The Consumptive Captain’s Wife in Farther Pomerania

Elsbeth, called Else, was the thirteenth child of Friedrich and Emma Klopp. She was born in the Wolmirstedt home on 21 September 1895. When she was 18 years old, she left Wolmierstedt and moved with her mother in 1903/04  to Elena, West Prussia. Already at that time, she must have carried the horrible lung disease within her, to which her sister Selma had succumbed.

At the beginning of the 1920s during a visit to her sister Jula Steuer (1877 – 1960) in Diensdorf she got acquainted with the Reichswehr officer Drusus Stier and married him. He was at that time stationed in Fürstenwalde/Spree and used to frequent with his army buddies Jula Steuer’s hotel, where he had met his wife. The name Stier is recorded in the position tables of the Prussian army for Stettin and Magdeburg. His father had been a royal-Prussian general, who also named his other son after a prominent Roman family Tiberius Stier. After viewing two portraits, which were taken in the photo-studio M. Kowalski in Stettin at the beginning of 1920, the author of the Klopp Family History states that the 26-or-27-year-old Else appeared to have been the prettiest of all the Klopp/Bauer daughters. She passed on her open and level-headed characteristics to her son Felix.

Captain Drusus Stier was an infantry officer and was wounded in World War I. Before the end of the war he was relocated to the fortress city of Strasbourg/Alsace. After the war, he took on his last Reichswehr employment in the early 1930s, presumably due to his poor health he was assigned a ‘retiree’ position at the army’s training camp in Groß Born (today Polish: Borne Sulinowo) in Pomerania. In Alt Valm near Bärwalde, the couple Stier lived in a no longer identifiable house at the village entrance.

Here an escalating marriage crisis eventually led to their divorce. According to vague family memories Else’s new husband Filter was supposed to have worn a police uniform. Perhaps he was a comrade of Drusus Stier. Apparently, Herr Filter did not want to deny himself the pleasures of Else’s intense passion, which often went hand in hand with women suffering from tuberculosis. The second marriage lasted only a short time. Else died in Alt Valm at the age of only 39 years. Her first husband, Drusus Stier, retired in the 1930s and moved to Berlin, where he lost his life by burning to an unrecognizable shell during a bombing raid in 1943.