Sanatorium and nursing home Süchteln-Johannistal - Waldniel department

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The sanatorium and nursing home Süchteln-Johannistal - Waldniel department was a branch of the provincial sanatorium and nursing home Süchteln-Johannistal (today: LVR-Klinik Viersen) in Waldniel - Hostert , today part of the municipality of Schwalmtal , district of Viersen . It was built in 1909 by the Franciscans as St. Josefsheim . In December 1941, the Waldniel “ children's department ” was set up in the institution. Here, physically or mentally handicapped children and young people were tortured as part of the so-called “ child euthanasia ”, and over 100 of them were murdered.

Former institutional chapel on the site in Waldniel

history

St. Josefsheim 1909–1937

The facility was built by the Franciscan Order from 1909 to 1913 and operated as a home and workplace by the Franciscans von Waldbreitbach for up to 600 men mentally and physically handicapped until 1937. It included a church, administration wing, school, apartment blocks, numerous workshops and a self-catering farm. The institution chapel is decorated with wall paintings by Josef Wahl .

In 1936 the Franciscan order was sentenced to heavy fines for offenses against foreign currency and the moral trials against members of the order and priests under National Socialism also hit brothers from Waldniel. Eventually the order had to file for bankruptcy and leave Waldniel.

Provincial sanatorium and nursing home Waldniel

After the St. Josefsheim was dissolved, the facility was acquired from the bankruptcy estate in 1937 by the Provincial Association of the Rhine Province , today the Rhineland Regional Association (LVR), for 600,000 Reichsmarks and continued as a subsidiary of the Süchteln-Johannistal Sanatorium with 870 beds. As a result of the drastic reduction in the daily meal rates and the resulting malnutrition as well as insufficient heating and hygiene, the death rate rose in all institutions.

"Children's department" Waldniel

Stumbling block for Margarethe Papendell, who was murdered on June 30, 1943, on the site of her former home in Inratherstrasse 145, Krefeld
Stumbling block for Elschen Harmel, who was murdered on January 9, 1943, in front of her house at Lösorterstraße 59, Duisburg

In August 1941, the governor of the Rhine Province, Heinz Haake , agreed to the demand of the “ Reich Committee for the Scientific Registration of Hereditary and Constitutional Serious Ailments ” under Viktor Brack , Hans Hefelmann and Richard von Hegener for a “children's department”. In the building of the former "Guardian Angel House" of the Franciscans, a so-called children's department with approx. 220 beds was set up, which was occupied on December 16, 1941 with the first children transferred from the Gangelt facility. The doctor in charge was initially Georg Renno , then Hildegard Wesse for a transitional period until her husband Hermann Wesse arrived on October 1, 1942.

Some of the children were moved to Waldniel from other facilities without the consent or notification of their parents. On March 8, 1942, twelve children were admitted to the Franz Sales House , and in 1943 62 children and young people from Bonn, some of whom died there or after being transferred to other children's departments. In 1942/43 at least 30 mentally handicapped children were killed by administration of Luminal . Other children were slowly starved to death for months. Emaciation, pneumonia or cardiovascular weakness was incorrectly entered as a diagnosis in the death certificates of the approximately 100 children killed. During the existence of the Waldniel children's department, two children and young people died while Renno was working, 91 in von Wesse's and six in Hildegard Wesse's.

When the facility was closed in July 1943, the remaining 183 children were transported to five other “specialist departments” in Görden , Uchtspringe , Lüneburg , Ueckermünde and Ansbach . A large number of those responsible for the Rhenish “child euthanasia” - staff from the health administration and clinics - were not prosecuted even after the end of the war, only the psychiatrist Hermann Wesse was convicted of the Waldniel child murders in 1948 in the Düsseldorf euthanasia trial.

Further use

From mid-1943 to March 1, 1945, the building was used as an alternative hospital for the Rheydt Municipal Hospital. In the following years they served, among other things, as a reform home. In the Guardian Angel House ("children's department") there was initially the elementary school for the surrounding honeys, a provincial education home for boys, later also a Caritas home for girls who had finished school, and from 1950 to 1955 a home for around 50 school-age boys ("hostert education home") ).

Around 1951, the British confiscated a large part of the building as a hospital. In 1952, the building could be bought back by the Order of the Franciscans at a reasonable price, but only partially used because most of the buildings remained confiscated by the British.

