Municipal mental hospital for children and adolescents Wiesengrund

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Memorial plaque on the house at Eichborndamm 238 in Berlin-Wittenau

The municipal mental hospital for children and adolescents Wiesengrund ( listen ? / I ) was a psychiatric clinic in Berlin-Wittenau (formerly: Dalldorf). Between 1942 and 1945 175 children were tortured here as part of the so-called child euthanasia , and 81 of them were put to death. In the houses at today's Eichborndamm 238-240, a memorial and the Reinickendorfer garden and road construction office are now housed. Audio file / audio sample

history

Eichborndamm 238 (2012)

The three buildings on Eichborndamm were built in 1887 after the Berlin city council bought the property in 1869. One of the buildings was destroyed in the war. The colonial-style houses initially served as branches of the Karl Bonhoeffer Psychiatric Clinic for patients with disabilities :

“The establishment of the asylum for the mad and idiots in Dalldorf in the 1880s was a very progressive facility for disabled people for its time. [...] The patients were in contact with the village population and helped with field work. They experienced a kind of rehabilitation, in accordance with a reformed health policy. "

- District Office Reinickendorf of Berlin (2012)

From 1925 the buildings were rededicated as the city's mental hospital for children. In 1942, Ward 3 of the clinic was given the euphemistic name “ Children's Department Wiesengrund”. The first children were admitted in February. Resident physician Gertrud Reuter, senior physician Gerhard Kujath and her superior Ernst Hefter were responsible . In addition to the Wiesengrund, more than thirty such “children's departments” were set up in Germany from 1940. Children were admitted who were classified as "unworthy of life" according to the ideology of National Socialism and the regulations of Nazi racial hygiene . The children in Wiesengrund came from Berlin and the surrounding area. Their “medical histories can be seen that predominantly children without significant family ties were selected; many were born out of wedlock and grew up in children's homes. "

On behalf of the so-called “Reich Committee for the Scientific Recording of Hereditary and Constitutional Severe Ailments” , among other things, genetic examinations and experiments were carried out on the children. Werner Catel , Hans Heinze and Ernst Wentzler were members of his committee of experts, chaired by Viktor Brack . The children were briefly called "Reich Committee Children", and their medical records were marked with "RA". The pediatrician Georg Bessau, for example, carried out experiments with a tuberculosis vaccine that had not yet been tested . Bessau died in November 1944. In February 1945, eleven children were infected with living tuberculosis pathogens. In addition, the children were abused for experiments with fever therapies and air encephalographs , as they were called at the time. They were considered to be “ballast existences” that would represent a “danger to the German national body” and therefore “not worth living”.

If children were deliberately murdered, the barbiturate with the former trade name Luminal was usually used. The doctors entered "natural death from pneumonia" as the cause of death. Older children were also murdered as part of the so-called Aktion T4 . What happened to the children's corpses is still unclear, according to Eve-Catherine Trieba in the Berlin online magazine QIEZ.

Poster of the exhibition Totgeschwiegen 1933–1945 at House 10 of the KBoN

“The careers of the doctors in charge continued unabated after the end of the war. Only the clinic director Ernst Hefter was arrested in December 1945 and died in August 1947 in Bautzen prison . The senior physician Gerhard Kujath became acting director of the house after the end of the war, from 1952 he took over the management of the child psychiatric department of the Free University of Berlin . The pathologist Berthold Ostertag became head of the neuropathological department of the Tübingen University Neurological Clinic after 1945 and was later awarded the Federal Cross of Merit . The specialist in neurology, Gertrude Reuter, practiced from 1946 to 1975 as a resident specialist in neurology and psychiatry in Essen. "

- Reinickendorf Museum

For decades, there was silence about the crimes that were committed both in the main building of the Karl Bonhoeffer Mental Hospital and in the Wiesengrund. It was not until 1988 that the exhibition “ hushed up ” brought the Nazi crimes in the Wittenau sanatoriums to the public. Elsewhere, too, it took many years to face responsibility. In 2013, for example, called Charité the memorial Charité Initiative - Science in responsibility to life and put it in November of the year as part of a memorial to the public. On September 2, 2014, among other things, on the initiative of the historian Götz Aly, the memorial and information center for the victims of the National Socialist “euthanasia” murders was set up in Tiergartenstrasse, to commemorate the victims of the murders of the sick during the Nazi era .

Memorial site and history laboratory

Reinickendorf Museum (2015)

In order to convey the regional historical development of the district, the Reinickendorf Museum was founded in Alt-Hermsdorf 35 . The museum is operated by the district office. In addition to a permanent exhibition, invitations to art exhibitions are held at irregular intervals. Special exhibitions are dedicated to specific topics related to the district and its history. The museum has a reference library and an extensive archive with numerous original documents. In addition, under the name of Gedenkort und Geschichtslabor Eichborndamm 238 , the museum looks after a memorial on Eichborndamm, just under four kilometers away.

