Gunhild Klöckner

Gunhild Klöckner (born January 21, 1934 in Cologne ; † May 4, 2020 in Berlin ), called Gunild , was a German teacher. She became involved as a contemporary witness and dealt with the time of National Socialism in Germany .

Gunhild Klöckner was the daughter of Rudolf Hartung , who was a doctor in Cologne. Joined the NSDAP as early as 1930, in 1932 he rose to the position of Gauobmann of the National Socialist Medical Association and thus to the highest medical party representative in the Gau Cologne-Aachen , a position which he held from 1934 as Gauamtsleiter for Public Health until 1945. In 1938/39 he was finally appointed head of the Rhenish district offices of the Reich Medical Association created in 1936 and thus a senior professional official for around 7,000 doctors. He was responsible for all medical and medical decisions at the Gau level. The perversion of medical action under the Nazi regime up to euthanasia can be exemplified in his curriculum vitae, but especially in his defense strategy in the judicial proceedings after 1945.

In addition, R. Hartung can undoubtedly be counted among the "incorrigible", that is, to that group of leading National Socialists who not only continued to maintain informal contact with one another after 1945 but also remained largely unbroken to the Nazi ideology. At the same time, the comparatively more than mild assessment and punishment of Hartung by German courts and denazification committees shows how quickly society was ready to suppress the events of the years between 1933 and 1945. Those who had been persecuted were immediately considered untrustworthy, while perpetrators like Rudolf Hartung often moved into respected positions in civil life.

Gunhild Klöckner played a key role in leading and keeping the discussion about former Nazi perpetrators alive and in documenting the contradictions in the actions of Nazi perpetrators. Her connection to the Nazi Documentation Center in Cologne was very close. She was one of the first to show with her commitment that the children of the perpetrators are forced to grapple with the deeds and convictions of their parents, and so in lectures and discussions in schools and other social institutions, she not only put the victim side and you Suffering and the consequences for the next generations must be considered, but that the children and grandchildren of the perpetrators must finally break their silence in order to have important political and social work to do as contemporary witnesses.

Life

Gunhild Klöckner was born the fifth of six children to a doctor and an operating room nurse. Due to severe visual impairment, which remained undetected until she was 12, she only learned to speak at the age of four and was considered "stupid" in her childhood and youth. Because of the heavy bombing raids on Cologne , her parents decided to move with the children from Cologne to Bergisch Gladbach , as Gunhild in particular was severely traumatized by the nights of bombing in the basement. To the amazement of the family, however, she passed the entrance exam for the Reich School of the SS in the Netherlands in 1943. For security reasons, this was moved from Heythuysen in the Limburg province to Reichenau on Lake Constance in a former psychiatric institution. She still remembers the room doors that can only be opened from the outside. After the war, like the other children, she was given to a peasant family in the area, where she had to work hard at the age of eleven and was also beaten.

Back in Bergisch Gladbach and later again in Cologne, she continued to attend school up to the so-called " Pudding Abitur ", as the qualification at the girls' high school was called. She then studied at the University of Education in Bonn to become a primary and secondary school teacher and began teaching in 1956. Her very first grade students invited her to their 50th class reunion in 2006 and remembered her as a warm and loving teacher.

As a young girl she was interested in music and sang it in various choirs. She only knew the second half of many operas and concerts, as she sneaked into Cologne's Gürzenich or the opera house during the break due to lack of money and sat in vacant seats.

In 1961 she married Dieter Klöckner with whom she had two children. She gave up her job. She still suffers from insomnia, which she attributed to the nights of bombing. When her son died of leukemia in 1983 , she and her husband became the initiators of the Bonn self-help group "Orphaned Parents", one of the first groups of its kind in Germany.

Gunhild Klöckner is a founding member of the group “Offender-Victim Children of the Third Reich / To-Refect-and-Trust” established in 1992 by the Israeli professor Dan Bar-On . She has dealt intensively with the role of her father in the Third Reich and is involved among other things. a. as a contemporary witness in schools. In addition, she was a volunteer and supervisor of telephone counseling for 22 years. From 2009 to 2016 she was a member of the contemporary witness group of the Seniors' Council of the City of Potsdam.

Publications

• Sing me the funeral song, issn 0949-3646 systhema 1997.
• Film BBC: Children of the 3rd Reich .
• Film: Finally breaking the silence (Heike Mundzeck)
• Article in the “Bonner Generalanzeiger” from December 15, 2015 about the Erzählcafé initiative and the impression Gunhild Klöckner left there
• Dan Bar On: Die Last des Schweigens , 1993, ISBN 9783896840387 , where GK's life story is the content of a chapter.
• Gunhild Klöckner: Finally break the silence. The daughter of a doctor and district head reports. In: Congress Documentation: Medicine and Conscience. 50 years after the Nuremberg Medical Congress , pp. 176–185, 1998
• Katrin Himmler: "Herrenmenschenpaare" 1993 . In: Krauss (Ed.) You were there. Pp. 62-79, Wallstein Verlag.
• Several contributions to the annual anthologies of the "Contemporary Witnesses" working group of the Potsdam Senior Citizens' Advisory Board between 2010 and 2017.
• Society for Christian-Jewish Cooperation Dresden eV: November 30, 1994 Seminar: Gunhild Klöckner: “Finally breaking the silence”.
• 1997. Schlippe, A. v. (Ed.): German Identity (s) - Fifty years after the end of World War II. (With contributions by A. v. Schlippe; Heike Bernhardt; Gunild Klöckner; Irene Wielpütz; Peter Heinl).
• Rudolf Hartung. Biography, life story, comments from his daughter Gunhild Klöckner
• The Germans - a people of perpetrators? Friedrich Ebert Stiftung

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Obituary notice , accessed on May 29, 2020
2. ↑ http://www.museenkoeln.de/nsdok/fundstuecke/08-hartung/
3. ↑ The last time narrative café - stories about the full life . In: General-Anzeiger Bonn . December 15, 2015 ( online [accessed June 19, 2018]).
4. ^ Society for Christian-Jewish Cooperation Dresden eV, Susanne Max: Society for Christian-Jewish Cooperation Dresden eV: Chronicle 1982 - 2011. Accessed on June 19, 2018 (English). 
5. ↑ : LIFE STORIES.NET:. Retrieved June 19, 2018 . 
6. ↑ The Germans - a people of perpetrators? On the historical-political debate about Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's book "Hitler's Willing Executors: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust"; Lecture and panel discussion of a colloquium of the discussion group History of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung and the Bonn Working Group of the German-Israeli Society, Bonn, September 4, 1996. Dieter Dowe. Research institute of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, accessed on June 19, 2018 .