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© Niedersächsiches Landesarchiv Hannover
Jacob Wendt * 1903
Rosengarten Bushaltestelle Neuenfelder Kirche (Harburg, Neuenfelde)
HIER WOHNTE
JACOB WENDT
JG. 1903
VERLEGT 1941 AUS
’HEILANSTALT’ LÜNEBURG
ERMORDET 7.3.1941
PIRNA-SONNENSTEIN
Jakob Wendt, b. 9.28.1903 in Nincop, committed to the "Langenhorn psychiatric hospital," transferred and murdered on 3.7.1941 at the Pirna-Sonnenstein killing center
Stadtteil Neuenfelde, Am Rosengarten, HVV-Bushaltestelle Neuenfelder Kirche
Jakob Wendt was the oldest son of the fruit farmer Johannes Wendt (2.19.1882–4.11.1957) and his wife Emma Wendt, née Diercks (b. 9.21.1884–11.27.1955). He was born in his mother’s parents’ house in Nincop. His brother Cordt (9.19.1907–9.13.1976) was four years younger.
His father owned an agricultural concern in Alten Land, the great fruit growing region in the southwestern part of the Hamburg metropolis. His orchard was situated in Rosengarten, then a part of the Prussian village of Hasselwerder, which amalgamated with the neighboring Nincop to become the Neuenfeld Community; eight years later, according the Great Hamburg Law, it was added to the territory of the State of Hamburg. The orchard no longer exists today. It fell victim to the most recent expansion of the take-off and landing runway of the Airbus Factory in Hamburg-Finkenwerder.
The two brothers, Jakob and Cordt Wendt, were very different, and their parents seem to have rather reinforced the differences. Cordt, the younger, was a sickly child and laid much stronger claims on his parents than the older Jakob. His mother, by inclination, gave much more affection to her younger son, a fact that did not remain hidden from friends and relatives.
It is not determinable whether or how her other son suffered under this unequal valuation. It is certain, however, that Jakob Wendt became increasingly depressed over the years. He visited his grandparents frequently and developed a special relationship of trust with his grandfather, to whom he often poured out his heart. Following the latter’s death, his depression grew continually.
On 1 December 1926, Jakob Wendt became a patient at the Hamburg Langenhorn Psychiatric and Care facility and four months later at the Lüneburg hospital and nursing home. The precise circumstances of these dramatic changes in his life are not known.
The attending physicians diagnosed Jakob Wendt with "dementia praecox," an early stage of memory loss and disorientation and recommended further in-patient treatment over long duration. In the following years at Lüneberg, Jakob Wendt experienced the collision of the staff’s efforts to provide improved personal care of patients and the expansion of work therapy with the demands of a continually stepped-up cost-cutting agenda.
In the summer of 1940, there arrived at the Lüneburg hospital and nursing home the questionnaire with which Hitler’s ordered "T4-Action" was initiated. Under this cover name was hidden the National Socialist "euthanasia” program, the massive killing of "life unworthy of life.” The questionnaire was to include all patients who could perform no or only mechanical work, who had lived in the institution more than five years, who had become criminal, and who descended from "non-Aryan" families. These were the bases for the work of the T-4 evaluators at Berlin headquarters who decided which of the institute’s patients should be killed and which should be allowed to go on living. Thereafter, the institutions would be informed as to who should be transported to a killing center.
On 7 March 1941, Jakob Wendt was among the 120 men from the Lüneburg "hospital and nursing home” brought to the Pirna-Sonnenstein gassing center in Saxony. Paul Nitsche, one of the former directors of the center, later testified that, as a rule, after their arrival the men were led before two presiding physicians, who as nonchalantly as possible determined the natural causes of death and entered these in the patient records, before they were taken to the gas chambers disguised as shower rooms and murdered.
Afterwards, the death documents and condolence letter, which Jakob Wendt’s family received, served, above all, the purpose of concealing these crimes.
Translator: Richard Levy
Kindly supported by the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung, Hamburg.
Stand: May 2019
© Klaus Möller
Quellen: Hauptstaatsarchiv Hannover, Patientenakte, Niedersächsisches Landesarchiv, Hann. 155, Lüneburg Acc. 2004/066/, Nr. 8625; Gespräch mit Hans-Günther und Margrit Wendt vom 19.7.2010; Reiter, Psychiatrie Niedersachsen, S. 193ff.; Raimond Reiter, Zwangssterilisation und NS-Verbrechen: Die Katastrophe von 1933–1945, in: Niedersächsisches Landeskrankenhaus Lüneburg (Hrsg.): 100 Jahre, S. 103ff.; Klee, "Euthanasie". 11. Auflage, S. 89ff.; Böhm/Schilter: Pirna-Sonnenstein, in: Sonnenstein, S. 26ff.
