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Ida Zinner * 1906

Stockhausenstraße 11 (Hamburg-Nord, Barmbek-Nord)

HIER WOHNTE
IDA ZINNER
JG. 1906
EINGEWIESEN 1939
HEILANSTALT LANGENHORN
"VERLEGT" 23.9.1940
BRANDENBURG
ERMORDET 23.9.1940
"AKTION T4"

Ida Zinner, born on 10/29/1906 in Hamburg, murdered on 9/23/1940 at the killing institution in Brandenburg on the Havel

Stumbling Stone at Stockhausenstrasse 11, Barmbek-Süd

The twins Ida and Felix Zinner were born on October 29, 1906 as the children of the Jewish couple Carl and Rosa Zinner. Their parents, too, had been born in Hamburg in 1873: Carl Zinner on September 13, Rosa, née Isenberg, on September 8. They married on May 19, 1899.

Carl Zinner was partner, later sole owner of Meier & Zinner, a wholesale paper and stationery business with headquarters at Kohlhöfen 10, from around 1903 at Admiralitätsstrasse 23 – both addresses in Hamburg’s new town.

One June 26, 1900, Leopold, Carl and Rosa Zinner’s first child, was born. His sister Therese (Resi) followed on February 20, 1903, the twins Ida and Felix on October 29, 1906, and finally Philipp on September 12, 1912.

Between 1905 and 1910, Carl Zinner moved the family residence to Grindelweg 3a in the Rotherbaum quarter, following the increasing trend among Jewish citizens to move from Hamburg’s [old] new town to the newly built Grindel quarter.

Carl Zinner died on November 9, 1925 and was buried at the Langenfelde Jewish cemetery. Now, his widow Rosa took over the company, Ida Zinner became the manager. Their son Leopold Zinner also worked in the family company, as warehouseman and travelling salesman.

Leopold was a member of the Social Democratic Party SPD and the Reichsbanner Schwarz–Rot–Gold, the paramilitary organization of the principal parties supporting the Weimar republic. He became treasurer of section 3 am Schlump. In February 1933, three Nazis attacked him in the Grindel passageway ("the Nazi Schultz and two other SS men!”) They beat him up and injured him on his head with a knife. In April, Leopold Zinner reported, the Nazi Schultz and other SS men had threatened to shoot him at his home in the Grindel quarter and then again at his shop in Admiralitätsstrasse.

Leopold now saw no other choice than leaving the country. Using a passport a friend had organized for him, he fled the country on May 4, 1933, leaving his belongings behind. Leopold Zinner settled in Brazil. He married Eugenia Sternik, probably in Brazil; the marriage remained childless. Leopold Zinner died on November 28, 1970.

Because of the anti-Semitic discrimination and reprisals and the resulting decrease in sales, Rosa Zinner was only able to keep the business going until 1934. It seems that Ida Zinner, who at that time still lived at Bornstrasse 20, had by then left the family company. The divergences between daughter and mother had aggrieved to the point they later, when Ida had hardly any income, made it impossible for her to live with her mother. The conflict strained Ida Zinner so much that tried to kill herself by jumping out of a window in the middle of 1934.

She suffered a fracture of the femoral neck that never properly healed and led to a walking disability with enduring pain and a sever impairment of her ability to work.

According to Leopold Zinner, his other sister Therese had by then took over the management of the company. Rosa Zinner shut down the company on April 1, 1934, and it was deleted from the company register on October 5, 1934.

Rosa Zinner lived at Stockhausenstrasse 11 in Barmbek-Nord until she died on October 27, 1937.

After a stay in Berlin from April to October 1932, Ida Zinner had returned to Hamburg. Perhaps she had hoped to gain distance to her mother and the ongoing quarrels with her in Berlin. Back in Hamburg, Ida rented a room at Grindelallee 5 and reported herself unemployed on February 1933. She found a temporary job with the Leo Schuster company, kitchen and household equipment, at Hamburger Strasse 126. It only lasted two days. Her uncle Franz Fischer and his wife lived not far from there, at Petkumstrasse 3 in the Uhlenhorst quarter. She rented a tiny room there and was treated just like any subtenant. Her situation must have been dismal – the quarrel with her mother endured, and her income was extremely meager. Nothing is known of her social contacts. These circumstances may have contributed to the development if a mental disorder. At the Barmbek General Hospital, where she was first treated, an expert opinion on her pursuant to the Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Disease of July 14, 1933 was written. The issue was to determine whether she suffered from a hereditary mental disease, which would necessitate her sterilization.

