Winfried Seibert - The girl that could not be named Esther

So now it came down merely to a choice between Gladbeck or Gelsenkirchen, two medium-sized industrial towns. At first it seemed more important to look for records in the Essen courts, and if not there, perhaps in the state archive in Dusseldorf. It turned out that the records of the district court in Essen had been destroyed in 1976. They had survived the war, but they had not been considered significant for modern history and had therefore not been archived. They certainly would have been worth keeping. We had lost a small historical possibility. Now the records were irrevocably gone.

It’s true that the lawsuit register at the district court in Essen provided an important clue, but the letter came a few days too late. Barely a week earlier I had solved the puzzle.

First I have to report on another false turn. Once the search had been narrowed to Gelsenkirchen and Gladbeck, I could concentrate on looking for Pastor L. in these two places. There could not have been many pastors whose names started with “L” in 1938 in Gladbeck or Gelsenkirchen. With the help of the Protestant Church Office in Cologne, I soon knew that at that time there were no pastors “L” in Gladbeck, but there were two such in Gelsenkirchen: Johannes Karl Leckebusch, born 1882, pastor in Gelsenkirchen-Buer starting November 1930, and Theobald Lehbrink, born 1898, pastor in Gelsenkirchen starting November 1933. Both were still of an age to be fathers in 1938.

To be sure, Pastor Leckebusch, 65 years old in 1938, seemed less likely than Pastor Lehbrink, who was 16 years younger. Besides, Lehbrink had additional interesting personal data. On January 31, 1939, he had retired from the active ministry. Why? He was barely 40 years old and had another good 25 years of service ahead of him. It could be that he had to quit the ministry because of his hard-headed confrontation over the name Esther, or it could have been that his church, to protect him, had cautiously relieved him of his duties because of the stand-to with the Nazi state. Besides that, he had published something in 1935 about God and authority, a very Protestant theme, which might have gotten him into trouble. After the war he wrote something about Arminius, the Teutonic opponent of the Romans. This too led me to believe that he was no run-of-the-mill pastor. He seemed likely to have been a pastor who took on the Third Reich in other articles as well – Theobald Lehbrink could be my man!

He had died in 1962 in Dassel, near Hanover. In 1941 he had remarried. Whether his first wife — Esther‘s mother, if he was the right one — had died early or if the marriage ended in divorce could not be determined from the short biographical data. If however he had divorced between 1938 and 1941, this could also explain his withdrawal from the ministry.

If he was Esther‘s father, and if Esther, under whatever name, was still alive, then there must be evidence in the estate papers. A call to the district court in Einbeck revealed that there were records of the estate, but they were in storage. By telling the person in charge that there were some copyright issues to clear up in connection with the pastor’s literary efforts, I was able to obtain — somewhat irregularly — a copy of the certificate of inheritance. Luckily, two days later I could discard it since other inquiries had shown that Pastor Lehbrink could not have been the mysterious Pastor L.

A telephone call to the church office in Dassel took me to a helpful woman who, as luck would have it, not only had known Pastor Lehbrink but had even been confirmed at the same time as his daughter. Even though this confirmand had been named Gisela, this did not mean anything since our Esther was originally not allowed to be called so. But the birthdate! After looking in the church records, the friendly woman said that Gisela had been born on May 18, 1939. Again nothing. With that birthdate, she could not have had an older sister born August 11, 1938.

Now what? There were two Pastors L. in Gelsenkirchen, and according to the list of Protestant pastors in Westphalia from the age of the Reformation down to 1945 only these two were of the right age, and neither one was the right one. The one to whom a lot of the evidence pointed was Lehbrink, but he wasn‘t the one. As it turned out, I almost had the fox guarding the henhouse. On May 8, 1992, the State Church Archive of the Protestant Church in Westphalia wrote me:

Unfortunately, on the basis of the available documents, we were unable to confirm your assumption of the possible paternity of the Pastor and Superintendent Theobald Lehbrink of a daughter named Esther, born August 11, 1938. Since Pastor Lehbrink numbered among the German Christians [Nazi-oriented breakaway church group], it is quite unlikely that he would have chosen such a name.

That was stated quite modestly. Lehbrink, as it later was shown, was an almost fanatical National Socialist with a rigid belief in the Fuehrer, or at least that was the way he expressed it in his Christmas 1935 tract on God and authority, as we shall later see. It is impossible that such a pastor, who stood so close to the Nazi-faithful German Christians, would have caused such a row over the name Esther in 1938. Why Lehbrink left his ministry in 1939 could not be explained. That wasn’t important now. What mattered was that Pastor L. was still unknown.

I didn’t know what to do next. Perhaps I had gotten carried away. Court decisions are not published with the purpose of identifying the parties to the dispute. But I only wanted to find the little girl Esther, born on August 11, 1938, in G., apparently Gelsenkirchen. I will never forget the decisive long-distance telephone call that ended my search.

On May 7, 1992, I reached a very friendly woman at the registry office in Gelsenkirchen, who was really surprised at what I had to ask her about. In 1938, I said, some 5,500 births were registered in Gelsenkirchen. That would come out to an average of about 15 children a day. Statistically, there must have been some seven little girls registered on August 11, 1938. Could there have been one or more whose family name began with “L“?

Luckily, the woman had become curious. It didn’t take more than two minutes for her to confirm that on August 11, 1938, the birth of a girl with the surname L. had been registered. That MUST have been Esther. But she couldn’t say – on account of the data protection law. I then explained why I was looking for this girl. Yes, she said, I was at the right place, and then she read next to the given name Elizabeth a subsequent registration of the name Esther in 1946. Unfortunately, she could not tell me the family name. She was really very sorry, but I had to understand.

We quickly established that the family name was neither Leckebusch nor Lehbrink. That used up the only two pastors L. in Gelsenkirchen. I was so to speak standing in front of the open birth registry book with the entry I was seeking, and I had forgotten my glasses. Esther was so close, but I couldn’t get any farther. I could only conclude that this Pastor L. had not been a pastor in Gelsenkirchen, and that the child had been born more or less by accident in Gelsenkirchen. We had had that problem in Gubin.

The woman understood my despair. When she heard my deep sigh and my utterance that a name starting with L must continue with a vowel and that there were only five of these, she suggested that I start at the end of the alphabet. In addition, she raved about the women’s hospital in Gelsenkirchen, which was always popular with mothers from Wattenscheid, a small town that is now part of the city of Bochum. – That was the answer!

Pastor L. came from Wattenscheid, and Esther had come into the world at the hospital in Gelsenkirchen. The presumed typo of “W” in place of “G” was not an error; both letters were correct. Suddenly, everything fell into place. After a lightning visit to the church office and a look at the centuries-long list of Westphalian pastors, it was clear that the name of Pastor L. was Friedrich Luncke.