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Elisabeth Rosenkranz * 1906

Armgartstraße 4 (Hamburg-Nord, Hohenfelde)

KZ Neuengamme
ermordet April 1945

further stumbling stones in Armgartstraße 4:
Alice Hertz, Eduard Hertz, Rudolf Ladewig

Elisabeth Anna Rosenkranz, born 6 Mar. 1906 in Kassel, arrested 23 Mar. 1945, "protective custody” at Fuhlsbüttel Police Prison, killed 22 Apr. 1945 at Neuengamme concentration camp
Rudolf Wilhelm Ladewig, born 30 Mar. 1893 in Brodersdorf near Rostock, arrested 23 Mar. 1945, "protective custody” at Fuhlsbüttel Police Prison, killed between 22 and 24 Apr. 1945 at Neuengamme concentration camp

Armgartstraße 4

During the nights from 22 to 24 Apr. 1945, 58 men and 13 women were killed in the custody bunker of Neuengamme concentration camp. Twelve of the women were hanged, one was beaten to death, some of the men were torn apart with hand grenades, the others were killed with a shot in the back of the neck. Those 71 individuals were so-called prisoners in protective custody of the Hamburg Gestapo from the Fuhlsbüttel Police Prison. They were killed without any kind of trial. They were considered "dangerous elements that absolutely had to be removed” and under no circumstances were to fall into the hands of the approaching Allied troops alive. The list of names was ordered compiled by the high-ranking SS officer and police chief of the 10th military district "North Sea”, which Hamburg belonged to, Lieutenant General of the Waffen-SS Georg Henning Count Bassewitz-Behr. His order led two lists to be compiled in Department IV ("Homeland Police”) of the Hamburg State Police Headquarters, one list with the names of 33 political prisoners, primarily Germans, and a second with the names of 38 Soviet and Polish forced laborers and war prisoners. Neither list is still in existence. They were destroyed during the final days of war in the Gestapo’s large-scale burning operation.

Those killed included Elisabeth Rosenkranz and her partner Rudolf Wilhelm Ladewig along with his children Rudolf Karl Ladewig, born on 19 Feb. 1923, and Annemarie Ladewig, born on 5 June 1919 (see "Rudolf Ladewig” at www.stolpersteine-hamburg.de).

Elisabeth Rosenkranz was a daughter of Heinrich Rosenkranz (1882–1954), master blacksmith for both decorative and building fittings, from Neustadt in Hessia and his wife Anna Katharina (1883–1959), née Hohmann, from Melsungen. She had three younger sisters, Dora, Gerda and Brunhilde. Their mother Anna Katharina was a trained innkeeper and ran her own guest house in Kassel that was destroyed by bombs during the war.

Elisabeth’s interests lay in arts and handicrafts. Once she finished high school in 1924, she completed training as a dressmaker. After passing the final examination, she attended schools for the applied arts and design for six semesters in Munich and Düsseldorf and undertook study trips to the Netherlands and Italy. She later worked as an interior designer, secretary and commercial clerk. She was also identified as an antiques seller at times. Her "motherly friend” Selma Möllendorf described her to Hamburg investigators on 27 Sept. 1945 with the words, "Ms. Rosenkranz was a brilliantly talented individual, musical, she could paint, sculpt, draw, sing and had business skills. She was a very aesthetically minded and good-natured person. She was a splendid individual.”

At the age of 22, Elisabeth married the businessman August Franz Beck of Kassel on 8 Aug. 1928 in Kassel. Less than a year later they were divorced on 31 July 1929, and Elisabeth took back her maiden name of Rosenkranz. Soon afterwards she left Kassel. In 1932 she was again living in Hamburg at Marckmannstraße 121, on the 2nd floor, in Billwerder. As of about 1936 at the latest, she apparently was doing well financially. So in 1937 she moved out of Billwerder to a wealthier neighborhood and lived at Schwanenwik 29 IV on the River Alster. She also had her own telephone line, a luxury not all people had back then, she played tennis, went riding, took piano lessons and employed domestic help on a daily basis. She got her driver’s license. She also owned a condominium at Am Langenzug 19 in Uhlenhorst which was rented and brought in 225 Reich Marks a month in rent. In 1938 and 1939 she lived in Chile. In light of the political changes brought about by the National-Socialist regime, she may have intended to emigrate since her Chilean identification card and returning emigrant pass were registered at the registration office. However she returned to Germany and lived at An der Alster 35 II as of 1940. In July 1941 she moved to an apartment around the corner at Armgartstraße 4, 3rd floor where she lived until her arrest on 22 Mar. 1945.

