Ingeborg Wessel

Ingeborg Paula Margarethe Wessel (married Ingeborg Sanders ; born May 19, 1909 in Mülheim an der Ruhr ; † June 13, 1993 in Rheinberg ) was the sister of Horst Wessel . After her brother was killed by communists and subsequently stylized as a " martyr of the movement " by Nazi propaganda , she profited considerably from the heroic cult around him. As an author, she published memorial literature about her brother during the Nazi era .

Life

Youth, Education and the Period of National Socialism

Ingeborg Wessel was the second of three children of Protestant pastor Ludwig Wessel and his wife Margarete Wessel .

Ingeborg Wessel and her mother were concerned about their way of life in the months before Werner and Horst Wessel's death . Her dealings with the mostly unemployed SA members, the violent clashes with the Red Front Fighters Association and Horst's dropout and his coexistence with the former prostitute Erna Jaenichen were the reason for regular admonitions.

After her brother Horst was admitted to hospital seriously injured on January 14, 1930, she and her mother and Richard Fiedler woke up to his bed until his death on February 23, 1930 .

The contents of the novel Horst Wessel published by Hanns Heinz Ewers to glorify Horst Wessel in 1932 . A German fate was heavily censored by mother and sister Wessel. Ewers could only hint at the relationship with Erna Jaenichen, so that Horst Wessel is portrayed in the novel as a quasi genderless, emotionally cold person. On the other hand, passages about “ten glowing nights” with a young Austrian cannot be verified. As an old woman, Ingeborg Wessel told of an alleged engagement between her brother and a Viennese student. Daniel Siemens suspects that she wanted to console herself with this story about the relationship that her family had rejected between Horst Wessel and Erna Jaenichen, who was not in keeping with her class.

After Horst Wessel's death and funeral, his mother and sister moved to Hanover to live with Margarete Wessel's sister, where they registered on May 4, 1930 at Stolzestraße 32. In the extensive reporting on the trial against Albrecht Höhler's perpetrators , it is not mentioned whether family members also took part. The trial was a political issue in which the family tragedy of a family with two dead members within two months was of no public interest. The two women moved back to Berlin on March 26, 1931. The new apartment was in the middle-class, comparatively quiet Wilmersdorf .

In 1931 Ingeborg Wessel had passed the Abitur at the Goethe Gymnasium in Hildesheim . She then began studying medicine at Berlin University , which she interrupted in 1932 for a semester at Rostock University and, according to her own statements, completed the medical state examination in Berlin in 1937. At the university she met the medical student Ewald Rudolf Sanders (* 1909), whom she married on June 3, 1938. According to her own statements, she then worked as an assistant doctor at the Charité . In 1944 she received her doctorate with a thesis of only 16 pages. According to her own information, she was employed by Telefunken and Tetenal Photo Works between 1942 and 1944 . Before the end of the Second World War, Ingeborg Wessel became a mother of three.

Ingeborg Wessel and her mother Margarete were able to benefit financially from the cult of the slain brother and son. Ingeborg Wessel published the biography Mein Bruder Horst in the National Socialist Franz-Eher-Verlag at the end of 1933 , which was published in 12 editions by 1941. The New Book for Girls she published was also published in at least seven editions. In the latter book she praised Horst Wessel as a role model for young people. She also presented it in Berlin schools. There were also other books and numerous articles. In a poll conducted in 1936, she was named as a popular children's author by male and female children. In her books she used the anti-communist rhetoric desired at the time and portrayed KPD members as "violent, dehumanized beasts". At the same time, she tried to show Horst Wessel as a member of the working class and as an example for people who were affected by "Soviet Propaganda had strayed from the right path ”and still can be converted. After the Second World War, she denied having contributed much to these books herself.

She was invited to the inauguration of monuments and memorial plaques throughout the German Reich and took part in the NSDAP party congresses from 1933 to 1935 with honorary cards . At the beginning of 1933 she and her mother applied for admission to the NSDAP with the membership numbers of the dead family members (Horst 48,434; Werner 92,715) in order to benefit from the preferential treatment of old fighters . They were denied membership numbers for "fundamental reasons". However, despite the ban on admission, they were accepted on February 16, 1934 with the membership numbers 2,084,783 for their mother and 2,084,611 for Ingeborg.

