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Erna

Epilogue

On September 1, 1947, Ella Ankermann wrote to Erna Baruch’s relatives from the Herrmann family in Cali, Colombia. This letter, often quoted here, also shows that Max Baruch’s Christian first wife still had contact with Erna’s first husband, Hermann Twelkemeyer, during the war. She said that she wanted to fulfill Erna’s last wish and wanted to take care of her daughter Edith, who had escaped to Scotland. And to explain why she of all people, Ella Ankermann, suddenly might have to take care of Edith, the daughter of the woman who had married her ex-husband Max, she wrote:

“There was still the possibility that Hermann Twelkemeier could be called to serve in the army! However, Mr. Twelkemeier informed me that Edith felt very comfortable and was in good hands with her “adoptive parents”.[1]

This indicates that she would have wanted to support Edith if her last relative, father Hermann Twelkemeyer, had not been able to do so anymore. However, it is advisable to read the letter of the Christian Ella Ankermann with a certain caution. Here and there her own needs and wish for help shines through between the lines. Now, after the end of the war, she would be sitting in bombed-out Berlin. She emphasized how altruistically she had always supported ex-husband Max and his second wife Erna, how she herself had been deprived of all financial means by Max’s divorce, how difficult her own situation was now, and how happy the Jewish emigrants must feel in Colombia today. But perhaps my suspicions may be wrong.

The behavior of Hermann Twelkemeyer, the Christian first husband of Erna Baruch, is demonstrably not as positive as his daughter Edith in Scotland probably assumed until her death in March 2018. One of the best experts in the Jewish history of Nordhausen, the former mayor of the town, Manfred Schröter, spoke with many contemporary witnesses there over a number of years.

In Nordhausen, in particular, other married couples from Jewish-Christian “mixed marriages”, who had remained together despite humiliations and had thus saved their Jewish partners from deportation, repeatedly expressed the suspicion that not Erna but Hermann Twelkemeyer had forced the separation. One Nordhausen family lamented Hermann Twelkemeyer’s “lack of character” and considered him complicit in Erna’s death. He could have saved her, since the Jewish partners in mixed marriages could still live relatively safely in Germany until shortly before the end of the Nazi regime and, for example, were exempt from the obligation to wear the yellow star. The accusations went even further. After the war, Twelkemeyer’s house was completely bombed out. However, during the short American occupation of the town, despite the extreme shortage of space, he had very quickly been assigned a replacement site in the best location. Manfred Schröter, therefore, suspected that Twelkemeyer deliberately pretended to be a Nazi victim to the victorious powers after the war. [2]

In the files of the Oberfinanzdirektion Berlin Brandenburg another “process” was preserved, which also did not show him in a particularly positive light. In the spring and summer of 1944, Hermann Twelkemeyer tried to transfer his life insurance policy, which he had taken out together with Erna, to himself. However, the insurance company had already expressed its doubts to the tax authorities as to how the property shares of the Jewish ex-wife, who was one of the subscribers to the contract, should be handled in a legally correct manner. The insurance company knew that the German state was claiming the assets of the murdered for itself down to the last penny. Quite “legally”. According to the 11th Ordinance to the Reich Citizenship Law (one of the “Nuremberg Laws” of 1935), the assets of the “expatriates” were completely forfeited to the German Reich after their death. The insurance company showed itself willing to accept Hermann Twelkemeyer as the sole beneficiary in life insurance– but only under the condition that the tax authorities renounced their share of the assets of the “expatriates”. They were to certify in writing that the tax authorities had renounced the “Jewish” part of the life insurance they had already saved. The Finance Department, however, apparently sensed larger amounts that could be lost to the Reich and so inquired about the divorced Jewish woman in Berlin. It asked the ex-husband for a statement. On May 10, 1944 – more than a year after the death of his ex-wife in Auschwitz – Twelkemeyer wrote to the authorities:

“In the meantime, since my wife is Jewish, I was divorced. I don’t know where my divorced wife is.”

That sounds neutral and plausible. On August 8, 1944, however, he added more:

“As for your further inquiries, I would like to inform you that my divorced wife was born in Nordhausen on 10 June 06. Where she went after the divorce is unknown to me. I assume that she is no longer in Germany. I further declare that my divorced wife was completely without assets and did not bring any assets into the marriage. I cannot go any further, since I did not take care of this woman again, nor did I receive any news from her”.

