Ella Lingens-Reiner

Ella Lingens-Reiner (born November 18, 1908 in Vienna , Austria-Hungary ; † December 30, 2002 ibid) was an Austrian lawyer and doctor who , as an opponent of National Socialism, was imprisoned in a concentration camp from 1943 to 1945 . In 1980 she was named Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem .

Life

Ella Lingens, born in Vienna in 1908, studied medicine and law in Munich , Marburg and Vienna . She was married to the doctor Kurt Lingens from Germany , who had already been excluded from all German universities in 1933 because of his membership in an anti-fascist student group.

After the " Anschluss of Austria " to the German Reich in March 1938, the couple considered whether they should emigrate , stay in Austria or whether it would be possible to stay without becoming complicit. They decided not to emigrate for the time being.

In the months after March 12, 1938, they helped Ella Lingens' Jewish fellow students to emigrate. During the November pogroms ("Reichskristallnacht"), they granted shelter to ten Jewish families in their house on the outskirts of Vienna. The couple helped other Jews to flee to Hungary, took in individuals temporarily and supported the parents of friends who had emigrated with food.

The extensive deportations of the Jews who remained in Vienna began in the summer of 1942 . Some turned to the Lingens for help. In the summer of 1942 Ella and Kurt Lingens were asked by the Polish underground movement with which they were in contact to help two Jewish couples escape. They took one pair in and found a hiding place for the second. With the help of a middleman, the two couples were to be brought to Switzerland . This middleman, a former actor named Klinger, was a Gestapo spy who betrayed the refugees to the authorities in Feldkirch on September 4, 1942 and denounced their helpers. Ella and Kurt Lingens were arrested on October 13, 1942 and imprisoned in the Vienna headquarters of the Gestapo in the former Hotel Metropol on Morzinplatz. Kurt Lingens was assigned to a penal company in Russia.

Ella Lingens-Reiner: Prisoners of Fear (1948)

Ella Lingens was initially imprisoned for four months in the Gestapo prison in Vienna and repeatedly interrogated. In February 1943 she, like Karl Motesiczky , who with the couple had been involved in the rescue of Viennese Jews, was deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp . Lingens and Motesiczky arrived in Auschwitz early in the morning at three o'clock on February 20, 1943. Although she enjoyed a privileged position there as a prisoner doctor, Lingens stood up for her fellow inmates and tried to save them from extermination. But for Lingens too, Auschwitz was “hell”. In April 1943 she fell ill with typhus and only barely survived. Motesiczky died there on June 25, 1943. In the meantime, Ella Lingens was transferred to the Babitz satellite camp of Auschwitz for two months in mid-1943 . She stayed in Auschwitz until the beginning of December 1944 and was then transferred to the Dachau concentration camp , where she a. a. remained imprisoned in the Munich subcamp Agfa-Kamerawerke until the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp by the US Army at the end of April 1945.

After her release she wrote that she had in Auschwitz at the thought of their child, the three-year Peter Michael Lingens , by the Nazis not be robbed of their honor and self-respect.

After that Ella Lingens had to find her way in her new life. Like many other concentration camp survivors, she was plagued by feelings of guilt: “Am I alive because the others died in my place?” She asks herself repeatedly. In contrast to many other concentration camp prisoners, she began to write down her memories and analyze Auschwitz experiences as early as 1947.

In her book Prisoners of Fear , published in 1948, she described the years of resistance and her experiences as prisoners in the National Socialist concentration camps . Dutch survivors of the Agfa-Kamerawerke subcamp protested against her depiction and accused her of depicting Dutch women as naive and misinterpreting facts, among other things. In 2003 her son, who had meanwhile become one of Austria's most famous journalists, published the German translation under the title Prisoners of Fear - A Life in the Sign of Resistance .

In the years after the liberation, when Austria's National Socialist past was hushed up, Ella Lingens did not let herself be deterred from remembering the crimes of the past. Despite the associated psychological stress, she went to schools and teachers' seminars as a witness to the times to inform the next generation about the dark past of fascism, war and the reign of terror. Although highly revered and valued abroad, Ella Lingens remained largely unknown in Austria. After the war she finished her medical studies and worked in several clinics and in the public health system in Austria. She became ministerial advisor in the Federal Ministry for Health and Environmental Protection and retired in 1973.

In early March 1964, Lingens testified as a witness during the first Frankfurt Auschwitz trial. Yad Vashem awarded Ella Lingens-Reiner and Kurt Lingens the Medal of Righteousness Among the Nations in Jerusalem in 1980 .