On a 3,600 m² plot of land that her mother Margarete Wessel received as a gift from the Krummhübel community a few kilometers from Werner Wessel's place of death in 1936, she built a house with a living space of 200 m² with high-quality facilities at the time, such as central heating and a garage . The NSDAP probably contributed to the costs. This house was occupied by mother and daughter with children from the end of 1942, fleeing from the Allied air raids , as their first residence. At the same time they took all valuables to the Giant Mountains. Before the advancing Red Army , they fled via the intermediate station in Dresden, where they claimed to have lost all their property in the air raids on February 13 and 14, 1945 , to the Weser Uplands. Margarete Wessel had been an honorary citizen of Hameln since 1933 and they found accommodation in neighboring Hajen .

After the Second World War

From December 1946 to April 1947, Ingeborg Sanders took care of the medical care of refugees living in the district there on behalf of the city of Hameln . From the summer of 1947 she was the director and doctor of a children's home at Benekestrasse 44 on Norderney . The house was up in 1936 by the Zionloge Hanover been operated as a Jewish children's home before it this far below value bought was. After that, the Association of German Recreation Homes for Children and Young People eV was the operator. How Wessel managed to take over the house can no longer be determined. According to her own statements, she was a member of the board of the association and was able to convince the British occupation forces that the association formally continued to exist and was the owner of the house. Therefore it is to be given back to her. The military government issued her a certificate on June 17, 1947, and on June 26, 1947, she took possession of the house in the presence of a British officer. This almost unique case in post-war Germany is made even more mysterious by the fact that there are memos from the Lower Saxony State Office for Blocked Assets from May 1949, in which Ingeborg Sanders is certified to maintain excellent contacts with high-ranking British circles. As early as August 29, 1947, a telegram between the British military authorities in Aurich and the headquarters in Hanover spoke of high-level interest in the United Kingdom in the surrender of the home to Sanders.

As part of denazification , Ingeborg Wessel was classified on August 8, 1949 by the main denazification committee for special professions in Hanover in the category of “supporters of National Socialism”. In addition to losing the right to stand as a candidate , she was sentenced to pay 500 DM court costs. The court largely followed her explanations and wrote in the reasoning, ignoring the known facts, that she had "held back politically in public" and did not allow her name to be exposed for propaganda purposes. "For these reasons and with regard to their basic attitude towards the party as stated above, the award committee came to the conclusion that the person concerned had neither the intention nor the awareness that she was making a significant contribution to the consolidation and maintenance of National Socialism through her literary work." The indictment appealed the judgment, which was rejected on June 27, 1950. The Sanders couple only paid 50 DM of the court costs. Ingeborg Sanders had given up management of the children's home at the end of 1949 and, when the bailiff wanted to collect the remaining costs in June 1950, had moved away with the unknown family since May 23.

The family moved to the Alt-Homberg district of Duisburg . Ingeborg Sanders had her own practice as an ENT doctor in Duisburg and her husband was a specialist in internal medicine in Moers . They earned relatively well and as early as 1957 they built two houses at Schillerstrasse 28 and 30. Ingeborg Sanders died in 1993 near Moers.

Works

• My brother Horst , Eher-Verlag, Munich 1933
• The new book for girls , Loewes Verlag, Stuttgart 1935
• Mothers of Tomorrow , Bruckmann, Munich 1936
• German land in distant zones. A colonial book for boys and girls , Verlag Abel & Müller, Leipzig 1939
• On the influence of the labyrinth fistula on hearing after radical surgery , dissertation, 1944

Individual evidence

1. ^ Daniel Siemens: Horst Wessel: Death and Transfiguration of a National Socialist, Munich, Siedler, 2009, ISBN 978-3-88680-926-4 , pp. 36, 271 and 274
2. ^ Daniel Siemens, p. 36.
3. ^ Daniel Siemens; P. 98.
4. ^ Daniel Siemens, p. 214
5. ^ Daniel Siemens, p. 105.
6. ^ Daniel Siemens; P. 68.
7. ^ Daniel Siemens, p. 118.
8. ^ Danial Siemens, pp. 141/142
9. ^ Danial Siemens, p. 142.
10. ^ ^{A b} Daniel Siemens, p. 140.
11. ^ Daniel Siemens; P. 160.
12. ↑ ^{a b c} Daniel Siemens, p. 143.
13. ^ Daniel Siemens; P. 93.
14. ^ Daniel Siemens; P. 142.
15. ↑ ^{a b c} Daniel Siemens, pp. 272–274
16. ↑ GND 125392788