27.” Let me try and explain what this means. Bear in mind I know virtually nothing about the organization of the SS.
The number of soldiers in a motorized squadron is unknown but was possibly only a few men. Standarte was a regimental sized unit of the SS. (more on this below) Sturmbann (Sturmbann – Wikipedia) refers to an “assault unit,” and was a paramilitary unit within the Nazi Party. As previously mentioned, the term originated from German shock troop units used during World War I who were characterized by their aggressive tactics and were often at the forefront of assaults. Putting this together suggests Wilhelm von Hessen was the motorized squadron leader of the second assault unit of Standarte 27.
The 1934 Dienstaltersliste is one source of the information in German Wikipedia on Wilhelm von Hessen’s service unit.
The number of column headings in the 1935 Dienstaltersliste was expanded to two side-by-side pages. The previously referred to rank of Sturmführer was now referred to as an Untersturmführer. A SS-Untersturmführer was the first commissioned SS officer rank, equivalent to a second lieutenant in other military organizations.
Translated, the left-hand page columns included the following information:
“Consecutive number”
“Surname & first name”
“Epee”
“Ring”
“SA sports badge”
“Reich sports badge”
“Service”
“Nazi Party Number 1-1,800,000”
“Nazi Party Number over 1,800,000”
“SS Number”
“Date of birth”
Several of the columns above refer to orders and decorations awarded during World War I by the German Empire, then later by the Nazis.
The right-hand page columns included the expanded list of SS paramilitary ranks, under which the date the soldier attained that rank is shown:
From the 1935 Dienstaltersliste, we learn that Wilhelm von Hessen was promoted to an SS-Obersturmführer on the 9th of November 1934. A SS-Obersturmführer was typically a junior company commander in charge of fifty to a hundred men.
Then on the 20th of April 1935 he was promoted to an SS-Hauptsturmführer. This rank was a mid-level commander who had equal seniority to a captain (Hauptmann) in the German Army and the equivalency of captain in foreign armies. (Figure 4)
By 1935 Wilhelm von Hessen was now attached to the “6 Mo. Sta.,” believed to mean that he was then part of the “6 Motor-Standarte.” Again, the number of soldiers in this motorized squadron is unknown. Also unclear is whether the “6 Motor-Standarte” equates to the 6th SS-Standarte.
According to the Dienstalterslisten, Wilhelm von Hessen was assigned to new units in both 1936 and 1937. In 1936, he had a position in the “Stammabt. Bez. 14.” “Stammabt.” stands for “Stammabteilung,” which was a unit of the so-called Allgemeine SS (more on this below) in which men older than 45 years of age or SS members no longer fit for service were grouped together. These “Stammabteilung” were in turn divided into “Bezirke” or districts. Wilhelm von Hessen’s assignment to this organizational unit is puzzling since in 1936 he was only 31 years old and had no known physical disabilities. Perhaps he served in an administrative capacity in this service?
By 1937 Wilhelm von Hessen was no longer with the Stammabt. Bez. 14. but had been reassigned to the SS Abschnitt XXVII. This unit had originally been established in November 1933, but by October 1936 had been reorganized. SS-Abschnitt XXVII was primarily an administrative and organizational unit within the Allgemeine SS. It did not directly engage in major military campaigns or operations, but instead was focused on overseeing SS activities, recruitment, and coordination within its designated area. While the unit was not involved in combat, SS Abschnitt XXVII played an essential role in supporting the Nazi regime and its ideology.
Let me explain two things I mentioned above, namely, the Allgemeine SS and the Standarte.
Both of my informants explained something that has been a source of confusion for me, namely, Wilhelm von Hessen’s membership in the SS while also serving as an officer in the Wehrmacht, the unified armed forces of Nazi Germany from 1935 to 1945. Wilhelm was a member of the so-called “General SS,” or Allgemeine SS which was the administrative and the non-combative part of the SS. This is not to be confused with the Waffen-SS which was the combat branch of the Nazi Party’s paramilitary Schutzstaffel organization.
Additionally, Wilhelm von Hessen apparently joined the Wehrmacht as an officer candidate in 1935 (i.e., “Krad 2” in Eisenach, Germany). Thus, he also embarked on a military career. According to one authority, until the outbreak of war in 1939, it was possible for a German to belong to both the SS and the Wehrmacht.
Supporting this, in Wikipedia, under the discussion about the Allgemeine SS the following sentence is tucked in: “SS members could also hold reserve commissions in the regular military as well as a Nazi Party-political rank.” Thus, as it relates to Wilhelm von Hessen, he could have been a member of the non-combative part of the SS, the Allgemeine SS, and worn an SS uniform, but also had a commission in the Wehrmacht, thus separately worn their outfit. And this seems to be supported by the fact that in the photo of him at Castle Kamenz he is in his black SS uniform but in another photo from the same period he is wearing his Wehrmacht uniform. (Figure 7)
Relatedly, another reference in German Wikipedia under Allgemeine SS states the following: “In 1939, the Allgemeine SS reached is pre-war peak with more than 260,000 members. During the second World War (1939-1945), around 60 percent of their members (around 160,000) served in the Wehrmacht (Army, Air Force, Navy) and around 36,000 in the ranks of the Waffen-SS.”
Putting this in context is another quote from Wikipedia under the discussion for the 6th SS-Standarte: “When World War II began in 1939, the Berlin SS regiment slowly began losing its members to regular military service, since mustering Allgemeine-SS personnel were not exempt from conscription.” Quite simply, then, as the war began and as Germany’s fortunes changed, members of the Allgemeine-SS began to be conscripted into the Waffen-SS and the Wehrmacht.
As discussed in Post 157, in the 1936/37 group photo Wilhelm von Hessen is wearing the letter “M” on his collar tab. This is the badge of the Motor-Standarten of the SS. As previously mentioned, according to the Dienstaltersliste der SS for 1935, he was a member of the 6.Motor-Standarte. The SS-Standarte was the primary regimental-sized unit of the Allgemeine-SS. There were 127 SS-Standarten although by 1945 most existed only on paper never reaching their prescribed strength.
The Standarten regiments each had their own number, but were also referred to by other names, such as location, a popular name, or an honorary title. After Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, the 6th SS-Standarte, for example, adopted the honor title of “Charlottenburg” and often participated in several major Nazi Party rallies held in the German capitol.
From German Wikipedia, I know that Wilhelm fought in WWII as a tank officer (i.e., Captain of the Reserve) and deployed with the 2nd SS Panzer Division in Poland and France, including at Dunkirk; he then fought in Greece and Romania before being killed in the spring of 1942 in Russia. Since the 2nd SS Panzer Division was an armored division of the Waffen-SS, this suggests Wilhelm transitioned to the combat branch of the SS at some point and presumably was a member of the Waffen-SS when he was killed.
In closing, I was able to determine through primary source documents that Wilhelm von Hessen joined the Nazi Party in 1932, the SS in 1934, and was part of the non-combative arm of the SS, the Allgemeine SS, for some period. Simultaneously in 1935, Wilhelm apparently joined the Wehrmacht. However, by the time WWII started in 1939, he was a member of the 2nd SS Panzer Division, one of the armored divisions of the Waffen-SS, suggesting he died fighting for the SS.
None of the new information I obtained and discussed changes my assessment that Wilhelm Prinz von Hessen-Philippsthal-Barchfeld (1905-1942) is the individual pictured in the group photo taken at Castle Kamenz in 1936/37.
Note: In this post, I discuss the process I went through to confirm that I’d incorrectly identified the sinister Nazi Reinhard Heydrich in a group photo taken in 1936/1937 at Castle Kamenz (Kamieniec Ząbkowicki, Poland). To prove this to my satisfaction, I made use of an AI-powered tool.
An astute reader recently informed me the person I had identified in Posts 133, Parts I & II, as Reinhard Heydrich (Figure 1), the Nazi’s notorious “Butcher of Prague,” in a group photo taken at Castle Kamenz in Silesia (today: Kamieniec Ząbkowicki, Poland) in 1936/37 (Figure 2) is not him. The picture in question was originally sent to me by a very reliable informant claiming a noted scholar had recognized Reinhard.
The German gentleman who questioned the identification is a physics teacher in Dresden with an avid interest in history, particularly German military history up to 1918. The man grew up in Gotha in the former German Democratic Republic or East Germany. According to the reader, Reinhard Heydrich’s doppelgänger is Wilhelm Prinz von Hessen-Philippsthal-Barchfeld (1905-1942), and he sent me a link to a photo of him in his military ensemble as well as his bio. (Figure 3) He claims that in the group picture Wilhelm von Hessen, who was head of a “Motor-Sturmbann” of the SS-Standarte 27, is seen wearing his military uniform with the collar tabs “M” for Motor-Sturmbann; even on the highest resolution picture of this gathering, I have difficulty distinguishing the collar tabs.
Since this is my blog the responsibility for fact checking the accuracy of the information I publish in my posts ultimately rests on my shoulders. Given the lengths I’ve gone to caution readers about cloning vital data from other people’s ancestral trees without sourcing the primary documents and verifying their accuracy, I decided I needed to take a similarly rigorous approach in determining whether the amateur historian is accurate.
Let me explain to readers who Wilhelm von Hessen was and whether it is even conceivable he could have been photographed at Castle Kamenz at the time the picture was taken. In 1936/37 Castle Kamenz was owned by Friedrich Heinrich von Preußen (1874-1940) (Figure 4) shown elegantly attired and seated in the front row of the group picture, second from the left. His younger brother was Friedrich Wilhelm von Preussen (1880-1925) (Figure 5) who obviously was not in attendance since he had died prematurely about a dozen years earlier.
Friedrich Wilhelm was a member of the House of Hohenzollern and a great-grandson of King Frederick William III of Prussia. He was married to Princess Agatha of Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst from Ratibor & Corvey (1888-1960) (Figure 6), seated as a widow in the center of the front row (Figure 7); together they had four daughters. (Figure 8) The third daughter, Princess Marianne von Preußen (1913-1983) was married to Wilhelm von Hessen. Thus, based on family connections, it is entirely plausible that he attended the family gathering at Castle Kamenz in 1936/37.
Obviously, the individuals in attendance at the gathering at Castle Kamenz are unidentified though some are familiar to the reader who furnished the group picture. I’m not entirely positive but think Princess Marianne von Preußen is standing in the second row, the third person from the left dressed in white. Though Friedrich Wilhelm and Princess Agatha’s four daughters were born between 1911 and 1919, as young women they are often difficult to tell apart.
The reader who shared the original photo included side-by-side photos of Reinhard Heydrich and the man purported to be him in the group picture. (Figure 9) Given that Heydrich’s identity had putatively been confirmed, I did not compare the images as carefully as I should have when writing Posts 133, Parts I & II. Had I done so initially, I might have observed a few things that later triggered some doubts. First, I noticed in the picture that is assuredly of Heydrich that he had a narrower face, longer nose, and bigger ears than the individual on the right. Second, and this is much more impressionistic, the person in the group picture is broadly smiling, an attribute I would hardly associate with as sadistic an individual as Heydrich.
Trained as an archaeologist steeped in the scientific method, I was still not convinced the person in the group picture was Wilhelm von Hessen. Because the link sent to me by the amateur historian depicting Wilhelm in his military uniform was not conclusive (see Figure 3), I went in search of other pictures of him. Because Wilhelm came from a royal family and married into another royal family, I had the good fortune to find several of them on the Internet and in my own collection of photos.