So wrote the man whose daughter lived with foster parents in Scotland because she had a Jewish mother. He did not take care of “this woman”– he obviously does not want to be associated with “this woman“ any more. Here, too, of course, the circumstances must be taken into account: Hermann Twelkemeyer wrote to a Nazi-dominated German authority. Did he possibly want to protect the theft of Erna Twelkemeyer’s life insurance premiums– which she had presumably paid for using her earnings from working in Herrmann’s business – from the grip of the Nazi state? Until about 1938 Erna and Herrmann Twelkemeyer had both made life insurance contributions, on the basis that the insurance company would eventually pay out the total sum owed to them both or, if one of them died, to the surviving spouse. But Erna and Herrmann ‘suspended’ the insurance in 1938 (i.e. they stopped making monthly payments) because Erna was Jewish.

In 1944 Herrmann – by then divorced from Erna – wanted to reactivate the life insurance, but only in his name. By this time, the Nazi authorities were already trying to forcibly collect all the savings of deported and murdered Jews. Herrmann claimed that Erna had never paid anything into the life insurance herself. I think he wanted all the money for himself. But something else is also possible: if he prevented the Nazis from taking control of the funds, he could then share them with his ex-wife Erna after the war. So, did he deliberately lie and tell the Nazis “I no longer know the woman” in order to save the money for both himself and Erna?  That is possible. But I think it is unlikely. After the war his neighbors in the town of Nordhausen thought that Herrmann Twelkemeyer was a coward who had betrayed his wife Erna. He had always sought only his own advantage. His choice of words in these letters of 1944 concerning his persecuted first wife makes me shiver.

According to Ella Ankermann, Twelkemeyer remarried after the war. She wrote to Colombia:

“Recently I went to Nordhausen, which by the way doesn’t look so badly bombed. Mr. Twelkemeier remarried, a 20-year-old young lady, on 23 August 1947.”

Twelkemeyer’s daughter, Edith Forrester-Twelkemeyer, later told the family version of the story, in a BBC television documentary. Hermann, her biological father, although Christian, had been in the “camp” and had escaped. In 1945 East Germany had been occupied by the Red Army. Trapped in the Russian occupation zone, her biological father had not been able to make contact with her in England. This would explain why she had heard nothing from her father for a long time after the liberation of Germany.

“My natural father, being a gentile, had escaped the camps, though trapped in the Russian zone he was unable to contact his daughter.” [3]

So aapparentlyhe was unable to contact his daughter. Maybe this was the version Edith had heard from her father, Hermann Twelkemeyer. They actually saw each other again.

In a long interview with the Scottish organization “Gathering The Voices” Edith described this reunion. And the discomfort she now felt after her long and happy long stay with her foster parents in Scotland. Bank official Gavin Forrester and his wife had lovingly supported her from the age of seven: first when she arrived, then as faithful and generous foster parents who accompanied and protected Edith through her childhood to her vocational training. Edith was so grateful to them that, although she was not an adopted child, she later adopted the surname Forrester with great conviction.

“INT: And did you see your father again?

EF: Yes.

INT: What happened with your birth father?

EF: That was very difficult, very difficult because I went to Germany and his sister was a dear aunt of mine and she’d been bombed and she was paralysed from the neck down and I was going to stay with her and my father. And he arrived at the station with beautiful red roses and everything. I have to confess with shame to this day; I felt nothing when I saw him. He was standing with his back to me when I looked out the window and he was tall and thin, just as I remembered him. Tall, very tall, six feet tall and you know, the crinkly hair which was grey of course but when he turned, the face was so wrinkled and ravaged. But he was always touching me and holding my hand and I could not, I could not feel the love that I had felt for this wonderful father that I had for nearly seven years, well seven years yes.

INT: And when was it that you went? How old were you by then when you went back to Germany to see him?

EF: Would it be nineteen or twenty? I was a student here.

INT: That is a long time.

