Blog restarts with a precious image of Hilda'a restitution affidavit
Typescript affidavit submitted in 1958 by Hilda Wohlegmuth Leibman in her restitution case against the Germany government.
This blog has been inactive for more than a year as I have been working on other things, primarily the publishing of a Holocaust memoir coauthored by Walter and myself. During that time I have not been documenting advances in what we know of our family roots. However, the information has continued to come in, so there is a bit of a backlog of material, as well as some new stuff, for me to work through as I start things back up.
To pick up the narrative, during my trip to Berlin in July 2018 I found at the Berlin Landesarchiv bulging record files on two matter related to our family history: a Ringel file containing documents concerning the dissolution of the Hermann Ringel business in 1939-1940, and a Wohlgemuth file of documents from the 1950s related to the restitution claims of Hilda and Elly.
I spent two days with the material in Berlin but was prevented by the archive regulations from capturing an image of any of the documents. One of the treasures in the files that I was able to identify and then translate was the two-page typescript affidavit submitted in 1958 by Hilda Wohlegmuth Leibman in her restitution case against the Germany government. In it, she provides a detailed explanation of her mother's personal history and an accounting of the wealth that she accumulated during her lifetime, assets that were illegally seized by the Nazi authorities.
The affidavit is a fascinating read, and I posted the translation here in the course of my hectic work during that trip. I urge you to read it again now while also gazing at the image of the original document, signed by our aunt Hilda.
This document is just one highlight from the full Landesarchiv files. Several months after returning from my 2018 trip, I received digital scans of all the pages in the two files. I saved them to my genealogy case files and then pretty much forget about them until a few days ago. Along with my other backlogged items, there is a lot of knowledge to unpack as I work through the material.
For now, the Hilda affidavit picks up the narrative thread regarding our Wohlgemuth family branch. I'll have a few more Woihlgemuth developments coming up.
