MilitarybGerman Note: This post relates some wartime memories of my German-born third cousin who is half-Jewish.
I first introduced my third cousin, Agnes Stieda née Vogel (Figure 1), to readers in the previous Blog post (Post 45). She is the granddaughter of one of my Pauly relatives, Margarethe Neisser née Pauly (Figure 2), one of Josef and Rosalie Pauly’s daughters; Margarethe predeceased by less than a year her husband, Dr. Ernst Neisser (Figure 3), who along with his cousin committed suicide in Berlin on October 4, 1942, rather than be deported to a concentration camp.
Release of my previous post prompted Agnes to put down in writing memories of her wartime years, fulfilling a request from her children. Agnes graciously shared these recollections with me and was open to the idea of turning them into a Blog post. What follows is Agnes’ firsthand account of some wartime memories in Germany, including a few footnotes to provide a historic and geographic context for her tale.
Briefly, some backdrop. Agnes was born in May 1927 at the municipal hospital in Stettin, Germany [today: Szczecin, Poland] where her grandfather, Dr. Ernst Neisser, was the Director. She lived in various places growing up, including two-and-a-half years in Kassel, Germany [northern Hesse, Germany], then three years in Switzerland before her parents eventually settled in the small Lower Silesian village of Baitzen, Germany [today: Byczen, Poland], not far from the German-Czechoslovak border; she attended boarding school in the not-too-distant German town of Gnadenfrei (i.e., 27km or 17 miles north-northwest of Baitzen), known before 1928 as Ober-Peilau [today: Piława Górna, Poland]. Gnadenfrei/Ober-Peilau (Figure 4) was for many years “the longest village in Germany,” because it stretched for several miles along a brook, the Peile River. Piława Górna is 54km or 34 miles south of the regional capital of Wrocław [German: Breslau].
In 1945, after WWII, Gnadenfrei was transferred from Germany to Poland. Today, it is in Dzierżoniów County, Lower Silesian Voivodeship, in southwestern Poland, about 10km (6 miles) southeast of Dzierżoniów, Poland [formerly Reichenbach, Germany]; the latter is located at the foot of the Owl Mountains [German: Eulengebirge], a mountain range of the Central Sudetes, also known as the Sudeten after their German name. The view from Agnes’s parents’ living room was of these mountains, a place she often hiked.
As mentioned, Gnadenfrei and Baitzen were only a short distance from the border with then-Czechoslovakia, and Baitzen was located along the main road that led there; the areas along the border with Germany were predominantly inhabited by German-speaking people, and during the interwar period, these native German-speaking regions within Czechoslovakia were referred to as the “Sudetenland.” (Figure 5)
Students of history will recall the Munich Agreement, or the “Munich Betrayal” as the Czechs refer to it; this was an agreement between France and Nazi Germany that France would not provide military assistance to Czechoslovakia in the upcoming German occupation of the Sudetenland, effectively dishonoring the French-Czechoslovak alliance and allowing Nazi Germany’s annexation of the area, a region of western Czechoslovakia inhabited mainly by German speakers (i.e., 3.67 million inhabitants including some 2.9 million Germans). Adolf Hitler announced it was his last territorial claim in Europe, and the choice seemed to be between war and appeasement. An emergency meeting of the main European powers – not including the Soviet Union, an ally to both France and Czechoslovakia – took place in Munich, Germany, on 29-30 September 1938. An agreement was quickly reached on Hitler’s terms. It was signed by the top leaders of Germany, France, Great Britain, and Italy. Czechoslovakia was not invited to the conference. Between October 1st and 10th, 1938, the German Wehrmacht occupied the Sudetenland.
With this brief background, what follows is Agnes’ story. Numbers in parentheses correspond to my footnotes at the end of the narrative.
