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Dorothea Petersen * 1896

Schmilinskystraße 60, vor Schulhof (Hamburg-Mitte, St. Georg)

HIER WOHNTE
DOROTHEA PETERSEN
JG. 1896
MEHRMALS VERHAFTET
ZULETZT VERURTEILT 1941
KZ FUHLSBÜTTEL
DEPORTIERT 1942
AUSCHWITZ
ERMORDET 2.12.1942

Dorothea Minna Petersen, born 6/5/1896 in Brunsholm, County Flensburg, perished in Auschwitz on 12/2/1942

last residence: Schmilinskystrasse 60

Dorothea Petersen came from the small village of Brunsholm, west of Kappeln in Flensburg County. Her parents were Andreas and Margarethe Petersen, née Nielsen. She spent her childhood and youth in the rural surroundings of her place of birth, absolved elementary school there and then worked as a housemaid in large farmhouses for several years. Later, she trained as a linen seamstress, and then left her native region as a young woman to work as a seamstress. Already in 1918, she was sentenced for a criminal offense for the first time; twelve further convictions for theft, fraud and embezzlement followed until 1933. Her sentences, however, never exceeded twelve months, in spite of her criminal record. Dorothea Petersen’s first conviction in Hamburg was in 1925; thereafter, she seems to have lived in the city continuously.

In 1927, she worked as a seamstress for the Otto Heise Company in Hamburg; but she had planned to open a linen store of her own. The same year, she met Paul Möbius, and got engaged to him in August. Shortly after, she persuaded her fiancé to give her 2,000 RM from his savings to invest in the linen store she claimed to own. In 1928, Möbius found out that she actually did not own a shop, and broke the engagement. However, he did marry her in 1929 after she had told him she was pregnant by him. However, when that claim turned out to be false, Möbius left his wife and in 1930 obtained the defeasance of their marriage.

Only at the end of 1931 did Paul Möbius file a penal complaint against Dorothea Petersen, and succeeded at the district court and the court of appeals (sentences of two years respectively 15 months by the court of appeals), but lost in the higher regional court that annulled the previous verdicts on the grounds that her former husband had already gained knowledge of the fact in 1929, and thus filed his complaint too late.

In 1933, Dorothea Petersen was again convicted, this time for rental fraud. Further convictions followed, in 1937 for theft and fraud, and the last one at the end of March 1941, when the Hamburg district court sentenced her to nine months in jail for fraud. She was to serve the sentence in the women’s section of Fuhlsbüttel prison up to the end of that year. Her inmate’s file does not reveal when and to where she was released, but it may be assumed that she fell victim to one of the Nazi regime’s measures of persecution of so-called professional criminals and antisocial elements and was probably deported to Auschwitz in 1942, where she was killed on December 2nd of that year.

Translated by Peter Hubschmid
Kindly supported by the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung, Hamburg.

Stand: February 2018
© Benedikt Behrens

Quelle: StaH 242-1 II Gefängnisverwaltung II, Abl. 13 und 2000/1; Schreiben des Museums Auschwitz-Birkenau v. 30.6.2005 und E-Mail dess. v. 5.8.2005.