NFC zu M9-01

DEALING WITH DEATH

Families had the opportunity to take the bodies or urns containing ashes home and bury them in their local cemeteries. At the Lüneburg institution cemetery, burial grounds were designated for children and for sick people of foreign origin. Many families saw death as a »release«. Shame also led to decades of silence in many families. Open mourning was rare. As a result, many relatives are only now learning about the fate of their loved ones.

It is a colour photograph of an open book with yellowed pages. The entries are handwritten. Each line is an entry. One of the entries is for Olga Schulze. The handwriting is difficult to read and the entry is written in black ink.

Excerpt from the death register of the parish of Sülze, 1876 to 1945, page 172, No. 8A.

ArEGL.

Some families had the urns sent home from the killing centres in Brandenburg, Pirna-Sonnenstein and Hadamar. The ashes of the others were dumped, for example down a slope (Pirna-Sonnenstein). The urns of the victims of »Aktion T4« were buried in their home cemeteries at the request of their families. Many used existing family graves for this purpose. It was often the case that the families paid no attention to the dead.

»*18 April 1908 Sülze, died in Hadamar near Limburg/Lahn (state mental hospital)
(Hadamar Mönchberg (Lahn) registry office no. 238). Place of burial unknown (cremated) (at the request of the parents, no mention was made of the deceased in church).«

The urn containing Therese Schubert’s alleged ashes was transferred to Lüneburg and reburied in the central cemetery. The cemetery administration asked the family to report to the administration office regarding the dissolution of the grave. However, Therese Schubert’s son Theo placed the plaque on another grave and ignored the request. Since 2014, the grave has been on the list of historic graves in the city of Lüneburg and is therefore permanently protected.

It is a colour photograph of a grave. The gravestone is made of grey granite. On a pedestal is a polished stone engraved with names and dates of birth and death. The stone is oval at the top. The gravestone is surrounded by green shrubs.

The grave of Therese and Heinrich Schubert at the Central Cemetery in Lüneburg, 2014.

ArEGL.

It is a colour photograph of a grave. The grave is a waist-high, polished grey stone. On it is written ‘Wilhelm Müller Family’. Beige stepping stones lead to the gravestone and form a semicircle around it. The grave is planted with shrubs and flowering spring flowers.

Grave of Wilhelm Müller, 2016.

It is a black-and-white, rough copy of an obituary from the newspaper. It is surrounded by a thick black border. Johannes Müller is remembered by his parents on behalf of his family.

Obituary for Johannes Müller. Geestemünder Anzeiger, April 1941.

Privately owned by Helga and Ludwig Müller.

When Wilhelm Müller died, he was laid to rest in his son’s grave and a gravestone was erected. Johannes Müller was murdered on 7 March 1941 in Pirna-Sonnenstein. Because his family had the urn transferred, an urn containing his supposed ashes was not scattered on the banks of the Elbe, but was buried in the cemetery in Bremerhaven. The family also mourned their loved one publicly.

It is a black-and-white photograph of a graveyard. Surrounded by trimmed hedges, the graves are visible. On the left, the elongated mounds of earth are not overgrown. On the right, they are overgrown and marked with wooden crosses. An angular stone is visible on the left.

Graves at the Lüneburg institution cemetery, around 1945.

ArEGL 16-3.

It is a black-and-white photograph of a single grave. A wooden cross with an engraved grave number can be seen. Behind the cross is a hedge. The cross is surrounded by simple lawn planting.

Martha Ossmer’s parents photographed their daughter’s grave when they visited it after the funeral. Many families were unable to attend the funerals of their loved ones.

Private property of Christel Banik.

All graves in the institution cemetery were marked with a simple wooden cross. Often, it bore only the grave number or the name. The planting was simple. Relatives had the option of replacing the wooden cross with a stone at their own expense.

Excerpt from the burial register [for the cemetery of the Lüneburg mental hospital] from 1922 to 1948.

StadtALg, FHA, 235.

297 murdered children and adolescents from the Lüneburg »child euthanasia« programme were buried in two children’s graveyards at the institution’s cemetery. At least eight other children were buried there in scattered locations in adult graves due to a lack of children’s coffins. Children with families in Lüneburg were buried in the central cemetery at their parents‘ request. There are also murdered children whose graves remain unknown to this day.

Visit to the institution cemetery, approx. 1946/1947.

