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Emanuel Kaletta, 1917
© Privatbesitz Rolf Mico Kaletta

Emanuel Kaletta * 1896

Lindenallee 44 (Eimsbüttel, Eimsbüttel)

HIER WOHNTE
EMANUEL KALETTA
JG. 1896
VERHAFTET
KZ NEUENGAMME
ERMORDET 24.7.1942

further stumbling stones in Lindenallee 44:
Jacob (Jakob) Ries

Emanuel Friedrich Karl Kaletta, born on 26 Dec. 1896 in Grabow/Lüchow-Dannenberg, died on 24 July 1942 in the Neuengamme concentration camp

Lindenallee 44

Rolf Mico Kaletta, the owner of Germany’s oldest gay sauna, the "Vulkan” in Hannover, learned only very late about the existence of his homosexual uncle, about whom the family had kept silent for decades: "Only at a very old age, my mother talked about the brother of my father Hermann, who had passed away early. She said: ‘Emanuel was like you, he also belonged to your club. He perished in Hamburg. The Nazis came and took him away.’ She did not use the word ‘homosexual.’ My grandparents had cast Emanuel out of the parental home; he and his boyfriend were not allowed to set foot in their apartment or their garden. My mother’s story was an event of utmost importance to me. That day, I resolved to do research into my uncle’s fate.” His grandparents had destroyed all traces of their son, denying his existence. There were no photographs, not even a birth certificate. Only two addresses of Emanuel Kaletta in the address book of his stepfather were preserved over the years. In 2006, Rolf Mico Kaletta discovered his uncle’s name on the web page of the Hamburg initiative "Gemeinsam gegen das Vergessen – Stolpersteine für homosexuelle NS-Opfer” ("Together against forgetting – Stolpersteine for homosexual victims of Nazism”) and was thus able to reveal a family secret guarded for a long time. Only a few months before publication of this biography, the family found in an old attic a family album with historical photos thought to have been lost that showed images of Emanuel Kaletta, too.

He was born in the village of Grabow in the Lüchow-Dannenberg district in 1896 and was the oldest of four children (two girls and two boys) of the chief forester in the Göhrde State Forest, Jacob Kaletta, a Catholic and native of Silesia, and Anna, née Lembke. Later, the family lived in Lüneburg. Little is known about the slender blond man, standing about 1.83 meter (6 ft) tall. This was connected not only to the extinction of mementos by the family but above all to the destruction of his Hamburg criminal justice and prisoner files. The only details known are that he learned the baker’s trade and fought in the First World War.

On 9 Apr. 1930, Emanuel Kaletta was entered in his stepfather’s address book as living at "Hamburg 4, Jägerstrasse 29, third [floor] with Meierdicks” and, after an undated change, at "Hamburg Barmbeck, Fuhlsbüttelerstrasse no. 175.” Subsequently, in 1939, he lived at Lindenallee 44 in Eimsbüttel with Hansen.

In 1933, Emanuel Kaletta must have come into conflict with the Nazi persecuting agencies due to his homosexuality for the first time, though nothing is known about the exact circumstances. Only a file card of the pretrial detention center at Holstenglacis documents his detention there for a "sexual offense” from 2 Oct. 1933 to 27 Mar. 1934. Where he eventually served his sentence was not noted. We learn a bit more only by way of a memorandum of the Hamburg Interior Administration dated Oct. 1935 concerning persons not eligible to receive the Honor Cross for Front-Line Veterans in accordance with an ordinance of the Reich and Prussian Minister of the Interior: Based on this, on 19 Jan. 1934, Emanuel Kaletta was sentenced to three years in prison and loss of his civic rights for the same duration and thus excluded from the decoration for "repeated sexual offenses and repeated unnatural sexual offenses [widernatürliche Unzucht].”

From 15 to 23 Mar. 1939, the 24th Office of the Criminal Investigation Department (24. Kriminalkommissariat), which was in charge of prosecuting homosexual behavior, ordered his committal to the Fuhlsbüttel concentration camp. A prolonged period of pretrial detention because of "unnatural sexual offenses” followed. On 22 Aug. 1939, Kaletta was sentenced due to this "offense” to three years in prison, a penalty he initially served in Hamburg starting on 9 Sept. 1939 and then in the Neusustrum Emsland camp starting on 17 Jan. 1940. From there, he was transferred on 26 July 1940 to the Rodgau prisoner camp in Hessen (Rollwald camp, Main Camp II).

At the end of his regular prison term on 13 Mar. 1942, he was transported to the Hamburg-Hütten police prison (building no. 40), where, instead of his release, his transfer to the Neuengamme concentration camp was ordered on 15 Apr. 1942. In Neuengamme, he received prisoner no. 7,027. In the camp, he survived for only three months, until 24 July 1942. The stereotype cause of death indicated was "cardiac and circulatory failure in combination with gastritis and enteritis,” and his urn was buried in the Ohlsdorf cemetery.

At this time, Emanuel Kaletta’s brother Hermann lived in Lüneburg, where one month before Emanuel’s death, his nephew Rolf Mico Kaletta was born in late June 1942. The latter himself was forced to find his way as a gay man for another 27 years under Sec. 175 of the Criminal Code, which the Nazis had tightened, and in 2008, he made his uncle’s fate and his own commitment to the Stolpersteine a subject of discussion in a documentary play entitled Die Kümmerer ("The carers”) at the Deutsche Schauspielhaus. Almost contemporaneously with the discovery of the family photographs, Rolf Mico Kaletta learned from the cemetery administration in Ohlsdorf that a gravestone for his uncle exists to this day (grave location Bp 74-44-19).

Translator: Erwin Fink

Kindly supported by the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung, Hamburg.

Stand: October 2016
© Bernhard Rosenkranz(†) / Ulf Bollmann

Quellen: StaH 213-8 Staatsanwaltschaft Oberlandesgericht – Verwaltung, Abl. 2, 451 a E 1, 1 d; 242-1 II Gefängnisverwaltung II, Ablieferungen 13 u. 16; 331-1 I Polizeibehörde I, 205 mit Dank an Sybille Baumbach, Hamburg, für den Quellenhinweis; 332-5, 10716 (Eintrag Nr. 752); Hessisches Staatsarchiv Darmstadt, G 30 Rodgau Nr. 5; Dank an Rolf Mico Kaletta, Hamburg, für die vielfältige Unterstützung; Dank an Rainer Hoffschildt, Hannover, Christian-Alexander Wäldner, Ronnenberg-Weetzen und Dr. Reimer Möller, KZ-Gedenkstätte Neuengamme für ihre Auskünfte; Rosenkranz/Bollmann/Lorenz, Homosexuellen-Verfolgung, S. 119–121 u. 223.