Renate Werwigk-Schneider

Renate Christel Werwigk-Schneider (* 1938 in Teupitz ) is a German doctor.

Life

Werwigk-Schneider studied medicine at Berlin's Humboldt University . Because of her church involvement, she was temporarily expelled from the university. At the beginning of 1963, she and her parents tried to escape through a tunnel at Brunnenstrasse 45 to meet their brother in West Berlin, who had previously fled. The plan failed and the escape plans were betrayed. Like her father, she was arrested in her house in February 1963, taken to the remand prison in Potsdam and finally transferred to the remand prison of the Ministry for State Security in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen. The Rostock District Court sentenced her to two years and six months in prison for trying to escape illegally. She was transferred to the Frankfurt (Oder) prison, where she was assigned to work as a prison doctor. After her discharge in the summer of 1965, she worked as a medical assistant and trained as a specialist in the children's clinic in Rangsdorf.

In 1967 she made a second attempt to escape with the help of a friend. From Bulgaria she tried to travel to Turkey with a forged passport. She was arrested at the Turkish border, taken to the state prison in Sofia and flown to the GDR, where she was sentenced to another three and a half years in prison in December 1967. In 1968 she was ransomed by the Federal Republic of Germany.

She works as a contemporary witness for the Hohenschönhausen memorials , Marienfelde emergency reception center and on Bernauer Strasse .

Honors

• 2013: Cross of Merit on Ribbon of the Federal Republic of Germany

Web links

• Documents on the biography of Renate Werwigk-Schneider https://www.flucht-aktion.de/
• Renate Werwigk-Schneider at ddr-zeitzeuge.de
• Renate Werwigk-Schneider at the Berlin Wall Memorial
• Federal Cross of Merit for Stasi Victims Renate Werwigk , Berliner Kurier, January 12, 2013