Tuesday 4 December 2012
Monday 3 December 2012
Archbishop
Jews who fled the Nazis: secrets of Justin Welby's family tree
The German Jewish ancestors of Justin Welby, the next Archbishop of Canterbury, were forced to flee the Nazis and then faced internment in Britain during the war as “enemy aliens”.
Justin Welby, the next Archbishop of Canterbury Photo: Geoff Pugh for the Telegraph
By Jason Lewis, Investigations Editor7:20AM GMT 02 Dec 201221 Comments
The full story of Justin Welby’s family, which provides a snapshot of a family caught in the dramas and tragedies of 20th century Europe, can be told for the first time today.
It is a story which his own father concealed from him and it was only last weekend that Bishop Welby learned from The Telegraph of his German Jewish roots and how his family, the Weilers, came to Britain.
But while his father, Gavin, was making his fortune in New York, posing as an aristocrat and selling whisky, his close relations faced persecution in Germany and were forced to flee for their lives.
Gavin Welby’s cousin was Dr Gerhard Weiler, a leading German chemist who ran a Berlin forensics laboratory pioneering techniques in microscopic analysis.
Before Hitler came to power in 1933 and introduced laws banning Jews from many jobs, including scientific work, Dr Weiler analysed samples for police murder investigations and Berlin hospitals.
His wife Dr Grita Thoemke worked with him and was an expert in anaesthetics.
His father, Dr Julius Weiler, brother of the Bishop of Durham’s grandfather Bernard, had founded the Westend Sanatorium, a leading psychiatric centre.
The family lived in a villa in the clinic’s grounds filled with Louis XV furniture, French tapestries, bronzes by Andrea Riccio, and paintings by Old Masters including Francisco Goya, Francesco Guardi and Jan van Goyen.
Martha Weiler, wife of Max Weiler, taken in 1919 with her sisters Emma, left and Louise, right
Julius was one of six sons of a wealthy merchant, Herman Weiler, and Amalie Hermbach. The family had thrived under the enlightened laws of the Kingdom of Hanover and, in the bustling market town of Osterode am Harz, they ran “S.J Weiler”, a small department store, started by their grandfather, Simon.
Herman Weiler sent his sons to the local Latin school and, while his siblings went to work in the family store, Julius went to University in Gottingen and studied medicine, before moving to Berlin to practise as a doctor.
The Weiler family shop taken in the late 1800's
In 1884, following their father’s death, the Weilers sold the store and four of the brothers, Siegfried, Max, Ernest and the Bishop of Durham’s grandfather, Bernard, travelled to London and set up “Weiler Brothers”, importing “ostrich and osprey feathers.
Their mother Amalie, Bishop Welby’s great grandmother, also moved to London, living in a flat in Hampstead with her unmarried youngest son Ernest. She died of pneumonia in 1914 and was buried the Jewish cemetery in Golders Green.
Back in 1920s Germany, Gerhard and his wife Grita had opened Dr Weiler’s Diagnostic Institute. Documents in the Jewish Archive in Berlin show that the family had “renounced” the faith as long ago as 1905.
As a 15-year-old Gerhard had been confirmed, but their conversion to Christianity did not save the family from Hitler’s anti-Jewish laws.
As Gerhard wrote later in his self-published memoirs: “We heard Hitler on the radio, screaming and ranting that the blame for all German ills lay with the Jews.
“It was the Jews’ fault entirely that Germany had lost the war...The Jews were also responsible for Germany’s supposed moral decline. There must only be one course of action to be taken: the Jews must be exterminated like vermin.”
The Weilers’ laboratory was in the basement of a large German villa which they rented to another family.
One of their staff, who cleaned the laboratory, was Communist. Working upstairs was a manservant who turned out to be a Nazi sympathiser.
When Hitler came to power in 1933 the manservant informed on the laboratory cleaner. He was imprisoned and executed.
“Adolf Hitler became Chancellor and the Reichstag (the German parliament) went up in flames’, wrote Gerhard. 'When we heard the news...Grita and I both agreed that we must leave the country’.
Offered a job at a laboratory at Oxford University, Gerhard headed to England and stayed with his uncle Siegfried, the last surviving Weiler brother who had set out from Germany in 1890.
“I stayed with my uncle in his luxurious flat, complete with cook, maid footman and chauffeur...(his) chauffeur drove me to Bedford College in a huge Humber limousine, where I was given a warm reception.
"I left in high spirits with the comforting thought that Adolf Hitler and his Third Reich would never harm either me or my family.”
But, travelling back to Germany to arrange their departure, he had a narrow escape at the border. Secretly carrying cigarettes in his fur coat, he was stopped by a Nazi official but claimed he had nothing to declare.
“Miraculously, they didn’t discover the cigarettes in the lining, otherwise I would probably not be here to tell the tale!”
The whole family, Gerhard, his wife Grita, her sister Kaete, a ballerina, and his father, Julius, left Germany. When war broke out, Gerhard was registered as an “enemy alien” under laws designed to stop Nazi spies and spent several months in an internment camp near Liverpool.
