Therese Blunck

Therese Friederike Helene Blunck (born June 9, 1875 in Schipphorsterwohld on Gut Bothkamp ; † June 16, 1942 in Kiel ) was a German welfare worker.

Live and act

Members of the Blunck family came from the area around Wankendorf , where they also lived. Therese Blunck was the daughter of Johann Joachim Blunck (* 1842) and his wife Christina Sophia, née Lüders (* 1839). The father worked in Langenreihe at Gut Bothkamp as a stone cutter and inste .

Therese Blunck lived in Wankendorf until she was around 18 years old . She then trained as a nurse in the deaconess mother house in Altona . A few years later she moved to the motherhouse of the German Red Cross in Kiel and worked there as a nurse, later also in Itzehoe . She had one last job in the venereal disease ward at the Kiel Municipal Hospital , where she decided to help morally endangered girls.

Blunck then devoted himself to church work, but could not make any real progress. Together with respected and influential Kiel citizens, she therefore founded the “Welfare Association Kieler Mädchenheim” in 1908, which was first chaired by the District Court President Andrae.

Around 1908, Blunck also founded a voluntary police welfare organization at the Kiel police headquarters with an attached home. This made her a pioneer of open and closed prevention for morally threatened girls and women in this state. Her home initially consisted of a rented floor and expanded into her own house in 1916.

Due to the growing workload, Blunck decided in 1920 to give up police welfare and concentrate on managing the home. She bought the house and opened her aid program for emergencies of all kinds. An extension built in 1928 allowed her to accommodate 110 people. Her work made her known far beyond the area of ​​Schleswig-Holstein. Blunck was considered the preferred advisor for particularly severe cases. In spite of the First World War , the global economic crisis and the seizure of power , she managed to lead the “welfare association Kieler Mädchenheim” into an important part of social work in Kiel and Schleswig-Holstein.

In the last years of his life, Blunck cared for more and more feeble-minded women and sheltered women and girls in need. Due to the resulting lack of space, she looked for a larger building on the outskirts of the city. Due to the lack of support from the National Socialists as well as a lack of funds and helpers, she was unable to implement these plans.

Therese Blunck died during the Second World War in mid June 1942. The girls' home she had set up was destroyed by bombs in 1944.

literature

• Margarete Wedemeyer: Blunck, Therese . in: Schleswig-Holstein Biographical Lexicon . Volume 1. Karl Wachholtz Verlag, Neumünster 1970, pp. 84-85