Klara Nowak

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Klara Friederike Anna Nowak (born March 29, 1922 in Berlin-French Buchholz ; † December 14, 2003 in Detmold ) was a German nurse and activist. In her youth she fell victim to the Nazi racial hygiene regime , according to which people with actual or perceived disabilities were forcibly sterilized . Klara Nowak was co-founder and chairwoman of the Association of "Euthanasia" victims and those who have been subjected to forced sterilization . She campaigned for the recognition and compensation of the victims of forced sterilization and played a significant role in the lifting of the National Socialist judgments.

Life

Klara Nowak grew up with her parents and two younger brothers on the outskirts of Berlin ; her father ran a gardening business. After finishing elementary school , she began training in home economics in 1936 . From 1938 to 1939 she worked as a uniform seamstress, after which she took on a household position in Holstein . When her 17-year-old brother Gustav fell ill in 1939 and suffered from feverish fantasies, the doctors treating him sent him to a psychiatric hospital for nine months . There he was classified as a “hereditary mentally ill person”.

A year later, Klara Nowak fell while working on a staircase and suffered a concussion . Since her brother was registered as "mentally ill", Klara was immediately admitted to psychiatry at the Neustadt state hospital. She was released after a few weeks. When she wanted to visit her brother shortly afterwards in the Charité hospital in Berlin , she was again detained in the psychiatric department on the grounds that she had behaved loudly and conspicuously. Although she was released after a short time, she had to be heard at the Hereditary Health Court in Berlin-Charlottenburg . The court attested her " schizophrenia " without any understandable medical evidence. Klara Nowak's only option to avoid life in a psychiatric facility was to consent to sterilization. In 1941 Gustav and Klara Nowak were forcibly sterilized. She was 18 years old at the time.

Klara Nowak later said about it: "Due to the forced sterilization, our life was steered into completely unpredictable paths, we were children, young women and men, whose feet were torn from under."

Gustav died a little later as a soldier, as did Klara's father and her other brother. After the war, Klara Nowak moved to Halberstadt with her mother and trained as a nurse.

In 1987, Klara Nowak founded the Association of Euthanasia Victims and Forced Sterilization in Detmold together with relatives of victims of “ Aktion T4 ” , of which she was chairman until 1999. The association collected testimonials from the victims and aimed to have the judgments against them overturned and to obtain compensation. Since the sterilization rulings were not classified as specifically Nazi until the early 1990s, they continued to exist legally, which prevented compensation for the victims.

In 1998 the Bundestag formally overturned the rulings of the “hereditary health courts”. Although the victims of "euthanasia" and forced sterilization were not entitled to benefits under the Federal Compensation Act, some of them received a one-off compensation of DM 5000. Nowak described this as a "ridiculous sum", but stated that she was not primarily interested in money. but at one end of the stigma.

Honors and commemorations

An information board is dedicated to Klara Nowak at the memorial for the victims of the T4 campaign in Berlin-Tiergarten .

Klara-Nowak-Strasse in Detmold is named after her.

literature

  • Henning Tümmers: recognition battles. The post-history of the National Socialist forced sterilizations in the Federal Republic. Wallstein Verlag 2011, ISBN 978-3-8353-0985-2 , pp. 288-292.
  • Frank Schneider, Petra Lutz: Captured, pursued, destroyed. Sick and handicapped people under National Socialism. Springer, Heidelberg 2014, ISBN 978-3-6425-4027-1 , pp. 188-191.
  • Armin Fuhrer: Forgotten injustice. In: The world . March 31, 1998, accessed March 24, 2018 .
  • Matthias von Hellfeld: agony without end. In: The time . November 21, 2012, accessed March 24, 2018 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ https://www.dgppn.de/_Resources/Persistent/543964c06b63730fc45060a2573bf018156c3070/Begleit-Heft%20erfasst%20ver sucht% 20vernichtung.pdf
  2. ↑ a b The association existed from 1987 to 2009. The successor to this has been the Association of “Euthanasia” Victims and Forced Sterilization since 2010.
  3. ↑ Frank Schneider: Captured, traced, destroyed./registered, persecuted, annihilated .. Springer-Verlag, 2014, ISBN 978-3-642-54028-8 , p. 190 ( limited preview in the Google book search).
personal data
SURNAME Nowak, Klara
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Nowak, Klara Friederike Anna (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German nurse and activist
DATE OF BIRTH March 29, 1922
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin-French Buchholz
DATE OF DEATH December 14, 2003
Place of death Detmold