Grave of Ingeborg Wahle, 1945. The gravestone indicates 22 February as the date of death. However, she died two days later.

Private property of Renate Beier.

The parents of the murdered children often insisted on tending to the graves themselves, even though the province of Hanover covered the maintenance costs for all graves in the institution’s cemetery. Ingeborg Wahle’s parents travelled to Lüneburg several times a year to tend to their child’s grave. They also had the wooden cross replaced with a pillow stone. In the 1960s, it suddenly disappeared without the relatives being notified.

Although Inge Roxin’s parents had no money, they insisted on placing an obituary notice in the Lüneburg newspaper, inviting people to the funeral and burying Inge at the Central Cemetery at their own expense. From then on, her parents also took it upon themselves to pay for the upkeep of her grave. Inge was worth that to them.

It is an obituary from a newspaper. The paper is yellowed. The notice has been cut out of the newspaper with scissors. The parents and siblings are named and referred to as ‘in silent mourning’. The place and time of the funeral are also printed. The funeral is to take place on 25 October at 2 p.m. at the Central Cemetery in Lüneburg.

Obituary for Inge Roxin, Lüneburg advertisements, October 1943.

Private property of Sigrid Roxin.

It is a colour photograph of Christian Meins' grave. It is a pillow stone. The stone reads: Christian Meins, 10 June 1939, 29 August 1943. The pillow stone is surrounded by lawn. Above the stone is a pot with pink flowers. The pot stands on a lawn edging that borders the lawn above the gravestone.

Christian Meins‘ grave at the Central Cemetery in Lüneburg, September 2021.

ArEGL.

Because he had been admitted as a »bomb-damaged child«, Christian Meins was not buried in the institution cemetery, but in the central cemetery in Lüneburg in a graveyard for bomb victims from Hamburg. In 1952, his grave fell under the War Graves Act. It has therefore been preserved to this day as a single grave with a gravestone.

The forced labourers murdered at Lüneburg Municipal Hospital were also buried in Lüneburg Central Cemetery. Their families were not informed of their deaths or burial locations.

Adult patients of foreign origin who died in the Lüneburg sanatorium and nursing home before December 1943 were treated like deceased persons of German origin in the institution’s cemetery. This ended when the number of foreign patients increased as a result of forced labour, imprisonment in camps and flight, and deaths became more frequent. From 1943 onwards, deceased persons of foreign origin were buried in a specially designated »foreigners« graveyard.

It is a colour reproduction of a page from a book. The paper is yellowed. The paper contains a list of graves. It is a two-column table. It is filled in by hand in even handwriting. The name, date of burial and grave number are recorded. Each row of the table contains two burials. Above the table is the heading ‘List of foreign graves’.

Directory of gravesites for foreigners in the burial register for the cemetery of the Lüneburg State Mental Hospital, with a register of names and location sketches, 1922–1948.

StadtALg, FHA, 235.

The paper is yellowed and slightly torn at the edge. The text is typed in small letters. It fills only a third of the page and is signed by hand.

The lack of respect Max Bräuner showed for the deceased at the Lüneburg mental hospital can be seen in a letter concerning the designation of additional burial grounds at the hospital cemetery. Bräuner justified his negative stance as follows:

»[…] that the relatives of the deceased in Hamburg cannot be expected to tend the graves of their loved ones in the midst of dead idiots. […].«

Excerpt from the transcript of the letter from City Planning Officer Kleeberg to the Office for Public Welfare, Gauleitung Ost-Hannover, dated 26 January 1945.

StadtALg, VA1, 3054.

It was ordered that sick people of foreign origin were to be buried in the outermost edge of a cemetery. The location of the graves of the victims of the murder of children and sick people of foreign origin is unknown in many places today. In Hadamar, there was a mass grave disguised as a single grave field, which was opened in 1945. In Kalmenhof-Idstein, the remains of three young people and children were found in 2020.

It is a black-and-white photograph. It was taken from a slightly elevated position. A wide, gently sloping graveyard is visible. Symmetrically arranged wooden stakes mark the individual graves in the graveyard. Each wooden stake bears a grave number. A soldier in American uniform stands at the edge of the graveyard with his helmet and rifle, looking towards the graves.

The image shows a mass grave at the Hadamar killing centre, 5 April 1945. Photographer: Alexander J. Wedderburn (28th Infantry Division of the US Army).

USHMM. PA 1071150.

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