Speculation About Mommichen’s Heritage
Who was her biological father in Germany?
Leila’s initial question on 26 March 2023:
Hi Paw! I was talking to Krissy recently about Mommichen's ancestry and she encouraged me to reach out to you. She told me that she heard Mommichen was Jewish, do we have any evidence to support that? Thank you. - Leila
Paw’s reply:
Dear Leila, I will answer your question with the understanding that it is essentially speculation that Nonni, I and my brother George came up with from fragments of history and hints about her life before she came to America to be my father’s wife in 1933.
It was not until late in her life, after a year of psychological counseling, that she gathered us all around her to confess her “big secret” … that she was not actually George Hoffmann’s daughter and had never been adopted by him. As we were growing up, she had never hinted at that. In fact, there was no discussion about the genealogy of my mother’s side of the family at all, even as my father devoted himself for years to mapping out the genealogy of his own family in the USA and back into Europe.
Erik Larsen’s book, “In the Garden of Beasts” depicts the political background in Berlin at the time Mommichen and Paw were courting while he was studying physics at the University of Berlin. Nonni is writing to you as I type to give you a summary of this book. The anti-Jewish Nazi policy under Hitler was beginning to simmer and boil in 1933. Although “Kristalnacht”, which revealed the Official Nazi Anti-Jewish Policy to the world did not happen until 1938, it was abundantly clear inside Germany by 1933.
George Hoffmann, as a wealthy piano factory owner and part of German society, would clearly have been aware of this evil brewing.
Mommichen (Eva) was actually the daughter of George Hoffmann’s wife, Mutti, who came, originally, from Poland. Eva, was raised and educated right alongside Ina, George’s own daughter with Mutti, Georgina (Ina). However he never officially adopted Eva, so she was sort of “paperless” in 1933. Perhaps that is why the Hoffmanns so eagerly approved of her marriage to an American physicist and shipped her off to America.
Extremely speculative is who Mommichen's biological father back in Poland was. There are hints that he was Jewish, possibly a communist, perhaps even a leader in the communist party. Maybe that was really Mommichen’s “big secret” that was never fully revealed. It was never discussed by my parents.
Bev’s Reply:
Dear Leila….When I read the book, “In the Garden of Beasts”, I began to question why Mommichen was so quickly sent to the United States to marry Paw’s Paw. She was only 21 or 22, and they had fallen love while he was studying in Germany. When he came back to the U.S. and secured a job at Princeton University, he sent a telegram asking her to marry him. Her response was that she was arriving in the States on a liner as soon as possible. Her mother had divorced her first husband, Mommichen’s father, (unusual to divorce at that time in history) and married Herr Hoffman, a wealthy piano manufacturer. He raised her but never adopted her. We didn’t know that until she had a breakdown in her 80s. This book led me to wonder if her biological father was either Jewish or a Communist, both of which were targets of the Nazis. I think…and I emphasize “think”…. that she would have been in trouble if she did not escape the rise of the Nazis. She came over in 1933. Read the book….it is a really good one.
——- Love, Nonni
Erik Larson, New York Times bestselling author of Devil in the White City, delivers a remarkable story set during Hitler’s rise to power.
The time is 1933, the place, Berlin, when William E. Dodd becomes America’s first ambassador to Hitler’s Nazi Germany in a year that proved to be a turning point in history.
A mild-mannered professor from Chicago, Dodd brings along his wife, son, and flamboyant daughter, Martha. At first, Martha is entranced by the parties and pomp, and the handsome young men of the Third Reich with their infectious enthusiasm for restoring Germany to a position of world prominence. Enamored of the “New Germany,” she has one affair after another, including with the surprisingly honorable first chief of the Gestapo, Rudolf Diels. But as evidence of Jewish persecution mounts, confirmed by chilling first-person testimony, her father telegraphs his concerns to a largely indifferent State Department back home. Dodd watches with alarm as Jews are attacked, the press is censored, and drafts of frightening new laws begin to circulate. As that first year unfolds and the shadows deepen, the Dodds experience days full of excitement, intrigue, romance—and ultimately, horror, when a climactic spasm of violence and murder reveals Hitler’s true character and ruthless ambition.
Suffused with the tense atmosphere of the period, and with unforgettable portraits of the bizarre Göring and the expectedly charming--yet wholly sinister--Goebbels, In the Garden of Beasts lends a stunning, eyewitness perspective on events as they unfold in real-time, revealing an era of surprising nuance and complexity. The result is a dazzling, addictively readable work that speaks volumes about why the world did not recognize the grave threat posed by Hitler until Berlin, and Europe were awash in blood and terror.
