Prose and Passion: meet the Weitze family

Thursday, March 30, 2023

meet the Weitze family

Every picture tells a story, season 2, picture 29.

Last year I discovered this lovely mother and daughters among our piles of family photos:

Inscribed on the back with the names Käthe, Karin and Brigitte Weitze. Bokeloh Mai 1947. To the best of our knowledge, they are not related to anybody covered in this series, and at the time I assumed that Hedwig Geppert (now Gellrich and widowed) must have met them when she arrived at nearby Brase, Lower Saxony, after eviction from Groß-Olbersdorf, Silesia (note that Hedwig got separated from her parents in the process and it took her years to find out where they had landed). On that basis I didn't include the photo in this series then (although I did put it on flickr in the hope of finding out more).

Now, however Mrs. Weitze (presumably Käthe because one of the girls is identified as Brigitte on a separate portrait) has turned up in further photos, both earlier and later. Here she is with her husband in uniform, so presumably during WW2:

The inscription is: Krummhübel / Talsperre
Fam. Baumann
Frau Fink m/ Sohn
Fam. Weitze
I think Käthe in the light dress is clearly recognisable.

Krummhübel (Karpacz) is a mountain resort in the Riesengebirge near Schneekoppe, and the terminus of a small railway line, the Riesengebirgsbahn. So that's definitely Silesia.

Here they are reunited after the war, I assume the child is the younger one from the top photo, as she has smooth hair and the older appeared to have natural curls. Judging by the child's size, I guess we're looking at the early 1950s now. On second thoughts, this is a different bloke now, looking at his earlobes. Very confusing. This photo isn't labelled but stamped by a shop in Bocholt which is the nearest town from Vardingholt, where Hedwig moved to reunite with her mother in 1953 (her father had died in 1952).

And here they are again looking a bit older, I guess, so maybe late 50s or even 1960s? This one is stamped by a shop in Kiel.

So it's beginning to look like a quite enduring connection that lasted across the eviction from Silesia as reflected in four photos from four very different places quite distant geographically. We can't rule out the possibility that Mrs. Weitze may have been Hedwig's cousin, considering that we discovered her cousin Lotti Geppert only very recently.

Gedbas.de seems to think that the hotspots of Weitze families are in Brandenburg, in places like Fürstenwalde and Weißenspring. Investigations on the wider web aren't helped by the fact that there is a military antiques dealership with the name Weitze.

Should anybody have any answers to some of the many questions I am raising in this series, please leave a comment here (I'll need to vet it, so it may take a few days before it goes public) or contact me at michaelgrr [at] yahoo [dot] co [dot] uk

Navigation tools:

Season 2 so far:

I started a twitter thread for season 2 here. However, as the bird site seems to be turning into an evil empire, I have now switched to logging the entries in a similar thread on Mastodon.

The twitter thread for season 1 is still here. It only loads 30 tweets at first, so you have to click "show more" a couple of times to get all 40 entries. Alternatively, visit the last instalment and find the numbered list of entries at the bottom.

I'm also adding all photos from this series to my family history album on flickr.