1. Katharine Wilhelmina, b. November 8, 1859, at Berlin, Germany. (B2C,51)

B2C,51.
Katharine (official spelling, Germany spelling Katharina) Wilhelmina Heine, only child of Katharine Whetten (Sedgwick) Heine and Wilhelm Heine, was born November 8, 1859, in Berlin, Germany. She was reared in Germany by her paternal grandparents, who declined the request of her maternal relatives that she be sent to the United States to live and to be educated. She married Edgar Hanfstaengl, head of the syndicate of art stores in German cities, in London, Paris, and New York City, and lived through tremendous experiences in the Franco-Prussian, the First and Second World Wars. One of her sons was killed in the German army and another died in Paris in the First World War in which she had, it is believed, three sons fighting for their native Germany. She visited her mother's relatives in Connecticut in her early years and, probably, again when her son, Ernst, was at the head of the Hanfstaengl branch art store on Fifth Avenue, New York City.

In Munich she knew Hitler, a rising artist, who exhibited in the Munich galleries and who knew well the Hanfstaengl art stores.

She last came to the United States, it is believed, in 1940 to attend as a delegate, representing the Oxford Group, the International Peace Conference, at which she was a prominent figure and in which she took an active part. At that time she visited some Sedgwick relatives in New England. Her son, Ernst, who had returned to Munich to live, had then broken with Hitler and had taken up his residence in London. In the Second World War her grandson, Egon, Ernst's son, volunteered in the United States Air Forces and in 1945 was an M.P. Sergeant in New Guinea. As a Harvard sophomore he gave up his university career to enter United States military service.

Most of the married life of Katharine Wilhelmina (Heine) Hanfstaengl