Search for Names, Places and Biographies


Already layed Stumbling Stones


back to select list

Johanna Führt * 1927

Winterhuder Weg 11 (Hamburg-Nord, Uhlenhorst)


HIER WOHNTE
JOHANNA FÜHRT
JG. 1927
EINGEWIESEN 1940
ALSTERDORFER ANSTALTEN
´VERLEGT` 16.8.1943
AM STEINHOF / WIEN
ERMORDET 3.10.1943

further stumbling stones in Winterhuder Weg 11:
Hans-Peter Harder, Horst Langeloh

Johanna Elisabeth Führt, born 12.4.1927 in Hamburg, admitted to the ‘Alsterdorf Asylum‘ (‘Alsterdorfer Anstalten‘, now ‘Evangelische Stiftung Alsterdorf‘) for the first time on 29.7.1930, second admission on 24.2.1940, transported to ‘Wagner von Jauregg – Curative and Nursing Home of the City of Vienna’ (‘Wagner von Jauregg-Heil- und Pflegeanstalt der Stadt Wien’, also known as the institution ‘Am Steinhof’) in Vienna on 16.8.1943, died there on 3.10.1943

Winterhuder Weg 11 (infant home), Uhlenhorst

Johanna Elisabeth Führt was born on 12 April 1927 in Hamburg. Her mother Antoinette (Antonie) Führt, born on 25 May 1906 in Groppenbruch (now a district of Dortmund), was not married to Johanna's biological father Friedrich Vogt at the time. The relationship produced three more children.

Antonie Führt worked as a ‘housemaid’ and occasionally as a sex worker. The year before her daughter was born, she had been treated for a sexually transmitted disease at Barmbek Hospital and was still under a sexual health care in June 1927. Although the child could not be diagnosed with an infection, her mother's illness was to play a decisive role in Johanna's life.

According to a report from the youth welfare office, Antonie Führt did not look after her daughter. The girl, who was only five weeks old, was therefore admitted to the infant home at Winterhuder Weg 11 on 2 June 1927. In 1930, it was reported there that Johanna had residual symptoms of rickets. Her visual acuity was said to be severely impaired by an iris coloboma on both sides (congenital cleft formation of the eye due to an embryonic malformation). She was said to have been easily irritable. Her ability to speak was still completely underdeveloped. Overall, she was judged in the expert opinion of the youth welfare office to be an imbecile (mentally handicapped) child who was ‘most probably also lues germ-damaged by her mother’. (lues = syphilis).

As a result, Johanna was recommended for admission to the ‘Alsterdorf Asylum‘ (‘Alsterdorfer Anstalten‘, now ‘Evangelische Stiftung Alsterdorf‘). The doctor at the youth welfare office, Ubenauf, confirmed in the medical admission certificate: ‘Admission to Alsterdorf necessary due to feeblemindedness (lues cong.). Poor, backward child. Iris coloboma on both sides.’

Johanna Führt had been living in the Alsterdorf Asylum since 14 August 1930. Even there, the care staff described her as restless, agitated, without speech, she could pull keys out of a cupboard and tried to put them back into the keyhole. Johanna survived pneumonia at the beginning of 1931. She was cheerful, obedient, spoke very indistinctly, but understood a lot. A little later, Johanna was said to help with small tasks such as dusting. In July 1931, the nurses noted that Johanna helped to undress her fellow patients in the evening, greeted a patient in the morning and asked him if he had slept well. In the play school, she surrounded her fellow patients with care and showed great persistance in needlework, which she completed despite her severe visual impairment. According to reports, she was able to eat and drink alone in 1932. She was hospitalised again due to pneumonia and bronchitis. In the course of 1932, there were signs of further developmental progress. Johanna could now speak small sentences. She treated the other children kindly and enjoyed spending a lot of time with them.

She was also described favourably in the play school: she liked to spend time with smaller children, took them by the hand on the way to school and looked after them well.

At the beginning of 1933, Johanna had to be transferred to hospital again due to bronchitis and at the end of 1933 due to pneumonia. The reports about Johanna in the following years are similar to those of the previous years.

