Gabriele Köpp

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Gabriele "Gabi" Köpp (born June 24, 1929 in Schneidemühl , † August 6, 2010 in Berlin ) was a German physicist . Outside of physics, she became known for her autobiography, in which she described her escape from the East and numerous rapes by Soviet soldiers .

biography

Gabriele Köpp grew up in Schneidemühl on the border of the provinces of Posen and West Prussia . At the end of the Second World War , Köpp was 15 years old. On January 26, 1945, her mother and her older sister sent her to flee from the approaching Red Army . The freight train carrying the refugees got into action that same day, the locomotive was shot to pieces by tanks. Gabriele Köpp was able to escape, her sister was missing. In the following 14 days Gabriele Köpp was raped many times by soldiers of the Red Army until she found shelter on a farm. After 15 months she found her mother in Hamburg. Her family avoided talking about what she had experienced, instead she should write it down. Her notes at the time formed the basis of her later autobiography.

From 1955 Gabriele Köpp studied physics at the University of Hamburg , where she received her doctorate in 1966. Topic of her thesis was the proton -Proton- scattering . In 1977 she completed her habilitation at RWTH Aachen University with a work on electron-positron destruction . In 1986 she was appointed adjunct professor at RWTH Aachen University . In 1994 she retired , but continued to work scientifically. In 1997 she wrote a textbook on quantum electrodynamics that was published by Teubner .

She published her story of flight and violence for the first time in 1992. The publicist Ingo von Münch named the acquaintance with Gabi Köpp as a personal motivation to deal in a book with the mass rapes of German women and girls at the end of the war. In 2010 Köpp's work was published in a revised form and - unlike when it was first published in 1992 - it was widely received. In comparison to relevant publications from the 1950s, the historian Miriam Gebhardt particularly emphasized Köpp's portrayal of the “existential loneliness and helplessness of the victims”. The portrayal of the betrayal by German women who blamed the unknown girl would not have fit into the discourse on victims after the end of the war. This was followed by a paperback edition and translations into Finnish , Estonian and Czech .

In 1999 Köpp moved to Berlin, where she died in 2010. Her urn was buried in the Karlshorst cemetery.

Fonts

  • My story. Report on an escape from the border region Posen-West Prussia in 1945. K. Fischer, Aachen 1992, ISBN 3-927854-37-9 . (First edition)
  • (with Frank Krüger): Introduction to quantum electrodynamics . Teubner, Stuttgart 1997, ISBN 3-519-03235-X .
  • Why was I just a girl? The trauma of an escape in 1945 . Herbig, Munich 2010, ISBN 978-3-7766-2629-2 . (New version)
  • Why was I just a girl? The trauma of an escape in 1945 . Knaur, Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-426-78450-1 . (Paperback first edition)

literature

  • Susanne Beyer: 14 days for life . In: Der Spiegel No. 8/2010 of February 22, 2010.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Gabriele Köpp: "I was still a child" . In: Threatened Völker - Pogrom , magazine of the Society for Threatened Peoples , ZDB -ID 511691-0 , No. 277 (03/2013).
  2. ↑ Gabriele Köpp: Influence of the pion resonances on the low-energy proton-proton scattering . Hamburg 1966
  3. ↑ Gabriele Köpp: Dispersion-theoretical description of the transition form factors Fγωπ (t) and Fγρε (t) with normal and anomalous cutting contributions and their influence on the electron-positron annihilation . Aachen 1977.
  4. ↑ Gabriele Köpp, Frank Krüger: Introduction to quantum electrodynamics . Teubner, Stuttgart 1997, ISBN 978-3-519-03235-9 .
  5. ↑ Ingo von Münch: “Frau, komm!” The mass rapes of German women and girls in 1944/45 . Ares, Graz 2009, ISBN 978-3-902475-78-7 , foreword.
  6. ↑ Miriam Gebhardt: When the soldiers came. The rape of German women at the end of World War II . DVA, Munich 2015, ISBN 978-3-421-04633-8 , section “Lonely among others”.
  7. ↑ Gabi Köpp: Kunpa en olisi ollut tyttö: tositarina saksalaistytön kohtalosta vihollisen käsissä 1945 , translated into Finnish by Anne Mäkelä. Minerva, Helsinki 2010, ISBN 978-952-492-399-6 .
  8. ↑ Gabi Köpp: Miks küll sündisin tüdrukuna? Sinisukk, Tallinn 2010, ISBN 9789949147335 .
  9. ↑ Gabi Köpp: Proč jsem jen byla dívka? Víkend, 2011, ISBN 9788072227983 .
  10. ↑ Author portrait at Droemer-Knaur
  11. ^ Obituary notice in: Aachener Zeitung / Aachener Nachrichten, August 21, 2010
personal data
SURNAME Köpp, Gabriele
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Köpp, Gabi (nickname)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German physicist, author of a contemporary witness report on rape in 1945
DATE OF BIRTH June 24, 1929
PLACE OF BIRTH Schneidemühl
DATE OF DEATH August 6, 2010
Place of death Berlin