Heusermann-Reiss, Käthe, born 15-07-1909 in Liegnitz, Silesia, to a middle-class family. Käthe attended, living in the Pariserstrassenr 39-40, in Berlin, a dental education and here Jewish Dr. Fedor Bruck with a young Kathe Heusermann in his dental office in Liegnitz in Silesia, in the early 1930’s Käthe was just somebody people liked, she was a splendid person. For many years she had supported Dr. Bruck. Käthe got food vouchers for him in the Reich Chancellery, in Berchtesgaden, and at the Führer’s headquarters in East Prussia, it could, as Dr. Bruck pointed out, have been fatal. Käthe herself never once spoke about that.” Dr Bruck here with his wife Irmgard Lutze, was summoned by the Gestapo to present himself to an “age transport for Jews.”  Realizing this was a death sentence, he fled to a friend in Berlin-Dahlem and went underground. After the war he emigrated to the United States and never again practiced dentistry after he arrived in America. In December 1952, Fedor Bruck born on 17-08-1895, in Leobschütz, Upper Silesia, and WWI soldier in the 89th Infantry Division  became a citizen of the United States, and legally changed his name to Theodore A. Brook. He passed away in Bronxville, outside New York City, in February 1982, age 86..She, age 28-04-1937, started as assistant of Dr. Hugo Johannes Blaschke

  Hugo  in his practice at the Pariserstrasse nr 39-40, in Berlin. Blaschke’s practice was on the well known Kurfürstendamm 213, Berlin,  in the neighbourhood of Adolf Eichmann’s office, Department IV-A4, IV means Gestapo, in the Tiergarten 4   A interior matters, 4 is religion and Jews and evacuation.

Aktion T4 was the name used after the war for Nazi Germany’s eugenics program based on “mercy killing” and compulsory sterilization. The program was initiated in October 1939 on the orders of Adolf Hitler. The office that had to carry out this Special Program worked under the leadership of Reichsleiter and Chief of the Reich Chancellery Philipp Bouhler and Hitler’s personal physician, Karl Brandt. Karl Franz Friedrich Brandt (08-01-1904 – 02-06-1948) was a German physician and Schutzstaffel (SS) officer in Nazi Germany. Trained in surgery, Brandt joined the Nazi Party in 1932 and became Adolf Hitler’s escort doctor in August 1934. A member of Hitler’s inner circle at the Berghof, he was selected by Philipp Bouhler, the head of Hitler’s Chancellery, to administer the Aktion T4 euthanasia program. Brandt was later appointed the Reich Commissioner of Sanitation and Health. Accused of involvement in human experimentation and other war crimes, Brandt was indicted in late 1946 and faced trial before a U.S. military tribunal along with 22 others in United States of America v. Karl Brandt, et al. He was convicted, sentenced to death, and hanged on 02-06-1948.age 44 in Landsberg prison.

Landsberg Prison is a penal facility in the town of Landsberg am Lech in the southwest of the German state of Bavaria, about 65 kilometres (40 mi) west-southwest of Munich and 35 kilometres (22 mi) south of Augsburg. It is best known as the prison where Adolf Hitler was held in 1924,

Mein Kampf

The prison was used by the Allied powers during the Occupation of Germany for holding Nazi War Criminals. In 1946, General Joseph Targget. McNarney, commander in chief of U.S. Forces of Occupation in Germany, renamed Landsberg War Criminal Prison Nr. 1.

In five and half years, Landsberg Prison was the place of execution of 252 condemned war criminals, all of them by hanging. Executions were carried out expeditiously. In May 1946, 28 former SS guards from Dachau were hanged within a four-day period. Bodies that were not claimed were buried in unmarked graves in the cemetery next to the Spöttingen chape

The name T4 is derived from the office address, Tiergartenstraße 4 in Berlin. Doctors and nurses involved in the euthanasia program were not always brought to justice. Responsible senior officials also escaped prosecution and continued to work in German health care after the war. As part of the Aktion T4, a total of 691 patients from the psychiatric clinic in Weißenau Abbey near Ravensburg, including children, were transported in 1940 by the infamous gray buses (Graue Busse) of the Nazi organization with the pseudonym Gemeinnützige Krankentransport GmbH (Gekrat), the public benefit patient transport B.V., transferred to the euthanasia center Schloss Grafeneck and murdered there.