Ella Lingens-Reiner died on December 30, 2002 in Vienna. Her son Peter Michael Lingens later reported: “A few days before she died, my mother got out of bed again. She leaned on the walls of the room and the long corridor and suddenly stood in the living room door, obviously a little confused. While each conversation fell silent, she repeated a single sentence, her eyes wide in fear: You won't burn me? You won't burn me, will you? “She was buried on January 10, 2003 in the Vienna Central Cemetery in an honorary grave (group 40, number 90).

Ella-Lingens-Platz, Munich-Giesing

Others

• A Viennese AHS in Floridsdorf (Gerasdorfer Straße 103) has been called Ella Lingens Gymnasium since 2006 .
• In 2012, Ella-Lingens-Strasse was named after her in Vienna- Donaustadt (22nd district) .
• In Munich was in 2016 in the district of Giesing of Ella Lingens-square named after her.

Works

• Prisoners of Fear . Foreword by Arturo Barea . London: Victor Gollancz, 1948
  • Prisoners of fear. A life under the sign of resistance . Deuticke, Vienna 2003, ISBN 3-216-30712-3 .
    Berliner Taschenbuch Verlag btv, Berlin 2005, ISBN 383330152X .
• Selection in the women's camp . In Hans Günther Adler , Hermann Langbein & Ella Lingens-Reiner (eds.): Auschwitz. Certificates and reports . European publishing house EVA, 2nd edition Cologne 1979, ISBN 3434004114 , pp. 98-104.
  • 6th edition, with a foreword to the edition history by Katharina Stengel: Series 1520. Federal Agency for Political Education BpB, Bonn 2014 ISBN 9783838905204 pp. 100-107

literature

• Hermann Langbein: People in Auschwitz . Ullstein, Frankfurt 1980, ISBN 3-548-33014-2 .
• Lexicon of the Righteous Among the Nations. Germans and Austrians . Edited by Daniel Fraenkel (German) and Jakob Borut (Austrian). Wallstein, Göttingen 2005, ISBN 3-89244-900-7 , pp. 332f.
• Ilse Korotin (ed.): "Civilization is just a very thin blanket ..." Ella Lingens (1908–2002). Doctor, resistance fighter, witness for the prosecution . Series: Biografia. New results in women's biography research, 8th Praesens, Vienna 2010, ISBN 978-3-7069-0646-3 .

Documentation

• Righteous Among the Nations: Ella Lingens , zeit.geschichte am Saturday, ORF , 2016

Web links

• Literature by and about Ella Lingens-Reiner in the catalog of the German National Library
• Photo of Ella Lingens from the identification file of the Gestapo Vienna at the documentation archive of the Austrian resistance (photo from October 1942)
• Yad Vashem - The stories of six Righteous Among the Nations in Auschwitz: Dr. Ella Lingens
• Short biography and photo of Ella Lingens-Reiner on http://www.auschwitz-prozess-frankfurt.de
• Ernst Klee : Auschwitz. Perpetrators, accomplices and victims and what became of them. A dictionary of persons , S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2013, ISBN 978-3-10-039333-3 .
• Süddeutsche Zeitung, April 24, 2015: Honoring someone upright

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Life data according to Ernst Klee: Auschwitz. Perpetrators, accomplices and victims and what became of them. An encyclopedia of persons , Frankfurt am Main 2013, pp. 258f.
2. ↑ http://www.auschwitz-prozess.de/ Search: "Lingens" Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial: Interrogation Protocol Ella Lingens (audio tape recording, HHStAW Dept. 461 - Public Prosecutor's Office at LG Frankfurt am Main. Date of recording: March 2, 1964)
3. ↑ Righteous Among the Nations Honored by Yad Vashem (PDF; 132 kB), January 1, 2013 at www.yadvashem.org
4. ↑ Ella Lingen's son Peter Michael Linges. Quoted from: Ernst Klee: Auschwitz. Perpetrators, accomplices and victims and what became of them. A dictionary of persons , Frankfurt am Main 2013, p. 259
5. ↑ http://www.friedhoefewien.at/eportal/ (to be determined via search function)
6. ↑ City council decides on Ella-Lingens-Platz. sueddeutsche.de, April 18, 2016, accessed on May 22, 2016 . 
7. ↑ from this the register of persons ( memento of the original dated December 3, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) 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. 
8. ↑ Excerpt from: Prisoners of fear. Victor Gollancz, London 1948. German 1st ed. 1962. The German editions of 1990, ISBN 3434460306 , and 1995, ISBN 3434462236 , can be read online.