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Amanda Tietz, geb. Cornils
© Horst Tietz

Amanda Tietz (née Cornils) * 1889

Ritterstraße Ecke Riesserstraße (vormals Sievekingsallee 2) (Hamburg-Mitte, Hamm)

HIER WOHNTE
AMANDA TIETZ
GEB. CORNILS
JG. 1889
DEPORTIERT 1943
RAVENSBRÜCK
ERMORDET 5.6.1944

further stumbling stones in Ritterstraße Ecke Riesserstraße (vormals Sievekingsallee 2):
Willi Hermann Tietz

Amanda Tietz, née Cornils, born 23 Aug. 1889 in Garding, Eiderstedt, detained 24 Dec. 1943 in Marburg, deported 6 Mar. 1944 to Guxhagen-Breitenau, deported onward to Ravensbrück concentration camp, died 5 June 1944
Willi Hermann Tietz, born 30 July 1885 in Driesen, Neumark, detained 24 Dec. 1943 in Marburg, deported 6 Mar. 1944 to Guxhagen-Breitenau, died 23 Apr. 1944

Ritterstraße 66 (früher: Sievekingsallee 2)

Amanda Cornils came from an old, established family from the west coast of Schleswig-Holstein, Garding in Eiderstedt. Her father Arrien Peter Amandus Cornils ran a saw mill there that supplied the whole Eiderstedt peninsula with wood. He was married to Ingeborg Catharina, née Hostrup, who came from the so-called flower farm in Tating. The flower farm was one of the farmhouses typical of Eiderstedt which is still owned today by the Hostrup Family. Their daughter Anna was born on 12 Aug. 1886, their son Walter on 30 Apr. 1888, and their daughter Amanda on 23 Aug. 1889.

Willi Tietz’s father Julius Tietz ran a wholesale lumber yard in Driesen, Friedeberg District in Pomerania (Neumark), a business founded by his father David Tietz in 1826. Driesen is located in Netzebruch, roughly 55 km east of Landsberg along the River Warta. His wife Hedwig, born Koeben from Forst (Lausitz), belonged like Julius Tietz to a Jewish family, yet both of them joined the Evangelical Church following the birth of their first three children, Elsbeth, born on 20 Dec. 1882, Dora, born on 13 Feb. 1884, and Willi, born on 30 July 1885. They went on to have three more children, Erich, born on 30 Apr. 1887, Hermann, born on 8 July 1888, and Hedwig, called Heta, born on 4 June 1895.

Julius Tietz, like his father David Tietz before him, was appointed to the city council in the 1880s, becoming secretary in 1890 and deputy superintendent in 1901. He also belonged to the executive board of the savings bank and 15 municipal deputations and commissions. Julius Tietz was considered an enthusiastic friend and supporter of the music scene in Driesen – his older brother Professor Hermann Tietz was the Ducal Court Pianist in Saxony and the founder and director of the Music Association and the Gotha Conservatory. After the death of Julius Tietz in 1906, his widow Hedwig Tietz initially took over the business, followed by their eldest son Willi Tietz, once he had finished his law degree.

Amanda Cornils and Willi Tietz met at a wedding reception in Marburg and became engaged. At that time, Amanda was living with her sister Anna in Hamburg. Anna had divorced after a brief marriage to Thomas Christiansen from Flensburg who had a doctorate in law. She and her son Rolf, born in 1915, lived with her widowed mother Ingeborg Cornils in a large apartment at Saling 23 in Hamburg-Hamm in a Gründerzeit building.

Over the course of the reorganization of former German regions following World War I based on the Treaty of Versaille, Driesen became part of Poland (today Drezdenko). This led Willi Tietz to follow his fiancé to Hamburg and found a lumber commission business in Raboisen using existing business contacts. It was registered in the trade registry on 13 Sept. 1919 under the name "Willy Tietz, Lumber Commission" with Willi Tietz as the owner.

Willi Tietz and Amanda Cornils were married on 3 Apr. 1920 in Hamburg. Julius Tietz had already passed away by that time. Willi’s mother Hedwig Tietz was living with her youngest daughter Heta in Aschara near Gotha in Thuringia. After her husband’s death, Ingeborg remained part owner of his lumber business, as she noted when she acted as witness to her daughter Amanda’s wedding. Their lives revolved around lumber; the second witness at their wedding was also a lumber dealer, Ferdinand Rathjens from Altona, at 37 years of age roughly the same age as Willi Tietz.