The first high quality picture I found of Wilhelm von Hessen was taken at the marriage of one of his wife’s sisters, Princess Luise von Preußen (1912-1973) to Moritz Richard Bruno Wilhelm Schmaltz (1901-1983) on the 30th of November 1936, possibly at Castle Kamenz. (Figure 10) It shows Princess Agatha, her four daughters, three sons-in-law, and one grandson. On the very far right in this picture can be seen Princess Marianne von Preußen (1913-1983) and her husband Wilhelm von Hessen. Regrettably, comparing this image of Wilhelm von Hessen to the group photo again yields no definitive answer to the naked eye as to whether it was Wilhelm.
My Internet search continued. I found an undated group photo of Wilhelm von Hessen including him and his four siblings. (Figure 11) He is pictured fourth from the left but once more the evidence is not clear cut that he is the person in the group picture.
Finally, I had the good fortune to find in Geni a high-quality picture of Marianne von Preußen and Wilhelm von Hessen, possibly from around the time they were married on the 30th of January 1933 (Figure 13); at the time, Marianne would have been 20 years old and Wilhelm 28 years, the approximate ages they appear to be in the picture. A simple visual comparison of this image of Wilhelm to the person in the group photo left me fairly convinced they were the same person. I asked several friends who I know from previous experience are adept with visual comparisons, and they agree. Unfortunately, the reader who originally sent me the group photo disagrees.
While I have no expertise in this area, both readers agree the man in the 1936/37 group picture is wearing a Schutzstaffel or SS uniform. However, the informant who sent the group photo claims that Wilhelm von Hessen did not switch from the Wehrmacht to the SS (i.e., German soldiers could not be members of both units simultaneously) until right before the Nazi invasion of France on the 10th of May 1940. Unfortunately, I can’t independently verify when von Hessen joined the SS. On his 30th of November 1936 photo, Wilhelm von Hessen is supposedly wearing a Wehrmacht uniform. (Figure 14) Based on this apparent discrepancy, I theorize the group photo was taken in late 1936 or in 1937 after the November 1936 marriage, by which time Wilhelm von Hessen was then a member of the SS.
Having convinced myself that the amateur historian is correct that the person in the 1936/37 group picture is not Reinhard Heydrich but Wilhelm von Hessen, as a lark I decided to see whether I could find an artificial intelligence (AI) application which could strengthen my case. I found an AI-powered tool which allows me to do precisely what I was looking to do, namely, compare two faces to measure similarity. It is called “FaceShape” and below is the link to this tool:
I’m admittedly not adept at using new technology, so the attraction of FaceShape is that it’s supremely easy to use.
Juxtaposing the images of Reinhard Heydrich and that of the person in the group photo originally sent by the first reader yields a low probability of only 27.04% that they are the same individual. (Figure 15) By comparison when I compare the known image of Wilhelm von Hessen from his sister-in-law Princess Luise’s 1936 marriage to the person in the group photo, FaceShape claims a 100% probability they are the same person. (Figure 16) Another comparison that yielded a 100% match was Wilhelm von Hessen’s photo from his sister-in-law’s marriage to one of him in his military uniform. (Figure 17) Readers can see the results of the various other images I contrasted. (Figures 18-20)
Comparing the photos I found of Wilhelm von Hessen to one another, then to the person in the group picture from 1936/37, sets my mind at ease that it is indeed Wilhelm von Hessen. However, I want to be very clear with readers that FaceShape is not perfect. Based on some of the images I juxtaposed, the application obviously does not work well with poor resolution images; where the person in question is partially blocked by another individual; where siblings are involved that resemble one another or are of similar age; when known pictures of the same person are from earlier in life vs. later in life; or in distinguishing gender.
In closing, I would merely say that I consider FaceShape or similar AI-powered applications to be one tool in an arsenal that genealogists can use to further one’s research and possibly resolve thorny identification questions. It clearly requires human interpretation after the tool is applied to consider the question of whether the results are logical and make sense. While I may not have convinced the original reader that Reinhard Heydrich is not in the group photo taken at Castle Kamenz, I have proven to my satisfaction the person in question is Wilhelm von Hessen, not Heydrich.
Note: In Part I of this two-part post, I talk about a homosexual member of the royal House of Hohenzollern, Friedrich Heinrich Prinz von Preußen, whom I first introduced to readers in Post 64. I was recently contacted by his great-grand-nephew who sent me a historically significant group photo showing his relative in the presence of several high-ranking Nazis including Reinhard Heydrich, the principal architect of the Holocaust. Part I of this post lays the groundwork for a discussion on the story behind the photo.
It is hard to know how to begin a story where the protagonist, Reinhard Heydrich, was one of the darkest figures in the Nazi regime. Often referred to as “The Butcher of Prague,” he had other equally disquieting nicknames, “The Hangman,” “The Blond Beast,” “Himmler’s Evil Genius,” and the “Young Evil God of Death.” Even Adolf Hitler described him as “the man with the iron heart.”
Heydrich (Figure 1) was the founding head of the Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service, SD), an intelligence organization charged with seeking out and neutralizing resistance to the Nazi Party via arrests, deportations, and murders. He helped organize Kristallnacht, a series of coordinated attacks against Jews throughout Nazi Germany and parts of Austria on the 9th-10th of November 1938, and was also chief of the Reich Security Main Office (German: Reichssicherheitshauptamt, RSHA), including the Gestapo, Kripo, and the SD. Reinhard Heydrich, however, is perhaps best known for chairing the January 1942 Wannsee Conference, the summit which formalized the plans for the “Final Solution to the Jewish question,” that’s to say, the deportation and genocide of all Jews in German-occupied Europe. Simply put, Heydrich was the principal architect of the Holocaust.
Readers might justifiably theorize that members of my extended family were victims of the genocidal policies formulated by this sinister character, and they would be correct. It seems almost obscene to speak the names of my revered ancestors in the same breath as I utter the name of this horrifyingly wicked individual. Yet, given the tenuous and divisive times we are currently living through, I think it’s important to talk about despicable people from the past to provide context for equally vile individuals running around today who espouse similarly annihilative intentions. Such people and policies should not be permitted to spawn in darkness and anonymity.
I can best begin this post by reintroducing readers to Agnes Stieda née Vogel (b. 1927) (Figure 2), my cherished 95-year-old third cousin from Victoria, Canada. Regular followers know that she and her parents have been the subject of several earlier posts, and I refer readers to those publications. Agnes’ parents were Dr. Hans Vogel (1897-1973) and Susanne Vogel née Neisser (1899-1984). (Figure 3) The Nazis used the pejorative term “mischling” to denote persons of mixed “Aryan” and non-Aryan ancestry, such as Agnes, who was half-Jewish. The Nazis applied a lot of pressure on their Aryan population to divorce their Jewish spouses, but in the case of Dr. Vogel he refused their exhortations.
Suse Vogel was a prolific writer. (Figure 4) Memories of her father, Dr. Ernst Neisser, and his final days were the subject of Post 48, while her 1944-1945 wartime diary was the basis for Post 86. Rather than summarize her recollections, I refer subscribers to my previous posts.
“From 1925 until 1932, Dr. Vogel worked as an art historian. He was a volunteer at the Kunstgewerbemuseum in Leipzig; established an art and local history museum in Zeulenroda in the state of Thuringia; was an assistant at the Städtisches Museum in Moritzburg; and was a lecturer for art history and a librarian at the Staatliche Kunstakademie in Kassel; after the Kunstakademie closed in 1932, he worked as a “wissenschaftlicher Hilfsarbeiter,” an unpaid scientific assistant, at the Gemäldegalerie and Landesmuseum in Kassel. In 1934, Dr. Vogel’s continued employment at the museum in Kassel was no longer possible because of his so-called ‘mixed marriage’ to Agnes’s Jewish or ‘non-Aryan’ mother, Susanne Vogel née Neisser. Between 1934 and 1935, while trying in vain to emigrate, he managed to secure a grant to inventory the building content and art collection of the Hohenzollern in Sigmaringen in southwestern Germany. This work caught the attention of Friedrich Heinrich Prinz von Preußen, who was a Prussian officer and member of the House of Hohenzollern and led to a project in 1936 cataloging the Prince’s library and copperplate collection; by 1937 though Dr. Vogel was relegated to a clerical position in the property of the Prince.”
As I further discussed in Post 64, Agnes has fond memories of Friedrich Heinrich Prinz von Preußen (1874-1940) (Figure 5) because he and his relatives protected her family and provided employment for her father during World War II. Friedrich Heinrich studied law at Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, and upon graduation joined the military. (Figure 6) However, in early 1907 he was relieved from the military because of his homosexuality. He was excluded from the Prussian army for this reason, but at the beginning of WWI he was once again allowed to become a soldier, but only at the rank of Gefreiter, basically a Private First Class, with no opportunity for promotion.
In late 1906, Friedrich Heinrich was nominated by Kaiser Wilhelm II as Lord Master of the Order of St. John or the Johanniter Order (German: Johanniterorden) as the successor to his late father, Prinz Albrecht von Preußen (1837-1906) (Figure 7), who’d died earlier that year; the Johanniter Order is the religious order of the House of Hohenzollern, the dynasty to which Friedrich Heinrich belonged. The poorly kept secret of Friedrich’s homosexuality, however, caused him to ask the Kaiser to withdraw his nomination, which he did. His secret eventually became public, so upon the advice of contemporaries, he left Berlin, eventually withdrawing to his estates in Kamenz [today:Kamieniec Ząbkowicki, Poland] (Figure 8) and Seitenberg [today: Stronie Śląskie, Poland] (Figure 9) in Lower Silesia where Dr. Vogel would later work for him.
Until recently, the above was the extent of my knowledge of Friedrich Heinrich’s life. However, as has been happening with increasing frequency of late, I’ve learned more about multiple people I’ve written about over the years, including Prince Friedrich. On the 7th of March, through my blog’s Webmail, I received a fascinating email from a German gentleman living in the United States named Peter Albrecht von Preußen (Figure 10); astonishingly, he explained that Friedrich Heinrich was his “second great uncle” (i.e., great-great-uncle).
Peter stumbled upon Post 64, and obviously interested in the subject, sent me a unique group photo showing Friedrich Heinrich and a handful of high-ranking Nazis, including Reinhard Heydrich, taken in 1936 or 1937 at Prince Friedrich’s estate in Silesia. I will get into a prolonged discussion about this exceptional image in Part II of this post but in Part I, I will discuss some other things Peter mentioned in his various emails that eventually provided the context for the cataloguing work that Dr. Hans Vogel was doing for the von Preußen family at their estates in Silesia.
There are multiple levels on which the current story intersects with topics I have previously discussed, so splitting the current post into two installments makes sense.
As a brief aside, soon after being contacted by Peter Albrecht, I asked him whether any of his relatives had lived in Ratibor, erroneously assuming that the Bruck’s “Prinz von Preußen” Hotel had previously been owned by a member of his House of Hohenzollern. Peter explained that it was not uncommon for the use of the family name, e.g., von Preußen, Prinz von Preußen, Prinz Albrecht Hotel, etc. to be licensed to business owners for a small annual fee. This is an early example of a franchise.
