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Edmund Ringert 1922 (Foto auf Personalkarteikarte der Polizeibehörde)
© StaH

Edmund Ringert * 1898

Poolstraße 20 (Hamburg-Mitte, Neustadt)

HIER WOHNTE
EDMUND RINGERT
JG. 1898
VERHAFTET 1938
KZ FUHLSBÜTTEL
NEUENGAMME
ERMORDET 23.8.1942

further stumbling stones in Poolstraße 20:
Sophie Zippor Grevesmühl

Edmund Paul Ringert, born 24.12.1898 in Schleusenau/District Bromberg/Posen (today Polish Powiat Bydgoski), arrested several times, murdered in Neuengamme concentration camp on 23.8.1942

Poolstraße 20

In front of the entrance to the house at Poolstraße 20 in Hamburg there are now two Stolpersteine. One of them commemorates the fate of Sophie Zippor Grevemühls, the other one that of Edmund Paul Ringerts. The inscription of the latter stone reads:

"HERE LIVED EDMUND RINGERT, BORN 1898 - ARRESTED 1938 -
KZ FUHLSBÜTTEL - NEUENGAMME - MURDERED 23.8.1942".

According to information from the Hamburg State Archives, Paul Grevesmühl's widow Sophie, as a tenant in Poolstraße, was also Ringert's landlady: he lived with her as a subtenant for about three years. Research in address books of the 1930s shows only Paul Grevesmühl, later his widow Sophie, but not Edmund Ringert as tenants by name. Nevertheless, from March 1933, the Grevesmühls lived first, and then, after Paul's death on February 22, 1934, Sophie Grevesmühl and Edmund Ringert lived on the second floor of the house at number 20 Poolstrasse. The entry in the municipal address directory of 1935 read: "Grevesmühl Wwe. P., I.". ("Wwe." stood for "widow," the "P." for the first name of the deceased main tenant Paul, and the "I." for the first floor).

Edmund Paul Ringert was born on Dec. 24, 1898 in Schleusenau (District Bromberg/Bydgoszcz in Posen/West Prussia), which was still German at that time and is now Polish. As will be explained, his persecution by German authorities, which began in 1938, was based on their disdainful assessment of Ringert's sexual preferences. In 1939, his path of suffering, which was desired by the state, also led him to Waren at river Müritz. There is now a second stumbling block dedicated to him at Am Seeufer 11.

Print and online sources as well as information from the Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial and materials from the Hamburg State Archives now make it possible to trace Edmund Paul Ringert's life. It can be learned that he grew up as the son of Eduard Ringerts and Julianna Ringerts, née Hennig, in a Catholic family that included seven siblings in addition to himself. Edmund graduated from elementary school but did not enter an apprenticeship, instead working for the railroad for some time. During the First World War, he fought at the front - finally in the rank of grenadier - and thus became an American prisoner of war in 1918. His release in 1920 was initially followed by work in the Ruhr mining industry.

At the time of his employment as a sub-warden with the Hamburg Police (Ordnungspolizei) on May 26, 1922, Edmund Ringert gave "laborer" as his civilian occupation. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum records the specific occupation of a milling worker. At this time, Edmund Ringert did not yet live on Poolstraße, but rather as a subtenant with the Matthiesens at Bornstraße 7 (HH-Rotherbaum). This can be seen from a personnel card kept at the Hamburg State Archives, which the police department, as his temporary employer, created about him in 1922. On June 30, 1928, however, Ringert left the police service again. After this career setback, he initially hired himself out as a casual laborer. A decade later, he worked as a plant security guard at Mecklenburgische Metallwarenfabrik m. b. H., or "Memefa" for short.

In 1938, Edmund Ringert came into conflict with the law because of his sex sexual orientation. Between November 18 and 24, 1938, he was therefore imprisoned for a week in the Fuhlsbüttel concentration camp. Pursuant to § 175 of the RStGB, the Hamburg District Court sentenced him on December 15, 1938, to ten months in prison for "continued misdemeanor." After he had served his sentence, the responsible state authority forcibly ordered Ringert to work in Waren /Müritz in October 1939.

In the second volume of the documentation "Stolpersteine in der Hamburger Neustadt und Altstadt - Biographische Spurensuche" (Stumbling Stones in Hamburg's New Town and Old Town - A Biographical Search for Traces) by Susanne Rosendahl, the legal situation of homosexual men is explained in detail: According to this, sexual acts between men were punishable in Germany from 1871 to 1994 under § 175 of the Criminal Code. From 1935 onward, a "covetous glance" or physical contact was sufficient for conviction. Often, denunciations were first made from within a man's social environment, before the Secret State Police or the criminal investigation department began concrete investigations. During the Nazi rule, some 54,000 men were sentenced to prison or penal servitude under § 175 or § 175a of the German Criminal Code (RStGB) - and some of them were also committed to "sanatoriums and nursing homes. This was regularly accompanied by the destruction of their social existence.

