Search for Names, Places and Biographies

Angela Lucassen * 1943

Marckmannstraße 135 (ehemalige Kinderklinik) (Hamburg-Mitte, Rothenburgsort)

ANGELA LUCASSEN
GEB. 12.4.1943
ERMORDET 17.10.1944

further stumbling stones in Marckmannstraße 135 (ehemalige Kinderklinik):
Andreas Ahlemann, Rita Ahrens, Ursula Bade, Hermann Beekhuis, Ute Conrad, Helga Deede, Jürgen Dobbert, Anneliese Drost, Siegfried Findelkind, Rolf Förster, Volker Grimm, Antje Hinrichs, Lisa Huesmann, Gundula Johns, Peter Löding, Elfriede Maaker, Renate Müller, Werner Nohr, Harald Noll, Agnes Petersen, Renate Pöhls, Gebhard Pribbernow, Hannelore Scholz, Doris Schreiber, Ilse Angelika Schultz, Dagmar Schulz, Magdalene Schütte, Gretel Schwieger, Brunhild Stobbe, Hans Tammling, Peter Timm, Heinz Weidenhausen, Renate Wilken, Horst Willhöft

Rothenburgsort Children's Hospital

In the former Rothenburgsort Children's Hospital, the National Socialists implemented their "euthanasia program" from the early 1940s.
Hildegard Thevs was able to research 33 names of murdered children.

A plaque on the building has commemorated the more than 50 murdered babies and children since 1999:

In this building
between 1941 and 1945
more than 50 handicapped children were killed.
An expert committee classified them
as "unworthy life" and assigned them
to be killed in specialized children's wards.
The Hamburg health administration
was involved in this.
Hamburg medical officers supervised
the admission and killing of the children.
Doctors of the children's hospital
carried them out.
None of those involved
was prosecuted for this.


Further information (in German) on the Internet at:

35 Stolpersteine für Rothenburgsort – Hamburger Abendblatt 10.10.2009

Stolpersteine für ermordete Kinder – ND 10.10.2009

Stolpersteine gegen das Vergessen – Pressestelle des Senats 09.10.2009

Die toten Kinder von Rothenburgsort – Nordelbien.de 09.10.2009

35 Stolpersteine verlegt – Hamburg 1 mit Video 09.10.2009

Wikipedia - Institut für Hygiene und Umwelt

Gedenken an mehr als 50 ermordete Kinder - Die Welt 10.11.1999

Euthanasie-Opfer der Nazis - Beitrag NDR Fernsehen 29.05.2010

Hitler und das "lebensunwerte Leben" - Andreas Schlebach NDR 24.08.2009
©

Angela Lucassen, born on 12 Apr. 1943 in Eichede/District of Stormarn, murdered on 17 Oct. 1944

Angela Lucassen was admitted on 3 Oct. 1944 to the Rothenburgsort Children’s Hospital. Eleven days later, her mother received a bill amounting to 40 RM (reichsmark) for ten additional days of hospital stay, but by the end of this period, her child was no longer alive.

Angela was her parents’ first child. The father was 29 years old and an active soldier; the mother was 23 years old. The family lived in Bargteheide in a one-room apartment with a kitchen. Angela was born at home on the due date calculated and weighed 3,000 grams (approx. 6 lb 10 oz). According to the mother, the birth had certainly been easy but in the process, Angela had sustained a brain hemorrhage. At the age of four-and-a-half months, cramps occurred for the first time. The seizures became more frequent and more severe, and they did not disappear either, even under treatment initiated by the Bargteheide physician Dr. Sauer with "Luminaletten” (tablets containing a small dose of Luminal [Phenobarbital] corresponding to the infant’s age).

The landlady’s daughter, a nurse by profession, recommended to the mother to turn to her superior, Dr. Wilhelm Bayer. She called on him with Angela in his private practice at the beginning of 1944. He, too, prescribed tablets. Then Angela fell ill with rubella. After the illness subsided, Mrs. Lucassen visited Bayer a second time, since Angela suffered up to nine seizures a day. He recommended admission to hospital, which the mother refused, however. Instead, she went to see Sauer again, who was practicing medicine in Lübeck by then. He took a lumbar puncture and sent her off with the notice that Angela’s condition was hopeless, adding, "It would be best if the good lord took her in again.”

After another visit to Bayer, he admitted Angela, by then one and a half years old, to the Rothenburgsort Children’s Hospital with a diagnosis of "seizures in combination with cerebral underdevelopment.”
At the time of admission, the seizures occurred four times a day, lasting only a few seconds each. Angela showed no interest in her environment; she was unable to walk and she was wetting her bed ("nicht bettrein”). She was accommodated on the surgical ward. The physician in charge, Ingeborg Wetzel, described Angela as a girl with good physical development "that resisted the examination shrieking. Impossible to get her attention by any means.” Her diagnosis was "idiocy” ("Idiotie”).

Angela was taken ten hours a day, often longer, into the underground air-raid shelter. In order to clarify whether she had a hydrocephalus, an encephalograph was administered on the third day in hospital. It yielded no results. After the examination, Angela vomited. During the hospital stay, no further convulsive fits were registered. Angela died as early as two weeks after admission.

Apparently, Bayer had already reported her to the "Reich Committee” ["for the Scientific Registering of Serious Hereditary and Congenital Illnesses”] ("Reichsausschuss” ["zur wissenschaftlichen Erfassung von erb- und anlagebedingten schweren Leiden”]) even prior to her being admitted, without the mother having given her express approval of "treatment” in advance. In the preliminary proceedings against Bayer, she said, "if, however, I had been asked by Dr. Bayer, I would have authorized him to undertake the treatment, for the condition of the child was such that I would have tried the utmost to help her, even though it was as dangerous as Dr. Bayer described it.”

Angela was administered the lethal Luminal (Phenobarbital) injection by the ward physician (Stationsärztin), with ward nurse Martha Müller assisting. The physician, Ingeborg Wetzel, indicated as the cause of death "circulatory failure.”

On 18 Oct. 1944, one day after Angela’s death, her mother was informed and requested to give her consent to an autopsy. Under number 797, Josef Heine from St. Georg General Hospital summarized the findings of the post-mortem, which he repeated before the investigating judge: "The child A. had pneumonia and a recent brain hemorrhage. Both factors amount to the cause of death. The pneumonia and the hemorrhage can have been caused by the injection of 7–10 cc of Luminal. Luminal can only be detected by chemical analysis. This was not carried out.”

The hospital itself gave notice of Angela’s death four days later, apparently after the autopsy had taken place, to the Billbrook records office, indicating as the cause of death "cerebral anomaly, pneumonia.” The father received special leave after the death of his daughter but he arrived too late for Angela’s burial.

Angela Lucassen spent two weeks at the Rothenburgsort Children’s Hospital, consequently the shortest period of any of the "Reich Committee children” known to us, until her death was brought about. She reached the age of one and a half years.


Translator: Erwin Fink
Kindly supported by the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung, Hamburg.

Stand: March 2017
© Hildegard Thevs

Quellen: StaH 213-12 Staatsanwaltschaft Landgericht – NSG, 0017/001; 332-5 Standesämter, 1237+359/ 1944; 352-8/7 Staatskrankenanstalt Langenhorn, Abl. 2000/1, 63 UA 8.