Denk-Mal freight car

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Denk-Mal freight car in front of the school building

The Denk-Mal freight car was set up in 1996 in front of the Winterhude district school in Hamburg-Winterhude . It shows a group of figures by the artists POM and Cristine Schell as well as a boxcar . It is intended to commemorate the deportation of two teachers who taught at the Meerweinstrasse school in Hamburg - on behalf of the victims of National Socialism .

monument

The installation was the result of the initiative of a student project group who began researching the past of their school in 1982. They found out from files that the two teachers had been dismissed in 1933 and researched the history of their persecution and murder. The Hamburger Hochbahn built the track structure free of charge, the freight wagon was set up with a crane truck from the fire brigade. The monument was erected in 1996.

The covered freight cars of the standard design were intended by the Deutsche Reichsbahn for the transport of cattle and general cargo and are therefore sometimes referred to as “ cattle wagons ”. They were mainly used in the east for "Jewish transports" and thus became the "central symbol for the deportations of National Socialism." The wagon on display is, however, a type Gms39 wagon built in Czechoslovakia from 1948 for the Deutsche Bundesbahn. For the deportation of German Jews , mostly old “third class” passenger cars were used. The report of Paul Salitter , who at the end of 1941 was in charge of escorting such a deportation train, has survived.

The teacher

Hertha Feiner-Assmus

Hertha Feiner-Assmus ; Student drawing

(* May 8, 1896 Hamburg; † March 1943 during transport to Auschwitz)

She studied pedagogy and worked as a teacher at the Meerweinstrasse school until 1933. In 1933 she was discharged from school and divorced from her husband. She was now working as an assistant teacher at a Jewish school. In 1935 she moved to Berlin, four years later, through the agency of her divorced husband, she sent her children to Switzerland to the Les Rayons boarding school on Lake Geneva , which was headed by Harald Baruschke at the time . Their attempts to bring the children back to Germany failed.

Hertha Feiner worked at various Jewish schools in Berlin. In 1941 he was forced to work with the Jewish community. There she had to help with the administrative preparations for the deportations. On March 12, 1943, she was deported to Auschwitz . She committed suicide on the way there.

In 1992 the Hertha-Feiner-Assmus-Stieg in Winterhude was named after her.

Julia Cohn

Julia Cohn ; Student drawing

(* October 14, 1888 Hamburg; deported to Riga on December 6, 1941, † between December 1941 and 1944 in the Riga-Kaiserwald concentration camp )

She was a teacher at the school in Humboldtstrasse ( Barmbek ) and at the school for language and business courses for emigrants in Beneckestrasse. On April 1, 1930, she moved to the newly built Meerweinstrasse school. On July 29, 1933, she was dismissed from school due to the “ Law to Restore the Civil Service ”, which stipulated that “non-Aryans” could not be civil servants. Only after long efforts and with reference to her husband's participation in the First World War did she receive pension payments from October 1933. Her husband, Jacob Cohn, who had given up his cigar import business in 1927, worked as an accountant. The Cohn couple had a son ( Paul Cohn ) and lived in Klosterallee ( Harvestehude ) to enable their son to attend school on the Grindel .

On November 9, 1938, Jacob Cohn was taken to Sachsenhausen or Dachau concentration camps. After four months of intensive efforts on the part of the family and because of the frontline deployment during the First World War, Jacob Cohn was released from the concentration camp with the instruction to emigrate as soon as possible. The Cohn family tried to find an opportunity to emigrate. But she had no foreign connections, and an entry permit was only available on guarantee from a guarantor . On May 30, 1939, the family was granted an exit permit.

The child Paul traveled to England on May 21, 1939 on a Kindertransport . The couple did not know how to finance their departure for themselves. When the Second World War broke out a short time later, it was hardly possible for Jews to leave Germany. At the beginning of December 1941, the Cohn couple were requested to meet on December 6th on the bog pasture in order to be transported east from there. Mr. Cohn believed he was going to work because the Nazis had asked the Cohn couple to take a spade with them.

In 1985 the Julia-Cohn-Weg in Alsterdorf was named after her.

See also

Further deportation memorials in (former) Germany in the context of train stations:

literature

  • Hertha Feiner, Karl Heinz Jahnke [Ed.] Before the deportation . Frankfurt / M .: Fischer 2001.
  • Rüdiger Wersebe, Julia Cohn, a colleague disappeared without a trace. In: Ursel Hochmuth / Hans-Peter de Lorent , Hamburg: School under the swastika. Hamburg 1985, pp. 201-202.
  • Raul Hilberg : Special trains to Auschwitz. , Frankfurt / M., Berlin: Ullstein Verlag, 1987.

Web links

Commons : Denk-Mal Freight Cars  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Sculptor Peter Märker. POM
  2. ^ Cristine Schell: art and museum educator, visual artist
  3. ↑ Jens Bergmann: A cattle wagon as a memorial ( memento from March 10, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Hamburger Morgenpost on November 7, 1996.
  4. ^ District Hamburg-Nord: Memorial 41 ( Memento from May 2, 2004 in the Internet Archive )
  5. ^ Alfred Gottwaldt: The German "cattle wagon" as a symbolic object in concentration camp memorials . Part 1. In: Gedenkstättenrundbrief , No. 139 (October 2007), p. 18 ff .; see also: ders., The German freight car. An icon for the murder of Jews? In: Museumsjournal , 13 (1999) H. 1; Karolin Steinke: Trains to Ravensbrück. About the permanent exhibition of the Ravensbrück memorial and the route of the goods wagon on display ... In: Contemporary history regional. Messages from Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania , 11 (2007) No. 1, pp. 103-105.
  6. ↑ Stefan Carstens: Freight Cars - Volume 1 . Railway & Model, 1989.
  7. ↑ For a detailed curriculum vitae see: Stolperstein für HERTHA FEINER
  8. ↑ Hertha Feiner: Before the Deportation: Letters to the Daughters. January 1939 – December 1942 , Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 2018, ISBN 978-3-596-31941-1 .

Coordinates: 53 ° 35 '14.9 "  N , 10 ° 1' 37.4"  E