Such an operation, however, was not performed in Barmbek. Instead, she was transferred to the Friedrichsberg mental hospital, the reception center for people with mental disorders in Hamburg, on October 18, 1934. From there she was transferred to the almshouse in Oberaltenallee on July 19, 1935, from which she was discharged on December 14, 1935. During her stay at the almshouse, she was taken to the Finkenau gynecological hospital to be sterilized on September 6, 1935. Even though the still existing records of her stay give no definite information, it may be considered as certain that the operation was performed.

From December 1935, Ida Zinner found a three-days-a-week job at the sewing room of the German-Israelitic Community. She again lived with her relatives at Petkumstrasse 3 and refused to move in with her mother. In her desperate social and financial situation, Ida Zinner mustered up all her courage and in January 18, 1936 wrote the following letter to the welfare agency:

"Yesterday, I called on you to apply for support. You sent me to the employment agency in Kohlhöfen, whom you also informed by telephone to say I was coming.

My welfare support payment amounts to Mk. 8.40 per week. My rent per week is Mk. 5.00
The amount per week remaining for subsistence is Mk. 3.40.

No, I really don’t know how I am supposed to live from Mk. 3.40 a week have a broken pelvis resulting from an accident, and my right leg is shortened. Extended walking or standing causes me pain, so that my healthy left leg also swells up and hurts. Thus, I need a lot of fare money. Once per week to Grosse Bleichen to have my unemployment card stamped and once to get money amount to Mk. 0.40 fare money
And then to the doctor once or even twice. 0.40 "
fare money 0.80
rent 5.00
Mk. 5,80
Welfare payment Mk. 8,40
Rent + fare money - 5.80
Subsistence per week Mk. 2.60

You made a remark that I am living in community with my aunt and uncle Franz Fischer, Petkumstrasse 3. You mean that I get food and drink from them for free.

Please believe me that you are mistaken. I cater for myself. I have rented the room with the right to use the guest stove just like any other person wo rents a room. I get nothing for free from my aunt, and anyone who claims I get something must come and prove it. The nurse who said that must have made it up. Someone at your office must want to do me evil. I must write you that I often sit in my room all alone, why are the people so nasty and wary to me, and I cry so that my nerves are all tattered. Life is hard and has so many dark sides. Just being poor is terrible, because you depend on welfare, but poor and crippled, then it’s best to put an end…
This is the 6th week that I have left the almshouse and still so much running around. I have no joy, only disappointment and nobody who would listen to me and see it my way. You are always harsh to me and often let me wait in vain and for a long time, so that other people who came later get their turn much earlier than me. I also am a human being and I am vulnerable like any other person. I by no means want to offend you or cause you unnecessary work.
With German greeting Ida Zinner"

From February 1, 1939, Ida Zinner lived in a room at Bornstrasse 14 with the hauler Arthur Isenberg, possibly a relative of her mother. Here, too, the rent was 5 RM per week, so that she had hardly anything to live on. The question if her leg ailment might be alleviated was discussed between two doctors, mainly with regard to a possible fitness for work. Thus, a Dr. Schütte wrote to his colleague Dr. Janssen: "Clinically as well as on the x-ray image the fracture in my opinion is osseously healed, so that, considering the fact that Frau Z. can walk sufficiently and regardless of that does not become fit for work again, further therapeutic action is not necessary.”

Ida Zinner received no answer to her letter to the welfare agency, neither was there a reaction to her cautious reminders. With her application to the objection desk of the welfare agency, she at least achieved a partial success. From November 11, 1936, Ida received an additional 2 RM per week, thus a slight augmentation of her meager income. Now, regardless of the great problems in their personal relationship, she again lived with her mother and her brother at Stockhausenstrasse 11. Rosa Zinner died a year later on October 27, 1937. Ida then did succeed in getting a job again, working at David Bornstein’s wholesale outlet for toilet items at Glockengiesserwall 2, before she was admitted to the Friedrichsberg state mental hospital on May 5, 1938. Ten days later, she was transferred to the state mental hospital in Hamburg-Langenhorn. The Langenhorn entry form gave the reason for her admission as "insanity.” After her discharge on May 2, 1939, she again worked at the sewing room of the Jewish Religious Association on three days a week and got 6 RM paid out to her. Her guardian and uncle Willy Zinner, Rappstrasse 4, who previously had run a milk shop and now worked as an errand boy, supported her the best he could. And Ida’s bother Philipp Zinner also gave her "small gifts” from time to time.

On July 15, 1939, the ambulance service of the Israelitic Hospital brought Ida Zinner to the Friedrichsberg state mental hospital. Her address when she was admitted was Rutschbahn 25a, Hs. I, with Belzinger. The Jewish couple Leopold and Minna Belzinger also had an ill daughter who had last been admitted to Friedrichsberg in February 1938 and who was to suffer the same fate as Ida Zinner (cf. biography Erna Belzinger). Three months later, Ida Zinner was again transferred to the Langenhorn mental hospital. And remained there.