“When WWII started with the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, I was in a Moravian-run boarding school in Gnadenfrei. When we heard the news on the radio, all the teachers started crying, a scary sight for us pupils. Only one younger teacher was happy—her home was in Danzig, a city in the Polish ‘corridor,’ which meant that it once again became German. I remember German Wehrmacht soldiers marching into Czechoslovakia, day and night, along the road on which my parents lived in Baitzen, Germany (Figure 6), though this may be a memory of when the Germans invaded the remainder of Czechoslovakia earlier that same year, in March 1939. We were only 20km (12 miles) from the border with Czechoslovakia.
I stayed at an all-girls boarding school in Gnadenfrei until I was 15 years old. Only later did I learn that the Director of the school had been sent multiple questionnaires asking whether any of her girls there had a Jewish background, which the Director threw unanswered into the garbage, a real act of courage. The Director and the students all had to salute the Nazi flag every morning, raising their arms and saying, ‘Heil Hitler”; once I raised my left arm and was reprimanded for it by the Hitler Youth leader. Although I was well-aware of my Jewish background, my mother’s Neisser family had long-ago converted to Christianity at a time when Germany let Jews convert. Nonetheless, for the Nazi Regime it was all about race, not religion.
I had a very close friend in the boarding school in Gnadenfrei, Karin, who was the daughter of landowning Silesian aristocrats, the von Czettritz/Neuhaus family. (Figure 7) I was often a guest at their house and spent the summer holidays in their home in Reichenbach. I saw my parents during the Christmas and Easter holidays. Karin commuted everyday by train from Reichenbach to Gnadenfrei to attend school there but was never a boarder. Sadly, Karin died of typhoid when she was 16, and my parents would not allow me to attend her funeral, afraid I would endanger her parents’ safety. This was a very bitter pill to swallow because of all the time I had spent with her and her family.
I remember being drafted into the ‘Jungmädchen’ [2], then into the B.D.M. [3]. We were required to pledge our personal allegiance to Hitler. I just put my free hand behind my back and stretched my fingers out, meaning the oath went in and out again of my consciousness. . .I thought it was rather a lark.
By 1942, my poor directors in both school and dormitory could no longer keep me, so from one day to the next, my years in Gnadenfrei were terminated and I returned to my parents’ home in Baitzen. The worst thing during the war years is that the brothers and fathers of many of my girlfriends were drafted into Hitler’s army, and died on the Front. Upon learning of their father’s or brother’s deaths, my girlfriends cried, and we, their friends, lay beside them in bed and tried to comfort them. I tear up even now thinking how awful this was for them and their families. To this day, I don’t know what happened to some of my girlfriends. After 1945, when that part of Germany became Polish, we had a ‘round letter’ that circulated twice a year with addresses of our schoolmates, but from a few we never heard from.
While we lived in Silesia, we would hear the Russian bombers flying overhead, but, living in the countryside, we never heard a bomb fall. We had food rations, but the real starvation came after 1945, when we had fled to Potsdam, a suburb of Berlin under Russian occupation.
Back to 1942. By the time I left school, ‘gymnasiums,’ schools which prepared you for university, were long closed to Jews and half-Jews. So, I did a lot of different things until I entered a gymnasium in Potsdam after the Nazi collapse to catch-up on my lost school years. My father could not work in his field as an art historian but managed to find a job with a Prince from the German aristocracy, I think a nephew or cousin of the last German Kaiser, who owned a large castle in Silesia; he gave him a job as a bookkeeper.
Later, the Russians threw us out of the house where we lived as refugees in Potsdam following Russian occupation of the area; we ended up living in a row house with a Frau von Mandelsloh and her husband, the sister and brother-in-law of my father’s former boss from Silesia. . .Frau von Mandelsloh was a veritable ‘angel.’
For about a year during the war, I was an au pair for a pastor and his wife who needed a housemaid for their two young children. During this time, we went back-and-forth between Potsdam and Silesia, living in both places. Obviously, as the war went on, anyone of Jewish ancestry was in more and more danger. Once, I remember, the Gestapo came to our small village. The mayor called us by telephone, which placed him in great danger, and warned us that we should disappear until everything was clear again. Can you imagine, the mayor calling?! Promptly, my mother and I trudged to the railway station in Kamenz [today: Kamieniec, Poland] (Figure 6) a half-hour’s walk away, through the freezing weather and caught the first train to Breslau [today: Wrocław, Poland], where we had relatives.
