Ruth Teutsch
Born: 1912 in Augsburg.  Father’s occupation: lawyer, Counsellor of Justice (“Justizrat”).  Flat: 18 / II Bahnhofstraße.

Ruth’s parents were Arthur Teutsch (b. 1875 in Venningen) and Klara, née Holzinger (b. 1884 in Ermreuth).  Ruth had two brothers, Walter (b. 1909) and Erich (1919–2007).
Ruth attended Maria-Theresia-School from 1924 to 1928, when she completed the sixth grade; presumably, she had joined the school in 1922 in class 1.
Afterwards, Ruth worked as a textile designer.  She married Josef Schwager (b. 1910 in Cham), who ran a shop where he sold men’s outer clothing.  In 1936, a son was born to them.
The family emigrated to England in 1939, then to the USA in the beginning of 1941 at the latest.  Josef bought a shop in Salt Lake City.  From 1947 on, Ruth taught weaving at the “Pioneer Craft House”.
In 1964, Josef died in Salt Lake City.
Ruth Schwager, née Teutsch, lives up to this day in the USA (September 2008).
Ruth’s elder brother, Walter, also emigrated to the USA in 1939.  He had a career as a conductor and music professor.
Ruth’s younger brother, Erich, fled to England in 1939, where he had to stay in the “Kitchener Camp”, a refugee camp in Kent, for six months before he could emigrate to the USA.  There he married Hilde Wormser (b. 1922), a daughter of Hedwig Frank.
Ruth’s parents were deported to Terezin in August 1942.  Arthur died there on May 21, 1943; on May 18, 1944, Klara was deported to Auschwitz.
Ruth’s nephew Rabbi David Teutsch (b. 1950) lives in the USA.  He has published a brief autobiography including memories of visits to Augsburg on a website.		  



Sources and further reading:
loi (abbreviation of an author’s name), “Balsam auf die heilende Wunde,” Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung, October 17, 2000, p. 31 (on Eric Teutsch).
Rabbi David Teutsch, “A Rabbi from Augsburg,” on the following website: www.geocities.com/Vienna/Strasse/5960/essteutsch.html (as of May 2008).
Reinhard Weber, Das Schicksal der jüdischen Rechtsanwälte in Bayern nach 1933, Munich, 2006, p. 263 (on Arthur Teutsch).		  
 
 
Frieda Thanhauser
Born: 1891 in Augsburg.  Father’s occupation: man of independent means.

Frieda’s father was Heinrich Thanhauser (1852–1906), her mother was Mina, née Jakobi (1856–1916).  Like Frieda, her older sister Karoline also attended Maria-Theresia-School, as well as her nieces Ilse and Klara Thanhauser later on.
Frieda attended the “Municipal School for Daughters” (“Städtische Töchterschule”), which later was to be called “Maria-Theresia-School”, from 1903 to 1905 in classes 1 and 2.
Frieda was deported to Piaski, Poland, on April 2, 1942, and pronounced dead after the war.
For two months, from April to June 1942, the engineer Arnold Hindls from Brno, Moravia, also lived in Piaski.  For him this was but one of many deportation stations, between Terezin and Ossovo.  In his memoirs, One Man Returned, published in Germany in 1965, he tells about Piaski:  “Piaski is a small town in the Lublin district, surrounded by sand, swamps, and forests.  The state road from Lublin to Chelm divides it into two parts.  Therefore, the Jewish ghetto, which once was very large and inhabited by approx. 3000 local Jews, extended on both sides of the state road.  Now, however, these two parts of the ghetto were each enclosed by high fences made of boards and barbed wire.  They had big gates, which were permanently guarded and opened only twice a day, for one hour in the morning and one in the afternoon.  The gates were closed towards the state road.  ...
The houses of the ghetto were mostly made of wood.  They had only small yards and were closely boxed together, mostly built on ground level, only a few had one story.  ...The small town had neither plumbing nor sewer.  For the approx. 6000 inhabitants of the two parts of the ghetto...there was only one well with		  




