Erna Kronshage

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Erna Kronshage - portrait photo from around 1940

Erna Kronshage (born December 12, 1922 in Senne II (today Bielefeld- Sennestadt ); † February 20, 1944 in the Tiegenhof institution near Gnesen ( Gniezno )) was persecuted by the Nazi regime, who was forcibly sterilized and then in the course of the " Aktion Brandt " was murdered.

Life

After finishing school, Erna Kronshage worked as a house daughter from 1937 on her parents' farm in the then independent rural community Senne II, district of Bielefeld (today Bielefeld-Sennestadt). When she suddenly refused to work in the autumn of 1942, on October 20, 1942, after an official medical examination, she was admitted to the Gütersloh Provincial Sanatorium, where she was diagnosed with schizophrenia , which was treated there with work therapy in the garden and housekeeping and shock therapy . Because of this hereditary disease (according to the Nazi nomenclature at the time) , the director of the sanatorium applied for “ sterility ” according to the law for the prevention of genetically ill offspring of 1934, against which her father Adolf Kronshage, as the legal guardian, vehemently objected and also questioned the diagnosis as a whole.

The Hereditary Health Supreme Court in Hamm finally rejected the father's complaint on July 22, 1943 against the decision of the Bielefeld Hereditary Health Court of March 29, 1943 on "sterility". The forced sterilization took place on August 4, 1943 in a Gütersloh hospital. Repeated requests from the father to release his daughter from the provincial sanatorium were ignored.

Instead, in the course of the air defense evacuations of the " Aktion Brandt " to create bed capacities for military and hospital purposes in the Gütersloh sanatorium, on November 12, 1943, 50 women and 50 men were transported to what was then the Tiegenhof Gauheilanstalt near Gnesen in occupied Poland the institution director Victor Ratka, who collaborated with the German occupiers, became one of the killing institutions in German-occupied Poland. According to the current clinic management, at least 3,586 people of different nationalities were killed there in the course of the Nazi euthanasia.

Other historians assume an enormous number of unreported cases in the total number of victims in Tiegenhof. Enno Schwanke suspects in his work "The State Healing and Care Institution Tiegenhof", 2015, that the true number of victims is probably around 5,000 people.

Erna Kronshage died there on February 20, 1944, after a stay of 100 days, of "total exhaustion", as indicated by the death certificate issued there. That was the usual paraphrase of targeted murder by a fat-free diet with a slight barbiturate overdose according to the Luminal scheme , which was developed and propagated by Hermann Paul Nitsche .

The death rate of the deportation transport from November 12, 1943 from Gütersloh to Gnesen was 90% until the end of the war.

The remains of Erna Kronshage found their final resting place on March 5, 1944 in the family crypt in the cemetery in Senne II.

Commemoration

Stumbling block Erna Kronshage

On December 6, 2012, a “ stumbling block ” was laid in front of Erna Kronshage's birthplace in Bielefeld-Sennestadt .

"Places of remembrance and remembrance" - in this memorial for 1017 victims of National Socialism in the provincial sanctuary in Gütersloh, "Erna Kronshage" is mentioned on a luminous name band in the Kreuzkirche of the LWL-Klinik Gütersloh.

In 2018, the Youth Volxtheater Bethel staged the play: "I want to live - especially differently", which Erna Kronshage's fate puts into the present day.

See also

literature

  • Lutz Kaelber: Virtual Traumascapes: The Commemoration of Nazi 'Children's Euthanasia' Online and On Site. Digital Icons: Studies in Russian, Eurasian and Central European New Media 4 (2010): 13–44. [1]
  • Lutz Kaelber: Children's departments ("Special Children's Wards"): Sites of Nazi "Children's 'Euthanasia'" Crimes and Their Commemoration in Europe - Tiegenhof

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Editor: Horst RH Wasgindt, Senne City: Sennestadt - History of a landscape . Ed .: Sennestadt GmbH. 2nd Edition. Selbstverlag, Sennestadt 1980 (p. 294: Hof Nr. 6; p. 450–451: commentary and illustration).
  2. ↑ Götz Aly: Aktion T4 1939–1945 - The “Euthanasia” headquarters at Tiergartenstrasse 4 . Ed .: Götz Aly. 2nd ext. Edition. Edition Hentrich, Berlin 1989, ISBN 3-926175-66-4 , pp. 174 , footnote 21 (Restoring the useful - killing the unusable).
  3. ^ Heinz Faulstich: Starvation in psychiatry 1914–1949: with a topography of Nazi psychiatry . Lambertus, Freiburg im Breisgau 1998, ISBN 3-7841-0987-X , p. 410-411 .
  4. ↑ Marian Drogowski: Historia, Okres okupacji hitlerowskiej 11.09.1939-21.01.1945. In: Dziekanka Hospital website - PL. Retrieved August 14, 2015 (Polish).
  5. ^ Enno Schwanke: The state sanatorium and nursing home Tiegenhof . In: Ina Ulrike Paul and Uwe Puschner (eds.): Civilization & History . tape 28 . Peter Lang GmbH, Frankfurt am Main 2015, ISBN 978-3-631-65236-7 , p. 127 .
  6. ↑ Bernd Walter : Psychiatry and Society in the Modern Age. Mental health care in the province of Westphalia between the German Empire and the Nazi regime (= research on regional history). Schöningh, Paderborn 1996, ISBN 3-506-79588-0 , excerpt from table p. 945.
  7. ↑ Play "I want to live ...". Accessed June 6, 2020 .
personal data
SURNAME Kronshage, Erna
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German victims of the Nazi regime
DATE OF BIRTH December 12, 1922
PLACE OF BIRTH Senne II, Bielefeld district (today Bielefeld-Sennestadt)
DATE OF DEATH February 20, 1944
Place of death Gauheilanstalt Tiegenhof (Polish: Dziekanka) near Gnesen