The Weimar Republic, officially named the German Reich, was the historical interval of Germany from the 9th of November 1918 to the 23rd of March 1933, during which Germany was a constitutional federal republic for the first time in its history. At the time, Friedrich Heinrich Prinz von Preußen owed back taxes to the German Reich. To pay them, in 1926 he agreed to rent the government the Prinz-Albrecht-Palais in Berlin, the palace the family once owned in the present-day Kreuzberg district of the city that was destroyed during World War II. This was a Rococo city palace in the historic Friedrichstadt suburb of Berlin built between 1737 and 1739 and acquired by the royal House of Hohenzollern in 1772. (Figures 11-12)
With Hitler’s take over of power in 1933, the arrangement that Prince Friedrich had with the Weimar Republic was annulled and Friedrich Heinrich once again took possession of the Prinz-Albrecht-Palais that year. One of Prince Friedrich’s younger brothers and Peter Albrecht von Preußen’s great-grandfather, Joachim Albrecht von Preußen (1876-1939), moved into the palace as the sole occupant. However, in 1934 the German government, now the National Socialists, again sued Prince Friedrich for the back taxes that he still owed. Friedrich Heinrich, however, had contacts with certain homosexual members of the SS, the Schutzstaffel, the Nazi organization most responsible for the genocidal murder of the estimated 5.5 to 6 million Jews and millions of other victims during the Holocaust. Accordingly, he was able to cut a deal with Reinhard Heydrich to again lease the Palais to the government, and the Nazis’ lawsuit ended. Peter’s great-grandfather moved into an apartment that Peter’s grandfather, Friedrich Karl Erich Albrecht von Preußen (1901-1976), Erich Albrecht for short (Figure 13), rented for him on the same block where he operated his car rental business.
Some further explanation regarding Friedrich Heinrich’s association with the gay community is useful. It is not my intention to reveal salacious details to readers about Prince Friedrich’s homosexual lifestyle, but rather to provide some relevant context which happens to be engrossing. Within the family, Friedrich Heinrich’s nickname was “Uncle Freddy.” He was known in Berlin’s gay community as “Straps Harry,” with “Straps” referring in German to garter belt stockings; as a cross-dresser he had an obsession for wearing these with French high heels.
Following the death of Friedrich Heinrich’s father, Friedrich Wilhelm Nikolaus Albrecht (1837-1906) (Figure 14), Friedrich Heinrich would throw lavish parties at the Prinz-Albert-Palais. Even though these events took place in the throes of the Victorian age which placed severe restrictions on the liberty of certain groups and occurred at a time when homosexuality was outlawed, because Friedrich Heinrich was a member of the House of Hohenzollern, there was nothing the Berlin police could do. Because of his ability and willingness to openly flaunt public norms and engage in what was tantamount to illegal activity, according to Peter Albrecht, Prince Friedrich was a “legend for gay rights,” even within the American gay community and even to this day. (Figure 15)
In the early through mid-1920s, Friedrich Heinrich allowed members of the so-called “Organization Consul” to use his estate in Kamenz for live fire and hand grenade exercises. (Figure 16) Wikipedia describes this organization as “. . . an ultra-nationalist and anti-Semitic terrorist organization that operated in the Weimar Republic from 1920 to 1922. It was formed by members of the disbanded Freikorps group Marine Brigade Ehrhardt and was responsible for political assassinations that had the ultimate goal of destroying the Republic and replacing it with a right-wing dictatorship.” While the group was technically banned by the Weimar Republic in 1922, live fire exercises apparently were not disallowed by the government until around 1926 so continued at Kamenz until then. It was around this time, that many members of the Consul joined the SS/SA and the Nazi Party. Friedrich Heinrich’s connections to the Nazi Party, specifically to its gay members, stem to this period.
Knowing that Friedrich Heinrich had protected Dr. Hans Vogel’s Jewish family, I wondered about Prince Friedrich’s support of an organization that Wikipedia characterizes as “anti-Semitic.” I asked Peter Albrecht about this, and he explained that between roughly 1948 and 1953, the U.S. Government started a full-blown investigation into the history of the Organization Consul. According to Peter, the study “revealed a staunch anti-armistice [i.e., Versailles Treaty] sentiment but wrote or documented very little about anti-Semitic motives within the organization.” It appears the assassinations were targeted at politicians who had signed or helped negotiate the Versailles Treaty, rather than at any members of the Jewish community. Peter stressed there’s no knowledge that Friedrich Heinrich was anti-Semitic, rather the opposite. However, what is clear is that he was a stalwart supporter of any group which opposed the Versailles Treaty.
One other thing is worth mentioning. The Organization Consul consisted of 5,000 or more members, and, likely, those of its members who were committed anti-Semites later joined the various Nazi organizations and were involved in the implementation of the “Final Solution.”
Let me resume the story. There is a relevant entry in Wikipedia under the history of the Prinz-Albrecht-Palais about the period after the palace was leased by the Nazis:
“The last chapter in the Palais’ history began after the Nazi Machtergreifung in 1933. In May, the headquarters of the newly established Gestapo secret police moved into a neighbouring building around the corner on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. When in 1934 the Sicherheitsdienst intelligence agency of the Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler took control over the Gestapo, Sicherheitsdienst chief Reinhard Heydrich moved from Munich to the Berlin Prinz-Albrecht-Palais. In 1935 also the neighbouring buildings at 101 Wilhelmstrasse and 103/104 Wilhelmstrasse were taken over and integrated into the large complex, which in 1939 became the main administrative seat of the SS-Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA).”
As a related aside, in a previous post, Post 131, I discussed the apartment where Curt and Elsa Glaser lived, displayed their extensive art collection, and held their regular art salons. It was located on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse in the same building later confiscated by the Gestapo for use as their headquarters and was one reason the Glasers were evicted from their residence.
After the Nazis leased the Prinz-Albrecht-Palais from Peter’s ancestors, it required the entire household of the Palais to be moved to the family estate in Kamenz. Peter Albrecht’s grandfather (see Figure 13), the most practical member of the family according to Peter, orchestrated the move. It was accomplished between October and December 1934, and involved the use of an armed 10-ton truck to move the valuable items during multiple trips, and several railroad box cars to move the rest of the belongings; on the receiving end, Friedrich Heinrich’s employees from his forestry operations unloaded the box cars. By the beginning of 1935, the complete inventory of two large castles, which had accumulated since approximately 1830, were stored in the basement in Kamenz.
Clearly, Friedrich Heinrich needed someone like Dr. Hans Vogel to assist in inventorying the valuable items and art work after Prince Friedrich’s bookkeepers had tallied the household items and furniture. This was a time-consuming operation since more than 50 tons of artwork needed to be catalogued. Suse Vogel, Dr. Vogel’s wife, indicates her husband stayed in the castle in Seitenberg, but Peter thinks this would have been impractical because the 20-miles between Kamenz and Seitenberg was connected by a cobblestone road that would have taken an hour of travel each way. There would have been ample accommodation for Dr. Vogel in Kamenz since Prince Friedrich had converted 50 of the 100 or so rooms in the castle to apartments with full baths, telephones, radio, electricity, and steam heat.
The circumstances of Dr. Vogel’s living arrangements and ongoing relationship with the von Preußen family are clarified in Suse Vogel’s diary. Friedrich Heinrich had an estate building in Seitenberg [today: Stronie Śląskie, Poland] which was his office and served as the headquarters of his brewery, vineyard, and forestry/agricultural operations. The prince’s primary residence was the castle in Kamenz [today: Kamieniec Ząbkowicki, Poland]. (For reference, Kamenz is approximately 373 miles northeast of Munich, Germany. (Figure 17))
Dr. Vogel had an apartment in the Castle Kamenz until the death of Friedrich Heinrich in November 1940 of prostate cancer. Upon Friedrich Heinrich’s death, his second cousin Prinz Waldemar von Preußen (1889-1945) purchased both Kamenz and Seitenberg from the community of heirs, consisting of Friedrich’s nephew and four nieces, along with 90 percent of the collections. (Figures 18-19) As a matter of interest, Prinz Waldemar was the nephew of the last German Kaiser, Wilhelm II. (Figure 20) In any case, Prince Waldemar relocated Dr. Hans Vogel to the Seitenberg estate following the death of his second cousin while Hans continued to catalog the von Preußen collection.
Suse Vogel provides a precise date in her diary when the von Preußen family and the German community evacuated Kamenz and the surrounding towns, the 11th of April 1945. This corresponds with the same week that the Soviet Red Army overran Breslau [today: Wrocław, Poland] and was closing in on Kamenz. The Vogel family fled to Berlin, while Prince Waldemar and his kin left for Bavaria; the Prince died there in 1945 of a blood disease.
The castle was looted and set ablaze by the arriving Soviet troops and then, what remained, was looted by the newly transferred Polish inhabitants. (Figure 21) Ultimately, the Polish government removed the remaining marble from the castle, and as with the Bruck’s “Prinz von Preußen” Hotel, transferred it to Warsaw to be used for the reconstruction of buildings there. In the case of the marble stripped from the castle in Kamenz, it was used to construct the Congress Hall at the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw. (Figure 22)
The von Preußen mausoleum at Castle Kamenz was desecrated by the newly arriving Poles with the burials disinterred. (Figures 23a-b) Fortunately, an honorable Polish citizen ended things before they got too out of hand and reburied the remains in the forest near the castle, carefully noting their location on a map. Before this concerned citizen died, he gave his map to the President of the local historical society, and in 2017, the City of Kamenz and the Catholic Church of Poland exhumed the graves and held a funeral service at the reconsecrated mausoleum. The European Union has provided funding for the rebuilding of the castle which is being overseen by the City of Kamenz.
This concludes Part I of this post. Part II will involve a discussion of the group photograph sent to me by Peter Albrecht showing his great-great-uncle Friedrich Heinrich von Preußen and the high-ranking Nazis who visited the Castle Kamenz in 1936 or 1937.
NOTE: In this post I examine the history of the Mennonites in the Vistula River delta in northern Poland, and my father’s interactions with them when he was a dentist in Tiegenhof which at the time was part of the Free City of Danzig. I also discuss why the historically pacifistic Mennonites went from fleeing the Netherlands, Flanders, and modern-day northern Germany in the mid-16th century to avoid religious persecution to becoming among Hitler’s staunchest supporters four centuries later.
The Dutch and Flemish Mennonites have lived in the Żuławy Wiślane, the alluvial delta area of the Vistula River in the northern part of Poland (Figure 1), for over 400 years. They came to Poland in the 16th century as refugees fleeing religious persecution in the Netherland, Flanders, and modern-day northern Germany.
Mennonites are a branch of the Christian church, with roots in the radical wing of the 16th century Protestant Reformation. Mennonites are part of the group known as Anabaptists who took their name from Menno Simons, a Roman Catholic priest who left the Church in 1536 and became a leader within the Anabaptism movement. Anabaptism is the doctrine that baptism should only be administered to believing adults, held by a radical Protestant sect that emerged during the 1520s and 1530s.
The first Mennonites came mainly from Swiss and German roots, with many of the important martyrs of the early church coming from the area around Zurich. The Low Countries regions of Friesland (i.e., province of the Netherlands located in the country’s northern part) and Flanders (i.e., the Flemish-speaking northern portion of Belgium), as well as Eastern Frisia (i.e., a historic region in the northwest of Lower Saxony, Germany) and Holstein (i.e., the southern half of Schleswig-Holstein, the northernmost state of Germany) became the center of the Mennonites. Religious persecution in the Low Countries under Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, 3rd Duke of Alba (1507-1582) forced many Mennonites to leave in the 16th century.
Historically, Mennonites have been known as one of the peace churches due to their commitment to pacifism. The majority of the early Mennonite followers, rather than fighting, fled to neighboring states where the ruling families were tolerant of their beliefs. In the 16th century Poland was among the most tolerant kingdoms in Europe.
The Mennonites, like the Amish who separated from them in the late 1600’s, represent the strictest branches of Protestantism. The Amish are widely known for their plain dress and rejection of modern technology and conveniences. Unlike the Mennonites, they form an exclusive and tight-knit community. Mennonites generally are not culturally separatist.