We are well informed about the furnishings of her apartment, her household belongings, wardrobe, her inventory of pictures and books because Elisabeth Rosenkranz must have been a particularly orderly and meticulous woman who kept accurate and well-sorted records of what she owned. Her records have survived, some of them even hold the purchase receipts. Under the heading "My Possessions” she lists, among other things, an expensive fur coat, just purchased (down payment of 600 Reich Marks), 16 hats, Meißner porcelain, two radios, one record player, etc. A representative of the Leipzig Feuer Insurance Company assessed the value of everything, excluding her library, at 41,560 Reich Marks and finalized a household insurance plan with Elisabeth Rosenkranz on 20 July 1943 (fire, theft, water damage) including 60,000 Reich Mark coverage for a five-year period. Her annual payment was 60 Reich Marks.

There are a number of indications that her well situated, lavishly decorated apartment, not to mention her extensive library collected with great care, was the decisive incentive for the Gestapo, and especially their undercover agent Alfons Pannek, to go after Elisabeth Rosenkranz. Her library contained an educated array of titles from Homer to Dante, Lessing, the German classics and Romantic literature, as well as Schopenhauer, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky. But it also held books by modern authors, thought undesirable by the National Socialists like Büchner, Heine, Strindberg, Heinrich Mann, Wedekind, Sinclair and Martin Buber. A large section of her collection held over 60 titles of specialist literature. It contained, among others, works on the architect Fritz Höger who built the Chile House in Hamburg from 1922 to 1924 and later became a member of the NSDAP. Other works were on the brick buildings of lower Germany, art history, crafts (like Adolf G. Schneck’s Der Stuhl – The Chair), and individual artists from various periods such as Rubens, Tiepolo, van Gogh, Daumier and Zille.

Elisabeth Rosenkranz’s partner Rudolf Wilhelm Ladewig was an architect. He had come to Hamburg with his wife Hildegard (née Bucka, born in Posen in 1892) and their two children Annemarie and Rudolf Karl 1935. In theoretical treatises as in his practical work, he had above all devoted himself to building small apartments and made a name for himself in this field – especially with the construction of the so-called Sternsiedlung in Reichenbach, Vogtland (1932/33), a system of one-storied hexagons. When the National Socialists came to power, it grew hard for him to continue to get good contracts in Reichenbach, the town where he lived. He was known to be a social-democrat, but more significantly, his wife Hildegard was Jewish. So the family left Reichenbach. In Hamburg, Rudolf Ladewig Senior had no shortage of contracts. Among other jobs, he worked for the emergency housing program of the Reich Defense District of Hamburg, for the Foreign Office and the German Academy of Housing in Berlin. For a time he worked in the offices of such important architects as Fritz Höger and Rudolf Klophaus. The latter built the press building at Speersort for the National-Socialist newspaper Hamburger Tageblatt in 1938 and in doing so created "in a sense Hamburg’s propaganda headquarters for the Third Reich,” according to the Hamburg art historian Hermann Hipp. Klopphaus dismissed Ladewig in July 1944 because of his "mixed marriage”. Ladewig was also harassed by the authorities: Although he had lost a leg below the thigh in World War I and was plagued by infections and pain, he was compelled to do forced labor on construction sites because he was "interrelated with Jews”. His children were also drafted into forced labor as "half-breeds of the first degree”: Annemarie had to perform forced labor at the Howaldtswerft shipyard, Rudolf Karl had to clear rubble at Freihafen.

His wife Hildegard increasingly suffered from anxiety and "nervous problems”. At the family’s request, she was admitted to the Psychiatric Clinic at Eppendorf University Hospital in the summer of 1944. The department director was Professor Hans Bürger-Prinz, who was at least well disposed to the healthcare policies of the National Socialists. Hildegard Ladewig died there on 30 Nov. 1944 under unexplained circumstances. The hospital cited suicide as the cause of death.

