Youth Welfare Service Johannesburg
The youth services Johannesburg is a Catholic institution of inpatient, inpatient and outpatient youth services in Surwold , district Börgermoor. Its sponsor is the Johannesburg GmbH, whose sole shareholder is the children and youth foundation of the Hiltrup Sacred Heart Missionaries in Emsland . In the facility, up to 600 children, adolescents and young adults of both sexes with different psychosocial problems in the age group between 6 and 21 years of age are cared for by a variety of socio-educational, school and professional aids.
History of Johannesburg
In the northern German space there was in 1900 no home for left school Catholic boy; they had to be housed in homes outside of the Diocese of Osnabrück . The Bishop of Osnabrück wanted to build an educational institution for Catholic male welfare children in Börgermoor. The basis at that time was that minors should be placed in homes in their faith. In the tradition of the poor houses in the country as well as work houses and the so-called rescue houses at that time, the construction was planned in a lonely area. On March 1, 1913, Johannesburg was inaugurated by Bishop Hubertus Voss . Heinrich Ganseforth was the first director of the "Canisianer Brothers" and the first 200 boys were placed under them. The Franciscan Sisters from Thuine took over the housekeeping. The Hiltrup Sacred Heart Missionaries were also victims of abuse, see.
The educational institution
In the educational institution, in addition to instruction in the Catholic faith, work education in peatland cultivation and agriculture should be taught to the pupils and given the opportunity for training in craft professions. On April 1, 1914, the bishop transferred the young people to the "Sacred Heart Missionaries" from Hiltrup on a trial basis for 10 years. They managed to overcome the educational and financial difficulties of the early years. In 1924 Johannesburg was finally transferred to them. In the housekeeping, the Thiener were replaced from 1916 by the Hiltrup nuns . In 1929, Father Esser took over Johannesburg as director. Father Peter Petto, who was assistant on the Johannesburg from 1914 to 1925, succeeded him. From his experience, Father Petto gave practical and theoretical impulses for the reorganization of home education and is considered a reformer of Catholic home education at the time. A family-like group education was practiced by him in the form of "home communities" . The institutional method of that time was specially promoted by Father Petto as a development of group pedagogy in order to take greater account of the individual characteristics of each young person. In 1941 Johannesburg was confiscated by the Gestapo and the friars and sisters were obliged to serve for another year. This was followed by the expulsion of the Fathers and a youth prison was set up in the Johannesburg premises at the end of 1942. At Pentecost 1945, Father Petto was able to look after Johannesburg again.
The new reform home
On July 1, 1946, the reform home was reopened with 17 boys from Göttingen . Reconstruction began with great financial difficulties. As a result of the events of World War II , many fathers died at the front and the mothers had to support the children on their own after the war. In the post-war period , there was the black market , smuggling , prostitution , many incomplete and broken families and a high level of youth risk. For the increasing number of conspicuous minors , education places were sought in the homes. It was supposed to be some kind of reformatory, but without prison walls , which were renounced because of the moor . The so-called pupils at the time were barefoot while working in agriculture and cutting peat . Even in cool weather, few wooden clogs or proper shoes were on. Most of the shirts and pants were torn. For the pupils there was 0.05 DM per hour for peat work and there was no money for agricultural work. The common rooms were unpainted, dark, unclean and only equipped with a light bulb. The plates were made of tin. This unsatisfactory condition prevailed there until the early 1950s.
The everyday life of home children
For example, Josef Dorsten , who was born on June 23, 1932 and had a younger brother, reported on his fate in Johannesburg. His father died in 1943 and after the war there was not enough to survive on the ration cards . Joseph and his brother went with the farmer hamsters . The mother received a small pension and had to work. The children were then left to their own devices , stealing sausage and preserves from the butcher's shop, and they got coal for the warm apartment, and they were caught. From 1946 that went too far for the Catholic neighbors and they informed the youth welfare office . As a result, Josef was labeled a " psychopath " in his file . His 35-year-old mother was unable to defend herself against the allegations and a court order placed him and his brother under care . On March 11, 1947, a welfare worker took Josef, who was then 14 years old, to the police station in Papenburg , where he had to spend the night on a chair because there was no bus going to Börgermoor to Johannesburg. There was heavy snow and it was the worst winter in years, so that the bus didn't drive to the care home until the next morning. A few days later his brother came to the youth home “Himmeltür” in Hildesheim .
As a pupil in Johannesburg Monastery, Josef and the 175 residents in the home suffered a lot, because hard, physical work, stick blows and sexual abuse were commonplace there. Everyday life, full of privation, consisted of a one-sided diet, with mainly "pamms" (thin vegetable stew ) and mashed potatoes . The hypocrisy of the priests and monks who took so quickly to the breeding stock and also went to the home pupils, he can not forget; you couldn't defend yourself. The so-called “pupils” were supposed to show “ gratitude ”, which, however, was forced with the breeding stock. As a pupil, Josef was subordinate to the “Highlands” department, where there was a dormitory for 35 boys; each had a bed and a locker . The large dining room also served as a lounge. Like many other boys, Joseph was employed in agriculture; there was no vocational training at the time. Young people naturally wanted to smoke , which was only allowed from the age of 16, and tobacco was also grown in the Johannesburg monastery . Josef had obtained stunted plants and successfully raised them in an open field, but this was forbidden. This was discovered and the friar E., whose trademark was a wooden club, asked Josef to empty his trouser pockets. The tobacco leaves fell to the ground. He hit Josef until his club was broken. Josef had written his mother a letter about life in the home. That was discovered and the Father Director first gave him a lecture about life in the home and of course there was again a beating . With his friend “Jupp” R. Josef was “loaned” from the home to a farmer in the neighborhood for work and the days were actually nice, because the farmer had a great dinner. Then the farmer invited us to smoke a cigarette . The farmer later reported to the secretariat how badly they talked about Johannesburg and that they also smoked. The punishment that followed was perceived as perfidious , mean, unjust, because during the night the priest called the pupil Josef to his “room” dressed in only his nightgown . Placed on his stomach over the chair, the priest straightened the nightgown over the bottom and there were 20 blows with the cane . After a short break there were another 20 strokes. When the father finished his chastisement , his friend Jupp also had to collect the punishment. There was a friar who could sing like an angel, and his character was bad the other way around . One night he invited the 16-year-old pupil Josef to his bedchamber to smoke a pipe with him . Then he fell victim to Josef. There was an atmosphere of command and obedience, with the pupils accepting the sexual abuse uncritically. This was not an isolated case, because the friar did not have any consequences until he was caught in bed with a group of pupils; only then was he transferred to another home.
