Carl August von Gerlach-Parsow

Chronicle

1. 1883

   Born on 2 December at Köslin, where his father August was Landrat; his baptismal names are Karl August Bogislav Bernd Hermann Jakob (Genealogisches Handbuch des Adels).

2. 1883

   Born as son of the fideicommiss lord of Parsow-Schwemmin.

3. 14. November 1905

   The register of annual hunting licences issued by the Köslin district between 1 October and 31 December 1905 lists under running number 51: "Karl August v. Gerlach, student, Parsow", valid from 14 November. He was twenty-one, his father still living, Parsow not yet his. Around him in the same column stand the government president Count von Schwerin, a head forester from Manow, innkeepers, half-peasants, a fishing tenant and a building technician – in this district a hunting licence was no badge of rank.

4. 1907

   On 31 March he takes out an annual hunting licence at Köslin; the register of Landrat von Eisenhart-Rothe lists him as "v. Gerlach, Karl August, estate owner, Parsow". It is the first official record of him as master of Parsow after his father's death.

5. 1909

   Engagement to Ruth von Bonin (Dresdner Journal, 29 October); wedding the following year.

6. 1910

   Marries Ruth von Bonin (b. Bottschow 1888, d. 1964) on 21 June; the Gotha lists him as holder of the Parsow-Schwemmin entail, owner of Trienke and Drosedow, reserve lieutenant in the 1st Guard Dragoons and honorary knight of the Order of St John. The Reichsanzeiger records the wedding on 23 June among the family notices ("Parsow"). The Berlin magazine Sport im Bild carries a photograph of the wedding party in the same volume and calls him a Royal Prussian lieutenant in the 1st Guard Dragoons.

7. 1911

   At the end of March the son Tessen is born at the Bonin estate of Bottschow (Reichsanzeiger 4 April). As "Referendar (ret.) and holder of the entail" he has old title and mortgage entries in the Drosedow land register cancelled in 1911/12 (public notices at the Kolberg district court, Reichsanzeiger 3 October 1911 and 2 May 1912).

8. 1912

   A son is born at the end of November (notices in the Berliner Börsen-Zeitung and Reichsanzeiger, 1/2 December) – a second child besides Tessen (b. 1911), about whom the family list is silent.

9. 1912

   Member of the German Dendrological Society – as "Referendar (ret.) and estate owner at Parsow near Nassow", as is his brother Klaus as Landrat in Bütow (Mitteilungen der DDG 1912); a yearbook of Prussian millionaires names him in the same year as a reserve lieutenant in the 1st Guard Dragoons, married to Ruth von Bonin.

10. 1916

    As lieutenant of the reserve of the 1st Guard Dragoons he appears in March in a list of decorations in the Reichsanzeiger (3 March 1916) – his service in the First World War. From the Eastern Front he reports as a farmer: his essay "Landwirtschaftliches von der Pinsker Nase (Beschreibung eines Rittergutes)" – agricultural notes from the Pinsk salient, describing a manor there – appears in the Pommernblatt (vol. 19, no. 42, pp. 672–677) and in the Deutsche Landwirtschaftliche Presse (vol. 43, nos. 80/81), as recorded in the bibliography of the German Agricultural Council for 1917.

11. 1916

    As church patron he gave two sums in the middle of the war: one thousand marks to the church at Trienke – for its decoration or for the upkeep of the burial place of the ancestors of his grandmother Charlotte von Beyme – and four thousand marks to the church at Drosedow (diocesan gazette of the province of Pomerania).

12. 1917/18

    In the forest about a mile from the manor he raises a memorial to his war horses: a boulder inscribed "Garde-Drag[oner]", "Osten – West" and "Mein Kriegsfreund Lotta" with the years 1914 and 1917/18, surrounded by smaller stones – the "horse cemetery" of Parsow, revisited by the Köslin regional press in 2005 (Głos Słupski, January 2005).

13. 1919

    In February a daughter is born (Reichsanzeiger 20 February). On 18 August cavalry captain Karl August von Gerlach is registered as a director of the Köslin joint-stock brewery, on whose supervisory board his father had already sat (Berliner Börsen-Zeitung 28 August 1919). Already in 1916 he sat as cavalry captain on the brewery's supervisory board next to captain von Blanckenburg-Schötzow (chairman), Count Kleist-Retzow and captain von Gaudecker (Reichsanzeiger 25 November 1916); into the 1930s he signs the invitations to the general meeting as chairman of the supervisory board (Reichsanzeiger 10 February 1930, 5 February 1931, 4 February 1939). An elder daughter had already been born at Parsow on 24 June 1917; she died at Braunschweig in 1981.

14. 1919–1930

    Two local offices carried him through the Weimar years: at the election of 4 May 1919 and again on 20 February 1920 he entered the district assembly of Köslin for the German National People's Party, to which he still belonged in 1930; at the same time he was head of the Parsow administrative district, comprising Parsow, Schwemmin and Warnin. In the same assembly sat the farm and forest labourer Emil Strutz of Parsow for the Social Democrats.

