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Mikel Kairies
© Archiv Evangelische Stiftung Alsterdorf

Mikel Kairies * 1872

Herrenweide 17 (Hamburg-Mitte, St. Pauli)

HIER WOHNTE
MIKEL KAIRIES
JG. 1872
EINGEWIESEN 1939
ALSTERDORFER ANSTALTEN
‚VERLEGT‘ 10.8.1943
‚HEILANSTALT‘ MAINKOFEN
ERMORDET 9.5.1944

Mikkeles (known as Mikel) Kairies, born on 11.11.1872 in Schudnaggen, Memel district (today Lūžgaliai, Lithuania), from 23.12.1929 onwards stays at the Friedrichsberg State Hospital, the "Langenhorn Sanatorium and Nursing Home" and the "Alsterdorf Asylum" (today Evangelical Foundation Alsterdorf), on 10.8.1943 transported to the ”Sanatorium and Nursing Home Mainkofen” ("Heil- und Pflegeanstalt Mainkofen”) near Deggendorf, where he died on 9.5.1944

Herrenweide 17

Mikkeles (known as Mikel) Kairies was born on 11 November 1872 in Schudnaggen, Memel district in East Prussia (today Lūžgaliai, Lithuania), the son of goat farmer (Kätner) Martin Kairies and his wife Marie, née Lavrenz. (Kätners were small farmers who had their own or leasehold farmsteads where they kept at least goats.)

The unmarried Mikel Kairies was admitted to the Friedrichsberg State Hospital in Hamburg on 23 December 1929.

In the 1920s, several people with the surname Kairies lived in the then independent Prussian town of Harburg who may have been related to him, including the family of the factory worker Mikkeles Kairies, who was born on 30 August 1870 in Schudienen, Tilsit district in East Prussia (now Sūdėnai, Lithuania). However, no family connection could be confirmed.

In 1929, Mikel Kairies lived at Herrenweide 17 in the St. Pauli part of Hamburg as a subtenant in a basement flat.

Based on the diagnosis of "insanity (persecution mania)" by Kurt Michaelis, a doctor with a practice at Reeperbahn 14, Mikel Kairies was taken from his home by ambulance to the Friedrichsberg State Hospital. There he told the attending physician that he had attended the village school and then worked in the countryside. He had done military service from 1892 to 1894. During the war, he had been wounded in Russia and Romania.

His parents had died, and he had not heard from his siblings, about whom he gave no further details, since the First World War.

We do not know when Mikel Kairies came to Hamburg.

He reported at the Friedrichsberg State Hospital that he had been persecuted since 1908. He felt he had been insulted by a woman's voice, reacted and received further insults. Shortly after his military service, a fortune teller had predicted his future mental health problems: evil people would persecute him throughout his life.

Mikel Kairies believed that he was being harassed by "radio waves" and slandered everywhere as a "bad person", so that he could not find work anywhere. Nevertheless, he learned to be a cobbler and was able to earn a living. The acquaintances to whom he told about his problems soon avoided him, so that he became lonely.

He attributed his stay at the Friedrichsberg State Hospital to the work of "criminals" who had harassed him with voices.

During his time in Friedrichsberg, Mikel Kairies' situation hardly changed. He could not be persuaded to work and mostly sat apathetically on a chair. He was soon considered quarrelsome and prone to brawling with younger patients. It became apparent that the now sixty-year-old was powerful and agile. A nurse reported that Mikel Kairies "resisted everything" and behaved in a dogmatic manner.

When Mikel Kairies was deemed to have exhausted all treatment options at the Friedrichsberg State Hospital, he was transferred to the "Langenhorn State Hospital” ("Staatskrankenanstalt Langenhorn") in northern Hamburg on 18 January 1935. In Langenhorn, too, his illness was diagnosed as "insanity, paranoia".

On 28 August 1939, Mikel Kairies was transferred from the institution in Langenhorn, now known as a "Sanatorium and Nursing Home” ("Heil- und Pflegeanstalt") to what was then called the "Alsterdorf Asylum" (Alsterdorfer Anstalten"). The reason for the transfer is not apparent from the files.
It was not until two years after his admission to Alsterdorf, on 6 October 1941, that a summary assessment of him was written: "Pat.[ient] makes an intelligent impression and is very interested in his surroundings. Prone to sudden outbursts of anger. He performs tasks, is quite independent. Keeps himself meticulously clean. His appetite is normal." It was not until 25 March 1943 that another report was written, which was essentially similar to the one from 1941. The diagnosis was now schizophrenia.

