“War is the only game in which both sides lose.”—Walter Scott
“There’s no honorable way to kill, no gentle way to destroy. There is nothing good in war. Except its ending.”—Abraham Lincoln
Note: This post is Part II about my father’s married Protestant friends from Danzig whom he befriended in the early 1930’s, and further information I recently uncovered about them and the fates of their relatives.
Related Post:
In Part I of this Blog post, I somewhat unrealistically anticipated I would uncover much more information on precisely how my father’s Protestant friends from Danzig, Ilse and Gerhard Hoppe (Figure 1), met their gruesome ends there, respectively, in 1940 and 1941. This expectation was based on the fact I was able to locate their daughter Gisela Hoppe (as I will refer to her throughout this post), born in 1939, through a German government-connected friend. It turns out Gisela survived the war and is still alive and living in Wildeshausen, Germany, having recently turned 80. This friend gave me an address and Gisela’s married name, so I naively assumed getting in touch with her would be relatively straight-forward. This was not the case.
Let me give readers a little more background before relating what I was able to learn. Peter Hanke, the gentleman affiliated with “forum.danzig.de,” whom I’ve mentioned in recent posts, offered to write a letter on my behalf to Gisela. He volunteered to help because he’d earlier attempted to find out more about Gerhard and Ilse Hoppe from the Polish State Archives in Malbork, thinking perhaps they would have their death certificates. He learned such documents were destroyed by fire at the end of WWII by invading Russian troops, so the search became moot. I explained in Part I of this post I stumbled upon Gerhard and Ilse Hoppe’s death certificates independently in ancestry.com, as well as their 1932 marriage certificate showing they wed in the Marienkirche in Marienberg [today: Malbork, Poland]. (Figures 2a-b) Upon finding these documents, I sent them to Peter suspecting he’d be interested.
Knowing Gisela’s married name and residence, I initially asked Peter if he could call her on my behalf; her phone number, so he was told, was unlisted, so he offered to write to her instead. I drafted a letter, which Peter translated and mailed in early November 2019. Both of us expected an almost instantaneous response given I’d included a few photos of Gisela’s parents from the early 1930’s and offered to share all 22 pictures from my father’s collection. I assumed this would be of great interest to Gisela since her parents had died when she was just a toddler and her memories of them would obviously be very vague or non-existent. Still, we heard nothing.
By around the middle of November, it became apparent we might not hear from Gisela at all. Regular readers know I’m persistent. I began to consider Gisela Hoppe no longer lives in Wildeshausen and tried to determine this by sending an email to the Stadt Wildeshausen, the City of Wildeshausen. Writing to City Hall is an approach I’ve successfully used in the past. Still, weeks went by without a response. Unwilling to admit defeat, I asked one of my German cousins whether she could call the Stadt Wildeshausen to check on my email; the City brusquely asked her to call back at another time. Instead, my cousin called Wildeshausen information, and was given the name and number of a person with Gisela’s married surname, whom she called. Likely, this was Gisela’s elderly husband who appeared to be somewhat confused by my cousin’s call. He led my cousin to believe Gisela had returned to Poland and gave my cousin the name and number of a Polish woman in Wildeshausen who might know her whereabouts; my cousin spoke with this lady, but she could add nothing.
In retrospect, I’ve concluded Gisela visited family in Poland and was gone from Wildeshausen for several weeks when I first wrote, because finally, on December 11, 2019, Peter Hanke received an email from her confirming the receipt of my letter. Both of us were elated to have finally established contact. She does indeed still live in Wildeshausen, and naturally my letter came as a big surprise. One of Gisela’s observations was how much the young picture of her father (Figure 3) reminded her of her brother, Rudi, who died young. My independent research has not uncovered traces of this brother. More on this below.
Having at last established contact with Gisela Hoppe and continuing to use Peter Hanke as an intermediary because of Gisela’s limited English, I emailed her all my father’s pictures of her parents. She was grateful to receive these as most family pictures of her parents were lost and left behind in the frantic escape from Danzig as the Russians were approaching.
I sense I’ve opened a portal into a very painful part of Gisela’s life she would prefer to forget. As sensitively as possible, let me explain what I’ve learned. In the waning days of the war, Ilse Hoppe’s sister, Gisela’s aunt Margot, with three children of her own, wanted to take Gisela and her brother Rudi with them as they escaped the approaching Russians. Anna Hoppe, their grandmother, who was their legal guardian with her husband Otto Hoppe after their parents’ deaths, refused to let them go. This brought Gisela and her brother a great deal of misery because the arriving Russians destroyed the supplies of insulin which quickly resulted in their grandmother’s painful death from diabetes. Their grandfather Otto found them but was already ill at the time, from an unspecified cause. For reasons that are unclear, he left them alone in Danzig, and ultimately, they were sent by the Poles to Berlin where they were adopted by various foster families. Eventually, they were reunited with family and raised by their grandmother’s niece who found them through the “German Red Cross Tracing Service.”
Gisela’s older brother, Rudolf Otto Richard Gerhard Hoppe, called “Rudi,” was born on the 2nd of April 1938. He committed suicide on the 9th of January 1965 in Göttingen, Germany where both he and Gisela were students, reasons unclear. Growing up, Gisela’s relatives told them about their parents. Ilse committed suicide apparently on account of postpartum depression, by cutting her wrists, though her death certificate notes she cut her carotid artery. Her father Gerhard accidentally died trying to adjust the blinds in their apartment without realizing the living room window was open causing him to fall to his death (Figure 4); this would account for the traumatic injuries noted on Gerhard’s death certificate. So, while the deaths of Gisela’s parents were macabre, it would seem no foul play was involved.
Translation of Dr. Gerhard Hoppe’s death notice published by the German Dental Association:
“On July 27, 1941, our professional comrade, the Dentist Gerhard Hoppe passed away suddenly. We lose in him an always helpful, good, and upright workmate, whose memory we will cherish.
Danzig, 28th July 1941, German Dentists, Chamber of Dentists, Dr. Manteuffel”
As noted in Danzig telephone books of the time (Figure 5), Gisela and her family lived on the second floor at Karrenwall 5 (Figures 6a-b), above the police station on the ground floor. (Figure 7) Gisela’s grandmother Anna Hoppe would threaten to take she and her brother to the police if they slid down the wonderfully smooth railing in the apartment.
Readers will understand my hesitancy in further exploring the war and post-war events in Gisela’s life given the tumult she’s experienced. Trite as this sounds, it’s fair to say war claims victims on all sides though one can hardly equate the tragic deaths of two non-combatant Protestant Germans to the Holocaust.