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Anna Brandt (née Lindemann) * 1898

Hohensteiner Straße 3 (Hamburg-Nord, Dulsberg)

HIER WOHNTE
ANNA BRANDT
GEB. LINDEMANN
JG. 1898
DEPORTIERT
AUSCHWITZ
ERMORDET 9.12.1943

Anna Marie Dora Minna Brandt, neé Lindemann, born on 11 Nov. 1898 in Hamburg, died on 9 Dec. 1943 in Auschwitz concentration camp

Hohensteiner Straße 3

Anna Brandt was born as daughter of the married couple Wilhelm and Maria Lindemann in Hamburg; she had a brother called Wilhelm. In 1921 she married the waiter Otto Ernst Brandt and they had three daughters Hedwig, Annemarie, and Hildegard. The family lived in the neighbourhood Dulsberg at Hohensteiner Straße 3. In a criminal file of 1932 Anna’s profession is indicated as "commercial employee", later files declare her as being "unemployed”.

In 1927 Anna came into conflict with the law for the first time. She was sentenced to eight days of confinement by the district court of the City of Hamburg because of two cases of shoplifting which she served in April 1928. On 4 April 1929 – approximately six weeks after being once again remanded in custody – she was divorced from her husband. This time she was firstly sentenced for theft by the district court of Schwarzenbeck and some days afterwards by the district court of Altona to one month prison respectively. After having served these sentences by the end of May 1929 she was, however, not released, but remanded in custody again and was sentenced by the district court of the City of Hamburg to a concurrence sentence of one year and nine months in prison for theft and shop robbery and for forging documents.

On 5 Dec. 1930 she was released from prison after a shortened sentence. After her release she stayed in the area of St. Georg at the hotel "Linden” and at a former fellow prisoner’s place. In Dec. 1930 and Jan. 1931 Anna Brandt committed several thefts in schools of the area and in the hospital St. Georg. On 23 Jan. 1931 she was remanded in custody for these crimes. It is possible that she lived in Dohlenweg 28 at Gl…? in the South East of Barmbek not far away from her old flat in Dulsberg. This change of address is appears (without a date) on her prison record.

After this renewed arrest Anna Brandt was most likely never set free again. Even before she was arrested by the district court of the City of Hamburg in the end of April 1931 – once to three months for theft and once for one year in prison for the same crime in six cases and for fraud in one case – the police department handed over her case "to the department of care… (for) commitment in the hostel Heim Sandweg 23". It seems she was imprisoned by the end of July of the same year and served her sentence until 26 Sep. 1932. Afterwards she was, however, not released, but kept in imprisonment, this time because of a renewed sentence by the district court of the City of Hamburg from May 1932 for one year and nine months in prison for "recidivist theft”, it not being clear whether she had committed this crime during her sentence in prison.

After having also served this sentence by the end of July 1934 Anna Brandt became a victim of the Nazi regime’s law against 'criminals by habit' (Gewohnheitsverbrechergesetz) of 24 Nov. 1933, an instrument of "preventive detention”. According to her prisoner’s record the district court of the City of Hamburg decreed this measure on the last day of her imprisonment, 26 June 1934. Anna Brandt was then detained in Lübeck, most likely in the women’s prison Lauerhof since Hamburg and Lübeck formed a network of prisons for female prisoners. In June 1937 Anna Brandt’s sentence was interrupted for a week because she had to be "transferred to Hamburg to a doctor" due to an illness, but afterwards she was retransferred to Lübeck.

No documents were found reporting about her way of suffering before she was deported to Auschwitz. It is very likely, however, that Anna Brandt became a victim of the infamous agreement between the Minister of Justice (Reichsjustizminister) Thierack and Reichsführer-SS Himmler of 18 Sep. 1942. This agreement declared all prisoners in preventive detention (next to other groups of detainees) in prisons were to be handed over to the SS for "extermination through labour”. Female prisoners were usually firstly taken to the women’s concentration camp Ravensbrück and this might have also been the case with Anna Brandt. It is not known when she eventually came to the concentration camp in Auschwitz. Only the date of her death on 9 Dec. 1943 was registered on a "death certificate" by the registrars of terror. Her old address in Dulsberg is written on this document and there a Stolperstein for her was placed.

Translator: Paula Antonella Oppermann
Kindly supported by the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung, Hamburg.

© Benedikt Behrens

Quellen: StaH 213-11 Staatsanwaltschaft Landgericht, A 13899/32; StaH 242-1 II Gefängnisverwaltung II, Abl. 13 und 2000/01; Schreiben des Museums Auschwitz-Birkenau v. 30.6.2005 und E-Mail dess. v. 5.8.2005; Bernhard Strebel, Das KZ Ravensbrück. Geschichte eines Lagerkomplexes, Paderborn u. a., 2003, S. 125f.; USHMM/ITS, Sterbeurkunde.