EF: And of course…what I didn’t know was that my Scottish father was going out of his mind because he said to Mum, “She’ll not want to come back. She’ll see her own father. She’ll not want to come back.” She kept saying, she was one of these wonderful calming spirits, she said, “Gavin, she’ll be back, don’t you worry. This is her home and she loves us.” And I never saw such relief on their faces when I stepped off that plane and just ran towards them, you know.“[4]

Edith’s biological mother Erna died in Auschwitz. And as a survivor and child of a murdered woman, Edith saw it as her duty to pass on her own story and that of her mother to the younger generation until her death. The story of a mother who was willing to tear herself away from her daughter so that she would be safe. The story of a very courageous mother who consistently gave up her sheltered life in Nordhausen to protect others. A mother whose deprivation by the tax authorities and disparaging assessment by her ex-husband was never known to her daughter in Scotland – thank God perhaps. The Nazis and many German beneficiaries had systematically destroyed her life, expelled her from her homeland, exploited her in factories, made her life hell in Berlin, then imprisoned her, and finally deprived her of her life. Not only that. Erna was also not allowed to have a resting place, a place of burial and remembrance. And even, after all that, there was actually one last tiny remnant left, which could also be stolen:

On January 20, 1944, the Berlin Brandenburg Finance Directorate noted that 387 Reichsmarks could still be “redeemed” from the sale of Max and Erna Baruch’s furniture from their apartment in Gervinusstrasse.[5] The landlord demanded the outstanding rent for the apartment, which had been vacant for several months after the deportation, from the state. After these “expenses” and “income” had been set off against each other, the Baruch couple’s “asset valuation” left a remainder. The “surplus” of 140 Reichsmark and 39 Pfennigen could still be booked to the state account. „Ordnung muss sein.“ (Order must be.)

  • [1] Letter from Ella Ankermann to family Herrmann in Cali, Colombia from 1.9.1957. In: Darling Mutti. Edited and compiled by Joan Marshall. Jacana Book. Johannesburg 2005 p.78 ff
  • [2] Mail from Manfred Schröter to the author from 13.09.2018
  • [3] Herald Scotland (Friday) 20th November 1998 , Goodnight, sweetheart
  • [4] Interview by Claire Singerman with Edith Forrester on the Website Gathering the Voices“. Edith Forrester Settling In https://new.gatheringthevoices.com/edith-forrester-setting-in/
  • [5] Two index cards Max Baruch and Erna Baruch, divorced Twelkemeyer Rep 36 A Chief Finance President Berlin Brandenburg (II), index and list of assets, Brandenburg State Main Archive

Erna and Max Baruch Get Married

At the end of November 1941 Erna and Max Martin Baruch married. How and where the two met remains uncertain. Max’s first wife, the Christian Ella Ankermann, wrote after the war:           

“Erna and Max got married on the 29th November 1941 and they always thought they would escape the deportation thanks to Erna’s former marriage to Hermann Twelkemeier who was Christian. We, unfortunately, did not have any children; then            things would be been different, I suppose.“[1]

Erna and Max probably moved in together for the first time to 7 Droysenstr in Charlottenburg. But there is no proof of this. What is certain is that Max Baruch lived there after his marriage. The following applies to both: their next apartment would be their last place of residence before their deportation. Six months after the marriage, the husband was admitted to our house at 20b Gervinusstrasse as the main tenant. It was Berta Cohn’s apartment on the ground floor. The Main Planning Office of the Lord Mayor of the Reich Capital Berlin made no secret of the fact that the head of the household, Max Martin Baruch, was forced to move into the apartment. On his letter of referral it says – as was usual on this type of form:

“This is a temporary measure against which objection is pointless. The Jewish tenants are admitted on the instructions of my office via the Jewish Kultusvereinigung zu Berlin e.V.”[2]

The form, signed by an official named Frank, is dated 11.06.1942. The executing organization is the Jewish Community of Berlin, which confirmed the move on 05.08.1942 under the name “Jüdische Kultusvereinigung Berlin e.V.” (this signature is illegible: Walther Israel NN.).

What is not written on the torn, brittle, yellowed form letter of the city of Berlin is the reason why the Baruch couple could move into Bertha Cohn’s apartment. The two dark rooms on the ground floor were “free”. And the reason for this can be found in databases and National Socialist transport lists. The previous tenants had been deported.

Bertha Cohn from Bavaria was 58 years old. At that time she was already widowed. With Carl, her husband, she had lived in the ground floor apartment for eight years. When he died in Berlin, Bertha Cohn shared her small apartment for a while with another Jewish widow, Flora Landsberger from Ratibor. Bertha and Flora each had “four Jewish grandparents” – it says this in May 1939 in the Nazi census files. Flora Landsberger was the first of the two who was transported “to the east”. And then, on 13 June 1942, a total of three older women disappeared from our house: Bertha Cohn, Martha Kaphan and Bela Erbe. Did a Gestapo van come? Or did they– like so many others– voluntarily walk with their suitcases to the S-Bahn station and drive to “their collection point”, as the Jewish community’s announcement letters said?