In the Grafeneck Euthanasia Center near Gomadingen in the Baden-Württemberg district of Reutlingen, 10,654 people with a mental disability or a mental disorder were systematically murdered by the National Socialist regime in 1940 as part of Aktion T4. Grafeneck was one of six euthanasia centers in the Kingdom where people from different institutions were brought solely to be murdered. According to Nazi ideology, the victims were of no use to society and in Grafeneck’s case came mainly from Bavaria, Baden and Württemberg, but also from Hesse and North Rhine-Westphalia.The headquarters of the Gemeinnützigen Krankentransport GmbH (Gekrat) was also located here, which arranged the transport of the victims of Aktion T4 and was managed by Reinhold Vorberg.left with lawyer Dietrich Allers. They carried out Hitler’s orders and had at least 275,000 German disabled people murdered between January 1940 and August 1941 as part of the Nazi ‘Aktion T4’ euthanasia program, so named after the location of the program’s headquarters at Number 4 Tiergartenstrasse in Berlin.

Between January 1940 and August 1941, at least 275,000 German disabled people  were murdered as part of the Nazi ‘Aktion T4’ euthanasia program, so named after the location of the program’s headquarters at Number 4 Tiergartenstrasse in Berlin.

  at seven o’clock in the evening. He took his instrument trunk and drove to the Kanzlei and could stop Hitler’s pain and was immediately the great man,  From then his was Hitler’s dentist and also Eva Braun, (Braun parents) Heinrich Himmler and Martin Bormann  were his regular customer. Blaschke and his assistant, had a an own dentist office and practice in the Reichskanzlei during 1944-45.

Käthe Heusermann trained under Bruck in the early 1930s, but the Jewish dentist had gone underground to evade the regime’s persecution, and she went on to work for Blaschke. The woman who gave Hitler the rinse-and-spit routine secretly supported Bruck for years with special rations and extra food vouchers she received as a member of the Führer’s extended staff. The discovery of their relationship could have been fatal.

Blaschke is in a dissertation of Dr. med described as ambivalent personality. On the one hand Blaschke was a close confidant of Hitler, who was also appreciated by SS bigwigs. In his capacity as a member of the department “Reich SS und Polizei” he was involved in the formation of dental stations in a concentration camp and possibly also related dental gold of murdered Jews for his dental procedures. There is a document which proves that Blaschke was the owner of a 50 kg teeth gold supply  and when the U.S prosecutor asked him if his dentists in the camps had pulled out the teeth of the death Jews, he just answered: That’s why we are here, or not.

After Hitler’s suicide Käthe left the stressed Führerbunker among others  01-05-1945, she was twice raped by Red Army soldiers. On 13-05-1945 she was arrested by the MGB, Russian secret service , as assistant of Hitler’s personal dentist Blaschke and spent ten years in Soviet prisons and camps and held in solitary confinement for six years without a trial..“In August 1951, I was finally charged,” she wrote. “By my voluntary participation in Hitler’s dental treatment, [they said] I had helped the bourgeois German state to prolong the war.” Heusermann told the Russians that Blaschke kept a special office within the Reich Chancellery’s bunker. She led them to the dentistry room, still stocked with its tools, reclining chair — and Hitler’s dental X-rays, “irrefutable evidence that Hitler was dead,” Elena Rzhevskaya a Soviet war interpreter wrote. “If we had not found Käthe … Hitler, as Josef Stalin wanted, would have remained a myth and a mystery,” she wrote. “But what suffering we had unwittingly doomed Käthe Heusermann to endure.” Elena Rzhevskaya died on 25-04-2017, aged 97. In May 1945 Soviet officers showed a dental bridge to Blaschke’s technician Fritz Echtmann and his dental assistant Käthe Heusermann and they both identified it as being Hitler’s. Blaschke also reconstructed the dental records of Martin Bormann from memory and these were later used to identify his skeletal remains which were discovered in Berlin in 1972, together with also the remains of Hitler’s Doctor SS Obersturmbannführer , Dr. Ludwig Stumpfegger   who  killed the Goebbel’s children in the bunker. The both of them commited suicide when they were trapped by the Russians escaping the Führerbunker in Berlin..

Death and burial ground of Heusermann-Reiss, Käthe.

      Sentenced to 10 years in the gulag, she was loaded into a cattle truck for the 2,800-mile trip to a labor camp in central Siberia. Years in solitary made her too weak to meet her work quota. She barely survived.

By 1955, Stalin had died and West Germany negotiated the return of German prisoners. Heusermann went home to Berlin. Her soldier fiancé had married in her absence. She went back into dentistry and she died 14-02-1993, age 83 in Düsseldorf. She is buried in the Reiss family grave on the Angermund cemetery of Düsseldorf, Schmitterweg, 40489. Leif Stjerna from Sweden, kindly sent me the grave pictures and most information.

Message(s), tips or interesting graves for the webmaster:    robhopmans@outlook.com