acceptable drinking water in the southern part.  Each person was allowed to fetch only one ten litre bucket a day from that well.  ...
The SS commando which was in charge of the ghetto was stationed in a large, solid building on the outskirts of the southern part of the ghetto, at the state road. The SS could well observe both parts of the ghetto from the balcony of the building.  Every visit by those ‘members of the master race’ meant slaps, kicks, and beatings.  They confiscated food which was ‘not allowed’ and smuggled into the ghetto.  ...Twenty to thirty people, nothing but skin and bones, died of hunger every day.  ...
In spite of these catastrophic provision conditions, all men and women who were able to work were recruited into groups to do excavation, gardening, and upkeep of the roads.  ...Also within the ghetto, there was enough work to do, for instance, the cleaning and deepening of the drainage and gravel ditches, and the construction of latrines, latrines, and more latrines, of which there were never enough.”
In the autumn of 1942, some Jews were taken from Piaski to Belzec, the others, approx. 4000, were taken to Sobibor, where they were killed.  Immediately thereafter, the Piaski ghetto was occupied anew by other deported Jews.
The name Frieda Thanhauser is mentioned on a plaque of the shoah memorial which can be visited in Augsburg’s City Hall (artist: Klaus Goth).

Source:
Arnold Hindls, Einer kehrte zurück.  Bericht eines Deportierten, Stuttgart, 1965, pp. 12–32.

    
 
   
  Ilse Thanhauser
Born: 1910 in Augsburg.  Father’s occupation: merchant.  Flat: 16 Bahnhofstraße.

Ilse’s father was Nathan Thanhauser (b. 1879 in Augsburg), a livestock dealer.  He was a brother of Frieda and Karoline Thanhauser.  His wife was Natalie, née Hochherr (b. 1880 in Berwangen).  Like Ilse, her older sister Klara also attended Maria-Theresia-School.  The girls also had a younger brother, Heinrich (b. 1915).
Ilse attended Maria-Theresia-School from 1924 to 1926 in classes 5a and 6a; presumably, she had joined the school in 1920 in class 1.
In May 1925, Ilse celebrated her “confirmation” in Augsburg, together with nine other Jewish girls (Bat Mitzvah: the feast of religious majority for Jewish girls, which can be celebrated individually on the Sabbath after a girl’s twelfth birthday; in Augsburg, however, it was held, similar to the Protestant confirmation, annually or after even longer intervals for several age groups together).
In the following year, Ilse graduated at Maria-Theresia-School.  She relates about her school years and her Jewish classmates (e-mail message of March 1, 2006):  “We had no problems in those years—there was absolutely no difference to the others.”
Ilse emigrated in 1932 to Italy, as an au pair.  There she met Giulio (Julius) Baehr from Cologne and married him in Milan in 1936.  Giulio worked as a representative of a brush factory.  In 1940, the contact to Ilse’s parents and brother broke off.  Giulio had to disappear.  Ilse and her little daughter, Ruth, were interned in a small village near Perugia.  Ruth fell sick.  Only after six months mother and daughter were allowed to settle in Bologna under police supervision so that Ruth could be treatened in the Bologna hospital.  In December 1943, Ilse, Giulio and Ruth could flee to North Italy.  Under a false name, the family awaited the end of the war and returned to their rented apartment in Milan.  Due to the delay of her medical treatment, Ruth was mentally handicapped.		  


At the beginning of April 1942, Ilse’s parents, Nathan and Natalie Thanhauser, were deported to Piaski, Poland.
Ilse’s brother, Heinrich Thanhauser, moved as an agricultural worker to a “re-education camp” in Bielefeld in 1940. Instead of being trained for the emigration to Palestine, the inmates rather had to do forced labour. There are differing notices about where and when Heinrich was deported. The last inmates of the camp were deported to Auschwitz in March 1943.
As a widow, Ilse lived with her second daughter, Nadia, near Genova. During the 1990s, she wrote a brief autobiography in the style of a diary. On March 1, 2006, Nadia Baehr wrote to the “Spurensuche” team: “Last year, my mother visited two classes of elementary schools and told them about her experiences during the war. The teachers had used Ilse’s diary to prepare the classes. On January 27th this year, the pupils sent my mother a postcard saying, ‘Thank you for teaching us not to forget.’”
Ilse Baehr, née Thanhauser, died in 2009.