In 1955 the federal government bought the site from the Franciscan order for the British. For the next 37 years, the area was rented to the British, who after renovations and extensions set up the British Military Hospital Hostert and from September 1963 to 1991 used the facility as a British Kent school. The Kent School taught 1,400 young people; 270 of them were housed in the boarding school.

The site was then up for sale and was sold to a private person in a foreclosure auction in November 2006. The owner only allows visitors to enter the grounds and buildings for a fee.

Commemoration

As early as the time of the Josephheim, a small cemetery had been laid out by the Franciscans on an area behind the institution, which was continued to be used during the National Socialist era by the Süchteln-Johannistal Provincial Sanatorium and the “Children's Department”.

Information board in front of the entrance to the prison cemetery

On the basis of a citizen's application in the municipal council, in 1987 the municipality transferred the sponsorship of the cemetery, which was dissolved in 1952 and which was acquired by the parish St. Mariae Himmelfahrt in 1958 and designed as a cemetery of honor in 1962, to the Schwalmtal secondary school (today: European school ), their students and Teachers designed the memorial that was inaugurated in the cemetery in 1988. A bronze plaque at the entrance provides information about the history of the cemetery. At the rear of the site there is a memorial stone dedicated to the innocent victims .

In June 1988, only the chapel, which was de-dedicated in 1978, with the glass windows designed in 1911, was placed under monument protection as monument no. 117 and two buildings on the street, but not the previous ones with the former “children's department”. Efforts to keep part of the decaying building as a memorial have so far been unsuccessful.

Since 1996, on January 27th (the day of the liberation from Auschwitz ) there has been a public memorial hour with students and teachers from the European School in the cemetery. The parish of St. Mariae Himmelfahrt holds the Corpus Christi celebrations there every year.

memorial

View from the inside of the institution cemetery to the memorial wall in the background

After the landscape committee of the Rhineland Regional Council decided in May 2016 to expand and redesign the Waldniel-Hostert memorial, Katharina Struber and the architect Klaus Gruber worked on the redesign from September 2016 to April 2018. To do this, they relocated the access to the former prison cemetery, which now opens to visitors through a sloping wall that becomes flatter.

  • Memorial wall

  • Memorial plaque

Metal plates in the form of commemorative coins are attached to the wall of the institution cemetery, which is upright at right angles. They bear the names of victims from the years 1939–1945. This form of commemoration was sponsored by 554 sponsors in 2017.

Within the enclosed area there are three large spherical sculptures, some of which sink into the ground, made of brightly painted cast aluminum with a diameter of up to 180 cm, whose final design with plaster and engraved writing was carried out during an integrative project with the Europaschule Schwalmtal and the Kunsthaus Kannen . The memorial was opened in May 2018 as part of the Corpus Christi celebrations.

  • Overview at the entrance to the institution cemetery

  • spherical sculpture made of cast aluminum, inscription: KLAUS WAR SCHLIMM

  • spherical sculpture with the inscription: PETER WEINT

  • Sculpture in memory of Elschen Harmel: ELSCHEN SLEEPS

literature

  • Andreas Kinast: “The child cannot be trained.” Euthanasia in the Waldniel children's department 1941–1943 . Böhlau Verlag GmbH & Cie, Cologne, 2014, ISBN 978-3-412-22274-1 ( book excerpt )
  • Lutz Kaelber, Raimond Reiter (ed.): Child murder in Waldniel and the legend of the Rhenish resistance , pp. 121–144. In child murder and “children's departments” under National Socialism: commemoration and research . Verlag Peter Lang, 2011, ISBN 978-3-631-61828-8
  • Volker van der Locht: From charitable welfare to the medical selection view. On the social history of the motive structure of care for the disabled using the example of the Franz-Sales-Haus in Essen . VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 1997, ISBN 978-3-8100-1912-7 , pp. 299-305, 366
  • Paul-Günter Schulte: The euthanasia in the Provincial Sanatorium and Nursing Institution Johannistal, Waldniel department, especially the children's department there . In: Linda Orth: The transport children from Bonn . Rheinland-Verlag, Düsseldorf, 1989, ISBN 978-3-7927-1050-0 , pp. 98-110
  • Katharina Struber, Klaus Gruber (eds.): Memory is created together. The redesign of the Waldniel-Hostert memorial . Mandelbaum Verlag, Vienna 2019, ISBN 978-3-85476-833-3
  • Wolfgang Franz Werner: Psychiatry in the Abyss: Searching for clues and determining the location after the Nazi psychiatry crimes. Rheinland-Verlag, 1991, p. 74 f.
  • Peter Zöhren: Next door - another world: The fate of the disabled in the Waldniel-Hostert institution, 1909-1945 . Schwalmtal, 1988.

