Maria Husemann

Maria Husemann (born November 1, 1892 in Elberfeld , † December 12, 1975 in Wuppertal ) was a German secretary who resisted the Nazi regime during the Nazi era .

Life

In 1926 Maria Husemann began her work as a secretary in the Elberfeld office of Caritas ; their boss was chaplain Hans Carls . After the “ seizure of power ” by the National Socialists , she and Carls ensured that Jewish and “half-Jewish” citizens received ID and support. In addition, anti-Nazi writings were copied and distributed in the Caritas office, including the sermons of the Münster bishop Clemens von Galen against euthanasia .

In September 1941, the office was denounced for distributing the scriptures . A visitor to the office, who had asked for copies of the documents, came to the camp for 18 months, Maria Husemann was arrested and initially released. On November 7, 1941, Hans Carls was arrested and taken to Dachau concentration camp ; Maria Husemann provided the seriously ill chaplain with food and medicine and supported other inmates. She regularly drove to Munich to receive the reports of Hans Carls smuggled out of the concentration camp, to keep them and to forward them to the highest ecclesiastical and secular circles.

On December 22, 1943, Maria Husemann was arrested by the Gestapo . Previously, after being bombed out, she had handed over treacherous documents to an acquaintance for safekeeping. During the planned return, the documents were stolen from a car, but the thief threw the papers away. Passers-by found the documents and they ended up with the authorities. After her conviction, Husemann was deported to the Graslitz labor camp of the Flossenbürg concentration camp , where she worked as a forced laborer in armaments. In the spring of 1945 the concentration camp was cleared and the inmates were taken on a death march , which Maria Husemann survived together with two Jewish women for whom she had campaigned. She returned to Wuppertal, where she initially spent two months in the hospital.

Until 1951, Maria Husemann worked again with Hans Carls for Caritas, which awarded her the Association's Silver Badge of Honor. From 1950 she was chairman of her co-founded the Union of Victims of the Nazi Regime (BVN), 1959 together with Johannes Rau co-founder of the Society for Christian-Jewish Cooperation and later the Managing Director. In 1970 she received the Federal Cross of Merit 1st Class from von Rau. Since 1993, a memorial plaque in the Archbishop's St. Anna High School , where Caritas used to have its offices, has been commemorating Maria Husemann.

Fonts

• My resistance struggle against the crimes of the Hitler dictatorship . Published by the Wuppertal city dean and the Catholic Council in 1983.

literature

• Pascal Cziborra: Women in the concentration camp. Possibilities and limits of historical research using the example of the Flossenbürg concentration camp and its satellite camps . Lorbeer-Verlag 2010. ISBN 978-3-938969-10-6 . P. 58–59 ( online in Google Book search)
• Klaus Goebel: Wuppertal in the time of National Socialism , Volume 1, P. Hammer, 1984.

Web links

• Maria Husemann at denkmal-wuppertal.de