We Are Looking for Relatives of Ernst Joermann / Jörmann
How did this pocket watch engraved with a German name end up in the United States? And who was the watch’s original owner? The children of a late U.S. Army veteran are hoping to find answers to these questions. Their father was the last person to own the gold-colored watch. The watch’s current owners would like to get in touch with Ernst Joermann’s family and return the watch if it was wrongfully taken from him during the Nazi era.
Only limited information is available about man believed to be the watch’s original owner. Very little is known about his life or about what happened to him during the Nazi era. According to documents from the Arolsen Archives, the watch may have belonged to Ernst Joermann (Jörmann), who was born in 1896 in Haan (now in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany). The documents contain several different spellings of his name: Ernst Jörmann, Ernst Joermann, Ernst Joerman, Ernst Jormann, and Ernest Jerman. However, it is also possible that the watch belonged to someone else with the same name who lived in southern Germany or was deported there.
Ernst Joermann’s date of birth, as recorded in the documents held by the Arolsen Archives, was probably March 3 or 23, 1896. In 1922, he was living in Hilden, where he married a woman named Maria. According to the passenger list of the “S.S. Deutschland,” Ernst left his home country in 1928, when he emigrated to the United States on a ship that set sail from Hamburg. His wife, Maria, followed him two months later.
The couple lived in Stamford (Springdale), Connecticut, USA, for a number of years. Ernst Joermann apparently visited Germany on several occasions after his emigration. Passenger lists document return trips to the United States in 1934 and 1938. In 1934, he gave his father, Wilhelm Joermann, resident in Haan, as his contact person in Germany. It is possible that his trips to Germany brought him to the attention of the Gestapo and led to his arrest. His name appears in a list of prisoners the Gestapo opened files on. These files are held by the Düsseldorf State Archives.
Is the watch from southern Germany?
In 1944–45, a young U.S. soldier called Frank Brown was stationed in Germany with the Cannon Company, 358th Infantry Regiment, 90th Infantry Division. Given his regiment’s movements in 1945, it is possible that the watch came from southern Germany, Bavaria, or the Bavarian-Czech border region.
According to his family, Frank Brown found the pocket watch on a German Wehrmacht soldier. He took it because he suspected that it did not belong to the soldier himself, but had been stolen from someone (possibly Jewish) who had been persecuted by the Nazis.
The pocket watch was sold under the Zentra brand name and bears a mark identifying Gustav Rau of Pforzheim as the maker of the case. Watches of this type were first manufactured in 1927. The U.S. Army veteran’s heirs are keen to return the pocket watch to the descendants of its original owner if it was wrongfully taken from him. The watch is believed to hold sentimental value rather than monetary value.