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Paul Hoh (hinten Mitte) im Kreis seiner Familie
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Paul Berthold Hoh * 1917

Quickbornstraße 21 (Eimsbüttel, Hoheluft-West)

"Heil- und Pflegeanstalt" Mainkofen
ermordet 1944

Paul Berthold Hoh, born on 14 July 1917 in Hamburg, died on 8 Oct. 1944 in the "sanatorium and nursing home” in Mainkofen/ Lower Bavaria ("Heil- und Pflegeanstalt” in Mainkofen)

Quickbornstrasse 21

He loved playing the harmonica and music on an old, battered phonograph. His nieces who still knew him, living in Hamburg to this day, describe him as "always nice and friendly.” That is also the way he is shown on a photo, taken in the early 1930s on one of the Christmas days, shy and smiling in the midst of his large family.

A late arrival, Paul Hoh was by far the youngest of the six children born to the married couple Bertha and Wilhelm Hoh. His only sister, Alma, was 15 years older than he was, and he never met his oldest brother Karl, for he had emigrated to Brazil as early as 1910 or around then. Two other siblings had died at the age of two and one year, respectively; in addition, his mother had several miscarriages, something that one can guess caused substantial physical and psychological strain. When Paul was born, Bertha Hoh had nearly turned 47 and suffered – as her husband later stated to personnel of what was then the Alsterdorf Asylum (Alsterdorfer Anstalten) – from "consequences of the war” during the pregnancy.

Wilhelm Joachim Louis Hoh (born in 1871) came from a Mecklenburg-based family of farmhands. In his early twenties, he had moved to Hamburg and found a job as a cigar worker. In 1894, he married Bertha Sophie Henriette Pfeiffer, close to one year his senior and the daughter of a cabinetmaker. She was a native of Ottensen, though living with her parents in Eimsbüttel at the time of marriage. In the following years, the growing Hoh family moved several times within Eimsbüttel and resided at Quickbornstrasse 21 when Paul was born in 1917. This is also the location of the Stolperstein laid for him. Difficult as it was to feed a family of seven on a worker’s wages to begin with, another child increased the social plight even further. This provides an idea about the hard toil that dominated Bertha Hoh’s everyday life – responsible for child rearing, the household, and looking after the husband, as well as possibly for earning a small additional income, as was necessary to a great extent among working-class families at the time.

According to statements by his two nieces and his nephew, Paul Hoh was what one would today describe as having learning difficulties. He was enrolled at elementary school only at the age of eight, attending the "special school for lower-ability children” ("Hilfsschule für schwachbefähigte Kinder”) on Eichenstrasse in Eimsbüttel for only three years overall. Since the children in the neighborhood made fun of him and he was not to become a laughing stock, his father had brought him to the appropriate Welfare Authority no. IV on 11 Apr. 1930. He was examined there and afterward committed to a "Hamburg institution for mental patients, idiots, and epileptics” due to "beginning feeblemindedness.” At first, the welfare authority had chosen the Friedrichsberg Psychiatric State Hospital, then deciding, however, on what was then the Alsterdorf Asylum (Alsterdorfer Anstalten). The admission register there listed Paul Hoh as "admitted” just under three weeks later.

Shortly afterward, his father Wilhelm died at the age of only 60. His sister Alma had already emigrated to New York with her second husband, leaving her ten-year-old son from her first marriage behind with her mother Bertha Hoh, where he grew up alongside Paul. Both boys were about the same age, and a photo shows them sitting peacefully side by side, looking at picture books.

On the referral form of Welfare Authority no. IV, Paul was characterized as "good-natured” and "calm,” on the record form (Abhörungsbogen) taken down upon his admission to Alsterdorf as "sociable,” "merry,” and "cheerful.” Some four years later, the tone was entirely different. In a report dated Sept. 1934, the managing senior physician Gerhard Kreyenberg described him to the welfare authority as "very dirty” and as someone who liked to torment weaker fellow inmates; he diagnosed "feeblemindedness of a very serious degree” and that "[m]entally, he was increasingly going backward in recent times,” deciding as a result of this: "Further institutionalization is required.” Two years afterward, at the end of July 1936, Welfare Authority no. III turned to what used to be the Alsterdorf Asylum at the time. The request put forward by the office: a medical expert’s report on Paul Hoh, since his mental state may "possibly be of importance regarding the hereditary health of the family with many children.” A few days later, Kreyenberg complied with this request: "The genealogical tree reveals that the parents – both the father and the mother – were alcoholics, and so were the grandfather on the mother’s side and the great grandmother on the father’s side. The patient has five supposedly healthy siblings, which were followed by miscarriages, and the ninth child born was the patient himself. This easily documents that it is a family with considerable genetic predisposition.” Furthermore, the senior physician stressed in his letter Paul Hoh’s "listlessness,” that "without strict supervision, [he] leaves any work unfinished and uses the unobserved time to begin his work of destruction.”