Żuławy Wiślane, the region in now-northern Poland where the Mennonites settled, covers about 386 square miles or 1000 square km. Historically the area was an estuary of the Vistula (Figure 2), Poland’s longest river which empties into the Baltic Sea. The arduous process of reclaiming the land from the sea began in the 14th century. This involved building hundreds of canals, miles of dikes, and networks of pumps and locks which allowed for the removal of water and the gradual drainage of the Żuławy territory. A good deal of this work was accomplished by the Mennonites who then built thriving communities across the Vistula delta.
According to an article in Wikipedia, entitled the “Vistula delta Mennonites,” the first Anabaptist reported in the area was in 1526 in Marienburg [today: Malbork, Poland] (Figure 3), a mere 15.6 miles south of Tiegenhof [today: Nowy Dwor Gdanski, Poland]. The first Mennonites from the Netherlands and Flanders arrived in Danzig [today: Gdansk, Poland] in the 1530’s. (Figure 4) As Poland’s principal seaport, Danzig played an important role in the grain trade with the Low Countries.
Menno Simons, founder of the Mennonites, is reported to have visited Danzig in 1549, and by 1569 the first Mennonite Church was founded in the city. Soon about 1,000 Mennonites lived in the city. While Mennonites were allowed to freely practice their faith, the Danzig city council refused to grant them the status of citizens; this situation remained unchanged until the city itself was annexed by the Kingdom of Prussia in 1793 in the Second Partition of Poland. The Vistula delta and the Danzig suburbs had already become part of the Kingdom of Prussia in 1772 after the First Partition of Poland, at which time more than 12,000 Mennonites lived in Prussian territory.
Only men who had served in the Prussian Army were allowed to purchase land; as conscientious objectors, Mennonites were subject to special charges, limiting their economic prospects. As a result, when Russian colonization agents sought to recruit settlers for the regions recently conquered from the Ottoman Empire following the Russo-Turkish War of 1768-1774, about 6,000 Mennonites, mostly from the Vistula delta, left for Russian Ukraine. These people formed the roots of the Russian Mennonites. The first Mennonite settlement in Russia, the Chortitza Colony, was founded by these emigrees in 1789; I touched on this topic in Post 112. The Mennonites who remained in the Vistula delta, however, became more and more assimilated, with some even willing to bear arms.
I will return briefly to the story of the Mennonites in the Vistula delta but let me provide some insight to readers for why I decided to go into such depth into this Protestant religion. I wrote in Post 5 that during the time that my father lived and worked in Tiegenhof he was friends with two women who lived in the same apartment building where he also rented an apartment and had his dental practice. The captions on his pictures identified the women as “Idschi” and “Suse” (Figure 5), and it was only when I found both their names in my father’s 1932 Day Planner with their surname and birthdays that I realized they were related and that their family name was “Epp.” In 2013, I would eventually track down their niece and grandniece in Lubeck, Germany, and learn they were respectively the youngest and oldest sisters of a large Mennonite family who were originally from Żuławy. While the sisters had a passing resemblance to one another, their age difference made it difficult to determine whether they were related.
Among my father’s pictures, there are multiple images of him shown socializing with Idschi and Suse Epp. A particularly interesting sequence of photographs (Figure 6) was taken in Stutthof, then part of the Free City of Danzig [today: Sztutowo, Poland], when my father had clearly been invited to an Epp family get-together. From Idschi and Suse’s grandniece, I learned that one of their brothers was also pictured. His name was Gerhard Epp. Much more on him later.
In researching the history of the Mennonites in the Vistula delta for this Blog post, I happened upon a series of articles written by a Dr. Ben Goossen, a Harvard University professor who has written extensively about Hitler’s Mennonite supporters. I was particularly intrigued in learning why people who were traditionally pacifists would be attracted to Hitler. In an article from October 2021 entitled “Hitler’s Mennonite Voters,” Dr. Goossen explains:
“Two factors made Danzig’s Mennonites particularly susceptible to Hitler’s project. First, members saw themselves as part of a global religious denomination they viewed as vulnerable to atheist communism. Since the eighteenth century, thousands of Mennonites had emigrated from the Danzig area to Imperial Russia. Although nationalist pressure convinced Danzig’s Mennonites to abandon pacifist teachings, they retained ties to pacifist coreligionists abroad. After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Mennonites in the Soviet Union faced hardships. Their relatives in Danzig welcomed Hitler’s anti-Bolshevism and his antisemitism. The Führer blamed Soviet atrocities on a fictional cabal he labeled as ‘Judeo-Bolshevism.’”
Another researcher, Alicia Good, in an article entitled “Unanswered Questions: Mennonite Participation in the Holocaust,” reinforces what Goossen tells us in this regard:
“Rempel makes the argument that the destruction of Mennonite church and community life in the Soviet Republic under Stalin was so destructive that not only did Mennonites abandon their peace theology, but they perceived Hitler’s invading forces as their liberators, thereby setting the stage for them to actively aid the Nazi agenda. Rempel describes the turbulence of the Russian Revolution: ‘Driven by fear and the predation of violent anarchists, many Mennonites in South Russia set aside their pacifist tradition and formed self-defense units to protect their homes and families against bandits and even the Red Army’ It was during this period that many Mennonites chose to leave behind their beliefs in nonviolence in order to fight a losing battle against the communists, who were perceived as a threat both because of their atheistic stance and their desire to abolish private ownership of property. Rempel infers that it was these initial violent actions which set a tragic precedent laying the foundations for the next generation of Mennonites to take up arms alongside the Nazis.”
According to Goossen, the second reason Danzig Mennonites were attracted to Nazism is that it appealed to their sense of aggrieved nationalism:
“Those who had given up pacifism and chosen not to emigrate adopted a strong German identity. They lamented Germany’s defeat in the First World War, and they reviled the 1919 Versailles Treaty, which became a nationalist punching bag. This treaty assigned guilt for World War I to Germany. It required steep reparations. And it split Danzig from Germany. The nineteen Mennonite congregations in eastern Germany, with 13,000 attendees, had once formed a united group. Versailles divided them between Germany, Poland, and the Free City (where 6,000 lived). Mennonite farmers further resented Danzig’s customs union with Poland.” (Goossen, 2021)
According to Dr. Goossen, during the 1930’s Mennonites became involved at every level of the Nazi Party in Danzig. For example, the second highest-ranking Nazi in Danzig, Otto Anders, was a Mennonite. Mennonite men joined the paramilitary Sturmabteilung (SA) and the Schutzstaffel (SS), while Mennonite women joined Nazi women’s organizations. While Mennonite men who became officers in the Nazi army typically left the church, rank-and-file members normally retained their church affiliation. Faith leaders in the church also became deeply Nazified, and according to Goossens, leaders from five of the seven Mennonite churches in the Free City of Danzig were party members.
Mennonites, who numbered only 1.5 percent of Danzig’s population, had an outsized effect in the Free City of Danzig. According to Dr. Goossen, in May 1933, Mennonites helped deliver Hitler the only country-wide majority he achieved in a free election; in the Free City of Danzig their ballots pushed the Nazis over the 50 percent threshold in the popular vote.
As Goossen further notes, “The historically pacifist Christian church disproportionately influenced Nazi rule in the Free City. During World War II, members became enmeshed in the Holocaust, staffing concentration camps, and using slave labor on their farms and in their factories. Prominent Nazis believed most Mennonites were ‘Aryan.’”
As to how Menno Simons, the founder of the Mennonites, might have felt about the alliance future generations of his followers made with Nazism, Goossen observes the following: “Four hundred years later, the Mennonites who helped to bring Nazism to Danzig were a theologically transformed group. Prior to the 1933 election, one preacher praised National Socialism to a ministerial assembly as ‘the only party which we as Mennonites can support.’ This viewpoint would have been anathema to this preacher’s own ancestors. Church historian C. Henry Smith, observing from across the Atlantic, rightly assessed that Danzig’s Mennonites strayed from their roots. ‘Menno Simons would find himself ill at ease, today, among his namesakes,’ Smith wrote, ‘were he to return to his familiar haunts around the Baltic.’ A time-travelling Menno Smith would soon be ‘in all likelihood, in a concentration camp.’”
Dr. Goossen has explained why Mennonites become Nazi collaborators. However, readers may wonder, as I did, what attracted or impressed the Nazis about Mennonites? It was certainly not the faith’s historic pacifism which the Nazis surely would not have emphasized. Turning again to Goossen, “The main strategy church officials deployed to ingratiate themselves with top Nazis involved claiming racial purity. Mennonites had supposedly kept their bloodlines ‘Aryan’ through centuries of intermarriage. German racial scientists had tested Mennonite populations in Danzig and agreed with this assessment. Faith leaders further sought to prove heritage by harvesting centuries-old data from church record books.” Simply put, the Nazis considered Mennonites to be unusually pure specimens of Aryanism.
Mennonites elevated racial status ultimately drew them into the Nazi’s orbit of crimes against humanity, as Goossen explains: “Hitler waged World War II as a race war. His soldiers conquered vast swaths of Eastern Europe to provide expanded ‘living space’ for the German people, whom the Nazis considered a ‘master race.’ The invaders and local collaborators seized property from Poles, Jews, and others. They distributed this plunder to members of the German racial elite and forced non-Germans into subservient positions. In Danzig, many Mennonites benefitted from robbery and slavery. For instance, SS officers at the Stutthof concentration camp, built in 1939, formed an entire labor commando with 500 inmates to serve a Mennonite arms manufacturer, Gerhard Epp.”
So, we come full circle to the first mention of Gerhard Epp (Figure 7), the brother of my father’s friends, the Mennonite sisters Suse and Idschi Epp. But it would not be the last as he was among the most prominent Mennonite collaborators.
Let me digress and briefly tell readers a little about the Stutthof concentration camp, located 21 miles (34 km) east of Danzig in the German-annexed Free City of Danzig. Opened in September of 1939, it was under the command of Heinrich Himmler’s SS and was at the time situated near the world’s largest Mennonite population. Stutthof was the first German concentration camp set up outside German borders in World War II, and was the last camp liberated by the Allies on the 9th of May 1945. It was originally set up as a concentration camp but was later utilized as a death camp equipped with a gas chamber and crematoria. Initially it housed Polish and Russian political prisoners, but soon became the destination for thousands of deported Jews. It is estimated that between 63,000 and 65,000 prisoners of Stutthof concentration camp and its subcamps died because of murder, starvation, epidemics, extreme labor conditions, brutal and forced evacuations, and a lack of medical attention. Some 28,000 of those who died were Jews. In total, as many as 110,000 people were deported to the camp during its existence, working under what were often brutal conditions.
Quoting again from Alicia Good as to how the Mennonites in the Żuławy region benefited from the proximity of the Stutthof concentration camp: “The Mennonite farmers and business owners in the Danzig region were not only aware of the existence of the concentration camp but they derived personal profit from its operations. Mennonite farms paid the camps to receive field laborers without payment for their labor and often for longer than the allotted 8-hour shifts to maximize profits. Mennonites who owned factories, such as Gerhard Epp (Figure 8), utilized the low-cost labor from concentration camps; Epp’s factory actually manufactured firearms for the Nazi war effort. Other Mennonite businesses profited by building and supplying the camps themselves. Since Mennonite attempts to show more sympathetic treatment of the workers was prohibited by the Nazis on the threat of the sympathizer being imprisoned in the camps, Mennonite arguments that their usage was to show mercy to the prisoners was unsustainable. Likewise, it cannot be reasonably claimed that the large Mennonite community did not know about the camps since they were actively profiting from this activity. Neither the presence of tens of thousands of people subjected to horrific conditions, nor the billowing smoke and ashes of the crematoria could have been denied by any Mennonites at Danzig or Stutthof who wanted to know the truth of what was happening in their backyard. Moreover, the presence of ethnically Mennonite names on the list of prison guards who were later convicted for their work at Stutthof demonstrates that at least some members of the Mennonite community themselves committed atrocities within the camp.”