15. 5. Mai 1919

    The Köslin district court entered in the register of cooperatives that Karl August von Gerlach, owner of the knight’s estate at Parsow, had been elected fifth board member of a cooperative registered at Körlin, in place of the late director Hausmann. The firm’s name cannot be read with certainty in the Reichsanzeiger print of 8 May. It was the third honorary post within a few weeks: the district assembly in May, the brewery board in August, and in between the seat at Körlin.

16. 1921

    In the list of certified seed he appears twice: for Parsow with oats, for Schwemmin with wheat, each with quantity, price and the postal address Nassow near Köslin (Reichsanzeiger, 1 February 1921). The certification of 1922/23 for oats had been the earliest evidence so far; seed breeding therefore begins at least a year earlier and covers both estates.

17. 1922

    Comprehensive renovation of Schloss Parsow under his direction.

18. 1922

    As holder of the Gerlach-Parsow family entail he applies under the family-estates ordinance for a family resolution dissolving the entail; hearing before the dissolution office for family estates in Stettin on 31 March (Reichsanzeiger 13 February 1922). In the Reichsanzeiger's seed-certification lists of 1922/23 he appears as a grower of oats.

19. 1924–1942

    Supervisory board of the Bohrisch brewery company in Stettin: newly elected in 1924 together with general director Erich Otte, re-elected in 1930, still in office in 1939 (Reichsanzeiger 3 April 1924, 25 March 1925, 27 May 1929, 3 March 1930, 21 March 1939). The annual accounts for 1939 and 1941 are signed by the "farmer Karl-August v. Gerlach-Parsow" as chairman of the supervisory board; in 1940 he also chairs the supervisory board of a Berlin credit institution (Reichsanzeiger 18 April and 18 May 1940, 9 March 1942). A handbook of joint-stock companies lists him twice: as "chairman of the supervisory board of the Kösliner Aktien-Bierbrauerei" and as "member of the supervisory board of Bohrisch Brauerei Aktiengesellschaft, Stettin" – he thus heads exactly the company his grandfather August had founded in 1873. In the handbooks the full name of the company is "Bohrisch Brauerei- und Conrad-Brennerei Aktiengesellschaft"; in 1922 it took over the Union brewery and later confined itself to brewing.

20. 1924–1928

    The provincial committee elected him first deputy member of the district committee at the government in Köslin – the authority deciding administrative disputes of the region. Beside him stood the estate owner von Kleist of Schmenzin. The Köslin directories list him in this role in 1924, 1926 and 1928.

21. 1925

    The electoral committee admitted the list of the German National People's Party for the election to the provincial diet of Pomerania in the constituency of Köslin (rural)–Bublitz; first on it stands "v. Gerlach, Karl August, entailed estate owner, Parsow" (Köslin district gazette).

22. 1925

    To the "Guide and Local History Book of Köslin and its Surroundings" he contributed a motto: "Whoever does not love and honour his homeland is not worthy of happiness in it either." It is signed "von Gerlach-Parsow, Royal Prussian lieutenant retired, entailed estate owner. Parsow, 24 June (Midsummer Day) 1925".

23. 1926

    He appears as a specialist author: in a volume of the Grünland joint-stock company (Belgard on the Persante, 1926) his contribution "Grassland questions and the tasks of the Grünland company" stands first after the foreword by the chairman von Wangenheim.

24. 1926

    As head of the administrative district he signed a veterinary police order on 24 March: because of foot-and-mouth disease on the Schwemmin estate, the private road between Parsow and Schwemmin through the Parsow woods was closed to public traffic (Köslin district gazette).

25. 1927/1932

    The journalist Hellmut von Gerlach – a namesake, not a relative – cites him in the Social Democratic and Communist press ("The barons as taxpayers", Vorwärts, 27 July 1932) as an example of tax-free large landholding and lists the estates: Parsow 730, Schwemmin 800, Drosedow 1,310, Trienke 1,680 and the Körlin town farm 130 hectares – 4,650 hectares in all; the Kreuzzeitung made clear that the Parsow Gerlachs had nothing to do with the journalist. In 1928–1930 he chairs the supervisory board of Grünland AG in Belgard, in 1940–1943 those of further companies (Reichsanzeiger). More precisely: he chairs the supervisory board of the Pomeranian fodder-growing company Grünland AG in Belgard from January 1925 until its liquidation in March 1934, signing the meeting notices at Parsow (Reichsanzeiger 5 January 1925, 25 October 1928, 6 February 1930, 24 February 1934). In June 1927 he defends the Landbund in Köslin before six hundred farmers of the Pomeranian Farmers' Union – with little response, according to the democratic paper, which likewise charges him with paying no income tax on 18,200 Morgen (Politischer Wegweiser 25 June 1927). Hellmut's article names as neighbours with the same tax record von Kameke-Karzig, von Sprenger-Nassow and Count Hertzberg.