The name history laboratory goes back to the fact that the former laboratory of the clinic was located in one of the three rooms made available by the district office for the purpose of the memorial. The memorial site and history laboratory create the opportunity to deal with the children's psychiatric clinic and its history. Among other things, guided tours are organized there in cooperation with the adult education center, which bring visitors closer to this part of the history of medicine in Berlin using the example of patient fates.

School projects

The museum has been working with schools since 2012, namely the Friedrich-Engels-Gymnasium . There is also a long-term collaboration with the Carl Bosch Oberschule . As part of the projects, the students use the premises of the former children's clinic. The aim is to acquire knowledge about the role of medicine in National Socialism in general and the history of psychiatry in particular and, with knowledge of the history, to reflect on today's dealings with sick people and the disabled.

In 2013, for example, at Friedrich-Engels-Gymnasium under the direction of Sabine Hillebrecht, the film You shouldn't live - research on the 'Children's Department Wiesengrund' by Inge Lechner, which became part of the permanent exhibition in the history laboratory. Hillebrecht from 1995 secondary school teacher at the Friedrich-Engels-Gymnasium and since 2012 Teacher for special tasks at the Department of History of the Humboldt University . Her research interests are the linking of school and extracurricular learning locations and the integration of schools' interests in exhibition and museum concepts. In this function, she developed the concept for the Wiesengrund history laboratory and accompanied the students of the Friedrich-Engels-Gymnasium through their research, which led to the publication of the biographies of around 40 victims. In 2013, she curated the exhibition “The child smiles upon friendly encouragement” at the Reinickendorf Museum - The Medical Crimes in the Municipal Mental Clinic for Children 1941–1945 . She also reports on the radio about the Wiesengrund history laboratory .

The core of the school projects are the medical files, which have been kept in the nearby Berlin State Archives since 2010 . Because they are always "built according to the same principle", "one can quickly find one's way around":

“First there are two full-body nude photos of the child: one from the front and one from the side. After a cover sheet with the most important data, the previous history is presented and this means that very extensive information about the parents follows, e.g. whether born in wedlock or out of wedlock, whether there were illnesses in the family, whether there were mental, nervous or venereal diseases, to what extent there was alcohol and nicotine consumption, information on the patient's birth and siblings. The results of the examinations are then documented, i.e. first of all an intelligence test according to Binet-Boberg, but also other examinations such as the results of encephalographies, lumbar or ventricular punctures and fever curves. [...] On some pages you can find brief information from the nurses and the ward doctor, possibly also a summary of a doctor's discussion with the parents. Finally, at the end, there is the pathologist's report, from which it can usually be inferred that all organs of the corpse were examined, weighed and measured without exception. "

- Sabine Hillebrecht

The cause of death was usually given incorrectly.

In March 2013, the Berlin State Archives prohibited further use of the medical files by schoolchildren because they - at the age of 17 and 18 - were supposedly “unable” to “handle” the “nude photos” of the children. With this ban, the memorial wall project came to an end. The children's surnames also had to be blacked out at the instigation of the State Archives. This thwarted the desire to bring the nameless victims to mind. According to the state archive, family members who are still alive could be “stigmatized” with full names . These conditions correspond to those of the Federal Archives , so that Götz Aly gave one of his essays the subtitle Dead Without a Name . However, the names and life data of those killed in the Vienna Children's Department are published on the Internet -  Alfred Wödl is one of them - and the Grafeneck Memorial also makes a database publicly available with the full names of the dead.

Internet

In addition to the memorial at the original location, there are websites that provide a wealth of additional information on the subject. For example, the American sociologist Lutz Kaelber , a professor at the University of Vermont, runs a website that provides information on various children's departments in Europe. According to him, the Karl Bonhoeffer Psychiatric Clinic published a book on the occasion of its centenary in 1980 that deals with its past between 1933 and 1945 in just one sentence. Kaelber mentions Wolfgang Stender's dissertation from 1982, which claimed that there were no patient files and that the killing of children could not be confirmed. A commemorative publication from the same year came to the same conclusion. Two years later, employees began researching the clinic's history during the Nazi era.

The Foundation Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe published a photo of the Wiesengrund Children's Clinic from 1942, the original of which is stored in the Institute for the History of Medicine and Ethics in Medicine at the Charité. Also Facsimilia the letters of two other children's wards released to their parents. The wording of the original can also be found in the “Circular of the Reich Ministry of the Interior on 'Early Registration' of August 18, 1939”.