In another article written by Dr. Ben Goossen in 2020 entitled “The Real History of the Mennonites and the Holocaust,” there is further mention of Gerhard Epp. From this article, we learn more about him through Goossen’s story of Mennonite war refugee Heinrich Hamm’s antisemitic and anti-Bolshevik involvement with Nazism. Some background about Hamm provides the framework for a further discussion of Gerhard Epp.
Heinrich Hamm was born in czarist Russia in 1894. During WWI he was a medic, though abandoned pacifism and took up arms against the communists during the Russian Revolution. Following the Bolshevik victory, Hamm lost his farm near the Ukrainian city of Zaporozhe, famous these days for the site of fighting between the Russians and the Ukrainians around Europe’s largest nuclear power plant. Following Stalin’s rise to power, Hamm moved to Dnepropetrovsk, and remained there following the Nazi invasion of 1941. However, with Germany’s reversal of fortunes on the Eastern Front, by early 1944 Hamm and his family abandoned the Ukraine and eventually settled in Stutthof, which as previously mentioned had a large and long-standing Mennonite population. Hamm and his family were among the first Mennonite refugees relocated from the Ukraine to Nazi-occupied Poland.
As Goossen notes, it was in Stutthof that Hamm met Gerhard Epp: “In Stutthof, Hamm became friendly with a prominent Mennonite businessman named Gerhard Epp. Prior to the First World War, Epp had worked in Russia, and he remained greatly interested in Mennonite coreligionists from the Soviet Union. Epp offered Hamm a job in a large machine factory he owned and operated—the same establishment that Hamm would later mention in the memo he wrote for MCC [i.e., Mennonite Central Committee] (see below), claiming he was coerced into providing cheap labor for greedy German war profiteers.” (Figures 9a-b)
Goossen later goes on to add, “Gerhard Epp served as a general contractor for camp [i.e., Stutthof], from which he leased hundreds of prisoners to produce armaments in his factory. Jews and other inmates were the true cheap labor. Hamm helped oversee their slavery and murder.”
Following the end of World War II, Mennonite leaders in Europe and North America sought to craft a narrative that emphasized how brutally and oppressively their denomination had been treated by the Nazis. The Mennonite Central Committee (MCC), the denomination’s premier aid organization of which Heinrich Hamm was an employee and spokesperson, reported in various memos to bodies like the United Nations that faith leaders were unaware of Nazi collaboration of refugees including the involvement of Heinrich Hamm. The following is drawn from a version of Hamm’s wartime experiences: “It is quite an erroneous idea to think that all Mennonites were brought to Poland to be settled on farms. I and my family came to a camp in Preussisch-Stargard in the Danzig area. Immediately representatives of various works and concerns came to fetch cheap labour. I had to work in a machine factory where I remained until the end of the war. Besides the four Mennonite families many Ukrainians, Frenchmen, and Poles worked there also. There was no difference in the way these various national groups were treated.” (Goossen 2020)
As Goossen goes on to note, “The efforts by Mennonite Central Committee to portray refugees like Heinrich Hamm as victims of Nazism were largely successful.” Declarations by the MCC officers as well as by the migrants themselves convinced agents of the United Nations that most Mennonites had not wound up in Germany of their own accord. As a result, the MCC succeeded in relocating most of their refugees under its care with United Nations assistance to places in West Germany or overseas, mostly in Canada and Paraguay.
Goossen has laboriously sifted through thousands of pages of historic documents scattered across half a dozen archives in four countries to piece together Hamm’s past and debunk his story; readers are referred to Dr. Goossen’s article for more details but suffice it to say that Hamm as an MCC employee and spokesperson knew very well how and why Mennonites had collaborated with the Nazis and how complicit they were in the murder of Jewish concentration camp detainees. As Goossen notes: “What is clear is that the Mennonite-owned factory in Stutthof was a place of terror. For hundreds of prisoners enslaved there, the factory’s Mennonite managers were responsible for much of that terror. It is also clear that after the war, Hamm tried to distance himself from this responsibility. He instead emphasized the suffering of his own family, which fled Stutthof in April 1945. As they crossed the Baltic under cover of night, a Soviet submarine torpedoed their ship. Hamm praised God for allowing the damaged vessel to make it to Denmark. The family remained in Denmark for the next eighteen months. Hamm emphasized his gratitude for the comfort he found during these lean times through worshipping with fellow Mennonite refugees and other Christians.” (Goossen 2020)
As I related in Post 5, my father’s friends, Idschi and Suse Epp, also escaped to Denmark as the Russians were approaching Tiegenhof. According to Gerhard Epp’s descendants whom I met in 2013 in Lubeck, Germany, Suse Epp died in Denmark in 1941 at the age of 71. Gerhard Epp’s daughter by his first wife who died in 1939 at the age of 44 was Rita Schuetze née Epp (Figure 10); at the time I met her in 2013 she was already suffering from severe dementia. However, Rita’s half-brother and Gerhard Epp’s stepson, Hans Joachim “Hajo” Wiebe (Figures 11-12), is twelve years younger than his sister and has a splendid memory; he shared some compelling family stories.
Of particular interest is the story Hajo Wiebe related of the role that Gerhard and Rita Epp played in helping Prussian citizens and German soldiers escape towards the end of WWII as the Russians were encircling Stutthof. Danzig to the west and Elbing [today: Elblag, Poland] to the south had already been captured by the Russians, so the only way Germans could still flee the area was to make their way across the frozen “Frisches Haff,” or Vistula Lagoon (Figure 13), to a narrow, sandy spit (Vistula Spit); here, they could be picked up by German boats cruising the Baltic Sea looking for fleeing Germans, then taken first to the Hel Peninsula and eventually to Germany. Using Gerhard’s mechanical expertise, he and Rita drove in his Mercedes all around the area south of Stutthof destroying the flood control dams previous generations of Mennonites had built and inundated the naturally marshy area to slow the advance of the Russians, allowing Germans an opportunity to take flight. However, even with the area flooded, travel across the Vistula Lagoon was fraught with danger as Russian bombers were always strafing escaping Germans who stood out against the frozen landscape. The exact date of Gerhard and Rita’s own get-away on one of the last German ships leaving from the Vistula Spit is recorded in family annals as May 6, 1945.
In closing I would merely say that thanks to the recent work of scholars like Ben Goossen revelations are finally coming to light of the role Mennonites played in the crimes of National Socialism. These crimes run counter to the common belief about this Christian denomination that they are historically pacifists. What led me to uncovering the truth was my father’s friendship with two of Gerhard Epp’s sisters and a casual encounter my father had with Gerhard prior to the war.
REFERENCES
Good, Alicia. “Unanswered Questions: Mennonite Participation in the Holocaust.”
Goossen, Ben. “How to Catch a Mennonite Nazi.” Anabaptist Historians, 29 October 2020, https://anabaptisthistorians.org/2020/10/29/how-to-catch-a-mennonite-nazi/.
Goossen, Ben. “The Real History of the Mennonites and the Holocaust.” Tablet, 16 November 2020, https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/history/articles/heinrich-hamm-mennonite-holocaust.
Goossen, Ben. “How A Nazi Death Squad Viewed Mennonites.” Anabaptist Historians, 16 January 2021, https://anabaptisthistorians.org/2021/01/16/how-a-nazi-death-squad-viewed-mennonites/
Neff, Christian and Richard D. Thiessen. “Wladyslaw IV Vasa, King of Poland (1595-1648).” Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. March 2015. Web. 11 Aug 2022. https://gameo.org/index.php?title=Wladyslaw_IV_Vasa,_King_of_Poland_(1595-1648)&oldid=140874.
“The History of Polish Mennonites.” Gdanski Trips, https://www.gdansktrips.com/the-history-of-polish-mennonites/.
Note: This is the first of a two-part story about the wartime “journal” or “diary” written by Johanna and Renate Bruck, the widow and daughter of my esteemed ancestor from Breslau, Germany [today: Wrocław, Poland], Dr. Walter Wolfgang Bruck (1872-1937), a second cousin twice removed. The German word “Tagebuch” strictly speaking translates as a diary or journal but in effect is more of a record or log of the extensive daily activities Johanna and Renate were engaged in between January 1940 and December 1944. What could have been an extremely absorbing account of the daily lives of an Aryan woman and her “mischling” daughter during WWII, within the context of global events and the impact of National Socialism on Jews, half-Jews, Germans, and others in Europe, instead turns into a mundane and drab account of their rather “ordinary” existences. The Tagebuch is often more remarkable for what it omits than what it says about the ongoing events of the tragic period in which it was written. It is difficult to make sense of many of the entries, which would in any case be of little or no interest to readers. For this reason I explain some of the war-related references and discuss a few specific people I’ve been able to identify.
Regular followers of my Blog are aware of the multiple posts I have recently written about Dr. Walter Wolfgang Bruck (1872-1937) and his extended family. This sequence of posts was prompted by a contact earlier this year from a Berlin doctor, Dr. Tilo Wahl, who in around 2013 purchased at auction the commemorative medals, personal effects, private papers, and photos that once belonged to Dr. Bruck. The seller of these items was Nicholas Newman, Dr. Bruck’s grandson, who sadly committed suicide in 2015 in London.
As Ms. Madeleine Isenberg, my friend affiliated with the Jewish Genealogical Society of Los Angeles, has been wont to tell me, there is no such thing as coincidence but rather as her uncle impressed upon her, its “beshert,” fate or predestination. Not only was it providential Dr. Wahl would stumble upon my Blog and contact me, but that he would also share copies of Dr. Bruck’s personal papers and photos. This was magnified when Nicholas Newman’s twin sisters from Sydney, Australia, similarly chanced upon my Blog while researching their deceased brother and contacted me.
Nicholas’s twin siblings, Francesca and Michele Newman (Figure 1), are the offspring of Renate Bruck’s third marriage. Since our initial encounter, we have developed a warm relationship and have had several Zoom calls. The twins have been able to fill in a few holes in my understanding of their mother and grandmother’s lives following their grandfather’s death in 1937, but most astoundingly, while examining their family memorabilia, they happened upon a so-called “Tagebuch,” written between January 1940 and December 1944 by their grandmother and mother, Johanna and Renate Bruck. (Figure 2) Technically a diary or journal, it can more accurately be characterized as a record or log of daily events the writers were engaged in.
Knowing the numerous questions I had about Dr. Bruck’s wife and daughter following his death, they offered to send me the original Tagebuch. While hesitant to risk losing this valuable document, I accepted their gracious offer and fortunately it arrived safely. The twins have since generously donated their mother and grandmother’s diary to the Museum of Cemetery Art (Old Jewish Cemetery), a Branch of the City Museum of Wroclaw, where their great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather are interred. Since Dr. Walter Bruck is well-known to staff of the museum, they were thrilled beyond measure to receive this donation.
Briefly, let me explain to readers how I was able to learn the contents of the Tagebuch. For much longer than I have been in contact with Francesca and Michele Newman, I have known one of their cousins from the Berlin neighborhood of Köpenick, Dr. Frank Thomas Koch (Figure 3); as another instance of serendipity, Dr. Tilo Wahl is a practicing dentist in this same district of Berlin. In any case, whereas Thomas and I are fourth cousins, Thomas and the twins are third cousins, so a generation more closely related. Over the years, Thomas and I have collaborated in tracking Johanna and Renate Bruck to England following their emigration from Germany, without specifically uncovering the intermediate steps that led to them arriving there.
