Edith Leffmann

Edith Leffmann (born July 22, 1894 in Cologne ; died February 3, 1984 in Mannheim ) was a German, Jewish pediatrician . During the Second World War she worked in the Resistance in France and returned to Germany disguised as a French foreign worker during the war. After the war she worked in Ludwigshafen-Hemshof . She was a co-founder and the first chairwoman of the Association of Victims of the Nazi Regime (VVN) in Rhineland-Palatinate .

Life

Edith Leffmann was born in Cologne as the daughter of the Jewish factory owner Bernd Löwenstein and his wife Martha (née Heidenheim). The mother was married to Arthur Leffmann, the director of the corset factory Löwenstern & Leffmann , for the second time . The parents made it possible for the daughter to study medicine in Bonn and Munich . After completing her degree and her doctorate , she first worked at the Berlin Children's Hospital. A little later she opened her own pediatrician practice. After marrying Robert Leffmann, their son Bernd Julius ("Bill") was born in 1924. Through her great social commitment during the Weimar Republic , she came into contact with the Red Aid and the KPD .

After the National Socialists seized power in 1933, Leffmann was forced to give up her practice in Berlin and she moved back to her parents in Cologne. In 1937 she had to close her practice in Cologne due to the tightening of laws against Jewish doctors. While the son and his grandparents emigrated to the Netherlands in 1939 , the Leffmanns fled to Brussels on April 17, 1939 . After the death of her husband in April 1940, Edith Leffmann fled to France.

With the financial support of their grandparents, Edith and Robert Leffmann succeeded in placing their son in a Quaker school in the municipality of Ommen , where the children and young people were to be prepared for a rural life in Palestine . The school was closed on April 10, 1943 and the Jewish youths were first imprisoned in the Herzogenbusch concentration camp and later in the Westerbork camp and deported to Auschwitz on September 22, 1943 , where Bernd Julius Leffmann was probably murdered immediately upon arrival.

Edith Leffmann was arrested in French exile and taken to the Camp de Gurs . Here she worked as a doctor for the camp inmates. After escaping from the Gurs camp, she joined the Resistance. Here she was involved in the Comité “Allemagne libre” pour l'Ouest (CALPO), a group in France that was close to the National Committee for Free Germany and carried out propaganda work among members of the Wehrmacht in southern France. She also took part in the distribution of the newspaper Soldat am Mediterranean . As part of the Travail allemand program, she went back to Germany camouflaged as the French nurse Marie-Louise Lefèbre from Roubaix . Here she continued her underground and sabotage activity in a paper goods factory in Eger among the employed workers.

After the end of the war, she and the resistance fighter Alphonse Kahn entered the French occupation zone via Paris . She settled in Ludwigshafen in August 1945 and joined the KPD. Edith Leffmann was the Jewish representative on the support committee for the victims of fascism, which was transferred to the Office for Reparation and Controlled Assets in 1950 . In spite of her own health problems and physical and psychological exhaustion, she took over the medical care of patients suffering from war and deprivation under the most adverse and simple conditions, which earned her the honorary title of Angel von Hemshof in Ludwigshafen .

Shaken by her own blows of fate and losses that she suffered during the time of National Socialism - in addition to her son, her parents were murdered in Auschwitz and her husband died in French exile - Edith Leffmann vehemently opposed oblivion, militarism and for rehabilitation from those who were politically and ethnically persecuted by National Socialism. In 1947 she was a founding member of the VVN in Rhineland-Palatinate, of which she was the first chairman of the regional association. Numerous communists were involved in the VVN, which led to constant efforts to ban the association in the early 1950s. She herself received a penalty warrant on August 26, 1952 because of her membership. In 1951 she ran for the KPD for the Rhineland-Palatinate state parliament .

Since 1960 she lived in Mannheim, where she died on February 3, 1984. She received an urn grave financed by Alphonse Kahn in Mannheim's main cemetery , which was cleared in 1999.

After her death, various citizens' initiatives campaigned for a public appreciation of Edith Leffmann's life achievement, against which politicians had concerns due to the KPD membership.

Honors

Stumbling block for Dr. Edith Leffmann in Cologne, Gleueler Strasse 192

In March 2012, three stumbling blocks were laid in front of the family's home in Cologne-Lindenthal at Gleueler Straße 192 in memory of Edith Leffman and her murdered son Bernd Julius and her husband Robert as part of the art and monument project by Cologne artist Gunter Demnig .

Stolpersteine ​​were also laid in Cologne for her mother, Martha Leffmann, her stepfather Arthur Leffmann and her cousin, the lawyer Ernst Leffmann .

After fierce controversies with the CDU-led Ludwigshafen city council, a memorial plaque was unveiled in front of their house at Carl-Friedrich-Gauß-Straße 6 in June 2013 at the instigation of a citizens' initiative.

During the Mannheim cultural summer in 2007, the life story of Edith Leffmann was artistically staged in the series Revolutionaries of Everyday Life .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d} Memory of "Engel vom Hemshof". on: mannheimer-morgen.de , March 3, 2012, accessed on March 30, 2015.
2. ↑ Bernd Julius Israel Leffmann. In: joodsmonument.nl. Retrieved May 7, 2019 . 
3. ↑ Dieter Schiller (Ed.): Exile in France. Reclam, Leipzig 1981, p. 397.
4. ^ Barbara Bromberger, Hans Mausbach, Klaus-Dieter Thomann: Medicine, Fascism, Resistance. Three posts . Frankfurt am Main 1990, ISBN 3-925499-41-5 , p. 303.
5. ^ Klaus J. Becker: The KPD in Rhineland-Palatinate 1946-1956 . (= Publications of the Parliament's Commission for the History of Rhineland-Palatinate), Rhineland-Palatinate Commission for the History of Rhineland-Palatinate, Volume 22, Verlag von Hase & Koehler, Mainz 2001, ISBN 3-7758-1393-4 , P. 291.
6. ^ Klaus J. Becker: The KPD in Rhineland-Palatinate 1946-1956 . (= Publications of the Commission of the State Parliament for the History of the State of Rhineland-Palatinate), Rhineland-Palatinate Commission for the History of the State of Rhineland-Palatinate, Volume 22, Verlag von Hase & Koehler, Mainz 2001, ISBN 3-7758-1393-4 , P. 293.
7. ↑ ^{a b} Memory of the "Engel vom Hemshof". on: mannheimer-morgen.de , June 14, 2013, accessed on March 30, 2015.

Web links

• NS Documentation Center Cologne: Dr. Edith Leffmann , accessed March 30, 2015