A second Hilda declaration lists jewels that Betty was forced to sell in 1939
A couple of days ago, Joanne was rereading the Hilda affidavit and noticed this line.
The list of chief objects from the apartment that I remember after so many years are provided separately, just as are the important jewelry items.
She wondered if I had that separate list, adding "It would be wild if we might still have any of those jewels in our safety deposit box."
She thought maybe the items mentioned by Hilda could have been pieces that were eventually passed on by Helga.
I should have realized right away that was not possible, because the jewelry in the restitution documents were items that were taken from Betty Wohlgemuth by the German government either before or after her death. Unless Hilda had somehow been able to reacquire the same items later, which really would have been wild.
Instead, my first reaction to Joanne's query was, yes, I had seen lists of jewelry items and even some drawings in the Landesarhiv Wohlgemuth file, where the restitution affidavit was originally found. Besides that one important document, most of the contents of the voluminous file have not been translated.
But I have all those digital scans right here on my computer, all 158 pages of them. I know this is a big future project for me to read and translate more documents in that file.
So the morning I took a rapid look through the PDF looking for the drawings that I had remembered. I was easily able to find a document that had two pages of drawings attached. One is shown above.
I sent that off to Jo and got to work translating the document, which I will provide in the next post.
