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Johanna Koch
© Archiv Evangelische Stiftung Alsterdorf

Johanna Koch (née Höfer) * 1869

Humboldtstraße 64-66 (Hamburg-Nord, Barmbek-Süd)

HIER WOHNTE
JOHANNA KOCH
GEB. HÖFER
JG. 1869
EINGEWIESEN 1933
HEILANSTALT LANGENHORN
´VERLEGT` 16.8.1943
AM STEINHOF / WIEN
ERMORDET 25.3.1944

Johanna Koch, née Höfer, born on 14 Nov. 1869 in Altona, admitted to the Alsterdorf Asylum (Alsterdorfer Anstalten, now the Alsterdorf Protestant Foundation) on 25 Feb. 1933, transported to Vienna on 16 Aug. 1943 to the ‘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‘, died there on 25 Mar. 1944

Humboldtstraße 64-66 (Barmbek-Süd)

Johanna Fanny Wilhelmine Höfer, married name Koch, was born on 14 Nov. 1869 in the then still independent Prussian city of Altona as the daughter of the ship's carpenter Johann Heinrich Andreas Höfer, born on 10 Jan. 1838, and his wife Maria Caroline, née Filitz, born on 16 Jan. 1838. Johanna had two younger sisters, Martha Henriette, born on 20 May 1878 in Altona, and Fanny Wilhelmine Martha, whose birth dates we do not know.

No details have survived about Johanna Höfer's childhood and youth. As a young woman, she earned her living as a seamstress. This is evident from the birth certificate of her son Theodor Johann Martin, whom she gave birth to out of wedlock on 16 July 1890.

On 3 Aug. 1901, Johanna Höfer married Carl Friedrich Koch, born on 15 Sept. 1876 in Halberstadt, who described himself as a sculptor at the time of the marriage. In March 1905, he authorised Theodor to bear the surname Koch. Carl Friedrich Koch was quite successful professionally. He rose to become plant manager at the renowned manufacturer of grand and upright pianos Steinway & Sons with production facilities in New York and Hamburg, among other places.

In contrast, the marriage between Johanna and Carl Friedrich Koch was not very happy. According to her husband, Johanna Koch was always ‘hysterical’. She is said to have suffered a severe seizure for the first time in 1915, which recurred at longer intervals and caused her to lose consciousness each time. Johanna Koch is also said to have been a heavy drinker, so much so that she was diagnosed with drunkenness. According to her husband, she was no longer able to run the household.

After a stay in the private clinic ‘Rockwinkel’ for ‘nervous and mental patients’ and withdrawal treatment in Bremen-Neuland from 24 July 1925 to 14 Jan. 1926, Johanna Koch was discharged as ‘unhealed’ with the diagnosis ‘epilepsy’.

The marriage between Johanna and Carl Friedrich Koch was divorced with effect from 4 March 1928. Shortly afterwards, on 12 June 1928, Carl Friedrich Koch married again. (He died on 2 Aug. 1946 in Hamburg). Johanna Koch's son died on 3 Dec. 1932 in Hamburg.

We do not know how Johanna Koch spent the five years after her divorce. Before she was admitted to the Alsterdorf Asylum (‘Alsterdorfer Anstalten’, now Evangelische Stiftung Alsterdorf) as a patient, she lived as a subtenant with Sauer at Humboldtstraße 64 in Barmbek. Her landlady called in the doctor Hans Krohn on 21 Feb. 1933 because Johanna Koch had said the same thing ten times in the course of a quarter of an hour. She had also recently found Johanna Koch in bed at night, unconscious and foaming at the mouth. This state had lasted about half an hour. An emergency doctor had been called at the beginning of November 1932 because of a similar incident. The doctor then declared that Johanna Koch had to be admitted to the Alsterdorf Asylum due to mental weakness.

She was admitted on 25 Feb. 1933, and the staff there noted that she was very restless, loud, derogatory and violent towards her fellow patients and carers, whom she had called crude names, and that she feared her breakfast might be poisoned. In autumn 1933, Johanna Koch fantasised that ‘everyone was going to the concert with my husband and I always had to work.’ After hitting an employee of the institution, she said to her, ‘Now you're finally going out with Carl Koch, you old man.’ This behaviour continued in the months leading up to autumn 1933. Then, in October, she suffered a very severe seizure, after which - according to her patient file - she became much calmer and more active. In the morning, she got up with the other residents without being asked and the imaginings that had previously plagued her no longer occurred.

