Luise Thiel

Luise Thiel was born in 1891 in Bergneustadt and moved with the family to Elberfeld and then to Witzhelden where her father started his Lebensheim. As a young girl she worked in her father’s recovery centre. Later she became a Diakonisse and also served as a nurse. Around 1926, at the age of 35, she retired from nursing and married Adolf Engel, a heilpraktiker from Seesen who was 18 years her senior. The couple did not have any children. He died in 1941 during the Second World War. In their apartment in Seesen Luise produced Hingfong and an extract of the ginseng root. The tinctures were filled into small bottles, packed in parcels and distributed by post. Luise passed away in 1964 in Seesen.

During her lifetime she meticulously put together the document which late, packed in parcels and distributed byr became known as Gustav Thiel’s Diary. She compiled this document about the life of her grandfather, Gustav Thiel, in Palestine, Germany and South Africa from diaries he kept and from letters he wrote to his father over the years as well as from what she was told by her own father, Peter Johannes Thiel. She sent a copy of this document to one of her father’s brothers, Ernst Thiel, in South Africa. From him it reached several other members of the Thiel family in South Africa and elsewhere around the globe and was the essential motivating force behind this work describing the life of Gustav Thiel and summarising what is known about his descendants.