26. 1927

    In the district assembly he read out the declaration of the Landbund group against the county budget: the surcharge on the property taxes was rising to 90.2 instead of the planned 71.6 per cent. The county complained in its gazette that the group had at the same time had the declaration spread in the press close to it (Köslin district gazette).

27. 1928–1930

    On 3 March 1928 he leads, with O. Peglow and manager Küchler, the Köslin district group of the Pomeranian Rural League in a march to district president Dr. Cronau at Köslin; the social-democratic press accuses him of having prepared his league group for a tax strike and, if need be, "the sword" (Hamburger Echo 6 March, Volkswacht 12 March 1928). In August 1930 he signs, with some thirty Pomeranian landowners, a declaration in support of Hugenberg's politics (Harburger Tageblatt 14 August 1930).

28. 1929

    On 31 October he invited the Belgard society for history and local studies to Danzkrug to recover an urn. It turned out to be a whole cemetery: in three and a half hours the excavators opened sixteen find spots, two urns coming out intact. He himself was ill; his wife and children attended, four estate labourers helped with spades, and the tenant of the Danzkrug inn supplied spoons, baskets and packing material. The site had been discovered by the estate forester (Unsere Heimat, supplement to the Kösliner Zeitung, no. 23).

29. 1931

    On 27 November 1931 a protective procedure under the Eastern Aid decree is opened for Parsow, the first step towards agricultural debt relief; the Stettin business journal "Ostsee-Handel" prints it in the list of farms with a taxable value above 40,000 Reichsmark in the Köslin district, alongside the neighbours Kartz von Kameke (Streckentin), Elisabeth von Kameke (Varchminshagen) and Walter von Blankenburg (Strachmin) (Ostsee-Handel vol. 12, 1932, no. 2). In the same year, according to a report from Bütow, he praises the president of the Reich Rural League, Eberhard Count von Kalckreuth, at a Landbund rally in Köslin. The list names him as "Karl August von Gerlach" with the estate of Parsow and appoints the Landberatung Pommern G. m. b. H. of Stettin as trustee.

30. 1920er/30er Jahre

    The Genealogisches Handbuch des Adels lists him as "Rittmeister (ret.) and member of the diet"; Kyra Inachin's history of Pomerania names him as a deputy of the German National People's Party. The diet meant is the provincial diet of Pomerania – see the list of candidates of 1925.

31. 1931

    The diocesan gazette advertised the second parish post at Körlin and named him as patron: applications were to be addressed "to the entailed estate owner von Gerlach at Parsow". The family's patronage thus reached beyond its own village churches into the small town.

32. 1933

    A retrospect on the Stettin provincial museum preserves a prank: he picked up a shard of glass outside a door of the assembly room in the New Provincial House and, at an evening event in the "Preußenhof", asked Field Marshal August von Mackensen to present it to the museum director. The old hussar did so with a little silver tray from the sideboard. To the museum man this donation was, as he later wrote, not the least bit amusing (Baltische Studien, new series 58).

33. 1933–1935

    He helped his brother Klaus with the family research: five letters and two postcards from Parsow, written between 11 August 1933 and 23 September 1935, lie in his working file "Gerlach charters 1347–1767"; Klaus answered from Berchtesgaden. In October 1934 the Stettin state archivist Georg Kupke wrote to him as well.

34. 1937

    Hellmuth Bethe thanks him in the preface of his study of the portraits of the Pomeranian ducal house (Baltische Studien NS 39) among the researchers and collectors who assisted him – Parsow is thus one of the houses that could contribute to the ducal portraits.

35. 1943

    Parsow manor becomes an evacuation depot of the Prussian State Library: after an inspection by Director General Hugo Andres Krüß on 12 July, 150 crates arrive by rail on 24/25 August – parts of the union catalogue and selected subject groups; the library pays 50 Reichsmark rent a month. Altmarrin, Billerbeck, Schötzow and Hohenwalde also take in holdings; in 1945 none of the houses is spared looting, and Parsow is hit hardest (Voigt 1995; Schochow 2003).

36. 1944

    The handbook of German joint-stock companies lists the Kösliner Aktien-Bierbrauerei at Brauergasse 11 with "Gerlach, Parsow" as chairman of the supervisory board and General Director Johannes Bundfuß of Stettin as his deputy – a year before his death he still heads his grandfather's foundation.

37. bis 1945

    Parsow, Schwemmin, Trienke and Drosedow in one hand – some 4,500 ha.

38. 1945

    Occupation by the Red Army. Abduction and murder. End of the Gerlach estate succession in Pomerania.

39. 1945

    When the Red Army arrives he is deported together with almost all the men of his estates and perishes; the Genealogisches Handbuch des Adels gives Friedenshütte in Upper Silesia as the place of death.

Sources and literature