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Helene Meyer * 1904

Sartoriusstraße 10 (Eimsbüttel, Eimsbüttel)

HIER WOHNTE
HELENE MEYER
JG. 1904
EINGEWIESEN 1912
ALSTERDORFER ANSTALTEN
"VERLEGT" 16.8.1943
AM STEINHOF WIEN
TOT 2.6.1945

Helene Hermandine Klara Meyer, born on 15.5.1904 in Hamburg, admitted to the then Alsterdorfer Anstalten (now Evangelische Stiftung Alsterdorf) on 15.7.1912, transferred to Vienna on 16.8.1943 to the "Wagner von Jauregg-Heil- und Pflegeanstalt der Stadt Wien" (Wagner von Jauregg-Heil- and Nursing Institution of the City of Vienna), died there on 2.6.1945.

Sartoriusstraße 10 (Eimsbüttel)

Helene Hermandine Klara Meyer was born on May 15, 1904, in her parents' apartment at Rombergstraße 16 in Hamburg-Eimsbüttel. She was the third of four children of Hermann Diedrich Meyer, born on July 12, 1875 in Stade, and his wife Wilhelmine Minna Bertha Meyer, née Steinmüller, born on July 17, 1869 in Dessau.

Helene Meyer's father first worked as a bleacher. (The bleacher's work consisted of removing the natural dyes from fabrics and yarns to obtain a pure white.) Later, he operated a laundry.

Helene Meyer did not learn to walk until she was three years old and to speak until she was four. In addition, a doctor diagnosed her with a mental handicap, which led to her admission to the Alsterdorfer Anstalten (now the Evangelische Stiftung Alsterdorf) on July 15, 1912.

There followed a period of more than twenty years there during which we do not know much about Helene Meyer's fate. A report in the 1930s (the exact date is missing) by the Alsterdorf assistant physician Schmidt-Petersen summarized Helene Meyer's condition as follows: "Admitted here on July 15, 1912. She was completely incapacitated, speech very slurred. She often had agitation states, hitting her fellow patients. She played with building blocks, but was still completely dependent. In 1935 she was occupied with household chores, which she carried out very eagerly, later she performed walking tours. Lately she has again declined very much, must be completely concerned in personal hygiene. She cannot occupy herself at all, sits around dully all the time and has no interest in her surroundings at all. In nature she is very calm. It is a case of idiocy. A change of the condition seems impossible. She is considered to be incurably ill, has no relationship with her environment. Institutionalization is permanently required." (The term "idiocy" was formerly used for a severe form of intelligence impairment).

During the heavy air raids on Hamburg at the end of July/beginning of August 1943 ("Operation Gomorrah"), the Alsterdorf institutions also suffered bomb damage. The management of the institution took the opportunity, after consultation with the health authorities, to transfer some of the residents who were considered to be "weak in labor, in need of care or particularly difficult" to other sanatoriums and nursing homes. On August 16, 1943, a transport with 228 women and girls from Alsterdorf and 72 girls and women from the Langenhorn sanatorium and nursing home left for the "Wagner von Jauregg Sanatorium and Nursing Home of the City of Vienna" in Vienna" (also known as the institution "Am Steinhof"). Among them was Helene Meyer.

The asylum in Vienna had been an intermediate facility for the Hartheim killing center near Linz during "Aktion-T4" (a camouflage term for the Nazi "euthanasia" program, so named for the location of the Berlin euthanasia headquarters at Tiergartenstraße 4). After the official end of the gas killings in the killing centers in August 1941, mass murder continued in the Vienna asylum itself: through overdoses of medication and failure to treat illness, but above all through food deprivation.

The surviving patient records for Helene Meyer in Vienna contain essentially only weight data: When she arrived there, she weighed 39 kg, already far too little for the 39-year-old woman. The last weight entry from December 1944 read 32 ½ kg. Her condition was described as "unchanged" at intervals of several months.

Helene Meyer died on June 2, 1945, at the institution, which had since been renamed the "Vienna State Sanatorium and Nursing Home 'Am Steinhof,'" allegedly of pneumonia.

In the Wagner von Jauregg-Heil- und Pflegeanstalt in Vienna, 300 girls and women from Hamburg lost their lives by the end of 1945, 257 of them 196 from Alsterdorf.

Translation by Beate Meyer
Stand: February 2022
© Ingo Wille

Quellen: Adressbuch Hamburg 1904-1915; StaH 332-5 Standesämter 8587 Heiratsregister Nr. 466/1897 Hermann Diedrich Meyer/Wilhelmine Minna Bertha Steinmüller; Evangelische Stiftung Alsterdorf, Archiv, Sonderakte Nr. 152 (Helene Meyer); Michael Wunder/Ingrid Genkel/Harald Jenner, Auf dieser schiefen Ebene gibt es kein Halten mehr. Die Alsterdorfer Anstalten im Nationalsozialismus, Stuttgart 2016, S. 331-371 (Transport nach Wien); Susanne Mende, Die Wiener Heil- und Pflegeanstalt "Am Steinhof" im Nationalsozialismus, Frankfurt/Main 2000.