One of the three women, Bela Erbe, last lived across the corridor from where I live now, on the third floor. Did the Nazi engineer, who lived in my apartment at the time, watch through his spy-hole on that June day when she last locked up? Or did he watch her from the balcony? One thing is certain: he and the other Germans, the “Volksdeutsche” in the house knew what was going on. There were simply too many who disappeared from here. A total of 39 people were murdered by the Nazis – just from our house. The list of victims from our street is much longer.

The three older ladies – Cohn, Kaphan, and Erbe “disappeared” to Sobibor that summer day. This was a brand new extermination camp:  only 3 months before – in June 1942-, construction had begun. And now the small apartment in the backyard with a view of the well was “free” again, available for Max and Erna Baruch.

  • [1] Letter from Ella Ankermann to family Herrmann in Cali, Colombia from 1.9.1957. In: Darling Mutti. Edited and compiled by Joan Marshall. Jacana Book. Johannesburg 2005 p.78 ff
  • [2] Max Baruch’s referral form to the Judenhaus Gervinusstraße 20. Private property of the house owner Dan M. Messerschmidt.

Who was Erna Baruch, Formerly Twelkemeyer?

Erna Baruch was not from Berlin. As Erna Herrmann, she had been born on 10.06.1906 in Nordhausen am Harz,Thuringia. Her parents, Theodor Herrmann and Else Herrmann, née Braumann, belonged to the Jewish community of the area; her father came from Göttingen. Presumably in the late 1920s Erna married her first husband, Hermann Twelkemeyer (born 1896), in Nordhausen. He was a Christian whose family came from Gütersloh in Westphalia. The young couple lived at Schackenhof 2 in the Harz town of Nordhausen, not far from the railway station.  The property was Jewish owned. It belonged to the Heilbrunn brothers. Erna’s parents probably also lived nearby. Hermann Twelkemeyer was a grocer who traded in bulk with meat, tropical fruits and other goods.

The young married couple, the Twelkemeyers, were doing well after their marriage. In autumn 1929 they took out a joint life insurance policy, which would later play an inglorious role. A long and happy life was planned: it was not until 1959 that the life insurance was to be paid out.

At first, however, the two were happy – especially when their daughter Edith was born to them on 31.03.1931. In family photos with the Jewish grandmother, Else Herrmann, the parents and their daughter smile happily into the camera. Edith later fondly remembered her nice Christian and Jewish relatives – but her Jewish ancestry did not play a particularly big role in her daily life. She experienced, “the best of both traditions,” as she later said: the Christian Christmas parties at her father’s parents’ home in Gütersloh; the Jewish Chanukah parties in Berlin at her great-aunt Lola’s in 124 Kantstrasse. Great-aunt Flora Lola Lauter nee Braumann was married to Louis Lauter, a Jewish businessman.

“These were lovely Jewish people that came and I loved them but being Jewish was never something that was discussed – you know, you are a Jewish child and you must do this and you must do that. At Christmas time I went one year to my father’s relatives in Gütersloh and the next year I would go to Berlin to be with my Jewish Omi’s sister and family. So it was the best of both worlds but a child accepts these things very much more and it’s only now when I think back that I think how could I not have guessed that things were not the way they should have been.”[1]

But only two years after the birth of Edith the signs indicated a storm was coming – even in Nordhausen. The Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses on April 1, 1933, marked the beginning. Nordhäuser SA and SS boasted that–

“At 10:00 a.m. all Jewish shops and businesses, as well as the offices of Jewish lawyers and doctors, were closed”.

“After the closure, red posters were displayed at the entrances with the following inscription: ‘Closed until the world Jews have stopped fighting against the awakened Germany. SA and SS Nordhausen.“[2]

After the introduction of the Nuremberg Race Laws in 1935, anti-Semitic agitation intensified. The local Nazi newspaper “Allgemeine Zeitung” writes on 5 August 1935 about a council meeting in Nordhausen, and notes how Lord Mayor Dr. Meister now intends to tackle “the Jewish question” in the city on the Harz: One begins with renaming the Jüdenstrasse (Jewish-Street), in “Am Ratskeller”. The Council applauds. There is also applause about the reasoning:

“By renaming Jüdenstrasse in Nordhausen, we want to make it known that it is above all important to us to bring about a time in Nordhausen in which no Jew is left in Nordhausen.”

