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Erna Dancker * 1910
Helmuth-Hübener-Gang (Hamburg-Mitte, St. Georg)
HIER WOHNTE
ERNA DANCKER
JG. 1910
EINGEWIESEN 1929
ALSTERDORFER ANSTALTEN
´VERLEGT‘ 16.8.1943
HEILANSTALT
AM STEINHOF / WIEN
ERMORDET 2.12.1944
Erna Emilie Dancker, born 1.6.1910 in Hamburg, died on 2.12.1944 in the "Wagner von Jauregg” sanatorium and nursing home in Vienna
Helmuth Hübener Gang (St. Georg)
Erna Dancker was the daughter of Bertha Dancker, a newspaper delivery girl, and Emil Sonntag, a laborer. Until she was committed to the Alsterdorf Asylum, she lived with her mother and two siblings at Borgeschstraße 14 in St. Georg, which no longer exists. She attended elementary school for three years, but was then transferred to an auxiliary school, where she was dismissed from the second grade.
Despite her mental disability, she was at least able to read and a report by Dr. Lyon (possibly the Jewish school doctor Erna Lyon, who emigrated to England in 1938) from 1925 states: "... a certain intelligence defect will remain. However, significant progress is to be expected”.
Despite this, Erna was admitted to the Alsterdorf Asylum on August 27, 1929 with the diagnosis "imbecility (catatonia)”.
Due to the Hereditary Health Law passed by the Nazi regime in 1933, Erna Dancker was forcibly sterilized on 1 February 1936 following a decision by the Hereditary Health Court for Hamburg in December 1935.
On August 16, 1943, she was transported in a collective transport with 228 women and girls from the Alsterdorf asylums to the "Wagner von Jauregg” sanatorium and nursing home in Vienna under the pretext of bomb damage caused by the Allied air raids. There she suffered the usual treatment for patients "unworthy of life” due to a lack of food and poor care, so that she died on December 2, 1944, with "pulmonary TB and bronchopneumonia” officially given as the causes of death.
Erna Dancker's deliberately poor treatment and care in both institutions since the beginning of the murderous National Socialist "euthanasia policy” is clearly reflected in her dramatic weight loss. While she still weighed 55 kg in 1936, which was normal for a young woman, this dropped to 46.2 kg at the beginning of 1940 and to an alarming 38.5 kg in August 1943, finally falling to 30 kg shortly before her death.
Borgeschstraße no longer exists. That is why the Stumbling Stone for Erna Dancker was laid in Helmuth-Hübener-Gang.
Translation: Beate Meyer
Stand: November 2024
© Benedikt Behrens (†)
Quellen: Stiftung Alsterdorf, Patientenakten der Alsterdorfer Anstalten, V363 (E. Dancker). M. Wunder/I. Genkel/H. Jenner, "Auf dieser schiefen Ebene gibt es kein Halten mehr …". Die Alsterdorfer Anstalten im Nationalsozialismus, Hamburg 1987, S. 213-36.