Web links

Commons : Sanatorium and nursing home Süchteln-Johannistal - Waldniel department  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d care, murder, lessons in Hostert - St. Josefsheim der Franziskaner. Archived from the original on January 28, 2013 ; accessed on September 7, 2018 .
  2. ↑ Speech by the LVR Head of Culture and Environment Milena Karabaic: On the traveling exhibition “The Monument to the Gray Buses” , September 1, 2011. Accessed August 22, 2016
  3. ^ The University of Vermont / Lutz Kaelber: Waldniel (Provincial Sanatorium and Nursing Home Johannistal zu Süchteln, Waldniel Partial Institution) , dated February 8, 2015
  4. ↑ Volker van der Locht: Euthanasia in the Franz-Sales-Haus during the 3rd Reich - Historical Experience - Consequences for the Present and Future . S. 412, 413. In: Manfred Not, Armin Wildfeuer (ed.): Person - Human Dignity - Human Rights in Disput . LIT Verlag, Münster, 2002
  5. ^ Ralf Forsbach: The Medical Faculty of the University of Bonn in the Third Reich . De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2006, ISBN 978-3-486-57989-5 , p. 517
  6. ^ LVR clinic Viersen: history. Archived from the original on July 19, 2014 ; accessed on May 4, 2015 .
  7. ^ Landschaftsverband Rheinland / Portal Rheinische Geschichte: "Euthanasia" and forced sterilization in the Rhineland (1933-1945) . Retrieved March 29, 2015
  8. ↑ Thomas Roth, NS Documentation Center of the City of Cologne : Conference report March 21, 2014: After '45: Denazification, reparation, prosecution . Retrieved May 4, 2015
  9. ^ LG Düsseldorf, February 7, 1953 . In: Justice and Nazi crimes . Collection of German criminal judgments for Nazi homicidal crimes 1945–1966, Vol. X, edited by Adelheid L. Rüter-Ehlermann, HH Fuchs, CF Rüter . Amsterdam: University Press, 1973, No. 339 pp. 337–346 Participation in the 'euthanasia program' through the killing of Reich Committee children by Luminal ( Memento of the original from March 14, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked . Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Acquittal of the nurse W. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www1.jur.uva.nl
  10. ↑ Airfield and Kent School for sale. In: Rheinische Post , September 23, 2016
  11. ↑ Kent School.de. Retrieved March 25, 2019 .
  12. ↑ Ottmar Fuchs (Ed.): Approaches to memory: conditions anamnetischer experience; Studies on subject-oriented memory work . LIT Verlag, Münster, 2001, p. 114
  13. ^ Villa Merländer eV - NS documentation center of the city of Krefeld: The cemetery of the euthanasia victims in Waldniel-Hostert .
  14. ↑ Memorial book for the Nazi victims from Wuppertal: Reimund Kornhoff . Retrieved August 22, 2016
  15. ^ Foundation Research Center for Glass Painting of the 20th Century eV: Schwalmtal-Waldniel-Hostert, Former St. Josefsheim . Retrieved August 22, 2016
  16. ↑ Working group for research into National Socialist “euthanasia” and forced sterilization: memorial and information point for the victims of the National Socialist “child euthanasia” in Waldniel-Hostert , from December 13, 2012
  17. ↑ Rheinische Post: Lease Hostert for memory? ( Memento of the original from March 4, 2016 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. , dated September 17, 2012 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.aavaa-verlag.com
  18. ↑ Waldniel-Hostert Memorial 1962-1988. Archived from the original on April 24, 2015 ; accessed on September 6, 2018 .
  19. ^ RP online: Calling the dead by their names , January 27, 2009
  20. ↑ Landschaftsverband Rheinland: Submission 14/996 from May 24, 2015
  21. ^ Katharina Struber and Klaus Gruber: Waldniel Memorial
  22. ↑ Waldniel Memorial: struber_gruber . Accessed May 31, 2018
  23. ↑ Westfälische Nachrichten: Design of a memorial from June 21, 2017. Retrieved on May 31, 2018
  24. ↑ waldniel-hostert.de: Institution cemetery memorial site . Accessed May 31, 2018

Coordinates: 51 ° 12 ′ 34.5 "  N , 6 ° 18 ′ 31.4"  E