(This biography is based on statements by Ilse Baehr herself and her daughter, Nadia Baehr.)

Sources and further reading:
Monika Minninger, Joachim Meynert and Friedhelm Schäffer, Antisemitisch Verfolgte, registriert in Bielefeld 1933–45.  Eine Dokumentation jüdischer Einzelschicksale, Bielefeld, 1985, p. 221, No. 1051 (on Ilse’s brother, Heinrich Thanhauser).		  


Joachim Meynert and Friedhelm Schäffer, Die Juden in der Stadt Bielefeld während der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus, Bielefeld, 1983, pp. 103–6 and 120–21 (on the deportation of the Jews from the “re-education camp” in Bielefeld).

Witnesses – Letters and memories:
Ilse Baehr’s autobiography

 to a shortened version (in English)

to the original version (in Italian)

Ilse Baehr, née Thanhauser, has given an interview for USC Shoah Foundation Institute (www.usc.edu/schools/college/vhi).

    
  Karoline Than(n)hauser
Born: 1886 in Kriegshaber (near Augsburg).  Father’s occupation: trader in Augsburg.

Karoline’s father was the trader Heinrich Thanhauser (1852–1906).  Her mother was called Mina, née Jakobi (1856–1916).  Karoline’s sister Frieda attended Maria-Theresia-School as well as herself, and so did her nieces Ilse and Klara Thanhauser later on.
Karoline attended the “Municipal School for Daughters” (“Städtische Töchterschule”), which later was to be called “Maria-Theresia-School”, from 1898 to 1902 in classes 1–4; the fourth class was the school-leaving class in those times.
In 1908, Karoline married the trader Simon Hochherr (b. 1882) from Düsseldorf. (Some time earlier, Karoline’s elder brother Nathan Thanhauser had married Simon’s elder sister Natalie Hochherr.)  Their son Heinz was born in 1910.  Karoline died soon thereafter in 1914.
Simon Hochherr married a second time.  His second wife was Ella, née Lieser.  In 1938, Simon moved to Amsterdam with his family.  After the occupation of the Netherlands by the Germans, the Hochherrs were interned in the Westerbork camp in 1940.  Simon, his daughter Liselotte (from his second marriage), his son Heinz, as well as Heinz’s wife and 3-year-old daughter were deported to Auschwitz.  The only survivor was Simon’s second wife, Ella.  She was brought from Westerbork to Terezin, where she was rescued in 1945 and sent to a camp for “displaced persons” in Switzerland.  In 1946, she emigrated to the USA, where she died in 1976.		    


Aside:
The second -n- in “Thannhauser” occurs only in the Annual School Reports.  An announcement of residence kept at the Augsburg City Archives as well as the documents described in the on-line catalog of the Leo Baeck Institute, New York, give the spelling “Thanhauser” (and “Karolina” instead of “Karoline”). 

Source:
Documents of the history of the Hochherrs are kept at the Leo Baeck Institute, New York; see the on-line catalog: http://www.lbi.org/ (as of May 2008).

    
  Klara Thanhauser
Born: 1908 in Augsburg.  Father’s occupation: merchant.  Flat: 16 Bahnhofstraße.