On 12 February 1940, Johanna was released ‘on a trial basis’ to the family of the child's father Friedrich Vogt, Tresckowstraße, but had to return to the Alsterdorf Asylum eleven days later. Friedrich Vogt's wife did not feel able to guarantee the care of the ‘extremely dependent’ child.

Records from Alsterdorf from May 1943 describe Johanna as follows: ‘Pat.[tient] is a quiet, contented child. She does a lot of little handouts. She is always ready to help. (...) Under supervision she can take care of her personal hygiene on her own, she just can't comb her hair. She plays very nicely with her dolls. She can also do little things around the house, but she gets tired easily.

During the heavy air raids on Hamburg at the end of July/beginning of August 1943 (‘Operation Gomorrah’), the Alsterdorf Asylum also suffered bomb damage. The head of the institution, SA member Pastor Friedrich Lensch, took the opportunity to get rid of some of the residents who were considered ‘weak in labour, in need of care or particularly difficult’ by transporting them to other sanatoriums and nursing homes with the approval of the health authorities. On 16 August 1943, 228 women and girls from Alsterdorf and 72 girls and women from the Langenhorn sanatorium and Nursing Home were ‘transferred’ to the ‘Wagner von Jauregg – Curative and Nursing Home of the City of Vienna’ (also known as the ‘Am Steinhof’ institution) on one of these transports. Among them was sixteen-year-old Johanna Führt.

During the first phase of Nazi ‘Euthanasia’ from October 1939 to August 1941, the institution in Vienna was an intermediate institution for the Hartheim killing centre near Linz. After the official end of the murders in the killing centres, mass murders continued in previous intermediate institutions, including the Vienna institution itself: through overdoses of medication and non-treatment of illness, but above all through food deprivation. By the end of 1945, 257 of the 300 girls and women from Hamburg had died, 196 of them from Alsterdorf. Johanna Führt was one of them.

The few reports written about Johanna Führt in the Vienna institution completely lack the empathy that was still evident in Alsterdorf. The doctor Barbara Uiberrak only wrote in her admission report on 12 September 1943: ‘Poorly oriented, in need of care, quiet. Complains of earache. Temperature 39°.’ Two days later: ‘weak, 39 degrees.’ On 20 September, she was diagnosed with ‘congenital weakness, lues’ and ‘temperature 38.7 degrees, deteriorating.’ In the Alsterdorf Asylum, however, Johanna Führt's venereal disease was never mentioned. On 1 October it read: ‘Permanently unclean in bed, in need of care, temperature 37.8 degrees, complains of pain.’

Finally, on 3 October 1943: ‘Exitus lethalis, diagnosis TB pneumonia.’

While no particular symptoms of illness were documented for Johanna Führt beforehand, her health is said to have deteriorated so rapidly in Vienna that she finally died after just one and a half months. There is no evidence of any medical measures to counteract her ‘decline’, so it is safe to assume that none were taken.

Barbara Uiberrak was one of the doctors involved in the ‘Euthanasia’ murders who never showed remorse and were never called to account. She was the pathologist responsible for the entire Steinhof Institutions from 1938 until the 1960s and also performed an autopsy on Johanna Führt's body. In the post-mortem report, she stated the cause of death as follows: ‘Cavernous pulmonary TB. Hepar lobatum [liver deformity, usually known as the final stage of tertiary syphilis]. Intestinal TB.’

Stand: January 2025
© Ingo Wille

Quellen: Evangelische Stiftung Alsterdorf, Archiv, Sonderakte V 348 (Johanna Führt); Zu Hepar lobatum: https://www.sozialministerium.at/Themen/Gesundheit/Uebertragbare-Krankheiten/Infektionskrankheiten-A-Z/Syphilis.html#:~:text=Tertiäre%20Syphilis&text=Im%20Fall%20einer%20Neurosyphilis%20im,dieses%20Stadium%20jedoch%20selten%20geworden. Zugriff am 28.2.2024

print preview  / top of page