Over the years, Rudolf Ladewig Senior had set up his office in Elisabeth Rosenkranz’s apartment. She had already been employed by him for a while, was considered an employee of equal standing to himself and received a considerable monthly salary of 800 to 1000 Reich Marks. Each month she transferred 125 Reich Marks of that to her mother in Kassel as of Oct. 1943 because her guest house had been bombed out. Elisabeth and Rudolf had in the meantime become a couple.

Yet how did Elisabeth Rosenkranz and Rudolf Wilhelm Ladewig come to be on a kill list of the Gestapo as "dangerous elements that absolutely had to be removed”? What is certain is that both of them were opposed to the National Socialist regime. In conversations with the Gestapo informer Alfons Pannek, she made no attempt to conceal her attitude. Under cover of being anti-fascist and running the lending library at Wendloher Weg 13 in Eppendorf, Pannek established contact with Elisabeth Rosenkranz, the book lover. Elisabeth, full of trust, even loaned him documents critical of the National Socialists for a few days, which he copied to offer it as proof to his handler at the Gestapo, the criminal inspector and SS-Sturmbannführer Henry Helms. Helms was director of Department IVA1 "communism” (founded in 1944). Like many others during the war years, Elisabeth Rosenkranz and Rudolf Wilhelm Ladewig also listened to the BBC’s German broadcasting service. However such passive opposition to the National Socialist system would hardly have been enough to put them on a liquidation list.

In addition, the questioning and witness statements in proceedings against twelve former Hamburg Gestapo officers and their staff before a jury at Hamburg Local Court (1947/49), the so-called Helms Trial, clearly demonstrated that both had occasional contact with individuals from the Hamburg resistance group KdF (Kampf dem Faschismus – Fight the Fascism) but were not among the group’s active members. From leading figures within the group who survived, like Carl Schultz, we know that the two were only mentioned after being asked specifically about them and were cited as being on the fringe (Helms Trial, file 13, page 10). There is no doubt that they were significantly less important to the KdF Group than personalities like Harry Breckenfelder, Erich Mau, Karl Raetsch and several others who belonged to the leadership, were known to the Gestapo and above all to the informer Alfons Pannek and yet were not included on the list. Pannek knew about the KdF in vast detail because he had worked his way up into their leadership circle. He was responsible for naming the KdF, whose name was an ironic play on the National-Socialist leisure program "Kraft durch Freude (Power Through Joy)” which had the same initials. He even issued the members’ IDs.

There was absolutely no evidence incriminating Rudolf Wilhelm Ladewig’s children Annemarie and Rudolf Karl. That was confirmed in court before the jury by Henry Helms’ secretary Ursula Prüssmann. She sat with Helms in the same room, was present during the interrogations and maltreatment, and wrote up records on them (Helms, file 8, page 120).

Elisabeth Rosenkranz, Rudolf Wilhelm, Annemarie and Rudolf Karl Ladewig were arrested in Mar. 1945 by Helms and his crime inspection assistant Ernst Lietzow for "preparations for high treason”. They were taken to Fuhlsbüttel Police Prison as so-called prisoners in protective custody.

So why were all four placed on the liquidation list? There can hardly be any doubt that in this case, as in others, their arrest and then their killing would open the door for crimes to be committed by Gestapo men and their informers, above all looting the homes of people arrested. In addition, they wanted to get rid of witnesses who could become dangerous to them after the war. It was in this manner that the apartment of the Hamburg resistance fighter Helene Heyckendorf was "freed up”. Pannek’s sub-informer Heinrich Lübbers and his secretary Helene Reimers moved in immediately following Helene Heyckendorf’s arrest and then stripped it piece by piece. The resistance fighter Erika Etter was arrested because she had seen through Lübbers and realized he was a plant. Helene Heyckendorf and Erika Etter also were among the 13 women who were killed at Neuengamme (see www.stolpersteine-hamburg.de).

Alfons Pannek, the allegedly "anti-fascist” manager of a lending library (which in reality was a front for the Gestapo), had set his sights above all on Elisabeth Rosenkranz’s library, but the rest of her apartment was nothing to scoff at either. Crime Inspection Assistant Ernst Lietzow was on the lookout for a nice apartment. Assigning apartments through the Housing Office had never been a problem for the Gestapo. But there were the potential witnesses: the Ladewig siblings. That was probably the reason they landed on the list.