In spring and summer of 1940, the Berlin "Euthanasia” agency at Tiergartenstrasse 4 planned a special operation to eliminate all Jewish patients living in public and private mental hospitals in Germany. The agency had all Jewish patients of the institutions registered and then assembled in so-called collecting institutions. In northern Germany, this was the Hamburg-Langenhorn mental hospital. All institutions in Hamburg, Schleswig-Holstein and Mecklenburg were ordered to transfer all of their Jewish patients there before September 18, 1940.

Ida Zinner belonged to the group of patients already living at the Langenhorn mental hospital before the reference date. After the patients from the other institutions in northern Germany had arrived in Langenhorn, they were sent on a transport to Brandenburg on the Havel on September 23, 1940, together with those who had already been living there, among them Ida Zinner. The transport arrived the same day, and the newly arrived patients were immediately herded into the gas chamber and murdered by carbon monoxide gas in the part of the former prison that had been converted into a gas killing facility. Only Ilse Herta Zachmann temporarily escaped that fate (cf. there).

Ida Zinner’s siblings had her death certificate when they claimed compensation after the war. As in all other documented notices of the deaths of those murdered in Brandenburg, it stated that she had died in Chelm. Accordingly, Ida Zinner’s entry in the birth register was amended stating that the registrar’s office Chelm II had recorded her death under the number 330/1941.

The people murdered in Brandenburg, however, had never been in the town east of Lublin called Chelm in Polish, Cholm in German. The mental hospital there had ceased to exist after SS troops had murdered almost all its patients on January 12, 1940. And there had never been a German registrar’s office in Chelm. It was solely invented to cover up the murder operations, and recording fictive later dates of death served the purpose of demanding board fees for the already murdered patients.

Ida Zinner’s siblings managed to escape to safety in good time. Leopold Zimmer already left Germany in 1933 (see above). Therese Zinner had married Walter Fonfey on July 3, 1936 and left the German Reich with him early enough. Ida’s twin brother Felix Zinner after finishing the Talmud Tora Schule had absolved an apprenticeship as a bookbinder and opened his own stationery store at Altonaer Strasse 48 in what is now the Sternschanze quarter in 1931. The business ran well, but had to be closed in May 1933 due to the Nazi boycott actions. Felix Zinner was forbidden to enter his premises. He lived from his savings and temporarily from unemployment benefits. Later, he worked as a painter for a Hamburg company. On October 30, 1936, he left Germany for Rio de Janeiro, where he eked out a living as a door-to-door peddler and lived in humble circumstances until he went to Israel with his wife in 1972. Philipp Zinner lived in Oberstrasse at the time of the 1939 census and is said to have left Germany with destination New York on May 9, 1941.

A Stumbling stone commemorating Ida Zinner lies before the apartment building at Stockhausenstrasse 11 in Barmbek-Nord.

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

Stand: March 2020
© Ingo Wille

Quellen: 1; 4; 5; 9; StaH 133-1 III Staatsarchiv III, 3171-2/4 U.A. 4, Liste psychisch kranker jüdischer Patientinnen und Patienten der psychiatrischen Anstalt Langenhorn, die aufgrund nationalsozialistischer "Euthanasie"-Maßnahmen ermordet wurden, zusammengestellt von Peter von Rönn, Hamburg (Projektgruppe zur Erforschung des Schicksals psychisch Kranker in Langenhorn); 332-5 Standesämter 1070 Sterberegister Nr. 406/1937 Rosa Zinner geb. Isenberg, 2924 Heiratsregister Nr. 498/1899 Rosa Isenberg/Carl Zinner, 8082 Sterberegister Nr. 517/1925 Rosa Zinner, 13405 Geburtsregister Nr. 2116/1900 Leopold Zinner, 13924 Geburtsregister Nr. 483/1903 Therese Zinner, 14675 Geburtsregisterauszug Nr. 585/1906 Ida Zinner; 351-11 Amt für Wiedergutmachung 2183 Rosa Zinner, 23961 Leopold Zinner, 27512 Therese Fonfey geb. Zinner, 31568 Felix Zinner; 352-8/7 Staatskrankenanstalt Langenhorn Abl. 1/1995 Aufnahme-/Abgangsbuch Langenhorn 26.8.1939 bis 27.1.1941; UKE/IGEM, Archiv, Patienten-Karteikarte Ida Zinner der Staatskrankenanstalt Friedrichsberg.
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