Note: In this post, I relate the forensic work I undertook to learn the fate of Franz Pincus/Pauly, husband of Lisa Pauly, one of Germany’s “silent heroes” during WWII. Franz Pincus and my uncle Dr. Fedor Bruck were second cousins, and though Franz died in 1941 before my uncle was forced “underground” in 1942 by the Nazis, Franz’s widow sheltered my uncle for periods during his 30 months in hiding.
Related Posts:
Post 40: Elisabeth “Lisa” Pauly née Krüger, One of Germany’s Silent Heroes
Post 44: A Trove of Family History from The “Pinkus Collection” at the Leo Baeck Institute
Post 48: Dr. Ernst Neisser’s Final Days in 1942 in the Words of His Daughter
Post 49: Guide to the Landesarchiv Berlin (Berlin State Archive) Civil Registry Records
Post 57: Disappeared Without A Trace, Maria Pohlmann b. Pauly
On February 3, 1947, Elisabeth “Lisa” Pauly née Krüger, one of my uncle Dr. Fedor Bruck’s protectors in the course of his thirty months spent “underground” eluding the Nazis in Berlin during WWII, wrote a letter of reference for him. (Figure 1) In this recommendation, Lisa Pauly mentioned that her husband had died in 1941, without naming him or specifying a cause of death. By referring to the Pauly Stammbaum, family tree (Figure 2), I was able to figure out her husband was Franz Pincus, although for a very long time I was uncertain this was really Lisa Pauly’s spouse. As I explained to readers in the original post, I was only able to confirm “Franz Pincus” and “Franz Pauly” were the same person by systematically going through 1920’s and 1930’s Berlin Address Books checking both names residing at the same address. Employing this approach, as discussed in the original post, I eventually found a “Franz Pincus” living at Deidesheimer Str. 25 in Friedenau in 1928 (Figure 3), and by 1930 discovered a “Franz Pauly” residing at that same address. (Figure 4) For whatever reason Franz changed to using his mother’s maiden name, though both Pincus and Pauly were Jewish.
Having uncovered Lisa Pauly’s husband’s name from the Pauly Stammbaum, I next turned to ancestry.com to see what more I might learn. As alluded to in the previous paragraph, I found Franz Pincus/Pauly listed in multiple Berlin Address Books in the 1920’s and 1930’s. I also found a family tree on ancestry.com providing his purported place and date of birth, in Posen, Germany [today: Poznan, Poland] on the 23rd of October 1898 (Figure 5a); this same tree showed that Franz Pincus’s sister, Charlotte Lieselotte “Lilo” Pincus, had been born in Posen on the 30th of December 1895. (Figure 5b)
When I stumbled upon a picture of Franz and Lilo as children, attending the 1901 wedding of their aunt Maria Pauly to Alexander “Axel” Pohlmann [see Post 57], where Franz looks decidedly older than his sister (Figures 6a-b), I knew Franz and Lilo’s year of births were incorrect. This allows me to reiterate a point I’ve repeatedly made to readers to question vital data found in family trees on ancestry and elsewhere unless you have the original documents to corroborate dates. So, while I was able to conclude Franz and Lilo Pincus were not born, respectively, in 1898 and 1895, I had not yet resolved in what year they’d been born.
I then remembered the Pinkus Family Collection [See Post 44] archived at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York which is accessible online. Thinking this might include a chart with Franz and Lilo Pincus’s names, along with that of their parents, I scoured the online documents, and eventually stumbled on a page with all their names. (Figure 7) This page confirmed what I had suspected, namely, that their years of birth had been transposed. It turns out, Franz Pincus was born in 1895, and his sister Lilo in 1898; the family tree on ancestry.com, however, correctly noted their respective dates of birth, the 23rd of October for Franz, and the 30th of December for Lilo. This same page also noted Lisa Pauly née Krüger’s place and date of birth, in Berlin on the 20th of December 1890. With the help of Mr. Peter Hanke, affiliated with “forum.danzig.de,” I was able to track down copies of both Franz and Lilo Pincus’s original birth certificates. (Figures 8-9) So far, however, I’ve been unable to pinpoint which borough in Berlin Lisa Pauly was born so have not found her birth certificate.
Having located Franz Pincus’s birth certificate, I now set out to try and find his death certificate. From the 1947 letter of recommendation his wife Lisa had written for my Uncle Fedor, I only knew he’d died in 1941, and assumed to begin with that he had died at Maßmannstraße 11, where he and Lisa Pauly resided at the time in the Steglitz Borough of Berlin. I erroneously assumed locating his death register listing in the Landesarchiv Berlin database would be relatively straight-forward; I was sorely disappointed.
At the risk of sounding pedantic, let me explain to readers how and where I was eventually able to locate Franz Pincus’s death register listing. This requires reviewing findings I discussed in Post 48, the publication describing Dr. Ernst Neisser’s final days in September-October 1942 in Berlin after he and his cousin Luise Neisser, with whom he lived, were told to report to an old age transport. To remind readers, the elderly Ernst and Luise Neisser opted to commit suicide rather than report for deportation. Because Luise died immediately after taking poison, I easily located her death register listing under the records of Berlin-Charlottenburg, but I was unable to find Ernst’s name listed in the records of this Berlin borough. Ernst, I later learned from a letter his daughter wrote in 1947, lingered for several days before dying, so I reckoned he might have died in another borough. I eventually figured out the only place in Berlin where Jews could still receive medical attention by 1942, or where they were brought to die in case of “failed” suicide attempts, was the Jüdisches Krankenhaus Berlin, the Berlin Jewish Hospital, in the Wedding Borough of Berlin. Having worked this out, I was then able to find Ernst Neisser’s death register listing under records for 1942 in the Wedding Borough and order his death certificate from the Landesarchiv Berlin.
