Rolf Merzbacher

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Rolf Merzbacher (born 15. May 1924 in Öhringen , died 25. November 1983 in Chur , Graubünden ) was a German Jewish refugee and when Holocaust - orphan his life patient of the sanatorium Bellevue in Kreuzlingen ( Thurgau , Switzerland ).

Life

Rolf Merzbacher grew up with his younger brother Werner with his father Julius Merzbacher (1890–1943) and his mother Hilde, nee. Haymann (1898–1943) in Öhringen. After the handover of power to the National Socialists , the father was allowed to continue his medical practice as a World War II participant and medal winner of the Knight's Cross of the Friedrich Order . When Rolf was refused entry to the Öhringen Progymnasium in 1936 for racist reasons , he came to see his grandparents Ida and Jakob Haymann in Konstanz and from there attended primary school in the neighboring Swiss town of Kreuzlingen , where the Haymanns had a branch of their business.

At the end of 1937 his father was sentenced to two months in prison in Heilbronn after falling for an anti-Semitic provocation by a Hitler Youth and handing out slaps and cane slaps. The parents gave up the doctor's practice in Öhringen and moved to Constance. Julius Merzbacher was arrested there after the Reichspogromnacht in 1938 and held for a month in the Dachau concentration camp . At that time, Rolf was fourteen years old, had been living in a family of teachers in Kreuzlingen for a year and was now attending secondary school there. As a refugee, he was not allowed to go to secondary school in Switzerland in 1940 and was supposed to start an apprenticeship as a gardener, for which he proved unsuitable.

The younger brother Werner was allowed to enter Switzerland with a group of Jewish children on February 16, 1939 as part of a humanitarian campaign and was brought up in Zurich by two women in Christianity. His naturalization was later rejected because his brother was ill, so that he had to emigrate to the USA . Werner Merzbacher became a successful fur trader and has lived with his family in Switzerland again since 1964.

In Constance, the parents prepared for the family to emigrate to the United States and tried to obtain the necessary entry documents. But they had not yet succeeded in doing this until 1940. And when the Germans conquered Alsace-Lorraine and the Reichsgau Baden " free of Jews " made and the Jews living there in the Wagner-Bürckel action in the on October 22, 1940 de Camp Gurs in southern France deported , was among them besides the parents and the Grandmother from Constance, while the mother's siblings managed to escape via Switzerland. Merzbacher's parents were transferred to Camp de Rivesaltes in September 1942 and to the Drancy assembly camp in October 1942 . On March 6, 1943, on the 51st transport, they were transported from there to the Majdanek concentration camp , where they became victims of the Holocaust. From then on every trace is lost, her death is later officially set for March 31, 1943.

Stumbling block in Constance

The National Socialists had revoked Rolf Merzbacher's citizenship in 1941. That year, at the age of 16, he came to a refugee labor camp in Davesco in Ticino for the first time , where he found no social connection and couldn't stand it. Because he suffered from weak contacts and fear of failure, he went to outpatient psychotherapeutic treatment at the Münsterlingen sanatorium and nursing home , where he was diagnosed with severe neurosis . In 1944 he voluntarily entered the clinic for inpatient treatment, and the diagnosis was initially made of Hebephrenic Schizophrenia and soon thereafter hereditary schizophrenia . The lack of integration into a family, the inability to attend high school, and feelings of guilt about the fate of the parents were excluded from treatment . Merzbacher promised himself a cure from the electroshock therapy (electroconvulsive therapy), which was newly developed in the 1930s , and although the procedure was initially rejected by his guardian, Merzbacher received 61 electroshock treatments from 1944 to 1951 under the supervision of the deputy director of the institution Roland Kuhn , his mental and physical health got so bad that he had to stay in the clinic permanently.

After the Second World War , the clinic and the Aliens Police in the canton of Thurgau tried together to deport the unwanted Jewish immigrants to Germany, justifying this by stating that anti-Semitism was no longer life-threatening there and that the patient was not aware of the change anyway. His guardian and the Israelite community in Kreuzlingen prevented this and placed him in the Waldhaus psychiatric clinic in Chur . The hospital stays were initially paid for from donations; in 1967 the State Office for Reparation in Karlsruhe denied a connection between persecution and mental illness. On the basis of an expert opinion by the Heidelberg psychiatrist Walter Ritter von Baeyer , at the end of the long-term lawsuits for German reparations, the Karlsruhe Regional Court recognized in 1970 that the illness was also due to the psychological effects of the persecution by the German National Socialists. The American psychiatrist William G. Niederlande , expelled from Germany, was one of the doctors who had researched survivor syndrome since the early 1960s .

In 1991, a street in Öhringen was named Merzbacherstraße after his father, and resistance in the municipality had to be overcome. On July 12, 2011, Stolpersteine for members of the Haymann and Merzbacher families were laid at Schottenstrasse 75 in Konstanz .

literature

  • Gregor Spuhler : Saved - broken. The life of the Jewish refugee Rolf Merzbacher between persecution, psychiatry and reparation . Chronos, Zurich 2011, ISBN 978-3-0340-1064-1 ( Publications of the Archives for Contemporary History ETH Zurich. Volume 7)
  • Gregor Spuhler: From the “puzzling case” to “typical hebephrenia”. The Jewish emigrant Rolf Merzbacher underwent treatment by Swiss psychiatrists 1942–1944 . In: Gregor Spuhler, Sibylle Brändli, Barbara Lüthi (eds.): Make a fall, become a fall. Knowledge production and patient experience in medicine and psychiatry in the 19th and 20th centuries . Campus-Verlag, Frankfurt 2009, ISBN 978-3-593-38864-9
  • A fate of Öhringen. The life picture of the Öhringen doctor Dr. Julius Merzbacher. City of Öhringen, Öhringen 1991

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ In 1996 z. B. that unfortunate pimp that once gave rise to Dr. Merzbacher's conviction and which his child's sin repeatedly caught up with because his full name was in the newspaper of the time on the occasion of the Merzbacher trial. Walter Meister, lecture on November 8, 1998 in Öhringen
  2. ↑ Summary of the biographer Spuhler in 2009
personal data
SURNAME Merzbacher, Rolf
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German Holocaust orphan
DATE OF BIRTH May 15, 1924
PLACE OF BIRTH Öhringen
DATE OF DEATH November 25, 1983
Place of death Chur