Elisabeth Hecker

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Elisabeth Hecker (born December 25, 1895 in Bad Oeynhausen ; † January 11, 1986 in Marktoberdorf ) was a German pediatrician and child and youth psychiatrist who was involved in Nazi crimes as part of child euthanasia .

Life

Hecker ended in 1915 their school career in Duisburg with the passing of the baccalaureate . She then began studying philosophy, but switched to medicine . After completing her medical degree at the universities of Marburg , Würzburg , Tübingen and Jena , she passed the first state examination in Jena in 1920 and received her doctorate there in 1921. med. She spent her internship in Danzig and Rostock . She then received a pediatric specialist training at the Berlin Children's Hospital. From 1923 to 1925 she was employed as a senior physician at the municipal children's clinic in Dortmund and then ran a pediatric practice in Castrop-Rauxel .

In March 1929 she entered the Lower Silesian provincial service and initially worked as a department doctor at the Provinzialheil- u. Freiburg nursing home , where she received a psychiatric and neurological specialist training. Further stations were the health department of the provincial administration service and the management of the Jannowitz children's convalescence organization . After the " seizure of power ", Hecker endorsed the law for the prevention of genetically ill offspring that came into force at the beginning of January 1934 by the National Socialists .

"Even if the thought processes of race care are more widespread today, there is certainly still much to be done to convince the individual who is being interviewed that the occurrence of mental and physical inferiority is not a disgrace to be covered up, but a Misfortune to be fought. Recently, there have been rapid advances in the field of racial care preventive measures. When the material for this work was collected in 1929, it was a utopia to believe in the implementation of a sterilization law in the near future. "

- Elisabeth Hecker in her essay “Genealogical Investigations on Imbecile”, which appeared in 1934 in the journal for the whole of neurology and psychiatry

In 1941, Hecker built the youth psychiatric state clinic in Loben , now Lubliniec , and headed the admission ward there. There she selected the children according to “social usefulness”: Either the children were transferred to reformatory institutions or, if the finding was “nonsense” or epilepsy , they were murdered in the ward run by the institution's director Ernst Buchalik by means of fatal Luminal gifts . At least 221 children died in the facility this way.

In the final phase of the Second World War , before the invasion of the Red Army in mid-January 1945, she moved west. She practiced as a country doctor in Bavaria and settled in Siegen in 1947 as a neurologist. In November 1951 she entered the service of the Westphalia-Lippe Regional Association and set up a new station at St. Johannes Stift in Niedermarsberg . From April 1952, the chief medical officer established a child and adolescent psychiatric department at the Gütersloh sanatorium , which functioned as an independent institution from March 1953 and was relocated to Hamm in 1965 ( LWL University Clinic Hamm ). On December 9, 1960, Hecker retired as a state medical advisor.

From 1965 to 1974, the Dortmund public prosecutor's office against former doctors and nurses of the Heil- u. Nursing home Lublinitz initiated an investigation. The investigation against Hecker ended in 1974.

Honors

  • Federal Cross of Merit, 1st class
  • Honorary membership of the German Society for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (1979 - 2013 revoked) The award of honorary membership was due to Hecker's participation in the Nazi euthanasia from 2002 "subject of critical discussion" at the DGKJP and in 2003 by the board of this association at a general meeting as a wrong decision rated. In the course of this process, the honorary membership was revoked in 2013 and all references to Hecker's honorary membership were removed by the DGKJP on its homepage and from documents.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Quoted in: Wilfried Huck: Exhibition about the Nazi crime child euthanasia “Wounds of Memory”. An artistic approach to the phenomenon of “child euthanasia” using the example of Elisabeth Hecker, first director of the West Clinic for Adolescent Psychiatry, Gütersloh, from 1965 Hamm . In: Landesjugendamt, Mitteilungen, Edition 146, Münster, March 2001 ISSN  0937-7123 , pp. 67-77
  2. ^ A b Ernst Klee: Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich , Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 235.
  3. ↑ Dr. Elisabeth Hecker (1895-1986): Merits as a child and youth psychiatrist on the one hand - participation in the extermination of the disabled on the other . In: Practice of child psychology and child psychiatry. - 52.2003, 2, pp. 98-108
  4. ↑ Messages  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . In: Journal for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Psychotherapy , Volume 30, Number 4/2002, pp. 305–309@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.psycontent.com  
  5. ↑ Statement of the German Society for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Psychosomatics and Psychotherapy on the withdrawal of honorary membership to Ms. Elisabeth Hecker (PDF; 180 kB) at www.dgkjp.de
personal data
SURNAME Hecker, Elisabeth
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German doctor and euthanasia perpetrator
DATE OF BIRTH December 25, 1895
PLACE OF BIRTH Bad Oeynhausen
DATE OF DEATH January 11, 1986
Place of death Marktoberdorf