Especially in the case of repetition, there was even the threat of forced consent to castration or the committal to "concentration camps" as well as to otherwise named institutions for abuse and killing. This was regularly accompanied by the destruction of social existence. Particularly in the case of repetition, there was even the threat of forced consent to castration or incarceration in "concentration camps" or in otherwise named institutions for abuse and killing. Denigrated by state authorities as "habitual criminals to be stamped out," many defendants chose suicide while the proceedings against them were still underway.

One section of the publication "Homosexual Persecution in Hamburg 1919-1969" by Bernhard Rosenkranz, Ulf Bollmann and Gottfried Lorenz, based on the results of the work of the initiative "Gemeinsam gegen das Vergessen - Stolpersteine für homosexuelle NS-Opfer" (Together against Forgetting - Stumbling Stones for Homosexual Nazi Victims), is devoted to the Mecklenburgische Metallwarenfabrik m. b. H., or "Memefa" for short, in Waren, an armaments factory owned by the Quandt industrialist family. This modern Nazi model factory produced semi-finished products (prefabricated raw material) and finished parts made of aluminum for the aircraft industry during the Nazi regime. For this purpose, Memefa used Eastern workers, prisoners of war and forced laborers - dubbed "compulsory laborers" by the Nazi regime - under sometimes inhumane conditions as employees.

As an example, Rosenkranz and others present the company as well as the fate of Edmund Ringert from Hamburg as one of the many workers exploited in Waren. In addition to him, numerous other men - often convicted under § 175 RStGB - were placed at Memefa by the employment office. In 1939, the National Socialist Reich government introduced a general obligation to work. From about then on, the Reich Aviation Ministry also used Memefa as an armaments factory for the Luftwaffe (Air Force) as well as for the Kriegsmarine (Navy): the company supplied segments for submarine construction, detonators for projectiles as well as control units for bombs.

After a denunciation - later falsified - by a hustler, the bachelor Edmund Ringert was again in trouble: Rosenkranz et al. report that the hustler Paul Kühnapfel had claimed to the Hamburg criminal police, after looking through an offender index, that he had been "indecently" touched by him. As a result, the suspect was arrested a second time in Waren at 9 a.m. on October 9, 1940. As the first lieutenant of the protective police there, Kuhr, stated in a letter to the senior public prosecutor at the Hamburg Regional Court on October 10, the prisoner Ringert was then taken to Ludwigslust at 7:40 a.m. the following day to a collective transport van. This took him to the remand prison in Hamburg-Stadt, i.e. probably to Holstenglacis 3.

Ringert admitted to the local investigators that he had "fornicated" with the hustler. For this, on January 10, 1941, the Hamburg District Court again punished him with one year in prison in accordance with § 175 of the RStGB. The reasons for the sentence stated at the time: "The defendant relapsed within one year. He must now face a severe prison sentence."

According to Rosenkranz and others, Ringert was released from the Hamburg-Stadt pretrial detention center on October 9, 1941, i.e., after only ten months, and transferred to the Schwerin police authority, which sent him to the Neuengamme concentration camp "for preventive detention" in October or November 1941.

Internal documents of the concentration camp listed Edmund Ringert there as a "professional criminal" (BV) with the prisoner number 06503. Hermann Kaienburg's study "Das Konzentrationslager Neuengamme 1938-1945" (Neuengamme Concentration Camp 1938-1945) reveals, among other things, that the days in the concentration camp during the summer months began at 4:30 a.m. with reveille. Work began at 6:00 a.m., evening roll call at 7:00 p.m., and night rest from 9:30 p.m. on. In winter, reveille was not until 5:00 a.m. and the prisoners worked until nightfall. Night rest was now already at 9:00 pm. On Sundays, work continued until 1 p.m. According to Kaienburg, the SS introduced public hangings as a punishment in the camp in 1942. Also in the same year, a separate crematorium was put into operation. More than half of the approximately 100,000 prisoners at Neuengamme concentration camp did not survive Nazi persecution.

In 1942, there were about 5,000 prisoners in Neuengamme concentration camp. Hermann Kaienburg points out that the supply of food for the concentration camp inmates was subject to fluctuations. In April 1942, for example, the food rations were reduced by the concentration camp management. In the fall of the same year, the management of the clinker plant repeatedly complained about the poor physical condition of the imprisoned workers. This made it seem impossible to provide the services that had been customary in the past. After another reduction in the winter of 1942/43, more than ten percent of the camp inmates died each month.