Given Thomas’ interest in this branch of our family, upon learning of the existence of the Tagebuch, he offered to transcribe it. I sent Thomas a high-quality PDF of the journal, which he systematically transcribed over a roughly two-month period. Then, using the best of the known online translators, DeepL, he translated the log. But Thomas went beyond a cursory perusal of the “journal.” He provided some context for events taking place in Nazi Germany that ought to have been touched on by Johanna Bruck but were not. As one additional step, I put Thomas in touch with Renate Bruck’s lifelong still-living 95-year-old friend, Ina Schaesberg (Figure 4), who was able to recall specific people named in the Tagebuch and identify their role in Johanna and Renate’s lives. Since Ina speaks little English, Thomas was more effectively able to extract information about these people from her than I could. Finally, yet another source of information was Bettina Mehne (Figure 5), daughter of Renate Bruck’s first husband, Matthias Eugen Walter Mehne, by Matthias’ second wife; Bettina was able to recognize the diminutive names of some of her ancestors.
Briefly, let me give readers an impression of the Tagebuch. It is a five-year diary, of a type that still exists today, with some peculiarities. It covers the span from January 1, 1940, through December 24, 1944, although not chronologically. That’s to say, January 31, 1940, is not followed by February 1, 1940, but rather by January 1, 1941, then January 1, 1942, etc. While this may make sense, it prevents the reader from following the flow of events. Thus, Thomas, in transcribing and translating the diary, did so chronologically.
The diary has two authors, Dr. Walter Wolfgang Bruck’s widow, Johanna Bruck née Gräbsch, and his daughter, Renate Bruck. (Figure 6) Most of the entries are recorded by Johanna, whose writing is Old German Script in vogue around the 1900’s (known as “die Kurrentschrift” or “Kurrent”for short in German); Renate’s handwriting is more typical of today’s German cursive.
The Tagebuch is written in a telegraphic style, meaning in a clipped way of writing that abbreviates words and packs as much information into the fewest number of words or characters. At times, this means that certain terms or turns of phrases are not well understood or are indecipherable.
Rarely is the Tagebuch introspective or self-analyzing. Comparatively intimate, confidential, or personal messages are rarely recorded. The diary does not give us a sense of the broader events going on in the war during the Nazi era. For Johanna and Renate life seems to go on as normal, notwithstanding the fact that as a half-Jew Renate was considered a mischling of the first degree.
The war, the aftermath of its destruction, hunger, and repression are rarely mentioned. If Renate as a mischling or her mother were ever under observation by the Nazis and their informants is never made clear. However, as the author James F. Tent asserts in his seminal book about German mischlinge, “In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Persecution of Jewish-Christian Germans,” the intensity of persecution, discrimination, and harassment of mischlinge in the Third Reich varied greatly. Tent reports that in certain areas and regions, there was little distinction between “Jews” and “Mischlinge” in terms of persecution, while in other parts of the Reich virtually nothing happened to them, and they were not treated as outsiders.
There were at least two areas where Renate’s status as a mischling affected her life. Until 1938, Renate attended the “Oberlyzeum von Zawadzky,” the Upper Lyceum in the Zawadskie district of Breslau, which was a private school for daughters from upper class families. After 1938, all “non-Aryan” girls were forced to leave. Following her expulsion from the Lyceum, until Renate relocated with her mother to Berlin in February-March of 1942, she attended the “Kloster-Schule der Ursulinen,” the Ursuline Convent School. Then, beginning in 1942 upon her arrival in Berlin, she attended the “Kunstgewerbeschule,” the School of Arts and Crafts.
The second area where Renate’s life was affected by her status as a mischling of the first degree was in her desire to be a fully recognized member of the “deutschen Volksgemeinschaft,” wanting “to belong” and not be an outsider; the Volksgemeinschaft is a German expression meaning “people’s community” that originally became popular during WWI as Germans rallied in support of the war. It appealed to the idea of breaking down elitism, and uniting people across class divides to achieve a national purpose. During the Nazi era, the wanting “to belong” among children and young people was expressed, among other ways, in their membership in the Hitlerjugend (HJ), Hitler Youth, or the Bund Deutscher Mädel (BDM), League of German Girls or Band of German Maidens. However, anyone who was “non-Aryan” could not become a member of the Hitler Youth or BDM.
Ina Schaesberg, Renate’s lifelong friend, relates an uncomfortable situation Renate put her in on account of her desire to belong to the BDM. So the story goes that Renate forced Ina to get her a BDM uniform so they could play together as “German Maidens” privately at home wearing their outfits. Jumping ahead to January 1942 which will be discussed in Part 2 of this post, Renate was denounced for this act by an informer that required Johanna to report to the police, although the incident appears to have had no serious consequences.
Johanna resolved to address the matter of Renate’s exclusion from the BDM. She makes the following entry on January 29, 1941. “I received first a call from Norbert Pohl about BDM application to Hess.” Let me attempt to put this in context for readers and tell readers about the players, acknowledging that I do not have a copy of Renate’s BDM application so can only surmise what it may have included.
Johanna Bruck seemingly appealed the issue of Renate’s application to join the BDM to a high, if not the highest, authority, namely to Hitler’s deputy in the Nazi Party, Rudolf Hess (1874-1987). The quote above makes this evident. Hess had been the highest-ranking member after Hitler of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP), National Socialist German Workers’ Party, and Reich Minister without portfolio since 1933 when the Nazis seized power.
Johanna could have justified her request that Renate be accepted into the BDM in one of two ways. Purely hypothetically, Johanna could have argued that Dr. Walter Wolfgang Bruck was not the biological father of Renate and that she was the daughter of an affair Johanna had had with an “Aryan.” It’s conceivable Johanna was aware of a similar argument that had been made in the case of the German field marshal general Erhard Milch (Figure 7) by his mother, distant relatives of both Renate and me.
To remind readers, I wrote about Erhard Milch (1892-1972) in a post entitled “I Decide Who is a Jew” (Post 54), a saying widely attributed to Hermann Wilhelm Göring, one of the most powerful figures in the Nazi Party between 1933 to 1945. Erhard Milch was a German field marshal general (Generalfeldmarschall) who oversaw the development of the German air force (Luftwaffe) as part of the re-armament of Nazi Germany following WWI. He was State Secretary in the Reich Ministry of Aviation and Inspector General of the Air Force. During most of WWII, he oversaw all aircraft production and supply. In other words, Milch was important to the Nazis. Based on his mother’s disclosure that Erhard was not the son of her Jewish husband but supposedly born of an incestuous relationship with her uncle, an “Aryan,” he was declared a so-called “Honorary Aryan” (i.e., a person with Jewish roots who was appointed an honorary Aryan).
Thus, one way Johanna hypothetically could have argued that Renate be accepted into the BDM was by professing she was not the child of a Jew. Alternatively, Johanna could have argued that while Renate was regrettably a “mischling of the first degree,” her enthusiasm for the Nazis, their movement, and their ideals more than made up for this “flaw.” Which option Johanna chose is unknown to us. Probably her request was not supported by Hess or was delayed and put on the backburner. Regardless, several months after Johanna’s request, Hess flew to England in May 1941, ostensibly to make peace with the Allies. He was interned in England, and following Germany’s defeat, at Nuremberg he was sentenced to many years in prison as a Nazi and war criminal.
Who then was the Norbert Pohl who called Johanna Bruck on January 29, 1941? According to my cousin Thomas Koch, Norbert Pohl (1910-1968) was probably already a big shot in the SS (Schutzstaffel, or Protection Squads) at the time of Johanna’s BDM request. He was the chief judge of the SS at the Police Court VI in Krakow from July 1940 until March 1942. Johanna makes a remarkable entry on February 12, 1941, recording that she received a call from Frau Pohl, presumably the wife of the SS grandee Norbert Pohl, urging haste with the written request. On February 20th, Johanna delivered the application to the Obergau, a division of the National Socialist state, specifically to the “Obergau 4, Obergaubehörde Niederschlesien der Nazipartei NSDAP,” which was headquartered in Breslau. Pohl may subsequently have forwarded Johanna’s letter and documentation to Rudolf Hess and kept her informed about developments.
Because of the clipped style in which the Tagebuch is written, we are left to wonder about some of the brief entries recorded by Johanna that may have been related to the application submission. For example, on February 28, 1941, so eight days after submitting the petition to the NSDAP, Johanna writes that she sent a letter to Mackensen. This is undoubtedly Anton Ludwig Friedrich August Mackensen (1949-1945), Generalfeldmarschall, Field Marshall General, Dr. Walter Wolfgang Bruck’s military superior during WWI (Figure 8) and someone who stood up for him in 1933 after he was dismissed from his academic position. (Figure 9) Could the letter have had anything to do with Renate’s application to the NSDAP and a request for his support? It seems likely, but we may never know.
As it relates to the formal written request Johanna submitted for Renate to the Nazi authorities on February 20, 1941, Thomas figured out the German designation for this application was called “Gesuch über die Gleichstellung mit Deutschblütigen,” an “application for equality with German-blooded people.” The relevant literature indicates about 10,000 such applications were presented, but that only about 500 of them were ever approved. Of particular interest is that Hitler himself approved or denied these requests. Hitler’s allies were apparently more lenient in ratifying them.
What is clear from the journal and what we now know was an “application for equality with German-blooded people” submitted by Johanna is that she knew many people, including influential Nazis.
Unfortunately, the Tagebuch contains no mention as to what transpired after Renate’s application was submitted. However, based on an entry recorded on the 16th of September 1941, apparently Johanna suspects that her “request” for Renate to be treated “as an equal to German-blooded people” has been or will be rejected.
Let me turn now to log entries having to do with the Nazi regime and wartime events that may be of interest to readers.
On February 23, 1940, schools other than Renate’s were closed on account of a so-called “coal vacation,” days schools were closed during severe winters to save coal and heating oil to be used in support of the war effort.
On February 25, 1940, Johanna records that “Klaus,”one of Renate’s friends, had his National Socialist youth initiation ceremony as school graduation ceremonies and initiation rituals into the Hitler Youth and BDM were referred to at the time.
May 1st was a National Holiday, “Tag der Arbeit,” Labor Day, interestingly appropriating a tradition from the Labor movement.
On June 2nd, 1940, Johanna mentions listening to the radio, without specifically indicating that the broadcast presumably celebrated the Wehrmacht’s victory over France. Then, on June 25th, there was a school vacation because of “the acceptance of the peace terms imposed on the French.”
Interestingly, on November 23, 1940, the day of Hitler’s failed “Beer Hall Putsch” in 1923, in Munich, the Führer delivered a radio broadcast.
In several places, Johanna merely records “Führer speech,” so we are left to peruse the history books to identify what major speech Hitler delivered on these dates. The first instance is on February 24, 1941, which corresponds with a celebration at the Münchener Hofbräuhaus on the announcement of the NSDAP platform when Hitler declared an intensification of submarine warfare.
On April 9, 1941, Johanna remarks on the “great political events in the Balkans,” which coincided with the Wehrmacht’s campaign against then-Yugoslavia and Greece, resulting in Salonika’s capture on that date.
On May 4, 1941, Johanna again merely records, “Führer speech.” This coincides with an address Hitler made before the German Reichstag, in which he invoked the alleged desire for peace on the part of Nazi Germany, which had always been thwarted and now led once again to the defeat of then-Yugoslavia and Greece in the Balkans.
Relatedly, jumping ahead to January 3, 1942, Johanna makes another clipped entry that requires explanation: “. . .sweater and jacket donated for the soldiers.” Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion plan, called for the capture of Moscow within four months of the Axis forces invasion of the Soviet Union on the 22nd of June 1941. Hitler and his generals were convinced they would defeat the Soviet Union before the onset of winter 1941. Therefore, the German soldiers were ill-equipped for the severe winter when the Red Army counter-attacked during the Battle of Moscow, and they were largely without winter clothes. The donations of clothing from the German population were intended to compensate for this lack of winter equipment; Johanna was among the donors.