My father and many older or injured people were the last ones drafted to hold the Eastern Front line by digging ditches, etc. My father had had his thumb shot off during WWI and spent nine months in a field hospital; he never recovered the use of his left hand, unable to grip anything, but this saved him from being drafted into the German Army. During the Nazi era, they honored those who’d been wounded during WWI.
Except for the Gestapo incidence, the Nazis left us alone mostly. We think that a young woman who lived in the same house denounced us. When the Gestapo came to my parents’ house, they removed books by Martin Niemöller [4], one of the founding members of the Confessing Church [5], which was known for opposing the Third Reich; one of their prominent members, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, was incarcerated and killed by the Nazis.
In Breslau, my father’s brother was exempt from the military because he was a Director of a large brewery, an important man who owned a large apartment with spare rooms. He could take me in but not my Jewish mother. She found refuge in the tiny apartment of a distant relative sleeping in an armchair.
In 1942, the Nazi Regime went quickly to work on their ‘Final Solution,’ as they called it. They gathered all non-Aryans and ordered them to report for deportation. My grandmother had already died a year before [1941] but my grandfather, his cousin, and many other relatives were ordered to register. Knowing what was coming, they instead took their own lives. My mother [Suse Vogel née Neisser] wrote about this, and her memoirs can be found on the Internet, but only in German; they are really in need of translation into English.
Back to the war. I had never experienced an air-raid but that was to come. Back in Silesia, I worked for a farmer from morning to night and loved that job. It was strenuous work, but being outside all day I was carefree, and never thought much about not being in school.
My grandfather, to whom I was very close, was still alive at the time. I have a very distinct childhood memory of being in his apartment in 1941 in Berlin when he learned of my grandmother’s death, of him standing by a window with tears running down his face; in all the years, I’ve never forgotten this image. I learned about my grandfather’s death when my parents sent me his obituary but found out only later why he had died. Of my grandmother’s sisters and their spouses who also committed suicide, I continue to learn about them even today. My dear parents tried to protect me from the Nazi horrors as much as they could and kept me innocent and naïve for a long time. When it became obvious that Germany would lose the war, Nazi rules became even stricter.
After one finished the B.D.M., every young girl was drafted and sent East to ‘defend’ the Fatherland. I was no exception. My mother, however, was unwilling to accept these circumstances and asked the advice of a doctor friend, aptly named Dr. Freund [German ‘freund’=friend]. He wrote a document for the authorities stating that I had streptococcus that had caused a heart valve disease. Streptococcus is so contagious it did the trick of my not being drafted. But I had to go to many clinics in Breslau to have my heart valve disease diagnosed; of course, the doctors could not find it because I was perfectly healthy. This strep was so indoctrinated into me that for years I was convinced I really had it.
In most ways the Hitler regime was very organized, but in others it was chaotic, and things were overlooked. Our wonderful neighbors in Silesia were very worried about my mother and me, more on account of the rapidly approaching Russian and Polish armies than the Nazis. Their newly-married daughter begged us to come with her and her parents, whom she also sought to protect, deep into the Silesian mountains where her husband’s parents owned a butcher shop and a restaurant in the small town of Lichtenwalde [today: Poreba, Poland] (Figure 8); the daughter’s husband was at the Front. We knew lots of wonderful and courageous people. I met only two fervent Nazis, one was my father’s own nephew, who, despite his fanatic beliefs, never denounced us. Still, he suggested my mother divorce my father, and, worse, urged her to commit suicide; my father was enraged with his nephew. When we left for the mountains, we could only bring one pack with us. Upon our arrival there, we found other people who’d fled from the heavy bombing in west German cities, notably Berlin.
