Sauerbaum and Allenstein

The Catholic half — Joachim Luwinski, Johanna Thimm, and their daughter Auguste

The Luwinski name in this family does not come from a father. It comes from a nineteen-year-old dressmaker who was not married when her son was born, and whose people farmed in the Ermland, the Catholic pocket of Protestant East Prussia.

Three generations

Anton Thimm: b. 16 July 1840
Elisabeth Thimm: b. 15 March 1845
Joachim Luwinski: b. 21 October 1865 at Allenstein (Olsztyn). Landwirt — a farmer. d. before 1955 at Sommerfeld, Osthavelland
Johanna Thimm: b. 25 March 1871 at Sauerbaum, Kreis Rössel. d. 30 October 1955 at Zeutern, now part of Kraichtal, near Bruchsal, Baden-Württemberg. Cause: heart attack
Auguste “Lizzy” Luwinski: b. 28 August 1893 at Sauerbaum. Schneiderin und Modistin — dressmaker and milliner. d. 22 June 1975 at Kraichtal, Baden-Württemberg — the same town her mother died in
Hilda Luwinski: Auguste's sister. Married Böttiger. No dates recorded

Where these places are

Allenstein and Kreis Rössel lie in the Ermland — the old prince-bishopric that stayed Catholic when the rest of East Prussia turned Lutheran, and which is Polish Warmia today. Farming country, German-speaking, Catholic, and about as far from Jewish Berlin as a family could be and still be in the same empire.

Johanna's recorded addresses make the family's century legible in four lines: the Hohenbrucher Chaussee at Sommerfeld until July 1932; Richard-Wagner-Straße 42 in Charlottenburg from 24 July 1932; and at the end, Besingstraße 110 at Zeutern in Baden-Württemberg, where she died in 1955. Out of East Prussia, into Berlin, and after the war into the west — a displacement the record states without ever naming it.

The one line that would name Joachim's parents Drafted, 20 September 2026

Johanna's parents are known — Anton Thimm, born 16 July 1840, and Elisabeth, born 15 March 1845. Joachim's are known to nobody. They are the oldest generation reachable on this side of the family, and the document that would name them is not a birth certificate but a marriage certificate, because a marriage record names the parents of both parties.

He was born at Allenstein on 21 October 1865; she at Sauerbaum on 25 March 1871; their daughter Auguste at Sauerbaum on 28 August 1893. The marriage therefore falls between about 1888 and 1893, at the civil registry of Biesowo or of Reszel.

And the letter has to get one thing right that a careless one would not: Prussian civil registration began on 1 October 1874. The births of Joachim in 1865 and Johanna in 1871 are therefore church records — St Jakobi at Allenstein, and the Catholic parish of Gross Bössau, whose register runs 1690 to 1897 and names Sauerbaum expressly. Those may be at Olsztyn or at the Archiwum Archidiecezji Warmińskiej, so the letter asks which. It is drafted, in Polish, with all six spellings listed.

And Auguste’s own birth entry now has a number 29 September

Everything above is about reaching the generation before her, and it has been slow because this archive has had nothing but a village name to ask with. Her 1924 marriage entry, sent by the Landesarchiv Berlin on 29 September 2026, cites her birth register directly:

“geboren am acht und zwanzigsten August des Jahres tausend acht hundert drei und neunzig zu Sauerbaum Kreis Rössel, Geburtsregister Nr. 88 des Standesamts in Groß-Bössau”

Standesamt Groß-Bössau, Geburtsregister 1893, Nr. 88. That is a civil register, well after 1874, and it is a different thing from the Catholic parish register discussed above — the letter drafted for Olsztyn asks for church records for her parents, and this asks for a civil record for her. A German birth entry names the parents, so Joachim Luwinski and Johanna née Thimm are one ordered copy away, from an office this archive did not previously know to name.

It is worth being exact about what changed. The archive already believed both parents’ names, from the family record, and had placed the village. What it lacked was a citation anyone else could act on, and it now has one: an office, a year and an entry number, written down by a Berlin registrar in 1924 who was reading the certificate she had brought with her.

Auguste

She was nineteen when Kurt was born in Berlin on 11 May 1912, and unmarried. The child took her name. She did not marry his father, Jacob Leibholz, until 5 January 1924 — nearly twelve years later — and their second son, Siegfried, was born the following year at Martin-Luther-Straße 60 in Schöneberg.

Then the marriage ends. The date is no longer missing. The margin of the marriage entry itself, written on 4 April 1940, records that by the judgment of the Landgericht Berlin 251. R. 80. 40, which became final on 21 March 1940, the marriage “ist … geschieden worden”. The scan is published, with the German and an English translation beside it.

After it: her second husband Paul Heinrich Bernhard Fricke, born at Magdeburg-Buckau on 15 April 1887, dead of cancer at Sommerfeld on 31 January 1946. The family tree has always named him; what it never had was a window to put him in. He has one now — the marriage cannot be earlier than 21 March 1940 and cannot be later than 31 January 1946, and she was still Auguste Fricke when she died at Kraichtal in 1975, twenty-nine years after he did.

The tree also records the ex-husband’s death “at Auschwitz in 1945”. That is the family’s record and this archive has corrected it — Jacob was deported on 26 February 1943 and did not die in 1945. The correction is on his page.

A dated divorce in a mixed marriage Dated 29 September 2026

A German woman not counted as Jewish, married to a Jewish man, in Berlin in the later 1930s, was in a Mischehe — and the pressure on such wives to divorce was official, sustained, and well documented, because divorce stripped the husband of the limited protection the marriage gave him. Some women held out; the Rosenstraße protest of February 1943 was made by wives who had.