Let me turn now to some entries in the Tagebuch that give us insight into aspects of Johanna and Renate’s personal lives and their circle of friends and acquaintances. While of lesser interest than the terse war-related notes, they are still noteworthy.
According to a note recorded on the 24th of March 1940, Johanna and Renate were members of the “Christengemeinschaft.” The “Christengemeinschaft, Movement for Religious Renewal” is a Christian church that is close to anthroposophy but is regarded as an independent cult community. It was founded in Switzerland in 1922 following the suggestions of Rudolf Steiner and had followers in Breslau. Today, there are 140 congregations in Germany though the church exists worldwide. From the point of view of the mainstream churches, it represents, among other things, a different understanding of baptism.
It was through the Christengemeinschaft that Johanna sought to have Renate accepted for confirmation classes. Judging from the somewhat vague notes in the Tagebuch, there were discussions and a dispute with Church Pastor Müller about this, but Johanna eventually prevailed seemingly with the help of other members of the congregation. In any case, Renate was eventually confirmed on the 17th of March 1941.
Relatedly, on June 19, 1941, Johanna makes a point of mentioning the ban of eurythmy in schools, and the great joy it elicited; whether this was personal joy or more widespread elation is unclear. Eurythmy is an expressive movement art originated by Rudolf Steiner in conjunction with Marie von Sivers in the early 20th century. Primarily a performance art, it was also used in education, especially in Waldorf schools, and – as part of anthroposophic medicine – for claimed therapeutic purposes. The ban of eurythmy was probably connected with the flight of Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s Deputy, to England on May 10, 1941. With his departure, anthroposophy lost its most important promoter among the Nazi hierarchy. Ten days prior to the ban on eurythmy, the Christengemeinschaft to which Johanna and Renate belonged had been banned, and its priests and leading community members jailed. While Johanna makes mention of the eurythmy ban, she is silent on the ban of the church. What effect the ban had on Johanna and Renate is unknown, but, regardless, by this time Renate had already been confirmed.
A brief entry from July10, 1941, “letter to . . .Lettehaus” was explained to me by my cousin. “Letteverein” and “Lettehaus” were institutions founded in 1866 to “promote the gainful employment of women.” Johanna was faced with the problem that her daughter was basically barred from higher education and university studies in Nazi Germany for “racial” reasons. But even though higher education was not attainable for Renate, economic independence was a goal for Johanna, who had to remember she would not live forever and that her assets might not be transferable to Renate. Therefore, these institutions offered options. In clarifying this entry, Thomas explained that his mother, also a mischling of the first degree, availed herself of the Letteverein and Lettehaus.
As to Johanna and Renate’s financial situation, let me say a few words. As I have alluded to and discussed in earlier posts, Dr. Walter Wolfgang Bruck was an eminent dentist. He was the personal dentist to the last German Kaiser’s family and other members of the nobility. Judging from the lavish social events he hosted and the lifestyle he led, it can be assumed he was well-to-do.
According to Breslau address books of the time, during the late 1920’s and the early 1930’s Dr. Bruck and his family lived in a luxurious home at Reichspräsidentenplatz 17 (Figure 10), with the owner of record at the time being Walter Bruck. Following the death of Paul von Hindenburg, the German general and statesman who led the Imperial German Army during World War I and later became President of Germany from 1925 until his death in 1934, Reichspräsidentenplatz was renamed by the Nazis to Hindenburgplatz. The renaming of the square was reflected in Breslau address books only in 1935. By 1937, however, his wife Johanna Bruck was now shown as the owner of record even though Walter continued to live at Hindenburgplatz 17. The change in ownership from Walter to Johanna Bruck was a measure to avoid expropriation of the estate by the Nazis as Walter was considered “Jewish,” whereas his wife was deemed to be “Aryan.” We know from elsewhere that Walter converted from Judaism in about 1917, around the time his mother died, and that, unlike his accomplished father and grandfather, respectively Dr. Julius Bruck and Dr. Jonas Julius Bruck, he was not interred in Breslau’s Jewish Cemetery. Obviously, as far as the Nazis were concerned, Walter’s conversion from Judaism was of no consequence and he was still deemed Jewish. On multiple occasions, Johanna mentions that she and Renate visited her deceased husband’s grave, regrettably never mentioning which cemetery he was interred in. This is a mystery to be resolved.
Dr. Walter Bruck died in Breslau on the 31st of March 1937, whether by his own hand or not is unknown. Following Walter’s death, Johanna is presumed to have sold the house around that time because when in 1939, the “racial” census takes place (Figure 11), the widow Johanna Bruck and her daughter Renate Bruck are no longer living at Hindenburgplatz 17, but at Oranienstrasse 4. (Figure 12) The latter house does not belong to Johanna but to a retired banker by the name of “E. Bucher.” Johanna and Renate apparently lived there in a large stately apartment, from which they sublet rooms. Apart from the income this generated, Johanna undoubtedly received a significant sum of money from the sale of the house at Hindenburgplatz 17 as well as an inheritance from her husband. At various points in the Tagebuch, Johanna bemoans the expenditure of money on certain things, but rarely do we get the impression that she is lacking for money, nor does her active social life or the multiple activities she and Renate are enrolled in suggest otherwise.
There are scores upon scores of names mentioned in the journal. An unusually large number of them are referred to as “Tante,” aunt, or “Onkel,” uncle, with most presumed to be close friends rather than blood relatives. Several, however, “Tante Leni,” “Tante Irene” or “Tante I.,” and “Onkel Willy” are known to the writer and are unquestionably Johanna and Renate’s kin. In some instances mention is made of celebrating this or that person’s birthday on a particular day or week; given my familiarity with the dates of birth of family members, I was able to work out how some of the people were referred to. Thus “Tante I.” was Johanna’s sister-in-law, Irene Elisabeth Gräbsch née Klar who was married to Johanna’s brother, Paul Karl Hermann Gräbsch. Tante Irene was often accompanied by her son “Ebi,” a cousin and frequent playmate of Renate’s. (Figure 13) “Tante Leni” was Johanna’s sister, Helene Emma Clara Steinberg née Gräbsch. (Figure 14) “Onkel Willy” was Willy Gräbsch, a merchant from Breslau, probably unmarried or widowed, whose relationship to Johanna is unclear.
Personally intriguing is the mention made on March 30, 1940, that Renate went to visit “Tante Margarethe” to wish her a happy birthday. The quotation marks indicate that while she was not a relative, she was still referred to as an aunt. There is no doubt this is Dr. Walter Wolfgang Bruck’s first wife who was Jewish, Margarethe Bruck née Skutsch. (Figure 15) She was born on March 30, 1872, in Breslau [Wrocław, Poland], and murdered in the Theresienstadt Ghetto on the 22nd of September 1942. (Figure 16) It is surprising that Johanna and Renate were in touch with Walter’s first wife, although, as this was certainly the case, it’s astonishing that Johanna made no mention in the diary when Margarethe was deported. Perhaps Johanna had already distanced herself from this Jewish “aunt” by then?
Among the names mentioned are a coterie I surmise are people who provided professional services to Johanna, such as housecleaners, cooks, seamstresses, teachers, clergy, etc. This includes “Fräulein Anna,” Miss Anna. According to Ina Schaesberg, she was the cook in the Bruck household for many years, during Dr. Bruck’s lifetime and after his death. She was considered “Aryan.” According to the 1935 “Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor,” Jews were forbidden to employ “Aryan maids” under the age of 45. However, since Anna exceeded this age limit, she could remain employed in the house of Walter Bruck even after 1935. Following the death of Walter in 1937, she continued to work for Johanna and even followed her to Berlin (more on this in Part 2 of the post).
Johanna’s and Renate’s beloved long-haired dachshund, “Resi,” is often mentioned, though it took me some time to figure out that this was a dog and not a person. (Figure 17)
Because Renate was an exceptionally cute young girl who blossomed into a very attractive young woman, she had droves of admirers whom she frequently saw and skillfully manipulated. The fate of most are unknown, but in at least two instances Johanna tells us precisely the dates they were killed while serving in the Wehrmacht. The death of “Hans Roth,” often mentioned in the diary, is noted on October 26, 1941, though he was killed on the 21st of September 1941 on the Eastern Front as his death certificate confirms. (Figures 18a-b) Similarly, an even closer friend of Renate’s, “Christoph von Kospoth,” was killed-in-action on the 4th of April 1944 near Dresden, Germany. (Figures 19a-b)
Other names and deaths are recorded by Johanna, but I’ve been unable to match them with historic documents which might have been able to tell me more about them.
Many names in the Tagebuch include only forenames or surnames, so it’s impossible to precisely identify these individuals. However, in several instances, with surnames and professions given I was able with certainty to discover the identities or people. While these rarely add much to the narrative of Johanna’s and Renate’s lives, I will discuss a few only because I was able to learn something about them.
A name that frequently appears in Johanna’s entries is called “Hella Goossens.” She appears to have been a friend. This represents the sole instance where I was able to find a picture of someone named in Johanna’s and Renate’s diary who was not a family member. A vivacious looking woman born on the 21st of May 1884 in Hagen, North Rhine-Westphalia, a Rio de Janeiro Immigration Card shows she immigrated to Brazil in 1950 (Figure 20); she is identified as a domestic worker. Seemingly, she was joining her son, Herbert Goossens, who had immigrated there in 1939. (Figure 21)
As I alluded to earlier when talking about Johanna and Renate’s financial situation, both were involved in numerous extracurricular activities, particularly Renate. For her part, Johanna was taking Italian lessons with a Frau Koesel at the home of a Frau Conberti. Mrs. Conberti is listed in Breslau Address Books between 1934 and 1941 and shows she was an interpreter and language teacher. (Figures 22a-b) One is left to wonder whether Johanna was merely taking Italian for self-improvement, or envisioned emigrating to Italy? In the case of Renate, she was taking piano lessons, violin classes, tap classes, confirmation classes, and more. She would meet her future first husband, Matthias Mehne, in late 1941 in Breslau at his luthier shop, and immediately be “smitten” by him, but there is no indication they got involved romantically until they met again in Berlin in 1942.
Readers may wonder, as I did, whether any of Johanna’s and Renate’s acquaintances and friends are directly or indirectly acknowledged as Jewish. In one instance the name “Grete Stomberg or Sternberg” is noted, who can be presumed to have been Jewish because her apartment was confiscated by the Nazis. Another named individual was “Ferdinand Abramczyk,” later identified through a Breslau Address Book as a Justizrat, a member of the Judicial Council, who’d had “Israel” added as his middle name by the Nazis to mark him as Jewish.
Johanna frequently mentions bouts of “biliary pain,” most frequently caused by obstruction of the common bile duct or the cystic duct by a gallstone. This would eventually lead to hospitalization.
There is one final topic I want to discuss before ending the rather lengthy first part of Post 109. As previously mentioned, it appears that by September of 1941, Johanna is aware that Renate’s application for her to be treated “as an equal to German-blooded people” has been or will be rejected. This may have been the impetus for Johanna to relocate to Berlin. However, rather than simply move there, Johanna sought to swap apartments with someone from Berlin. She hosted a couple, the Günthers, with whom she would eventually exchange apartments. In February-March 1942, Johanna and Renate would move to Xantener Straße 24, in the Berlin district of Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf. More will be said on this in Part 2 of Post 109.
Among the more popular posts I have published in my Blog are veritable wartime diaries I have managed to get a hold of from various branches of my Jewish family. In all these instances, there is clearly an effort on the part of the author to write names in code or designate Jewish or “righteous” individuals by single letters or initials to conceal their identities. At no time do I detect a similar intent by Johanna or Renate.
