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Heinz Pabst * 1933

Eißendorfer Straße 62 (Harburg, Eißendorf)

HIER WOHNTE
HEINZ PAPST
JG. 1933
EINGEWIESEN 1940
ALSTERDORFER ANSTALTEN
1943 "VERLEGT"
HEILANSTALT MAINKOFEN
ERMORDET 27.4.1944

Heinz Pabst, born 13 Dec. 1933 in Harburg, committed to the Alsterdorfer Asylum, moved to the "Mainkofen Mental and Nursing Home", killed 27 Apr. 1945

District Eißendorf, Eißendorfer Straße 62

Heinz Pabst was the first child of his parents Henry and Erika Pabst, née Finke (born on 18 Oct. 1908). His brother Manfred came into the world five years later on 13 Nov. 1938. Before she married, Erika Pabst had worked as a domestic servant. Her husband was a machine fitter.

Heinz Pabst’s delivery did not go smoothly. He had to be pulled out with forceps, during which his mother sustained damage to the anal wall which was then treated at the Harburg-Wilhelmsburg State Hospital. The boy suffered convulsions for three days following his birth. The effects of the complicated delivery soon proved to be longterm.

At the age of two, the child was not able to sit or walk. He only could lie, even though his physical development was otherwise good. His appetite was healthy. Cognitively the two-year-old boy was clearly behind in development. At that time he was not able to say any words and only expressed desires and needs with simple gestures. He appeared nervous and grew more restless and aggressive the older he got.

Henry and Erika Pabst contacted the Harburg youth welfare office early on about their son’s developmental disorders. As a result, the boy was examined several times at the Harburg-Wilhelmsburg State Hospital and at Eppendorf University Hospital. The attending medical officer found his diagnosis confirmed by each of the expert medical assessments, namely that Heinz Pabst suffered from "feeble-mindedness” due to a birth defect. The notion of him attending school was totally out of the question. Moreover, the little boy already posed "a danger to the general public due to his temper tantrums, his destructive desires and his aggressive behavior towards other children”. Hence he had to "be admitted to an asylum for the feeble-minded (like Alsterdorf) as soon as possible [at the expense of the state welfare office]”. So the state welfare office ordered the boy’s referral to a "Hamburg asylum for the mentally ill, idiots and epileptics”. On 17 June 1940, Heinz Pabst was admitted as a foster child to what was then called the Alsterdorfer Asylum at the age of six and a half.

His further development there was very contradictory as the entries of the doctors and nurses in his patient file show. One entry states he was lively and liked to play with blocks, could not speak but understood everything, while another entry two weeks later reports "he usually has to be tied down. He does not play much, he really only throws his blocks all over the place.”

The work of two men was decisive for Heinz Pabst’s future path, men who held leading positions and and shouldered great responsibility in caring for the welfare of the Alsterdorfer Asylum and its residents: Gerhard Kreyenberg and Friedrich Lensch. Gerhard Kreyenberg, the chief physician and deputy director of the insitution, had over the years developed an ever more stringent selection concept which particularly affected those barely able to work, adults no longer able to work, and children with severe disabilities. Many of his final expert opinions concluded with the words "can no longer be kept here” or "no longer tenable”. When Pastor Lensch, the director of the then Alsterdorfer Asylum, asked Hamburg’s healthcare authority to evacuate roughly 750 of the asylum residents during heavy Allied air raids on Hamburg on 30 July 1943, the Healthcare Senator Friedrich Ofterdinger promptly reacted to the request. Within the next two weeks, 469 male and female patients of the then Alsterdorfer Asylum were deported based on Kreyenberg’s selection criteria to institutions which killed by starvation, cold, overdosing medications and not treating physical diseases.

On 10 Aug. 1943, Heinz Pabst and 112 other inmates of the Alsterdorfer Asylum were loaded onto a transport and taken to the "Mainkofen Mental and Nursing Home” near Passau where the new arrivals were not at all welcome. The dormitories in which they were distributed contained over 100 beds. Yet even worse was the starvation many of them were subjected to. At the end of 1942 the Bavarian Ministry ordered "that those inmates who perform useful work or are receiving therapeutic treatment... are to receive better food rations to the detriment of the other inmates… both in terms of quality and quantity.” The consequences of that decree soon became evident as the statement of a survivor documents who was fortunate to have had to work in the kitchen: "They [many friends] starved, … they just didn’t get anything, but we couldn’t defend ourselves. There was no place we could turn to. We just had to accept it… Then you heard Krause was gone, and then Becker was gone and…”

On 8 May 1945 when Hitler’s Germany surrendered, 52 of those who had been moved there from the Alsterdorfer Anstalten were no longer alive. They included Heinz Pabst. He died on 27 Apr. 1945, not having even reached his twelfth birthday, and was laid to rest at the asylum’s cemetery.

The administrators of the "Mainkofen Mental and Nursing Home” did not notify his parents about the death of their child until five months later – on 20 Sept. 1945 – and afterwards denied their request that their child’s body be cremated and the urn sent to Hamburg. The reason they gave was that the "exhumation would cause considerable difficulties” and that "the rest that the deceased had found in our asylum cemetery should not be disturbed unless absolutely necessary.”

Translator: Suzanne von Engelhardt
Kindly supported by the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung, Hamburg.

Stand: February 2018
© Klaus Möller

Quellen: Gedenkbuch der Evangelischen Stiftung Alsterdorf; Archiv der Evangelischen Stiftung Alsterdorf, Krankenakte Heinz Pabsts (V460); Wunder u. a., Kein Halten, 2. Auflage.