Horst Willy Julius Amandus Tietz was born on 11 Mar. 1921. The year he began school, in 1927, Willi, Amanda and Horst Tietz moved into a newly built apartment at Sievekingsallee 2. They maintained close and warm relationships with the other family members. Despite the difference in their ages, Rolf and Horst grew up like brothers.

Horst, like his cousin Rolf before him, went to the private elementary school run by the Jewish couple Moosengel on Papenstraße in Eilbek. After taking the entrance examination for secondary school at Volksschule Ritterstraße, he attended Kirchenpauer-Realgymnasium high school on Hammer Steindamm across from the entrance to Hammer Park, a brick building opened in 1930, built in the style of the construction director Fritz Schumacher.

Although Willi and Amanda Tietz were Protestant, they met with anti-Jewish resentment as early as the 1920s, even from their own family. The end of the Weimar Republic and the handover of power to Hitler caused them a great deal of anxiety. Amanda’s brother Walter Cornils had joined the NSDAP on 1 Jan. 1930. The Tietz Family closed ranks when Rolf Christiansen also embraced the National-Socialist ideology. Their relationship to Willi’s family members also became increasingly more distant. As their Jewish relatives, they felt inhibited towards Amanda. Her son’s later analysis was that they "stoked Amanda’s burning self-hatred which welled from her feelings of guilt from being an ‘Aryan’, under which she suffered immeasurably” – and which made her maintain with all her love the weak contact still present. After the death of her mother, who had played a central role in the family, she managed to once more forge a closer relationship between the Family Tietz and Rolf Christiansen.

At the same time, Willi Tietz’s business contacts shrank. His company, which he had already moved from Raboisen to Sievekingsallee over the course of the world economic crisis, no longer yielded any appreciable profits. Due to the increasing isolation, he often felt trapped in a hopeless situation like his brother Hermann who had taken his own life when he had to give up his pharmacy in Berlin in 1935. Amanda Tietz managed time and again to dissuade her husband from taking the same step. To spare his father further humiliation, his son Horst undertook visits to the authorities for him and had himself registered as the new owner of his father’s company when he came of age on 13 Mar. 1942. Yet this did not change any of the actual circumstances since Horst knew nothing about lumber and, according to his father, "couldn’t tell a birch from a primrose”. Instead he dedicated himself to an intensive study of math. After helping his father discover an accounting error by using a math formula, his father gave him permission to study mathematics.

After finishing high school in 1939, Horst Tietz reported for military service, following lengthy consideration. As a "half-breed of the first degree”, that path was still open to him and he hoped to "stabilize his position” by reporting for duty. He was sent to the Reich’s labor service, one level below military service, but returned home just a few months later. Due to a decree, soldiers who wanted to study medicine or chemistry, the so-called degree programs essential for the war effort, were to be given leave from the military to attend university. Chemistry was so close to mathematics conceptually that Horst Tietz decided to study chemistry. Since Hamburg University was closed, he completed his first trimester in Berlin where he was able to live with Meta Tietz, his uncle Hermann’s widow. While he had no proof of ancestry, he was able instead to use his father’s combat certification for having fought in World War I.

In Jan. 1940, he finally began to study mathematics in Hamburg with Erich Hecke, however was banned from studying in Dec. 1940. On the advice of Erich Hecke, he continued to attend classes illicitly. Neither a plea for clemency addressed to the Reich Chancellor nor an intervention from his cousin Rolf Christiansen were able to prevent his expulsion from university. Indeed Rolf’s intercession on behalf of his cousin led to him being demoted to lieutenant and re-assigned to combat partisans in Russia, where he fell in Feb. 1942. His mother Anna, having in the meantime moved to Mittelstraße (today Carl-Petersen-Straße), received the news of his death on 9 Mar. 1942. That same night she took her own life.

By now the deportation of Hamburg’s Jews to the East had begun. Willi Tietz’s sister Dora Deutschländer was deported on 8 Nov. 1941 along with her husband Arnold and daughter Annemarie to Minsk Ghetto, after which all contact ceased. Only one person from her family survived, her son Helmut who had emigrated to Israel at an earlier date.