On 10 August 1943, the Asylum‘s doctor, SA member Gerhard Kreyenberg, noted the following about Mikel Kairies: "Transferred to Mainkofen due to severe damage to the Asylum caused by air raids. Signed Dr Kreyenberg".

After the "Alsterdorf Asylum" suffered damage during the heavy Allied air raids on Hamburg at the end of July/beginning of August 1943 ("Operation Gomorrah"), the director of the Alsterdorf Asylum, SA member Pastor Friedrich Lensch, took advantage of the situation and asked the Hamburg health authorities for permission to transport around 750 residents because they had been made homeless by the bombing. Between 7 and 16 August 1943, three transports carrying a total of 469 girls, boys, women and men left Alsterdorf in different directions. On 10 August 1943, a transport with 113 men and boys left Alsterdorf for the "Mainkofen Sanatorium and Nursing Home" near Deggendorf.

Mikel Kairies was part of this transport, which arrived in Mainkofen on 12 August 1943. There, in March 1944, he allegedly contracted pulmonary tuberculosis. As noted on the death certificate, he died of this disease on 5 May 1944. Schizophrenia was listed as his underlying condition.

On Mikel Kairies' patient record at the "Mainkofen Sanatorium and Nursing Home", there is a stamped entry with the following content: "Registration form sent to the Reich Ministry of the Interior on 15 October 1940". The registration form was probably drawn up by the "Alsterdorf Asylum" together with 406 other registration forms and sent on 15 October to the "Euthanasia" headquarters at Tiergartenstraße 4 in Berlin. We do not know whether the "Euthanasia" headquarters responded to the registration form for Mikel Kairies or what that response was. It also remains unclear why the stamp on Mikel Kairies' Mainkofen patient file only appears with the year 1943.

The so-called "registration forms" were used to record patients living in psychiatric hospitals during the first phase of the Nazi "Euthanasia" programme between 1939 and August 1941. The "Euthanasia" headquarters decided on the life and death of those affected. In the course of "Aktion T 4", a code name based on the address Tiergartenstraße 4 in Berlin, more than 200,000 patients were probably registered using registration forms and 70,000 of them were suffocated with carbon monoxide in specially equipped killing centres.

The "Mainkofen Sanatorium and Nursing Home", which was a psychiatric hospital before the Nazi era, was systematically converted into a death camp. During the first phase of the "Euthanasia" murders until August 1941, people were transported from there to the Hartheim Castle killing centre near Linz and murdered with gas. The names of 606 of them are known. Later, the patients in Mainkofen were murdered themselves, through starvation as part of the Bavarian Hunger Decree (a diet of starvation rations, meat- and fat-free food, known in Mainkofen as the ‘3-B diet’), neglect by nursing staff and overdoses of medication. According to the information available in 2016, 760 residents of the Mainkofen institution died of malnutrition. The causes of death given were intestinal catarrh, tuberculosis, pneumonia and pulmonary tuberculosis.

Of the 113 boys and men from Alsterdorf, who arrived in Mainkofen on 12 August 1943, 74 died by the end of 1945. As in other death camps, "pulmonary tuberculosis" was repeatedly cited as the cause of death – forty times among the 74 patients from Alsterdorf who died in Mainkofen. "Intestinal catarrh" was cited as the cause of death fifteen times. Only 39 people from Alsterdorf survived 1945, including 15 adults and 24 children and young people up to the age of 21. The surviving patients were transferred back to Alsterdorf on 19 December 1947.

It can be assumed that Mikel Kairies fell victim to the food deprivation that is common practice in Mainkofen.

Stand: October 2025
© Ingo Wille

Quellen: Evangelische Stiftung Alsterdorf, Archiv, Bewohnerakte V 399 (Mikel Kairies). Michael Wunder, Ingrid Genkel, Harald Jenner, Auf dieser schiefen Ebene gibt es kein Halten mehr – Die Alsterdorfer Anstalten im Nationalsozialismus, Stuttgart 2016, S. 315-330.