At the beginning of her stay in Alsterdorf, Johanna Koch weighed 52 kg. By October 1936, she had put on a lot of weight and now weighed 74 kg.

The staff tried to keep Johanna Koch busy with small household chores, but she could not be persuaded to do so: ‘My mother didn't do that either as she got older.’ Or: ‘And if I'm not fifty years old, then I'm a hundred years old and centenarians don't need to work any more.’

In the years that followed, the reports were similar: she dressed alone, needed help with personal hygiene, continued to be very unclean, at times quite mischievous and wilful.

Her weight dropped again over the years, to 44 kg at the end of 1940 and 39 kg in spring 1943.

The Alsterdorf Asylum also suffered bomb damage as a result of the heavy air raids on Hamburg at the end of July/beginning of August 1943 (‘Operation Gomorrah’). The head of the asylum, 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’ (‘Wagner von Jauregg-Heil- und Pflegeanstalt der Stadt Wien’, also known as the institution ‘Am Steinhof’) in Vienna on one of these transports. Charlotte Heyne was among them.

On admission to the institution in Vienna, Johanna Koch was judged to be quiet and clean, but physically weak. She was nice, friendly and very polite at the admission meeting, but lacked orientation and denied having had seizures or drunk alcohol.

In February 1944, Johanna Koch's weight had dropped further to 36 kg.

At the beginning of March 1944, the Viennese institutions filled out the ‘Registration Form I’ ("Meldebogen I”), which had to be used during the first euthanasia phase from 1939 to 1941 to report important data on the institution inmates to the ‘euthanasia’ centre in Berlin, Tiergartenstraße 4. The information on these individual registration forms formed the basis for deciding whether people with mental disabilities or mental illnesses were to be killed in one of the six gassing centres. The diagnosis ‘epilepsy’ was entered for Johanna Koch. Her medical file provides no information about the purpose of this registration form long after the centralised control of the murder of the sick and whether it was sent to Berlin, or whether it had any influence on Johanna Koch's further fate.

On 24 March 1944, her medical file stated that her left lower leg showed intense redness and slight swelling. On suspicion of ‘erysipelas’ (skin disease/ erysipelas), Johanna Koch was transferred to Pavilion 19, which served as an ‘infection pavilion’ and was a place of induced death.

One day later, the patient file stated ‘sudden deterioration’. Johanna Koch died on 25 March 1944, the cause of death noted as ‘status epilepticus, pulmonary oedema, acute cardiac insufficiency’.

After the official end of the first phase of ‘Euthanasia’ in August 1941, the murders of the sick were systematically continued within the institution, but by other means: Overdoses of medication, failure to treat illnesses and, above all, food deprivation led to the deaths of over 3,500 patients in the Vienna institution. Of the 300 girls and women from Hamburg, a total of 257 died by the end of 1945, 196 of them from Alsterdorf, including Johanna Koch.

Stand: December 2024
© Ingo Wille

Quellen: Adressbuch Hamburg 1933; StaH 332-5 Standesämter 6201 Geburtsregister Nr. 1448/1878 (Martha Henriette Höfer), 6264 Geburtsregister Nr. 2345/1890 (Theodor Johann Martin Höfer), 5954 Heiratsregister Nr. 779/1909 (Carl Friedrich Koch/Johanna Fanny Wilhelmine Höfer), 8830 Heiratsregister Nr. 328/1928 (Carl Friedrich Koch/Wilhelmine Minna Anna Klara Sohl), 5233 Sterberegister Nr. 200/1897 (Johann Heinrich Andreas Höfer), 5241 Sterberegister Nr. 2315/1899 (Marie Caroline Höfer), 8115 Sterberegister Nr. 482/1932 (Theodor Johann Martin Koch); Evangelische Stiftung Alsterdorf, Archiv, Sonderakte V 181 (Johanna Koch); Peter von Rönn, Der Transport nach Wien, in: Peter von Rönn u.a., Wege in den Tod, Hamburgs Anstalt Langenhorn und die Euthanasie in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus, Hamburg 1993, S. 425 ff.; Michael Wunder, Ingrid Genkel, Harald Jenner, Auf dieser schiefen Ebene gibt es kein Halten mehr – Die Alsterdorfer Anstalten im Nationalsozialismus, Stuttgart 2016, S. 283 ff., 331 ff.. Harald Jenner, Michael Wunder, Hamburger Gedenkbuch Euthanasie – Die Toten 1939-1945, Hamburg 2017, S. 305.