An old acquaintance of Elisabeth Rosenkranz, Liselotte Hinze, who had been bombed out and who Elisabeth had taken in as a favor, quickly warmed to the secret police and took on small informer services for them, like noting telephone callers for Elisabeth and the names of visitors. She was allowed to remain in the apartment following Elisabeth’s arrest. For a couple weeks Lietzow and friends from the Gestapo also settled in and enjoyed life until the British arrived.

When Elisabeth’s sister Brunhilde Rosenkranz and Rudolf Ladewig’s sister Lotte Müller-Spreer entered the apartment after the war, an apartment now free of the Gestapo, they were aghast. Several wardrobes and bookcases had been emptied out, the jewelry was missing along with an array of other valuable objects. Her "My Possessions” record from 1943, which had survived, left no doubt as to the situation. Cash amounting to about 37,000 Reich Marks had also disappeared. Rudolf Ladewig had just received that money as payment from the German Academy for Housing and kept it in the apartment – that is what he had told his sister Lotte shortly before his arrest. His studio was also completely stripped. Nothing was left of his drawings, his writings or his notes.

On Friday, 20 Apr. 1945, Elisabeth Rosenkranz and the three Ladewigs were taken to Neuengamme concentration camp along with the other women and men. It was just being evacuated. After the 4,000 Danish and Norwegian prisoners who had been concentrated there had left the camp on the "white buses” of the Swedish Red Cross on 22 Apr., the time had arrived to pull off the massacre without any undesirable witnesses. Prison Camp Director and SS-Obersturmführer Anton Thumann was in charge of the camp. Also involved on a rotating basis were four block wardens with the rank of SS-Unterführern, each with a squad of five armed guards. Several prisoners were ordered to hang the victims, take down the bodies, transport them to the camp crematorium and repeatedly clean the killing site.

Starting at about 10 pm, the women were first strangled in two groups in the corridor of the detention bunker. After midnight, when the first 20 to 25 men from prisoner block 20 were brought out and the killing was to continue, the prisoners revolted with their fists and boards taken from the plank beds in their cells, with a knife and the gun that they bashed out of Thumann’s hand. One shot injured his hand. The completely unexpected resistance shocked the killers but was crushed, after some confusion, with hand grenades and machine guns. One woman was discovered hiding under a plank bed, having temporarily escaped being killed. Perpetrators and witnesses contradict each other about her death. Some said she was killed with a brick, others said she was killed in a barrage of fire from the machine gun. We do not know who that woman was. The follow night, the night from 23 to 24 Apr., the remaining 35 to 40 surrendered to their fate. Thumann had them brought into the corridor outside their cell one by one and killed them with a shot in the back of the neck. He straightforwardly admitted to the killings during the Neuengamme trials before the British military tribunal on 9 Apr. 1946: "Yes, I shot and killed them all myself.”

We should not forget that of the 71 victims, we only know the names of 13 women and 20 men. Their names were on the liquidation list of Henry Helms’ and Emil Eggers’ department. Who were the other 38 men? This much is certain, they were prisoners of war or forced laborers from Poland and citizens of the Soviet Union. The director of Department IVE2 ("Neglect of work, factor sabotage”) Detective Superintendant Albert Schweim had put them on a separate list for liquidation. We do not know their names or why they were killed. However we do know that the revolt in the detention bunker, that is certain, was their doing.

The British military tribunal proceedings in 1946/47 (the so-called Curiohaus Trials) were only about revenge for crimes perpetrated against members of the Allied Forces. The crimes against Germans were ignored. Count Bassewitz-Behr, who ordered the liquidation lists be drawn up and signed off on the one with the names of the German victims was acquitted for lack of evidence. He was extradited to the Soviet Union for his prior activity in Ukraine and died in an East Siberian work camp in 1949. Prison Camp Director Thumann and other perpetrators at Neuengamme concentration camp were sentenced to death and executed.