This panel used to say that the date was the thing to find, and that a divorce before 1938 and one in 1942 were different histories which the Berlin records could tell apart. The Berlin records have now told them apart. 21 March 1940 — two and a half years after the Nuremberg pressure on Mischehen began in earnest, and two years and eleven months before Jacob was deported on 26 February 1943.

The rest of the paragraph stands exactly as it was written. This archive does not know why Auguste divorced Jacob, and having the date does not tell it. A date is not a motive. Nothing in the register says who petitioned, on what ground, or under what pressure — and the one file that might, the divorce case of the Landgericht Berlin, is not in the marriage register’s Sammelakte: the Landesarchiv has confirmed that the Sammelakte holds only the 1923 banns papers.

What can be said without guessing: she was not among the wives who held out to the end, and the Rosenstraße protest was three years after her decree. That is a fact about a calendar, not a judgement about a woman, and this archive is not in a position to make the second one. Her son was already in Johannesburg; her younger son was fifteen; her ex-husband had three years to live and no way of knowing it.

What she did that can be seen

Her younger son was at Sommerfeld — her own family's place — from January 1943, weeks before his father was deported, and he was still there on 30 April 1945. Whatever else is unclear, a half-Jewish seventeen-year-old was got out of Berlin at the right moment and kept out.

She outlived both husbands by three decades and died at Kraichtal in Baden-Württemberg on 22 June 1975, having buried one son in Johannesburg six years earlier and leaving the other in Potsdam. Her trade passed to Kurt: she was a Schneiderin und Modistin; he was a dress designer.

Mother and daughter died in the same town Settled

This page has been giving two places. Johanna Thimm died on 30 October 1955 at Zeutern near Bruchsal; Auguste died on 22 June 1975 at Kraichtal. Zeutern is a district of Kraichtal — one of the nine villages amalgamated into the town in 1971–75, which is why the earlier death is registered under the village name and the later one under the town’s. Johanna’s last address, Besingstraße 110 at Zeutern, is a Kraichtal street.

So the line ends where it ends: out of Sauerbaum in the Ermland, through Sommerfeld and Charlottenburg, and into one small Baden town where a mother and her daughter died twenty years apart. Auguste did not die somewhere unconnected. She died where her mother had.

Lizzy has a date of birth now, and a seventh spelling

This archive has carried Auguste “Lizzy” Luwinski as 1893–1975 with no day and no month. The Arolsen Archives index, read on 17 September 2026, has her:

LEIBHOLZ, Auguste — maiden name LUWWINSKY — born 28.08.1893

28 August 1893. And the maiden name is spelt with a doubled W — a seventh form of this surname, and the first that is German rather than South African. It is on the spellings page now, because anyone searching German records for this family needs it.

And she is in the records of Nazi persecution at all, which is the part worth sitting with. She was the Catholic East Prussian wife of a Jewish husband — a Mischehe — and she survived the war in Berlin while he did not. She shares a document identifier with her husband and with her son: Jacob, Auguste and Kurt are all DocID 11214358. What that means, and what it does not →

And on 20 September 2026 that document was opened. It is the family’s Berlin registration card, and its second line reads “Auguste geb. Luwwinsky · 28.8.93 · Sauerbaum”. Until then her birthplace rested on a single source — the 1939 census card, which gives Sauerbaum/Rössel. Now a Berlin clerk writing a different form for a different purpose has written the same village. The card also narrows her younger son’s birthplace by one step: the 1939 census database has Siegfried, born 05.08.1925 in Berlin, and the card says Berlin-Schöneberg — the family’s own district.

The Luwinskis of Berlin, and they are in the garment trade

Joachim Luwinski and Johanna Thimm will have had children besides Auguste, and this archive has never been able to name one. The Berliner Adressbücher — the Berlin city directory, digitised free for every year from 1799 to 1970 — give twenty-three pages carrying the name Luwinski in a hundred and seventy years. It is not a common Berlin name.

Volume	The entry, as printed
1913	`LuwinSki, I., Invalide.`	The year after Kurt was born to Auguste Luwinski, nineteen and unmarried.
1933	`Luwinski Alfred Bügler N31 Putbusser Str 24`	*A Bügler* is a garment presser.** Lizzy was a dressmaker and milliner.
1936	`LuwinSki, A., Bügler.`	The same man, three years on.
1943	`Luwinski, A., Kraftwagenführer`	A lorry driver by 1943 — a presser could not stay a presser in a war economy.
1957–1970	Luwinski entries in six post-war volumes. Lizzy lived until 1975.

This is a lead and it is not a finding. Nothing read here links Alfred Luwinski to Auguste. What is true is that a Luwinski household was in Berlin in the clothing trade in the years Lizzy was a dressmaker there, that the name is rare in that city, and that she had siblings somebody has to find. A brother is the obvious guess, and it is a guess — this archive has been caught three times in a fortnight by treating a good fit as a fact. Putbusser Straße 24, in Wedding, is a specific address, and it can be checked.

Still to find

The Sauerbaum and Allenstein Catholic parish registers, for Joachim, Johanna and their parents.
Kurt's 1912 Berlin birth register entry — whether Jacob acknowledged him at the time or only in 1924.
The Berlin-Schöneberg marriage entry of 5 January 1924, and the divorce file that followed it.
Joachim's death at Sommerfeld, dated in the tree only as “before 1955”.
Whether Alfred Luwinski of Putbusser Straße 24 was Auguste's brother. The Berlin registration records, or a Sauerbaum baptism naming Joachim and Johanna's children, would settle it either way.