“All exits were guarded by soldiers with bayonets,” he recalled and several Jewish inmates committed suicide.
After the war he lived in Oxford, where he ran a private forensic laboratory, and did not return to Germany for 31 years. Grita died in 1983 and Gerhard in 1995.
He left much of his art collection, including a series of Renaissance drawings, to Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum and a language prize, funded by a bequest, which bears his name at Roehampton University.
The Hanovarian town of Osterode am Harz where Justin Welby's forebares can be traced back to
Other members of the Weiler family, however, did not survive. The Holocaust records at Yad Vashem in Israel record the death of a young boy, Nathan Sommer, from Kassel, close to the Weilers’ hometown of Osterode am Harz. His mother was Gertrud Weiler, in all probability a cousin of the nearby merchant family.
A picture in the memorial archive shows a tiny boy holding a dog and clutching his sister’s arm.
Nathan, who was born in 1934, was “murdered” on an unknown date after being transported by the SS to the Riga ghetto, in Latvia, where most of the 24,000 Jewish inhabitants were massacred in late 1941.
Meanwhile, the Bishop of Durham’s father, Gavin, returned to London from New York after the war and established “Gavin Distillers”, based in Oxford Street. He exported whisky to America and even had his own blend, “Gavin’s Gold Label”.
As a 19-year-old Alison Wilkinson, then Cowie, began working for Welby as his personal, business and social secretary shortly after he had stood unsuccessfully as a Conservative candidate in the 1951 election.
Gavin Welby
Mr Welby had a reputation as a ladies’ man. Briefly married before the war to factory owner’s daughter, Doris Sturzenegger — a fact which he later kept secret from his son — his second wife, Jane Portal, who is Bishop Welby’s mother, divorced him on the grounds of adultery. He also had affairs with actress Vanessa Redgrave and President Kennedy’s sister, Pat.
“I remember one time he had got this great stack of letters from a girlfriend and he said he wanted me to just tear them all up and throw them all away,’ recalls Mrs Wilkinson. 'There were girlfriends in the background but I never met any of them or knew who they were’.
Gavin Welby, who died in 1977, took many of his secrets to his grave, and his son desperately wants to know whether, unbeknown to him, he has a half-bother or half-sister.
However, The Telegraph has learnt that there were no children from his short-lived 1934 marriage to Miss Sturzenegger.
She later re-married, to Alfred Henry, a corporate accounting executive, and the couple moved to Los Angeles, where they had two children, but the family confirmed her first marriage was childless.
The German Jewish ancestors of Justin Welby, the next Archbishop of Canterbury, were forced to flee the Nazis and then faced internment in Britain during the war as “enemy aliens”.
Justin Welby, the next Archbishop of Canterbury Photo: Geoff Pugh for the Telegraph
By Jason Lewis, Investigations Editor7:20AM GMT 02 Dec 201221 Comments
The full story of Justin Welby’s family, which provides a snapshot of a family caught in the dramas and tragedies of 20th century Europe, can be told for the first time today.
It is a story which his own father concealed from him and it was only last weekend that Bishop Welby learned from The Telegraph of his German Jewish roots and how his family, the Weilers, came to Britain.
But while his father, Gavin, was making his fortune in New York, posing as an aristocrat and selling whisky, his close relations faced persecution in Germany and were forced to flee for their lives.
Gavin Welby’s cousin was Dr Gerhard Weiler, a leading German chemist who ran a Berlin forensics laboratory pioneering techniques in microscopic analysis.
Before Hitler came to power in 1933 and introduced laws banning Jews from many jobs, including scientific work, Dr Weiler analysed samples for police murder investigations and Berlin hospitals.
His wife Dr Grita Thoemke worked with him and was an expert in anaesthetics.
His father, Dr Julius Weiler, brother of the Bishop of Durham’s grandfather Bernard, had founded the Westend Sanatorium, a leading psychiatric centre.
The family lived in a villa in the clinic’s grounds filled with Louis XV furniture, French tapestries, bronzes by Andrea Riccio, and paintings by Old Masters including Francisco Goya, Francesco Guardi and Jan van Goyen.
Martha Weiler, wife of Max Weiler, taken in 1919 with her sisters Emma, left and Louise, right
Julius was one of six sons of a wealthy merchant, Herman Weiler, and Amalie Hermbach. The family had thrived under the enlightened laws of the Kingdom of Hanover and, in the bustling market town of Osterode am Harz, they ran “S.J Weiler”, a small department store, started by their grandfather, Simon.
Herman Weiler sent his sons to the local Latin school and, while his siblings went to work in the family store, Julius went to University in Gottingen and studied medicine, before moving to Berlin to practise as a doctor.
The Weiler family shop taken in the late 1800's
In 1884, following their father’s death, the Weilers sold the store and four of the brothers, Siegfried, Max, Ernest and the Bishop of Durham’s grandfather, Bernard, travelled to London and set up “Weiler Brothers”, importing “ostrich and osprey feathers.
