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Elisabeth Korpatsch * 1927

Frohmestraße 42 (Schule) (Eimsbüttel, Schnelsen)

1943 Auschwitz
ermordet 07.05.1943

Elisabeth Korpatsch, born 26 Feb. 1927 in Altona, killed 7 May 1943 in Auschwitz

Frohmestraße 42

Elisabeth was the daughter of the Sinti couple Johannes and Baba Korpatsch who had seven more children. She did not grow up with her birth parents. As a child she was initially placed at the children’s home at the Kreuzkirche, however the district is not known. By 1933 at the latest, though, she lived with a foster family by the name of Baumgarten (the husband was the dock worker Johannes B.) at Konradstraße 56 (today Govertsweg) in Altona. At Easter of 1933 she started school at the 14th Girls’ Elementary School on Paulstraße (today Otzenstraße) in Altona where she stayed until the end of 1938. Since her foster parents moved to Im Ginsterbusch 2 located in Schnelsen, she changed schools at the beginning of 1939 to the elementary school on Frohmestraße, also located in Schnelsen, where she completed her final two years of obligatory schooling, apparently with success.

Afterwards she ostensibly began an apprenticeship with a hairdresser in Schnelsener. At the time of her deportation to Auschwitz on 10 Mar. 1943, she was staying at "Alexanderheim" (a girls’ home run by the Inneren Mission) at Alexanderstraße 21/23 in St. Georg, according to the details in the deportation list. Only a brief two months after her arrival at the "gypsy camp" in Auschwitz, she suffered the same tragic fate of her father and five of her siblings at other National Socialist persecution sites, and the same fate as four other close relatives who also perished in Auschwitz.

A Stolperstein has been laid for Elisabeth Korpatsch in front of the school that today is located on Frohmestraße, the school she attended approximately 70 years ago. [Former classmates of hers initiated this Stolperstein]


Elisabeth Korpatsch – Video clip from the Julius-Leber-Schule in HH-Schnelsen on YouTube 21 June 2012

Translator: Suzanne von Engelhardt

Kindly supported by the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung, Hamburg.

Stand: October 2016
© Benedikt Behrens

Quellen: AfW, Entschädigungsakten; StaH 331-1 II – Polizeibehörde II (Deportationsliste v. 10.3.1943); StaH, Jugendbehörde I, 359 b;Schreiben und E-Mail des Museums; Auschwitz-Birkenau v. 30.6. und 17.8.2005; Apel, Linde/F. Bajohr, "Die Depotationen von Juden sowie Sinti und Roma vom Hannoverschen Bahnhof in Hamburg 1940–1945"; in: Zeitgeschichte in Hamburg, 2004, S. 29–35.