Arrests of individual Jews “for rampant rents” or “racial desecration” followed, and brutal mistreatment took place in the streets. In the so-called “Poland Action” – the forced expulsion of Jews from the German Reich – at the end of October 1938, about 40 Jews from Nordhausen were deported to the no man’s land between the Polish and German borders.[3]

Daughter Edith and her cousin Kurt Herrmann had traumatic memories of 9 November 1938. The synagogue was burned down. In the city, Jews were arrested in their houses then driven through the streets as a demonstration of power; alongside the destruction of shops and the unhindered burning of the synagogue. Finally, they were held under guard for the night at Am Siechenhof. The women and children were released home the next morning, but many of the Jewish men were deported to the Buchenwald concentration camp.

According to Edith Twelkemeyer, her father, Christian Hermann Twelkemeyer, was also arrested during the November terror and released 2-3 days later. She did not say where he was taken.

“They took my father away. But my father, being non-Jewish, he, of course, was able to come back two or three days later and, you know, we were relieved at that.” [4]

”I can remember walking through town with the maid the day after,” recalls Edith Forrester, then a happy six-year-old in the east German town of Nordhausen. ” We saw the glass covering the street and the devastation in our friends’ homes, but I never really connected it to me – it was only when the SS dragged my grandmother from her sickbed that I knew fear. Night after night we’d lain awake, listening to the SS marching beneath the window, and then one day, inevitably, it was our turn. I can still hear them coming up the stairs and remember the confusion as they ransacked the house, hauled people out of bed, and took my papa away. They took all the men in the building, but only my father came back.” [5]

Her Jewish cousin, Kurt, had to endure much longer in the Buchenwald concentration camp. The Jews from Nordhausen and from all over Thuringia were driven together and suffered cruel and humiliating violence there for days on end, resulting in suicides, torture and murders in the camp. Finally Kurt succeeded in being released from the camp because of a lucky coincidence and some ingenuity.  Kurt had been in Buchenwald for about two weeks in November 1938. However, in the suit he wore when he was arrested, he found an old receipt. It was a receipt from his travel agency stating that he had booked passage on the „Orinoco“ steam-ship to Havanna, Cuba in the winter of 1938. Unfortunately it was only the receipt, not the ticket itself. He had sold the actual ticket a few days before he was sent to Buchenwald, because changes to the Cuban visa requirements meant that his plan to escape to Havanna would fail. Nevertheless, he took the receipt and told the Buchenwald SS-men that he would be leaving Germany for Cuba in a couple of days. Based on that, the SS-men let him go. A short time later he was able to flee illegally via Belgium to the USA.

The daughter of Erna and Hermann, Edith Twelkemeyer, was sent from Germany to England via the Hook of Holland as a child transportee in March 1939. Together with other children, including Bob Mackenzie, she landed in Harwich on 16 March 1939. Before leaving Nordhausen, her father accompanied her to the train station; her mother remained at her side on the journey via Hanover to Hamburg. There Erna helped her unsuspecting daughter Edith up the high steps into the train to Holland. They saw each other one last time as other children lifted the 7-year-old girl up so that she could look out of the window of the departing train.

Edith’s moving story about her very kind host parents, Mr and Mrs Forrester, in Kirkcaldy, Scotland, can only be briefly mentioned here (it is described in detail in a radio show).

Immediately after their daughter Edith was safe, Erna Twelkemeyer left her husband in Nordhausen and went to Berlin. Her daughter Edith was convinced that the separation and later divorce was a decision of her mother Erna. At first, she believed, Hermann Twelkemeyer would have not wanted to do this. Mother Erna would have told her husband that the separation was necessary for his safety.

Erna never saw him again after her departure. She herself had hoped to come to her daughter in Great Britain as a domestic servant, because for a time this was the only possible way for adult Jewish women from Germany to be accepted in the UK. But this plan failed.

“My father had to divorce her. He didn’t want to divorce her but she said, “It will be better for your safety and I will go”. So she agreed to that and she didn’t see him again. But it has been emphasised again and again by both sides of the family that my father wanted to stay with my mother and she would not allow it, so her child was going to be safe. And I think she had hoped she would get to Britain as a domestic because that was the only way they could get there, to be in service, but she never made it.“[6]