literature

  • Karl Cervik : Child murder in the Ostmark. Child euthanasia under National Socialism 1938 - 1945 (=  adaptation, self-assertion, resistance . Volume 18 ). Lit, Münster, Hamburg, London 2001, ISBN 978-3-8258-5551-2 .
  • Sabine Damm, Norbert Emmerich: The lunatic asylum Dalldorf - Wittenau until 1933. The beginnings of the Berlin lunatic . In: Working group to research the history of the Karl Bonhoeffer Nervenklinik (ed.): Totgeschwiegen 1933–1945. On the history of the Wittenauer Heilstätten, since 1957 Karl-Bonhoeffer-Nervenklinik . 2nd Edition. Berlin 1989, p. 15 ff .
  • Heiner Fangerau , Sascha Topp, Klaus Schepker (eds.): Child and adolescent psychiatry during National Socialism and in the post-war period. The history of their consolidation . Springer, Berlin 2017, ISBN 978-3-662-49805-7 .
  • Petra Fuchs (ed.): 'Forgetting about annihilation is part of annihilation itself': life stories of victims of National Socialist ' euthanasia ' . Wallstein, Göttingen 2007, ISBN 978-3-8353-0146-7 .
  • Sabine Hillebrecht: The difficult memory of victims of the National Socialist patient murders. The example of the children killed in the meadow . In: Memorial circular . No. 176 , 2014, pp. 29–38 ( gedenkstaettenforum.de [accessed November 10, 2018]).
  • Lutz Kaelber, Raimond Reiter (eds.): Child murder and 'children's departments' in National Socialism. Commemoration and research . Lang, Frankfurt, M., Berlin, Bern 2011, ISBN 978-3-631-61828-8 .
  • Gerhardt Nissen : Depressive Syndromes in Childhood and Adolescence. Contributions to symptomatology, genesis, etc. Forecast . Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, New York 1971, ISBN 3-540-05493-6 .
  • Hans-Walter Schmuhl : Crossing borders. The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics 1927 - 1945 (=  History of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society in National Socialism . Volume 9 ). Wallstein, Göttingen 2004, ISBN 978-3-89244-799-3 .

Web links

Commons : Municipal Mental Hospital for Children and Adolescents Wiesengrund  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Claudia Keller: The exploration of cruelty. In: Der Tagesspiegel. June 3, 2013, accessed November 8, 2018 .
  2. ↑ a b c d e f g h Sabine Hillebrecht: The difficult memory of victims of the National Socialist patient murders. The example of the children killed in the meadow . In: Memorial circular . No. 176 , 2014, pp. 29–38 ( gedenkstaettenforum.de [accessed November 10, 2018]).
  3. ↑ a b The children of the 'Wiesengrund children's department'. Reinickendorf district office of Berlin, May 30, 2012, accessed on November 8, 2018 .
  4. ↑ a b c d e f Memorial site and history laboratory Eichborndamm 238. On the history. Museum Reinickendorf, accessed on November 9, 2018 .
  5. ↑ a b c "Child Euthanasia". In: The National Socialist "Euthanasia" Murders. Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, accessed on November 11, 2018 .
  6. ^ Museum Reinickendorf. Guided tour of the Eichborndamm memorial site. Gluseum, November 12, 2017, accessed November 9, 2018 .
  7. ↑ a b c Claudia Peter: Commemoration: In memory of the children. Pediatrics and National Socialism. November 4, 2013, accessed November 10, 2018 .
  8. ↑ a b Udo Benzenhöfer : Nazi 'Child Euthanasia': 'Without any moral scruples' . In: Deutsches Ärzteblatt . 97 A 2766–2772, no.  42 , 2000 ( aerzteblatt.de [accessed November 10, 2018]).
  9. ↑ a b c Eve-Catherine Trieba: The sad story of the Wiesengrund children. In: QIEZ . February 23, 2015, accessed November 10, 2018 .
  10. ↑ Municipal mental hospital for children and adolescents Wiesengrund. Sanatorium and nursing home in Berlin. Memorial T4, accessed November 10, 2018 .
  11. ↑ The exhibition. hushed up e. V., accessed on November 11, 2018 . "Hushed up" exhibition on the history of the Wittenauer Heilstätten 1933 - 1945 on YouTube , accessed on November 11, 2018.
  12. ↑ Imprint. In: Museum Reinickendorf. Retrieved November 9, 2018 .
  13. ↑ District Office Reinickendorf: Guided tour of the memorial site 'Former Municipal Psychiatric Clinic for Children' at Eichborndamm 238. February 17, 2015, accessed on November 10, 2018 .
  14. ↑ a b Sabine Hillebrecht. Retrieved November 10, 2018 .
  15. ↑ Götz Aly: The burdened. 'Euthanasia' 1939–1945. A history of society . S. Fischer, Frankfurt, M. 2013, ISBN 978-3-10-000429-1 , p. 9 .
  16. ^ Lutz Kaelber: Children's departments ('Special Children's Wards'). Sites of Nazi 'Children's' Euthanasia ''. Crimes and Their Commemoration in Europe. Retrieved November 10, 2018 .
  17. ↑ Lutz Kaelber: Berlin-Wittenau (municipal mental hospital for children ['Wiesengrund']). Retrieved November 10, 2018 .

Coordinates: 52 ° 35 ′ 22.7 "  N , 13 ° 19 ′ 33.3"  E