Literally, with the hundreds of entries in Johanna’s and Renate’s Tagebuch, it is difficult to do justice to the diary. However, as I’ve indicated multiple times, the clipped style of writing associated with a telegraphic style makes it unlikely I would have been able to decipher the names of most of their acquaintances and friends nor the role they played in their lives. More importantly, it’s improbable this would have added much to the narrative since so many of the entries focused not on the political and current events of the time but rather on the social and amorous activities of the writers.
In closing I will quote from Ms. Renata Wilkoszewska-Krakowska’s observations of Johanna and Renate’s diary. Renate is my friend and Branch Manager, Museum of Cemetery Art (Old Jewish Cemetery) which is a Branch of the City Museum of Wroclaw, the institute where the Tagebuch was donated. Sadly, Renata’s thoughts mirror my own: “I am amazed that in the era of mass deportations of Breslau and Silesian Jews from 1941 to 1944, there is nothing in the diary on this subject. On November 21, 1941, over a thousand people were arrested, held for four days at the Odertorbahnhof train station, then deported to Kaunas, Lithuania, and shot on November 29th. Among them were many famous and influential inhabitants of Breslau, including Willy Cohn and his family, author of the famous diary/journal entitled “Kein Recht. Nirgends” (“No Law. Nowhere.”), published in German and Polish. In the context of the war, the everyday life of Johanna and Renate seems quite banal and normal. It’s hard for me to believe it, because as early as 1942, mischlinge were also deported to the occupied part of Poland and East.”
REFERENCES
Schwarzmüller, Theo. Zwischen Kaiser und Führer: Generalfeldmarschall August von Mackensen. Paderborn, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, 1995.
Tent, James F. In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Persecution of Jewish-Christian Germans. Lawrence, University Press of Kansas, 2003.
Note: In this post I discuss the internment of Dr. Walter Rothholz, my second cousin once removed, in Nazi-occupied Norway focusing primarily on the historic events surrounding this occupation.
Dr. Walter Rothholz (1893-1978) who I first introduced to readers in the previous post (Post 65) was a lawyer with a Dr. jur. (Doctor juris). (Figure 1) He is my second cousin once removed. Even was I positioned to present a complete biography of Dr. Rothholz that is not my aim, nor would that be of any interest to readers. Where I delve into specific ancestors, my goal is to show how their lives intersected with major historic events of their time, so in the case of Dr. Rothholz, how his life was upended by the Nazi occupation of Norway starting in 1940 and how he barely survived that ordeal.
Dr. Rothholz was born in Stettin, Germany [Szczecin, Poland] in 1893, a place previously discussed where various of my ancestors come from. Rothholz was decorated with the German Iron Cross for his heroism during WWI. Between the first and second World Wars, he was an international law expert who worked for the German Foreign Ministry. In 1936, he married Else Marie “Elsemai” Bølling (1915-1976) (Figure 2), a Norwegian woman, a move that allowed him to emigrate to Norway in 1939 and seemingly escape the Nazi scourge. Students of history will realize this was not to be Dr. Rothholz’s fate.
Briefly, some history. Operation Weserübung (German: Unternehmen Weserübung) was the code name for Germany’s assault on Denmark and Norway during WWII and the opening operation of the Norwegian Campaign. The name comes from the German for “Operation Weser-Exercise,” the Weser being a German river. The German occupation of Norway began on the 9th of April 1940 after German forces invaded neutral Norway. Conventional armed resistance to the Germans ended on the 10th of June 1940. Germany occupied Denmark and invaded Norway, ostensibly as a preventive maneuver against a planned, and openly discussed, Franco-British occupation of Norway.
German occupation of Norway lasted until the 8-9th of May 1945 following the capitulation of the German forces in Europe. Throughout this period, Norway was continuously occupied by the Wehrmacht (i.e., the unified armed forces of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945). Civil rule was effectively assumed by the Reichskommissariat Norwegen, which acted in collaboration with Norway’s pro-German puppet government, Vidkun Quisling’s regime, giving us the origin of the word “quisling,” collaborator or traitor. During the “occupation period,” the Norwegian King Haakon VII and the prewar government escaped to London, where they acted as a government in exile.
Dr. Rothholz was interned in Berg prison on October 26, 1942. Berg interneringsleir (Berg internment camp) was a concentration camp near Tønsberg, Norway that served as an internment and transit center for Jews and later political prisoners during the Nazi occupation of Norway; it is located approximately 102km (63 mile) south-southwest of Oslo. Berg was the only prison camp in Norway that had only Norwegian prison guards, whose treatment of prisoners was particularly harsh, so much so that three of them were sentenced after the war to life-long forced labor. What precipitated Rothholz’s internment on October 26th was a message from Berlin received the previous day ordering the arrest of all Norwegian male Jews. Already by the 26th of October, 60 of the first Jews arrested had been gathered in Berg, where they were set up to build the camp.
The Jewish round ups involved both Norwegian police authorities and German Geheime Staatspolizei (abbreviated Gestapo, the official secret police of Nazi Germany and German-occupied Europe); Sicherheitsdienst (SD, the intelligence agency of the SS and Nazi party in Nazi Germany); and Schutzstaffel (SS, the German “protective echelon” founded in 1925 as Hitler’s personal guards). By November 26th, women and children were also arrested for deportation. That same day, the male prisoners were divided into two groups: those who were married to Norwegian women, and those who were unmarried or married to non-Aryan women. The last group was sent to the extermination camps. A total of 227 Jewish men were deported from Berg to the extermination camp of Auschwitz in Oświęcim, Poland. Only seven of these men survived. The few Jews who were married to “Aryans” remained in Berg, as in Dr. Rothholz’s case.
There is a humiliating side story about the Berg internment camp. It was referred to as “Quisling’s chicken farm” because some Jews and other Nazi opponents wore metallic poultry leg bands on their fingers as protest markers against the Nazi authorities and the German Occupation; the pro-Nazi government decided to create a “hen farm” for these “chickens” at Berg. In a speech delivered to the National Assembly on Pentecost 1942, President Vidkun Quisling said, “. . .some people walk around with chicken rings on their fingers. . .we’re going to create chicken farms for them. Here near Tønsberg we will thus be able to get a large hen farm.”
In the Jewish campaigns in Norway, 767 of the approximately 1,800 Jews living there were sent to the German concentration camps in Poland. Only 32 of these survived.
On December 2, 1942 Dr. Rothholz was moved from the Berg internment camp to Grini (Norwegian: Grini fangeleir; German: Polizeihäftlingslager Grini), the Nazi concentration camp in Bærum, Norway, which operated between around June 1941 and May 1945. Bærum is a suburb of Oslo and is located on the west coast of the city. The camp was run by SS and Gestapo personnel. Dr. Rothholz had a good understanding of the geography of Germany so as the noose was slowly closing and the war was ending, he was able to keep his fellow prisoners informed of what the messages from the front meant.
Other than guards, the German occupiers devoted few personnel to the camp. Since many politicians, academics and cultural personalities were detained at Grini, a certain level of internal organization was established by the prisoners. They toiled in manufacturing, agriculture and other manual labor, with much of this work taking place outside the camp. Grini was liberated on the 7th of May 1945, although Dr. Rothholz had apparently already been evacuated to Sweden on the 2nd of May. Walter’s son, also named Walter Rothholz, was born while he was interned. (Figures 3-4)
Dr. Rothholz was granted Norwegian citizenship after the war and returned to Germany for a period. He became involved in the refugee situation and other international law issues.
Consequentially, Rothholz testified in 1967, along with other of his fellow prisoners, against Hellmuth Reinhard. Reinhard was the head of the Gestapo in Norway between 1942 and 1945. His ability to largely avoid being punished for his crimes against humanity is a sad commentary and worth a short sidebar.
Hellmuth Reinhard was born Hermann Gustav Hellmuth Patzschke in Unterwerschen, Germany, but changed his name in April 1939 to the more Germanic-sounding “Reinhard.” He joined the SS in March 1933, and soon became a member of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (German: NSDAP), the Nazi Party. He had a law office at the Reichsführer-SS Sicherheitsdienst in Leipzig from 1935; later served at the SD headquarters of the Reichsicherheitshaumptamt (RHSA, the Reich Main Security Office, an organization subordinate to Heinrich Himmler); then in 1939, transferred to the Sicherheitspolizei (SiPo). From August 1940, he worked in Amsterdam at the central office for Jewish emigration from the Netherlands. Eventually, he came to Norway in January 1942 as head of the Gestapo.
Hellmuth Reinhard was second in command to Heinrich Fehlis in Norway. He had the rank of SS-Hauptsturmführer, corresponding to captain, then became SS-Sturmbannführer, equivalent to major. According to historians, Reinhard had primary responsibility for the deportation of Jews from Norway. Whether Adolf Eichmann gave direct orders to deport Jews from Norway, or whether Reinhard took the initiative based on Hitler’s overall plans for Jews is not clear. Regardless, Reinhard was the individual responsible for notifying the Gestapo in Stettin that 532 Jews were on their way aboard the SS Donau (Danube) on November 26, 1942.
At the end of the war, Reinhard was in the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, where, using his birth name Patzschke, he was released by British occupation authorities, obviously unaware of his SS background. Incredibly, Reinhard reverted to his birth name, resumed contact with his wife and children, then, in 1951 after “Reinhard” was declared dead, remarried his wife who was then officially a widow. It was only later that the German War Crimes Office in Ludwigsburg, investigating the Gestapo commander in Norway, discovered that the “widow” had married a man of the same birth name as Reinhard. He was arrested in December 1964 and brought up on charges in 1967. The charges involved murder and complicity in murder.
The charge against Reinhard that Walter Rothholz and other former Jewish prisoners testified to related to the deportation of the Norwegian Jews. The various witnesses claimed the internment and deportation of the Norwegian Jews could not have happened without Reinhard’s knowledge. Despite the substantial body of evidence supporting Reinhard’s involvement in the Jewish deportations and several murders, on June 30, 1967, he was sentenced to a mere five years for complicity in the murders during a counter-resistance action dubbed “Operation Blumenpflücken.” While Reinhard was also found guilty of deporting Jews, he supposedly could not be sentenced for this crime because the statute of limitations of 15 years for deportations had run out. Unbelievably, Reinhard was released in 1970 having served barely three years.
The trail was followed closely in Norway, and the verdict, once rendered, was characterized by the Norwegian newspapers as “scandalously mild.”
Let me end on a personal note. My father, a German-trained dentist, was never able to convince the American authorities to recognize his German credentials following his arrival here in 1948; they wanted him to redo his dental studies, something he felt he was too old to contemplate. Still, hoping to resume his dental profession in Germany, he travelled there in the mid-1950’s. For reasons that remain unclear and which we obviously never discussed, my father’s return to Germany never happened. I’ve often wondered whether this might have been related to the “hostile” environment he found in Germany where “low-level” German supporters of the Nazi regime had comfortably resumed their lives and reoccupied positions of power, and protected their former co-conspirators? Perhaps, it’s a rhetorical question to which there is no answer. Or, maybe, the mild judgement meted out to the mass murderer Hellmuth Reinhard was a manifestation of Germans disregarding the past. My father was a man with strong moral principles and would have been deeply offended by this dismissal of past sins, particularly since his beloved sister Susanne was murdered in Auschwitz. During our own McCarthy Era, I remember my father abruptly cancelling his subscription to the former “Long Island Press” for their unbridled support of Senator Joe McCarthy, so it would not surprise me that my father could not abide returning to post-war Germany under the prevailing circumstances of the time.