During a fire bombing the night of 27 to 28 July 1943, the Tietz Family lost their home and all their belongings, but temporarily gained reprieve from the clutches of state power. Since they lived in a "privileged mixed-marriage”, none of them wore the Star of David, hence they could be evacuated unmolested. They reached Crivitz and made the fateful decision to go to Marburg, where the couple had met, to avoid further evacuation to the East. After changing their accommodation several times in Marburg, their landlady denounced them, and the three of them received a summons from the Gestapo for the morning of 24 Dec. 1943.

During hours of interrogation, Amanda Tietz was pressured to separate from her husband by promising her she would be released if she did so. She acknowledged the suggestion by vomiting in front of the officers. Willi Tietz, for his part, tried unsuccessfully to take his life during the interrogation to bring about their separation. On 24 Dec. 1943, they were taken to the county court jail and held in separate cells.

On 6 Mar. 1944 Amanda, Willi and Horst Tietz were transferred to Breitenau "work education camp” for "protective custody”, a place which doubled as a collection site for deportation to concentration camps and was under the jurisdiction of the Kassel Gestapo.

Their transport began with a walk to the train station, continued in a cell car of the Reich National Railway and ended with a walk of several kilometers from Grifte to Abtei. Amanda was again separated from her husband and son and registered in the prisoner ledger with the number 187. Nothing is known about her activity in Breitenau. The two men were put to work as on a farm. Willi Tietz became gravely ill under the concentration-camp-like prison conditions and was moved to a "departure cell”. Horst’s efforts to obtain medical care for his father failed. On 22 Apr. 1944 he was moved to his father’s cell which already held eight people, but his father was already unconscious. On his way to his father’s cell, he saw several female prisoners in the next yard waiting to be deported. He recognized a woman who had been shaved bald and waved at him as she cried. It was his mother who he was never to see again. Willi Tietz died the following morning at 9 a.m. in the arms of his son. After a brief wake, Horst Tietz had to join the march of the transport to Buchenwald concentration camp.

As her husband lay dying, Amanda Tietz was deported. It is not known whether she ever learned of her husband’s death. The process of her deportation could have been stopped when he died, but that did not happen. The next stop of her imprisonment was the police prison in Leipzig. When the jail had to be cleared out due to lack of space, she was transferred with 54 other female prisoners in so-called protective custody on 2 May 1944 to Fürstenberg in Mecklenburg and taken to Ravensbrück concentration camp where she was registered under the prisoner number 37 632 and housed in block 9.

After six weeks of quarantine in the small camp at Buchenwald concentration camp, Horst Tietz was assigned to block 42 as a prisoner in "protective custody” with the number 14768 and a red triangle on his prison uniform indicating he was a political prisoner. He worked at the Gustloff Works 2 manufacturing machine guns. In early July, he applied for and was granted permission by the administration of Buchenwald to send a special letter to Ravensbrück. In response he received a message dated 20 July 1944: "Your mother, Amanda Tietz, died on 5 June 1944 at the local camp.” No further details are known about her death.

On 11 Apr. 1945 Horst Tietz was liberated from Buchenwald concentration camp by US troops and was finally able to fulfill his dream of studying mathematics which led to a professorship in mathematics at the University of Hanover. Four years after his parents’ deaths, he married Lieselotte Wiese with whom he started his own family. He parents’ memory was kept alive in his new family.


Translator: Suzanne von Engelhardt
Kindly supported by the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung, Hamburg.

Stand: March 2019
© Hildegard Thevs

Quellen.: BA (BDC), Schreiben vom 30.8.2011; StaH, 231-7, Handelsregister, A 1 Bd. 90, Nr. 21739; 314-15 OFP, R 1939/1000; 332-5 Standesämter, 1058-705/1936; 1153-331/1942; 3379-371/1920; Gedenkstätte Ravensbrück, E-Mail; Sächsisches Staatsarchiv, Schreiben vom 17.8.2011; Julius Schuberths Musikalisches Conversations-Lexikon, hg. Prof. Emil Breslaur, 11. Aufl., Leipzig; Tietz, Horst, Aus dem Leben durch die Hölle zum Polarstern, 1921–1950, unveröffentlichtes Manuskript 2006/2007.