My life would have been different

It happened in May 1941 in one of the three railroad company buildings at the end of a street named “Zollstrasse”. “My God Gustav, now tell me, is something wrong with our boys?” Of course, the grandmother was worried: the two sons were in the war. Grandfather had just come into the kitchen with the mail. There was an official letter from Berlin. He hastily opened it at the kitchen table, read it and shook his head in disbelief. “That’s not possible, but unbelievable!” “So tell, what has happened?” “There, Martha, read for yourself.”

It was a notification from the Foreign Office in Berlin. It said that the grandfather’s older brother, who lived in America, had died in January, widowed and childless, and had left all his property in his will to the male descendants of his only brother, who lived in Germany.

Attached was a letter written in German from the law firm of Pemberton & Englund in Adams (Wisconsin), according to which he had been appointed by the Chippewa County probate court to be the official executor of the estate and to handle the last will and testament. The notification from the office concluded with the recommendation to contact the aforementioned law firm in the USA immediately if inheritance claims were to be asserted.

That was actually a huge surprise: The brother, his name was Johann, had emigrated to America from the then Prussian province of Posen (now Poznan in Poland) as a young man before the First World War. Like many compatriots, he had settled in Wisconsin with farmers who also came from Germany. The last report was that he had married into a well-off farm in a place called Chippewa Falls and now called himself John.

Years later, after the Treaty of Versailles, the grandfather’s family also left the province of Posen and moved to the Münsterland in a small town near the Dutch border. Somehow, the already tenuous thread of communication between the two brothers was completely broken without there ever being a rift. They had simply lost sight of each other.
So now this! Of course, the grandfather wrote to the lawyer’s office and gave the names of the two sons. At the same time, due to the events of the war, he asked for understanding in not being able to reveal the whereabouts of the children. However, he remains available as a contact person until further notice.

And then? In June 1941, the war events in the Balkans and North Africa led to all German assets in the USA being frozen and ongoing inheritance matters being put on hold. With the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, America was at war with Japan, and four days later Germany and Italy also declared war on the United States.

Since then no one has done or heard anything about the matter. If things had turned out differently, I would not have been born 11 years later in the German city of Gronau at the Netherlands, but probably in Wisconsin.