Their mother Amalie, Bishop Welby’s great grandmother, also moved to London, living in a flat in Hampstead with her unmarried youngest son Ernest. She died of pneumonia in 1914 and was buried the Jewish cemetery in Golders Green.
Back in 1920s Germany, Gerhard and his wife Grita had opened Dr Weiler’s Diagnostic Institute. Documents in the Jewish Archive in Berlin show that the family had “renounced” the faith as long ago as 1905.
As a 15-year-old Gerhard had been confirmed, but their conversion to Christianity did not save the family from Hitler’s anti-Jewish laws.
As Gerhard wrote later in his self-published memoirs: “We heard Hitler on the radio, screaming and ranting that the blame for all German ills lay with the Jews.
“It was the Jews’ fault entirely that Germany had lost the war...The Jews were also responsible for Germany’s supposed moral decline. There must only be one course of action to be taken: the Jews must be exterminated like vermin.”
The Weilers’ laboratory was in the basement of a large German villa which they rented to another family.
One of their staff, who cleaned the laboratory, was Communist. Working upstairs was a manservant who turned out to be a Nazi sympathiser.
When Hitler came to power in 1933 the manservant informed on the laboratory cleaner. He was imprisoned and executed.
“Adolf Hitler became Chancellor and the Reichstag (the German parliament) went up in flames’, wrote Gerhard. 'When we heard the news...Grita and I both agreed that we must leave the country’.
Offered a job at a laboratory at Oxford University, Gerhard headed to England and stayed with his uncle Siegfried, the last surviving Weiler brother who had set out from Germany in 1890.
“I stayed with my uncle in his luxurious flat, complete with cook, maid footman and chauffeur...(his) chauffeur drove me to Bedford College in a huge Humber limousine, where I was given a warm reception.
"I left in high spirits with the comforting thought that Adolf Hitler and his Third Reich would never harm either me or my family.”
But, travelling back to Germany to arrange their departure, he had a narrow escape at the border. Secretly carrying cigarettes in his fur coat, he was stopped by a Nazi official but claimed he had nothing to declare.
“Miraculously, they didn’t discover the cigarettes in the lining, otherwise I would probably not be here to tell the tale!”
The whole family, Gerhard, his wife Grita, her sister Kaete, a ballerina, and his father, Julius, left Germany. When war broke out, Gerhard was registered as an “enemy alien” under laws designed to stop Nazi spies and spent several months in an internment camp near Liverpool.
“All exits were guarded by soldiers with bayonets,” he recalled and several Jewish inmates committed suicide.
After the war he lived in Oxford, where he ran a private forensic laboratory, and did not return to Germany for 31 years. Grita died in 1983 and Gerhard in 1995.
He left much of his art collection, including a series of Renaissance drawings, to Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum and a language prize, funded by a bequest, which bears his name at Roehampton University.
The Hanovarian town of Osterode am Harz where Justin Welby's forebares can be traced back to
Other members of the Weiler family, however, did not survive. The Holocaust records at Yad Vashem in Israel record the death of a young boy, Nathan Sommer, from Kassel, close to the Weilers’ hometown of Osterode am Harz. His mother was Gertrud Weiler, in all probability a cousin of the nearby merchant family.
A picture in the memorial archive shows a tiny boy holding a dog and clutching his sister’s arm.
Nathan, who was born in 1934, was “murdered” on an unknown date after being transported by the SS to the Riga ghetto, in Latvia, where most of the 24,000 Jewish inhabitants were massacred in late 1941.
Meanwhile, the Bishop of Durham’s father, Gavin, returned to London from New York after the war and established “Gavin Distillers”, based in Oxford Street. He exported whisky to America and even had his own blend, “Gavin’s Gold Label”.
As a 19-year-old Alison Wilkinson, then Cowie, began working for Welby as his personal, business and social secretary shortly after he had stood unsuccessfully as a Conservative candidate in the 1951 election.
Gavin Welby
Mr Welby had a reputation as a ladies’ man. Briefly married before the war to factory owner’s daughter, Doris Sturzenegger — a fact which he later kept secret from his son — his second wife, Jane Portal, who is Bishop Welby’s mother, divorced him on the grounds of adultery. He also had affairs with actress Vanessa Redgrave and President Kennedy’s sister, Pat.
“I remember one time he had got this great stack of letters from a girlfriend and he said he wanted me to just tear them all up and throw them all away,’ recalls Mrs Wilkinson. 'There were girlfriends in the background but I never met any of them or knew who they were’.
Gavin Welby, who died in 1977, took many of his secrets to his grave, and his son desperately wants to know whether, unbeknown to him, he has a half-bother or half-sister.
However, The Telegraph has learnt that there were no children from his short-lived 1934 marriage to Miss Sturzenegger.
She later re-married, to Alfred Henry, a corporate accounting executive, and the couple moved to Los Angeles, where they had two children, but the family confirmed her first marriage was childless.
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