Laboratory examination books of Neuengamme concentration camp show that Edmund Paul Ringert repeatedly suffered health problems during his imprisonment and therefore stayed in the infirmary several times: On February 20, 1942, an examination of his urine was conducted, and on August 22, 1942 - one day before his death - the in-house laboratory finally examined the prisoner's sputum (saliva) for tuberculosis. The finding: "Tbc: ø."

Edmund Ringert never saw his last place of residence, Am Seeufer 11 in Waren, again. He was murdered at 10 a.m. on August 23, 1942. In the sick bay death register Stammlager II of the concentration camp (with records of the dead from May 1 to December 16, 1942) as well as in the virtually identical register of the "Sonderstandesamt A" established by the SS in Neuengamme, the cause of death is noted as "Cardiale Insuffizienz" - i.e. acute heart failure. According to surviving prisoners, however, such information served to systematically conceal entirely different causes. The actual causes of death were hunger, maltreatment and fatal exhaustion due to the hard forced labor - or death sentences. The website of the Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial names the "Neuengamme Concentration Camp" as Ringert's place of death. The death certificate, viewed online via Arolsen Archives, specifies this with the addition of the address "Hausdeich 60".


After the end of the "Third Reich", the inhumane § 175 StGB (German penal code) continued to exist not only in the western occupation zones, but also in the territory of the Federal Republic. Between 1949 and 1969 alone, around 100,000 homosexual men were investigated. In about half of the cases, convictions were handed down. Section 175 of the German Penal Code was still upheld by the Federal Constitutional Court in 1957, and it was not until 1969 that sexual acts between men of legal age (i.e. at least 21 years of age) remained unpunished in West Germany. Female homosexuality was not prosecuted, but could still have an aggravating effect on punishment in court if other accusations were made.

The cremation register of the Hamburg-Ohlsdorf cemetery shows that Edmund Ringert's body was not cremated here until October 15, 1942, almost two months after his death. "To cover the funeral costs," Ringert's mortal remains had already been transferred to the Anatomical Institute of the Eppendorf University Hospital the day after his death (i.e., on August 24, 1942). Fellow prisoners confirmed at the time that the body of the prisoner, who had died at the age of only 43, had been picked up. Like almost 500 other dead from Neuengamme Concentration Camp, he was dissected as part of the teaching of medical students at the UKE.

The burial of the urn took place on or shortly after October 15, 1942. The location of the grave was initially designated Bl.71 Rh.53 No.29. Sixteen years later, on October 6, 1958, the urn was moved to a warrior's cemetery of honor in Ohlsdorf. Edmund Paul Ringert's grave has since been designated Bp.74 Rh.46 No.05.

Translation by Beate Meyer
Stand: February 2022
© Lars Güthling, Hamburg

Quellen: Kaienburg, Hermann: "Das Konzentrationslager Neuengamme 1938–1945", Bonn 1997; Rosendahl, Susanne: "Stolpersteine in der Hamburger Neustadt und Altstadt – Biographische Spurensuche." (Bd. 2), Hamburg 2018; Rosenkranz, Bernhard/ Bollmann, Ulf/ Lorenz, Gottfried: "Homosexuellen-Verfolgung in Hamburg 1919–1969" (basierend auf den Ergebnissen der Arbeit der Initiative "Gemeinsam gegen das Vergessen – Stolpersteine für homosexuelle NS-Opfer"), Hamburg 2009; "Hamburger Adressbücher" 1930 – 1940; https://www.ushmm.org/online/hsv/person_view.php?PersonId=3764519 (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; online eingesehen: 28.8.2021); Materialien (Laboruntersuchungsbücher, Krankenrevier-Totenbuch Stammlager II, Register des "Sonderstandesamtes A", Feuerbestattungsregister des Friedhofs Hamburg-Ohlsdorf u. a.) sowie schriftliche Auskünfte der KZ-Gedenkstätte Neuengamme (2019); https://www.kz-gedenkstaette-neuengamme.de/geschichte/totenbuch/die-toten-1940-1945/?tx_ registerofdeaths_registerofdeaths%5Bcontroller%5D=Person&tx_registerofdeaths_registerofdeaths%5Bperson%5D =15931&cHash=efac88c9a192646a43e0c18b62910a4b; Website der KZ-Gedenkstätte Neuengamme https://www.kz-gedenkstaette-neuengamme.de; online eingesehen: 28.8.2021; Website Arolsen Archives (Sterbeurkunde Edmund P. Ringerts), https://collections.arolsen-archives.org/G/SIMS/01013002/0033/ 104179197/001.jpg, online eingesehen 2019; StaH, 331-1_II_634 (Personalkarteikarte mit Porträtfoto u. a.) sowie telefonische und schriftliche Auskünfte des Staatsarchivs Hamburg (2019).