Klara’s father was Nathan Thanhauser (b. 1879 in Augsburg), a livestock dealer. He was a brother of Frieda and Karoline Thanhauser.  His wife was Natalie, née Hochherr (b. 1880 in Berwangen).  Like Klara, her younger sister Ilse also attended Maria-Theresia-School.
Klara attended Maria-Theresia-School from 1918 to 1920 in classes 1 and 2; perhaps she completed the fifth grade in 1923.
Afterwards, Klara attended a commercial school and worked as a clerk.  Some time later, she had herself trained as a nurse in Frankfurt on Main.
In 1937, Klara married Siegfried Straußer (b. 1904 in Schweinfurt), who was a skilled cigar maker.  The couple lived in Schweinfurt.
In November 1998, Frank Ephraim interviewed 90-year-old Klara (Claire) for his book Escape to Manila.  This is what she told him:  In the summer of 1938, Klara read an article in a Jewish newspaper which introduced a new immigration programme to the Philippines.  This programme owed its existence mainly to the American brothers Frieder, who were cigar producers in Manila, and to president Manuel L. Quezon.  People with certain professions, among them cigar makers, were offered entry without problem.  Thus, Klara and Siegfried applied for visas at the US embassy in Frankfurt (the Philippines not yet having been granted full independence by the USA).
One day after the November pogrom in 1938, Siegfried was imprisoned and taken to the Dachau concentration camp.  Soon after, Klara was informed officially that they had been granted their visas.  She travelled to Frankfurt to describe the situation there.  Thereupon, the consul declared in a letter that it was vital that Siegfried appeared personally to receive his visa and then emigrate to the Philippines, where an American company had employed him.  With this letter Klara		  


persuaded the Gestapo to release her husband.  He bore deep scars from his imprisonment at the concentration camp and never talked about what he had experienced there.  In February 1939, he boarded ship for Manila.  Klara followed
roughly half a year later (September 14, 1939), and she also managed to take Siegfried’s father with her.
Siegfried worked at the cigar factory “Helena”.  After the company closed down in 1941, the couple ran a German style “Wurstladen”.  Both survived the capture of the Philippines by Japan and the re-capture by the USA.
At the beginning of April 1942, Klara’s parents, Nathan and Natalie Thanhauser, were deported to Piaski, Poland.
Klara’s brother, Heinrich Thanhauser, moved as an agricultural workder to a “re-education camp” in Bielefeld in 1940.  Instead of being trained for the emigration to Palestine, the inmates rather had to do forced labour.  There are differing notices about where and when Heinrich was deported.  The last inmates of the camp were deported to Auschwitz in March 1943.
In May 1946, Klara and her husband were able to move to the USA.  They worked at “Barton’s Chocolate” in New York, a famous chocolate factory.
Klara, who now called herself “Claire”, visited Augsburg in October 1992.
Claire’s husband, Siegfried (“Fred”), died in 1992 in New York.
Claire Strausser, née Thanhauser, also died in New York in 2002.		  




Sources and further reading:
Monika Minninger, Joachim Meynert and Friedhelm Schäffer, Antisemitisch Verfolgte, registriert in Bielefeld 1933–45.  Eine Dokumentation jüdischer Einzelschicksale, Bielefeld, 1985, p. 221, No. 1051 (on Heinrich Thanhauser).
Joachim Meyert and Friedhelm Schäffer, Die Juden in der Stadt Bielefeld während der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus, Bielefeld, 1983, pp. 103–6 and 120–21 (on the deportation of the Jews from the “re-education camp” in Bielefeld).
Frank Ephraim, Escape to Manila: From Nazi Tyranny to Japanese Terror, Urbana—Chicago, 2003.
Eva-Maria Knab, “‘Hände zur Versöhnung ausgestreckt.’ Jüdische Gäste suchen am Lech eigene Erinnerungen und neuen Kontakt zur Heimat,” Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung, October 20, 1992.

    
  Anna Triest
Born: 1914 in Augsburg.  Father’s occupation: businessman.  Company: 4 Viktoriastraße.

