Anna Lehnkering

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Stumbling block for Anna Lehnkering

Anna Lehnkering ( August 2, 1915 in Sterkrade - March 7, 1940 in Grafeneck ) was a German woman who was murdered in a gas chamber by the Nazi regime as part of Operation T4 .

Life

Anna Lehnkering was the third child of the innkeeper couple Anna and Friedrich Lehnkering from Sterkrade . Anna was postponed from school for a year and soon after starting school was transferred to an auxiliary school , which she left at the age of 14. She then helped out at home.

In 1934 the family moved to Mülheim an der Ruhr . At the request of the Oberhausen district doctor Ludwig Fleischer and a decision by the Duisburg Hereditary Health Court , Anna Lehnkering was forcibly sterilized on February 18, 1935 in the Evangelical Hospital in the city of Mülheim an der Ruhr . When she was being treated there a year later for a kidney disease, the attending physician arranged for her to be admitted to the Bedburg-Hau Provincial Sanatorium in December 1936 . There she was diagnosed as "moronic". The " nonsense " is innate and caused by heredity.

In the following three years in Bedburg-Hau, Anna Lehnkering, who was previously considered good-natured and willing, developed into an increasingly difficult patient who was assessed as "annoying" by the hospital staff. Since she also refused to work, she met the essential selection criteria according to which the victims of the “euthanasia” murders were selected: She was considered “incurably hereditary”, a difficult patient and “economically useless” and therefore fell to “ annihilation unworthy of life Life ”. In March 1940 she was one of almost 2,000 patients who were relocated from Bedburg-Hau to make room for a hospital. On 6./7. In March 1940 she was taken to the Grafeneck killing center with more than 450 other men and women , where she was gassed on March 7, 1940 .

Anna's footsteps

By chance Sigrid Falkenstein came across the name of her aunt Anna Lehnkering on the Internet on a "list of people who were murdered by German doctors" and began to research. From the family memory, with the help of old photos and patient files, she reconstructed Anna's life story, which she finally published together with the psychiatrist Frank Schneider . In her book, Falkenstein draws a bow from her personal search for clues to the social handling of forced sterilization and "euthanasia" from the Nazi regime to the present day, and she describes her work of remembrance from the Ruhr area, Bedburg-Hau and Grafeneck to "euthanasia" memorial and Information point at the Philharmonie in Berlin. In a review, Der Spiegel stated that the book endowed "the main character with a dignity that she was never granted during her lifetime."

Quotes

“That was not a“ death by grace ”, but rather cruel mass murder. The victims, however, were not an anonymous mass. Like Anna, they all had names and faces and each had a unique, irretrievable life. "

- Sigrid Falkenstein

“It is time to honor the murdered by name and to name their life data in a generally accessible database. Only then will the long forgotten victims be given back their individuality and human dignity, at least symbolically. "

- Götz Aly : The burdened. "Euthanasia" 1939–1945.

At the congress of the German Society for Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Neurology (DGPPN) in 2010, Sigrid Falkenstein quoted the following words in her speech as a member of Anna Lehnkering:

"What is not remembered can happen again at any time if the external living conditions deteriorate significantly."

- Dorothea Buck

Commemoration

In front of the house at Düsseldorfer Strasse 38 in Mülheim an der Ruhr , a stumbling block for Anna Lehnkering was installed on April 2, 2009 . Since 2009, an installation of memory by Ulrike Oeter in the Bedburg-Hau Clinic Museum has been commemorating Anna. In 2012, the children's and youth theater Mini-Art staged the play “Änne's last journey”, which is based on Anna's fate. In 2013 the exhibition “Tiergartenstrasse 4 - History of a Difficult Place” was shown at the Berlin Philharmonic. The exhibition links the history of the address Tiergartenstraße 4 with Anna's life and has since been shown as a traveling exhibition in various locations in Germany.

Sigrid Falkenstein remembered her aunt Anna Lehnkering during the memorial hour for the victims of National Socialism in the German Bundestag on January 27, 2017.

See also

literature

  • Sigrid Falkenstein : Anna's footsteps. A victim of Nazi "euthanasia". With the collaboration of Frank Schneider . 2nd Edition. Herbig, Munich 2018, ISBN 978-3-7766-2954-5 .
  • Sigrid Falkenstein: Anna's footsteps. A victim of Nazi "euthanasia". Short version in simple language by Andreas Lindemann. Fun reading, Münster 2015, ISBN 978-3944668406 .
  • Götz Aly : The burdened. "Euthanasia" 1939–1945. A history of society. Fischer, Frankfurt 2013, p. 10.

Web links

proof

  1. ↑ Speech by Sigrid Falkenstein, relatives of a victim: Nazi euthanasia and forced sterilization in the family memory - mirror of collective repression and increasing memory. (No longer available online.) German Society for Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Neurology, November 2010, archived from the original on February 28, 2017 ; Retrieved January 30, 2011 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.dgppn.de
  2. ↑ Änne's last journey. Theater mini-art, accessed May 22, 2018 .
  3. ↑ Tiergartenstrasse 4 - History of a difficult place. T4 exhibition, accessed May 22, 2018 .
  4. ^ Sigrid Falkenstein: Day of Remembrance of the Victims of National Socialism. Memorial hour in the German Bundestag on January 27, 2017 / speech by Sigrid Falkenstein. (PDF) In: bundestag.de. January 27, 2017. Retrieved February 11, 2017 .
  5. ↑ Bundestag commemorates the victims of "euthanasia" in the Nazi state. German Bundestag, January 27, 2017, accessed on February 11, 2017 .
personal data
SURNAME Lehnkering, Anna
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German woman who was murdered by the Nazi regime as part of Operation T4
DATE OF BIRTH August 2, 1915
PLACE OF BIRTH Sterkrade
DATE OF DEATH March 7, 1940
Place of death Grafeneck