My mother and I took literally the last train leaving Silesia, which was already overcrowded with German refugees. My mother made it on the train, but I made it only to the running board. People, seeing we would be separated, lifted me up and shoved me in; despite the incredible chaos, they helped us find one another. Now came the nail-biting part of the journey, hoping my Jewish mother would not be discovered. Fortunately, she did not have to wear the Star of David [6]. . . Near Berlin the train stopped because it was being shot at from above, although not bombed. So, we entered Berlin, the burning images still vivid in my memory. And, there stood my father, waiting for us at the Potsdam train station. My mother and I, who had never quarreled before, argued about who would be the first to hug my father. I relented and gave her that privilege. I think this was the most decisive and happy moment of our lives.
On that very first night, there was a terrible air-raid that entirely flattened Potsdam. It was my first experience with bombings. Finally, the sirens sounded telling us it was safe to leave the air-raid shelter. Upon reaching street-level, we walked to one of the main arteries which was entirely engulfed in flames on both sides of the street with a strong wind blowing. . .we did not yet know most of the city had been destroyed. When the planes came the following night to finish the job, I remember sitting in my mother’s lap so scared I could not control my trembling. The next day or the day after that, my father said, ‘we cannot remain here, or we will be killed.’ We had a friend who lived in the country, so we loaded our backpacks and left Potsdam.
I don’t remember how many hours or even days before the Reich crumbled. I can’t even remember any celebration, because right away came, first the Polish soldiers, then the Russians, with their built-up hatred, bent on revenge for all the German Army had done to them. Fortunately, neither my mother nor I was raped, but in both cases, it was a close call.
But I better stop here because I try to erase these terrible memories.”
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The “Heim ins Reich” was a foreign policy pursued by Adolf Hitler during World War II, beginning in 1938. The aim of Hitler’s initiative was to convince all Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans) who were living outside Nazi Germany that they should strive to bring these regions “home” into Greater Germany, but also, relocate from territories that were not under German control, following the conquest of Poland in accordance with the Nazi-Soviet pact. The Heim ins Reich manifesto targeted areas ceded in Versailles to the newly reborn nation of Poland, as well as other areas that were inhabited by significant German populations such as the Sudetenland, Danzig, and the south-eastern and north-eastern regions of Europe after October 6, 1939.
[2] The Jungmädelbund (“Young Girls’ League”) was one of the original two sections of the “League of German Girls” or “Band of German Maidens” [German: Bund Deutscher Mädel, abbreviated as BDM], the girls’ wing of the Nazi Party youth movement, the Hitler Youth. The Young Girls’ League was for girls aged 10 to 14, and the League proper for girls aged 14 to 18. In 1938, a third section was introduced, the BDM-Werk Glaube und Schönheit (“Faith and Beauty Society”), which was voluntary and open to girls between the ages of 17 and 21.
[3] B.D.M. (Bund Deutscher Mädel), as explained above, was the girls’ wing of Hitler Youth for girls aged 14 to 18.
[4] Martin Niemöller (1892-1984) was a German theologian and Lutheran pastor, and was best known for his opposition to the Nazi regime during the 1930’s. While he was initially a supporter of Adolf Hitler, he became a co-founder of the “Confessing Church,” which opposed the Nazification of German Protestant Churches. Interestingly, while Martin Niemöller is by no means a household name, a poem he wrote, multiple variations of which exist, will be extremely familiar to many readers:
First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
The New England Holocaust Memorial in Boston, Massachusetts has an engraving of one of the many poetic versions of Niemöller’s poem on location.
[5] “Confessing Church” [German: Bekennende Kirche], as explained above, opposed the Nazification of German Protestant Churches.
[6] Students of history will know that the Nuremberg Laws in 1935 banned marriages between Jews and non-Jews, and that Nazis designed policies to encourage intermarried couples to divorce. However, even among intermarried couples, there was a hierarchy, at least for a period. Families with an Aryan husband and baptized children were part of the category classified as “privileged mixed marriages”; they received better rations and the Jewish wife did not have to wear the yellow Star of David. Although Agnes was baptized, on her birth certificate it is written: “I bring to your attention that this child had Jewish ancestors.” So, even though Agnes was born in 1927, as readers well-know, anti-Semitism existed long before the Nazis came to power.