During the proceedings before the jury at Hamburg Local Court (9 May 1947 to 2 June 1949) Alfons Pannek received the highest sentence of all the accused, twelve years in prison. His handler Henry Helms was punished for his crimes with nine years in prison. Pannek’s judgment never became legally binding on formal grounds, the proceedings were suspended in 1951, and he was released. Helms received an early release in Nov. 1953. Albert Schweim, who had sentenced the 38 foreign victims to death, managed to escape from the British, went underground and lived under a false identity, unrecognized with his "fiancée”, a Polish woman, in Dortmund. He died in 1975 without ever being brought to trial.


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

Stand: December 2019
© Johannes Grossmann

Quellen: StaH 213-11 Staatsanwaltschaft Landgericht 2694/56 Strafsachen gegen Henry Helms und Andere, 23 Bände, besonders 1 bis 5, 8, 9, 18, 21, 23 (Urteil); StaH 351-11 Amt für Wiedergutmachung 6443 (E. Rosenkranz), 300493 (R. Ladewig sen.); Hamburger Adressbücher 1929 bis 1965; Freundeskreis der Gedenkstätte Neuengamme e.V. (Hrsg.), Curiohaus-Prozess, verhandelt vor dem britischen Militärgericht in der Zeit vom 18. März bis zum 3. Mai 1946 gegen die Hauptverantwortlichen des KZ Neuengamme, Hamburg 1969, 3 Bde.; Maike Bruchmann, Annemarie Ladewig, Rudolf Karl Ladewig, in: Stolpersteine in Hamburg-Winterhude. Biographische Spurensuche, Hamburg, 2008, S. 133–138; Johannes Grossmann, Die letzten Toten des Konzentrationslagers Neuengamme, in: Hamburger Abendblatt, Magazin, 4.4.2015, online auf: www.abendblatt.de/hamburg/article205239105/Die-letzten-Toten-des-Konzentrationslagers (letzter Zugriff 27.7.2015) und in: Christliche Israelfreunde Norddeutschlands, Marsch des Lebens, http://mdl.cindev.de/die-letzten-toten-des-konzentrationslagers-neuengamme (letzter Zugriff 27.7.2015); Beate Meyer, Eine unheilige Personalunion: Gestapobeamter und Parteigenosse – Henry Helms, in: dies., "Goldfasane" und "Nazissen". Die NSDAP im ehemals "roten" Stadtteil Hamburg-Eimsbüttel, Hamburg, 2002, S. 105ff.; Ursel Hochmuth/Gertrud Meyer, Streiflichter aus dem Hamburger Widerstand 1933–1945, Berichte und Dokumente, Frankfurt a. M., 1980; Herbert Diercks, Gedenkbuch Kola-Fu. Für die Opfer aus dem Konzentrationslager, Gestapogefängnis und KZ-Außenlager Fuhlsbüttel, Hamburg, 1987; ders., Dokumentation Stadthaus. Die Hamburger Polizei im Nationalsozialismus, hrsg. v. d. KZ-Gedenkstätte Neuengamme, Hamburg, 2012; ders., Dokumentation Stadthaus. Die Hamburger Polizei im Nationalsozialismus, hrsg. v. d. KZ-Gedenkstätte Neuengamme, Hamburg, 2012, S. 36; ders., Der Einsatz von V-Leuten im Sachgebiet "Kommunismus" der Hamburger Gestapo 1943 bis 1945, in: KZ-Gedenkstätte Neuengamme (Hrsg.), Beiträge zu Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Verfolgung in Norddeutschland, Heft 15, Polizei, Verfolgung und Gesellschaft im Nationalsozialismus, Bremen, 2013, S. 119–135; Karin Schawe, Die KZ-Gedenkstätte Neuengamme. Ein Überblick über die Geschichte des Ortes u. die Arbeit der Gedenkstätte, hrsg. v. d. KZ-Gedenkstätte Neuengamme, Hamburg, 2010; Hermann Hipp, Vortrag in der Katholischen Akademie Hamburg, 23. November 2006, Online-Download von: www.hamburg-domplatz.de/site/downloads/1900_32_hipp.pdf (letzter Zugriff 27.7.2015); Universitätskrankenhaus Eppendorf, Klinik und Poliklinik für Psychiatrie und Psychotherapie: Geschichte der Klinik, online unter: www.uke.de/kliniken/psychiatrie/index_15716.php (letzter Zugriff 27.7.2015).