Soon after his appointment to director of what was then the Alsterdorf Asylum in 1930, Pastor Friedrich Carl Lensch had formulated the following ideas: "[…] On the other hand, we would like to emphasize that the danger of increasing contamination of our people with defective genetic make-up was recognized in particular by the person who for the first time worked on feeblemindedness in a comprehensive scientific way, the founder of our institution, Pastor D.[eacon] Dr. Sengelmann; 2. that the Asylum, by way of isolating all feebleminded persons, as far as possible, something already striven for throughout the past 80 years, has contributed very substantially to pulling them out of the people, eliminating them from reproduction, and thus to dissolving them on their own.” Then, shortly after their assumption to power in 1933, the National Socialists passed the "Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases” ("Gesetz zur Verhütung erbkranken Nachwuchses”). It formed the basis of compulsory sterilization of some 400,000 persons between 1934 and 1945. In 1936, Paul Hoh was sterilized as well, and the following year, Kreyenberg declared him as unfit for "service in the Wehrmacht.” Even as early as 1931, as the certified psychologist Michael Wunder pointed out in 1988, the institution then called the Alsterdorf Asylum was characterized by the "combination of economy and racism.” The people in charge regarded "inmates fit for work as curable treatment cases (…), those unfit for work as ‘incurable nursing cases,’ as custody cases beyond treatment,’ for which the ‘custodial wards’ with low daily nursing charges were established.” Thus, at the end of Oct. 1942, Kreyenberg once again described Paul Hoh to the regional welfare office (Landesfürsorgeamt) as lethargic and therefore often asleep during the day,” propped up on a broom.” Repeatedly, Bertha Hoh had filed applications for institutional leave for her son, but they were rejected most of the time, since he was not allowed to leave the asylum too often in succession, the argument went. Paul Hoh’s nieces remembered that they were able to visit him together with their aunt or their parents in what was then the Alsterdorf Asylum as late as the end of 1942. They recalled "huge barracks” with "large tables and benches” as well as "metal bowls” from which people had to eat. It was "like prison.”

After the heavy air raids on Hamburg from 27 July until 3 Aug. 1943, the Alsterdorf Asylum took in numerous homeless and injured persons, and the institution’s own buildings were also damaged by bombs. As a result, Pastor Lensch, in agreement with the Hamburg public health authority, had some 500 institutional inmates transported off. Paul Hoh, too, was among the 112 charges transported on gray busses of the ‘charitable ambulance organization’ (Gemeinnützige Krankentransport GmbH – ‘GekraT’) to the Heil- und Pflegeanstalt Mainkofen, a "sanatorium and nursing home” near Passau in the early hours of 7 Aug. 1943. The local "leaving register” ("Abgangsbuch”) indicates his date of death: 8 Oct. 1944. Allegedly, he died of pulmonary tuberculosis. The high mortality rate in Mainkofen and the indication of stereotype causes of death – including pulmonary tuberculosis – as was common in psychiatric institutions in the last years of the war, rather point to death by starvation, debilitation, and diseases not treated. For instance, the journalist Ernst Klee calls Mainkofen also the "hunger institution.” Following the intervention by a Hamburg initiative made up of relatives of persons who perished in Mainkofen, a memorial site is being established on the premises of today’s Mainkofen District Hospital (Bezirksklinikum Mainkofen), the successor institution of what was then the Heil- und Pflegeanstalt Mainkofen. The site commemorates by name each of the victims of National Socialism in Mainkofen.

Translator: Erwin Fink

Kindly supported by the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung, Hamburg.

Stand: October 2016
© Frauke Steinhäuser

Quellen: StaH, 147 Js 58/67, Sonderband 5, E 7 (52), Betr. Verlegung von Pfleglingen 1938–545; Gespräch mit dem Angehörigen Hans Hoh und seinen beiden Schwestern im Juni 2009; Ev. Stiftung Alsterdorf, Archiv, V 402; Projektgruppe, Verachtet – verfolgt – vernichtet; Friedrich Carl Lensch, Dennoch, in: Briefe und Bilder aus Alsterdorf. Hamburg 1931/32; Wunder u. a. (Hrsg.), Schiefe Ebene; Cranach/Siemen (Hrsg.), Psychiatrie im Nationalsozialismus; "Mainkofen plant Gedenkstätte für Opfer des Nationalsozialismus", Website des Bezirksklinikums Mainkofen, http://kurzurl.net/QO2kj, Zugriff 4.1.2012.