The young people who had experienced such something that needed a opinion by Josef Dorsten psychotherapists . Josef was lucky because he had found “an angel among all the devils” in Brother Schröer , who helped him through many a difficult hour until March 15, 1949. Josef was also allowed to work in the monastery farm together with this friar . Two years and three days in Johannesburg were still very bad for Josef Dorsten and he described this time: "It was hell" . In 1949, when he was almost 17 years old, Josef was housed with a farmer in Neubörger in order to spend a “working holiday” there. He had to work there as a so-called serf up to the age of 19 for 30 DM a month and it was paid into the pension fund accordingly.
Josef Dorsten has been visiting the grave of Brother Schröer every year since 1993 , because he is eternally grateful to the good soul of his time in Johannesburg.
The establishment of youth welfare
The new director of Johannesburg was Father Güldenberg in 1952, who tried to take up the tradition of Father Petto. In the general discussion about home education in Germany at the end of 1960, a more far-reaching change took place in children's and youth homes. Up until then, Johannesburg had a bad reputation, with adolescents from all over Germany who were difficult to educate being admitted there ... “who otherwise would not have any facility ”. The home communities should now also be designed in the new way of thinking of the time, with young people in a form of controlled self - administration . In a kind of home parliament, the young people should determine everyday things such as control and order in the house themselves. However, the new efforts to improve reforms, such as reducing group size, were initially somewhat hampered by government subsidies. There were now smaller groups, an expansion of vocational training and a gradual opening of the homes to the outside world was also achieved in Johannesburg. In the early 1970s, the then director, Father Kaperschmidt , stopped peat farming with the introduction of the cost-covering maintenance rate and Father Maaß's apprentice workshops continued.
In 1975 the age of majority was reduced to 18 years. This enabled school- age children to be accepted. At the beginning of the 1980s, under the director Alois Hügle , integrative approaches were further developed by external trainees and the outdoor living groups, so that the first outdoor living group was opened in Aschendorf in 1980. An integrative training of the girls and boys from the area was tested with a positive effect through new workshops. Various socio-educational forms of care were scientifically supported under Wichard Klein for disadvantaged young people in conjunction with the Federal Institute for Vocational Training in Berlin , the State of Lower Saxony and the Westphalian Wilhelms University in Münster . After the disadvantaged program, Johannesburg also became a sponsor of this measure in 1982 and was important in the field of training for disadvantaged young people. Since then, girls and boys outside of Johannesburg have been provided with independent socio-educational support as part of their vocational training.
In 1996 Johannesburg was recognized as a " rehabilitation facility" and has since been a regional center for vocational rehabilitation for young disabled people . In its more than 90-year history, Johannesburg has developed very well for youth welfare and youth social work by practicing a holistic approach to social pedagogy as well as school and vocational training. A special needs school , the “Pater Petto School” , was integrated as an all-day school , with an action- and project-oriented workshop and specialist working groups being created.
Review
The story of life in this Johannesburg monastery was told by the then 76-year-old Josef Dorsten and other inmates from 2008 after many decades of displacement. There were also reports from other homes by the so-called home pupils at the time, in which there had been harrowing conditions and unbelievable grievances, with violence, forced labor and sexual abuse prevailing. The experiences in German children's homes in the post-war period were described in front of the Petitions Committee of the Bundestag . Johannesburg supports the processing by handing over the old files and would like to apologize personally to the pupils at that time for the offenses in order to be able to initiate “processes of reconciliation” . The managing director of Johannesburg Wichard Klein invited Josef Dorsten to hand over the files in 2009 and apologized for the injustice suffered.
Web links
- The Johannesburg in Surwold, Borgermoor district
- Report from then home child Josef Dorsten in Johannesburg
- Petitions Committee of February 17, 2009 as a round table “Former children in care” in its first meeting. ( Memento from June 10, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
- Life reports of children from other children's homes ( Memento from December 16, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) (1945–1975)
- Official round table "Former Children in Care" in Berlin
Individual evidence
- ↑ Location and info of Johannesburg
- ↑ Basic conceptual ideas of the work and see section Target group
- ↑ The first 2 paragraphs in the "History of Johannesburg"
- ↑ "Hiltrupper-Missonare" ( Memento of the original from February 17, 2014 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.
- ↑ Discs of July 14, 1949 of the then working group of youth associations (Annex to Lower Saxony State Parliament - Drs. 16/896 of February 11, 2009)
- ↑ Josef Dorsten's blog on May 13, 2009, see first section "My Family"
- ↑ See: Josef Dorsten tells about his time in the youth home in Johannesburg. Section: "By Matthias Schrief"
- ^ [Article in Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung of July 3, 2009, page 10 - Northwest ("Johannesburg apologizes")]
- ^ [Article in Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung of July 3, 2009, page 10 - Northwest ("Johannesburg apologizes")]
