Usually he was brushed off but was delighted when he met a Marga von Versen who knew Else von Versen, now Auerbach and gave him her address. (not so easy then pre-internet). Her brother Helmuth von Versen answered Wolf’s letter to her on 23.8.1963 saying ‘my sister Else has asked me to answer your letter to her because she cannot do so as she is almost blind…. We do remember our great grandmother Passage (the ‘old Passage’) was born a Nelky who was married to Arnold and after his death married W Passarge. She had 3 children with Arnold - Hermann, Emma and my grandmother Sara. She was born in 1806 and died in 1905. she was described as having ruled the family for almost 100 years’.

With the help ion Registry Offices and Prussian State Archives, Wolf established the descendants of Else Auerbach from Matthias Nelky and then Johanna Nelky. Wolf developed a correspondence with Helmuth von Versen, a great grandchild of Johanna, It is likely that Johanna married Levi Arnold before the Berlin trials (that involved her brothers - the gang of thieves) began. Levi was a co-defendant but was acquitted. They married in the Altmark where Matthias and Dorothea lived. The first authenticated date of her arrival in Berlin is 1838, especially as a Jew. She was the first member of the Nelky family to settle in Berlin, opened a textile business and was very successful living in the best and expensive districts of Berlin. Helmuth wrote that she was a rich widow although we don’t know when Levi died. She was apparently very beautiful.

She had a baby on 14th April 1839 that she called Adolf Nelky and the Von Versions did not know of him. In 1859, she married Wolf Passarge, 13 years younger than her although they had been together for 20 years. He acknowledges the son as his and changes his name to Adolf Passarge. she plays the ‘great lady of Berlin’, talk only of Potsdam as her place of birth, changes her husbands name to Wilhelm to be more royal and pretends to be 3 years younger than she is in order to please her husband. It is possible that she knew where some of her brother’s stolen loot was hidden as it was never found. She sounds quite a character and Helmuth von Versen said the family had ‘some peace after her death’.

Wolf wanted to find out what happened to the youngest child of Matthias Nelky. He knew about the 3 sons - Louis, Elias and Hermann (see chapter 3 of the book) but not about Johanna born in 1806. He remembered his parents talking about being related to the Von Versen family and that as a child he used to visit an aunt Else von Versen and play with her son Walter. He tried to trace her and went through the phone book of Berlin and Hamburg following up every von Versen he could find.

Her granddaughter Elise Krakauer married Major K E Engelhard von Versen. Her great grandson in the next generation married into the von Heydebrand und der Lasa, the parents of Axel von Versen and Ruth Wolff whom Wolf was in correspondence with. Very extraordinarily, my dad also discovered that my husband Michael Gopfert’s step mother was Renate von Heydebrand und der Lasa before her marriage to his father - and knew the people Wolf was writing to. So Michael and I are related - though only distantly and through marriage!

From the State Archive, taken from the Jewish & Dissident Register in 1961, the legalisation of Adolf Nelky’s birth to Johanna and Wolf Passarge, born on 14th January 1839 at 5pm