In trying to track down Franz Pincus’s death register listing, I decided to apply the same logic and “assume” he might also have died in the Wedding Borough of Berlin for unknown reasons. Obviously, I had no way of knowing then whether Franz Pincus’s death ultimately was from a “failed” suicide attempt, war wounds, fatal disease, or natural causes. Nonetheless, my logic turned out to be sound, and, as in the case of Ernst Neisser, I located Franz Pincus’s death register listing under 1941 in the Wedding Borough. (Figures 10a-b) Naturally, I ordered a copy of Franz’s original death certificate uncertain what new information it might include.
Franz’s typed death certificate arrived several weeks later. (Figure 11a) My cousin translated the form and it included several new pieces of information. (Figure 11b) Franz had been given the added middle name of “Israel” as was required of all Jewish-born males during the Nazi era. It confirms he died on the 2nd of August 1941 in the Berlin Jewish Hospital of a ruptured appendix. And, at the bottom of the certificate, it shows he’d gotten married on the 12th of May 1928 in Berlin’s Friedenau Borough, or so my cousin and I both read.
Armed with a new vital event to check out, I again immediately turned to the Landesarchiv Berlin database trying to locate Franz Pincus and Elisabeth Krüger’s marriage register listing. Surprisingly, I was unable to find it even though the precise date and number of the certificate, Nr. 241, were furnished. I’ve previously encountered this situation, even with exact dates and specific Berlin boroughs in hand, where it is not always possible to track down listings of vital events. The reason for this is not clear to me.
Just in the last few days, collecting and organizing newly acquired information for this post, I reexamined Franz’s typed death certificate hoping something new might reveal itself, and indeed it did. While the marriage year clearly seemed to be 1928, I began to question whether the typed “8” might not be a “3,” so checked the marriage listings under “K” (for Krüger) for 1923 and was rewarded by finding Elisabeth Krüger and Franz Pincus’s names in the Berlin-Friedenau Landesarchiv database. (Figures 12a-b) I’ve now ordered and await the actual marriage certificate but detected a notation in the register that Franz Pincus changed his surname to Pauly, a footnote obviously made some years after Franz got married.
A recent check in MyHeritage for Franz Pincus yielded a “German Minority Census, 1939” form which corroborates some of the aforementioned information, namely, Franz’s dates of birth and death, and he and his wife’s ages and residence in Berlin-Steglitz in 1939. (Figure 13) The information from MyHeritage was late in coming and might have short circuited other searches I did.
Franz Pincus’s sister, Charlotte “Lilo” Pincus, I discovered from ancestry.com rode out the war in Scotland; as a German foreigner, she was briefly interned before being released and allowed to teach. (Figure 14) She returned to Berlin after the war. A small metal sign bearing her name has been placed at the Christus-Friedhof in Mariendorf, Berlin, showing she died on the 6th of September 1995. (Figure 15)
From time to time, I stumble across a family letter or diary mentioning the people about whom I write. In writing this post, I recalled a brief mention of Franz and Lilo Pincus in a letter Suse Vogel née Neisser, daughter of the Dr. Ernst Neisser discussed above, wrote in 1972 to her first cousin, Klaus Pauly. (Figure 16) Klaus developed the Pauly Stammbaum, and he asked Suse Vogel’s assistance in identifying some of the people in the picture taken at Maria and Axel Pohlmann’s 1901 wedding. This included Franz and Lilo Pincus (Figure 17), and translated below is what Suse Vogel wrote about them:
“. . .The remaining little dwarfs bottom left: the upper one is obviously Franz Pincus-Pauly, below probably his sister Liselotte (is she calling herself Charlotte now?) I confess that I disliked her since childhood contrary to the nice ‘Blondel,’ her brother. And I was in agreement about that with bosom friend Aenne. Later, but long before Hitler-times, I declared to myself that Franz and Lilo were raised by their father strictly positivist. To my childish horror they did not ‘believe’ in anything. So, they were a priori ‘without faith, hope and love’ – sounds very presumptuous, but that’s how I felt as a young girl.”
While Suse Vogel’s words are not particularly complimentary, the mere fact I could find anything written about Franz and his sister, provides a fleeting glimpse into these long-gone ancestors and brings them to life in a small way.
FRANZ PINCUS/PAULY & HIS IMMEDIATE FAMILY
| Name
(Relationship) |
Vital Event | Date | Place |
| Franz Pincus/Pauly
(self) |
Birth | 23 October 1895 | Posen, Germany (Poznan, Poland) |
| Marriage | 12 May 1923 | Berlin-Friedenau, Germany | |
| Death | 2 August 1941 | Berlin-Wedding, Germany | |
| Charlotte “Lilo” Pincus (sister) | Birth | 30 December 1898 | Posen, Germany (Poznan, Poland) |
| Death | 6 September 1995 | Tempelhof-Schöneberg, Berlin, Germany | |
| Elisabeth “Lisa” Krüger (wife) | Birth | 20 December 1890 | Berlin, Germany |
| Marriage | 12 May 1923 | Berlin-Friedenau, Germany | |
| Death | 25 April 1977 | Stuttgart, Germany | |
| Oscar Pincus (father) | Birth | 23 April 1859 | Insterburg, East Prussia (Chernyakhovsk, Russia) |
| Marriage | 21 October 1893 | Posen, Germany (Poznan, Poland) | |
| Death | 18 January 1934 | Magdeburg, Germany | |
| Paulina Pauly (mother) | Birth | 26 April 1872 | Posen, Germany (Poznan, Poland) |
| Marriage | 21 October 1893 | Posen, Germany (Poznan, Poland) | |
| Death | 31 March 1922 | Magdeburg, Germany |