Anna’s parents were Karl Triest (b. 1879 in Bamberg) and Franziska (“Fanny”), née Bettmann (b. 1886 in Ebelsbach).  Karl Triest was a co-owner of the firm “Lammfromm & Biedermann”, a wholesale business for linen and wool clothes. Anna had an elder brother, Fritz (1911–85).
Anna attended Maria-Theresia-School from 1924 to 1933 in classes 1–G9.  She passed her maturity exam (“Abitur”) in 1933.
Anna’s brother, Fritz, studied law.  Due to anti-Jewish legislation, he had no chance to work as a lawyer in Germany from 1933 on.  He emigrated to Cincinnati, Ohio, that year.  Later, he was a spice producer.  In 1943, he joined the US Army.
Anna also emigrated to Cincinnati in 1937, where she called herself “Ann”.  She worked as a nurse.  In 1942, she married Heinrich Malsch, americanized to Henry E. Malsh (b. 1907 in Bamberg); the couple had a son.  Henry died in 1956.  Ann married a second time; her second husband was Richard Robens (b. 1898), who also came from Germany.
In 1938, Ann’s parents also emigrated to Cincinnati.  Karl worked there as a sales assistant.  He died in 1965, his wife, Franziska, in 1980.
Ann’s uncle Berthold Triest (b. 1886) was a co-owner of a linen factory in Munich.  Together with his wife, Lina, née Westheimer (b. 1899 in Karlsruhe), he fled to Luxembourg in September 1939.  They did not, however, succeed in emigrating to the USA.  From Les Milles, a French internment camp, they were deported to Auschwitz in 1942.  Their daughter, Margot, was saved from deportation by the OSE (Oeuvre de secours aux enfants), a Jewish organisation for the rescue of children.  Their son, Heinz (b. 1923), had managed to flee to the USA just in time in 1939.  He returned to Germany as an American soldier.  He		  



changed his first name to Howard and was naturalized.  He worked as a translator during the Nuremberg trials.
Two grandparents of Ann, Moritz Triest (b. 1850 in Maineck) and Rosa Westheimer, were deported to Terezin in June 1942.  Moritz died there after three months on September 3.  Rosa witnessed the liberation of the camp in the spring of 1945.
Ann’s second husband, Richard Robens, died in 1979.
Ann Robens, née Anna Triest, lives up to this day (July 2008) in the USA.

Sources:
Andreas Heusler, Brigitte Schmidt, Eva Ohlen, Tobias Weger, and Simone Dicke with the collaboration of Maximilian Strnad, Biographisches Gedenkbuch der Münchner Juden 1933–1945, vol. 2 (M–Z), ed. Munich City Archives (“Stadtarchiv München”), Munich, 2007, pp. 648–49 (on Berthold, Lina and Moritz Triest).
Steve Palackdharry, Documentary Journey to Justice, USA, 2006.  DVD Munich, 2008 (on Ann’s cousin Howard Triest and the Munich branch of the Triest family).		    
 
  Gertrud Türkheimer
Born: 1916 in Augsburg.  Father’s occupation: businessman.  Flat: 21 Haunstetter Straße.

When Gertrud (“Trude”) joined Maria-Theresia-School in 1926, her father had already died.  Her mother was Elsa Türkheimer, née Levinger.  Gertrud was a niece of Karoline Levinger and a cousin of Hildegard Levinger.  In the residential building of the Türkheimer family, there lived for some time, among others, Gertrud’s schoolmate Gerda Ruppin with her parents. 
Gertrud attended Maria-Theresia-School from 1926 to 1932 in classes 1–G6.
On June 2, 1930, Gertrud celebrated her “confirmation” in Augsburg, together with eight other Jewish girls (Bat Mitzvah: the feast of religious maturity for Jewish girls; it can be celebrated individually after a girl’s 12th birthday, but in Augsburg it was held annually or after even longer intervals for several age groups together, similar to the Protestant confirmation).
After completing school, Gertrud worked as a sales assistant in the book department of the “Schocken” department store in Augsburg.
Gertrud emigrated to Brazil, where, in 1936 or 1937, she married Siegfried Riegler (b. 1912 in Augsburg), who had worked in Augsburg at the firm “Wernecker & Farnbacher”.  Gertrud’s mother, Elsa, joined them in Brazil.
Gertrud Riegler, née Türkheimer, died in Curitiba, Brazil, in 1968.