Family life in Pirna, Germany

The Hess family was a prominent, assimilated Jewish family in Pirna, Germany. They owned a large chemical and lacquer manufacturing plant. Gustav and Hermine Hess had three children - Ilse, Manfred, and Albert. All were married in Germany and managed to escape the war. Ilse and her family moved to NY (she married Alfred Rosenstern and the name was later changed to Roston). Manfred, his wife Gertrud "Trude", and their daughters Ursula and Luise left Germany for England in 1939. Albert Günther Hess (AGH) and his family went to Belgium and later to the US. AGH was born on March 1, 1909. He studied music and law; still and motion picture photography was his lifelong hobby. In the 1930s, he made travel and family films on 9.5 mm. He was drafted by the US Army shortly after arriving in the US in the early 1940s. He was in a military intelligence unit, interrogated and translated for Nazi prisoners, interviewed Hermann Goering, and helped liberate Dachau (His photographs are available in the USHMM Photo Archives). In the 1950s, he returned to filming his family and documenting his travels. AGH married three times, first to Ilse Sobel (who appears in many of his early films and who - later in the US - went by the name Peggy Kaufman), next to Gisela Oppens (a refugee and the mother of the donor), and finally to Julia Kao. AGH was also a criminology professor, an airplane pilot, a boater, and a language enthusiast.