Marga Wolf

Marga Wolf (actually Maria Margarethe Wolf ; born January 19, 1880 in Dresden ; † January 3 or 4, 1944 in Theresienstadt ) was a German doctor who was a victim of the Holocaust .

Life

Marga Wolf was the daughter of the banker and councilor Alexander Alfred Wolf and his wife Bertha , nee. Rooster . The originally Jewish couple Wolf had converted and raised their daughter Marga and her older brother Ludwig Paul, who later settled as a doctor in Berlin , in the Protestant faith.

Marga Wolf became a Johanniter teaching sister, then took her Abitur at the age of 27 and studied medicine in Freiburg im Breisgau , Jena , Leipzig and Tübingen . In 1913 she received her doctorate in Tübingen. During the First World War she headed an epidemic hospital on the Russian front . After the war she came to Stuttgart , where in 1919 she took over the management of the Charlottenhaus for women who have recently given birth and for women with poor health , which is now called “Klinik Charlottenhaus”. In 1920 she opened a gynecological and pediatric practice on the third floor of Charlottenstrasse 21 A.

Marga Wolf did unpaid work in children's homes in Stuttgart. She treated poor people for free. For eight years she gave specialist courses in health education at the Stuttgart Adult Education Center. In 1931 she moved her practice to Charlottenstrasse 1, a building right next to the Wilhelmspalais . Of the eight rooms she had there, she used four for the practice and four, together with her friend Elisabeth Schröder, a teacher, for residential purposes. The practice was equipped with sunlamps , diathermy and X-ray equipment.

1933 she was after the seizure of power by the National Socialists , the insurance license revoked. As a result, their economic situation worsened. In 1935 she moved to Blücherstraße 6, where only a single room could be used for the practice. On October 1, 1938, she had to resign from the medical association . A move to Stälinweg 22 followed. Elisabeth Schröder, who as a civil servant should not have lived in the same household as a “ Jew ”, had herself retired. By 1941 at the latest, however, the two women no longer lived together; Marga Wolf had moved to Felix-Dahn-Strasse 73 in Degerloch , Elisabeth Schröder to her brother in Cannstatt . The reason for this separation lay in the protest of a roommate party in Stälinweg against the “Jewish” resident of the house, Wolf. Marga Wolf moved from Felix-Dahn-Straße to Königsträßle 42 in Degerloch. This new residence was arranged by the pastor's wife Inge Vorster, whose children Marga Wolf, who had to wear the Jewish star , accompanied them to the church service in order to protect them from hostility from the Nazis.

Marga Wolf received an offer from the pastor of the Reformed congregation in Stuttgart Kurt Müller and his wife Elisabeth Müller to go into hiding with acquaintances in order to try to survive the time of National Socialism. However, she refrained from doing so because she did not want to endanger her helpers and believed that as a doctor she could help her fellow sufferers. She was entrusted with looking after the Jews who were to be deported from the assembly camp on the Killesberg , and was finally transported away herself. Various people had objected to Marga Wolf's deportation. Mothers whose children Marga Wolf had treated sent petitions to high places, the director Hans Walz von Bosch attempted to request her as a doctor for the foreign workers in the company, and Pastor Müller tried to find an " Aryan " grandmother in her family tree, to save her. All of these attempts failed. Legal contestation proceedings after Marga Wolf's deportation were also unsuccessful.

Marga Wolf ran her private practice until immediately before her deportation . In order to be able to pay about 43,000 Reichsmark Jewish property tax, she had sold a large part of her securities. In her will, the unmarried and childless woman had designated pastor A. Vaas and doctor Albrecht Schröder as heirs; however, after their deportation, their property was confiscated by the National Socialists. When the inheritance could later be assumed, Vaas waived his share except for 100 Reichsmarks, which were used for an anniversary foundation. Schröder later wrote an article in memory of Marga Wolf, which was published in the Württembergisches Ärzteblatt and in the Stuttgarter Zeitung .

Deportation and death

Marga Wolf was supposed to kill a "mentally ill" person who was feared to be disrupted during transport immediately before she was transported, but she refused to do so. She wanted to take a medical set with her when she was deported to the "old people's ghetto" Theresienstadt on June 17, 1943 , and let her friend Dr. phil. Walter Pfeiffer received her last farewell greeting, a letter that she put in a copy of Ina Seidel's book The Way Without Choice . The letter from which it emerges that the piano manufacturer Pfeiffer also tried to save the doctor is now in the Stuttgart State Archives. Inge Vorster and Elisabeth Schröder accompanied Marga Wolf to the assembly point in the Jewish community center on Hospitalstrasse in Stuttgart, where she had to report for the transport. Several survivors reported about their fate in Theresienstadt. Not only was her doctor's equipment removed, but the liver and iron preparations that she was dependent on because of pernicious anemia were confiscated. Marga Wolf knew that this would mean her death sentence. She gave away parts of her food rations to fellow prisoners and declared that she did not need that much herself. On November 11, 1943, she collapsed after a nine-hour roll call. She then apparently fell ill with pneumonia . According to a newspaper clipping Dr. Walter Pfeiffer had kept her, she died on January 4, 1944 at midnight, according to other sources on January 3, 1944.

In front of one of her Stuttgart residences, a stumbling block reminds of Marga Wolf.

publication

• Infant mortality at the Tübingen Polyclinic in 1911 and 1912 , Stuttgart 1913.

Web links

Commons : Marga Wolf  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Stumbling block for Marga Wolf

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Biography of his brother Ludwig Paul Wolf  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
2. ↑ Anne-Christel Recknagel: 'Woman, help yourself! , Hohenheim Verlag 2002, ISBN 978-3898509701 , p. 147.
3. ↑ Charlotte Lucke and Konrad Lucke: Inge Vorster and Trude Kopske - Two forgotten heroines , contribution to the history competition of the Federal President in 2008. Uploaded to Google Docs by Bernd Lucke on September 24, 2009.
4. ↑ Joachim Scholtyseck, Robert Bosch and the liberal resistance against Hitler 1933-1945 , CH Beck 1990, ISBN 978-3406455254 , p. 280.
5. ↑ ^{a b c} Susanne Rueß, Stuttgart Jewish Doctors during National Socialism , Königshausen & Neumann 2009, ISBN 978-3826042546 , p. 325.
6. ↑ The stone bears the version of the name "Margarethe Wolf" and the date of death January 3, 1944. According to an article in the Ärzteblatt (PDF; 70 kB), Marga Wolf died in 1943. The spelling of the first name - Margarethe or Margarete - is inconsistent in the article on the Stolpersteine ​​project ; according to the quotes in this text and according to her DNB entry, she called herself Marga.