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Emilie Warnecke
© Archiv Evangelische Stiftung Alsterdorf

Emilie Warnecke * 1876

Danziger Straße 19 (Hamburg-Mitte, St. Georg)

HIER WOHNTE
EMILIE WARNECKE
JG. 1876
EINGEWIESEN 1885
ALSTERDORFER ANSTALTEN
‚VERLEGT‘ 16.8.1943
‚HEILANSTALT‘
AM STEINHOF / WIEN
ERMORDET 4.3.1944

Henriette Wilhelmine Emilie Warnecke, born 7.9.1876 in Hamburg, admitted to the Alsterdorf Asylum ("Alsterdorfer Anstalten", now Evangelische Stiftung Alsterdorf) on 11.6.1885, deported to Vienna on 16.8.1943 to the ‘Wagner von Jauregg-Heil- und Pflegeanstalt der Stadt Wien’ (also known as the ‘Am Steinhof’ institution), died there on 4.3.1944

Danziger Straße 19 (St. Georg)

Henriette Wilhelmine Emilie Warnecke (called Emilie) was born on 7 September 1876 in her parents' home on the corner of Süderstraße and Amsinckstraße 79 in the Hammerbrook district of Hamburg. She was the eldest of three children born to the labourer Heinrich Emil Christian Warnecke, born on 26 March 1850 in Hamburg, and his wife Anna Margaretha, née Steingrüber, widowed Knutzen, born on 13 August 1843 in Muggesfelde, Segeberg county.

Two more children were born after Emilie: Gustav Ferdinand Emil on 9 August 1877 at Amsinckstraße 79 and Carl Franz Max on 3 August 1879 at Brandstwiete 12.

The parents had probably married outside Hamburg. Further personal details of the couple could not be found in the Hamburg civil registers (Personenstandsverzeichnisse).

Emilie Warnecke suffered from whooping cough and pneumonia during her childhood. Her right eardrum was damaged due to an illness with scarlet fever. The doctor Hermann Gustav Gernet assessed Emilie Warnecke in 1885, writing that she was so mentally weakened by the consequences of childhood illnesses in her early years, despite her strong physical development, that her condition had increasingly taken on the character of idiocy [a term no longer in use for mental disability]. She had suffered peculiar seizures of an ‘epileptiform nature’. Attempts to have her attend school had been unsuccessful. She had repeatedly run out of the flat and then been picked up on the street without being able to give any information about herself. Although the parents did what they could do for her, her condition in the house was becoming increasingly precarious. The child would have to be handed over to an institution if she was to become something.

After her admission to what was then the Alsterdorf Asylum on 11 June 1885 ("Alsterdorfer Anstalten", now Evangelische Stiftung Alsterdorf), Emilie Warnecke was described as a ‘good-natured, silly, but very lively and noisy girl who could be used for simple work’. The diagnosis was: graft hebephrenia [Pfropfhebephrenie, this term refers to a subtype of schizophrenia].

It was not until 1892 that a brief report stated that she had suffered very severe seizures every six months or so. In 1901 it was stated that she had not been able to acquire ‘the slightest knowledge’ by attending the institutional school, that she did not understand manual labour, that she did very light housework, and that she was good-natured and sometimes moody.

From 1904 onwards, various illnesses were noted: in the hospital at the asylum, she also suffered from a ganglion on her hand. In 1922 she suffered from pneumonia and in 1925 from gastritis.

Emilie's mother Anna Margaretha Warnecke died on 3 January 1922. Her death is not mentioned in the patient file, nor is that of her father on 11 September 1930. We do not know whether she learned of her parents' death or how she reacted to it.

Her file repeatedly states that she was agitated and that she once smashed a window pane and sustained cuts to her left arm, which had to be treated in the hospital. Emilie Warnecke occasionally had to stay in bed as punishment for allegedly unruly behaviour. In 1929, the staff also noted that she was very agitated and had threatened to slit her wrists or throw herself out of the window. In mid-December 1929, she actually threw herself out of the window because she was supposed to go back to bed as punishment. The fall left her with a broken arm, facial wounds and abrasions on her knee, face and both arms. Because of her agitation, she was also isolated in the guardroom (Wachsaal) several times in 1930. She was given Luminal and Morphine-Scopolamine injections to treat her agitation. (Restless patients were isolated in ‘guard rooms’ and treated with permanent baths, sleep and fever cures. These were introduced in the Alsterdorf institutions at the end of the 1920s. Over the course of the 1930s, their function changed: patients were now primarily sedated here, sometimes with medication, sometimes with restraints or other measures. Those affected often perceived this as punishment).

The patient file makes special mention of the fact that Emilie Warnecke wanted to escape from the institution in mid-1930. Due to her agitation, she was subjected to a continuous bath in the guard room. A short time later, she is said to have screamed in her excitement, ‘Where am I supposed to stay with my stuff; Mum, Dad, I want to get out of here, I want a man, I want to get married.’ In 1931, the reports about Emilie Warnecke remained essentially unchanged. She also expressed suicidal intentions and called for her deceased parents.

In June 1931, Emilie Warnecke had to stay in the guardroom for four days. It was repeatedly reported that she was very irritable and agitated, had hit fellow patients, spat at them, pulled out their hair and injured herself by scratching. The reports were repeated in the following years. Emilie Warnecke was repeatedly isolated in the guard room.

It was not until April 1943 that there was a change. It was now said that Emilie Warnecke could take care of her own personal hygiene under supervision and was happy to help other patients dress and work. At the same time, however, she is said to have become agitated over little things and to have picked fights. Overall, she seems to have been a very demanding patient for the carers.

Her weight, which was recorded as 59 kg in 1934, was only 40.5 kg in autumn 1942.

The last entry in Emilie Warnecke's Alsterdorf patient file is dated 16 August 1943 and reads: ‘Transferred to Vienna due to severe damage to the asylum caused by bombing. Doctor Kreyenberg.’

During the heavy air raids on Hamburg at the end of July/beginning of August 1943 (‘Operation Gomorrah’), the Alsterdorf Asylum also suffered bomb damage. The head of the asylum, SA member Pastor Friedrich Lensch, took the opportunity, with the approval of the health authorities, to get rid of some of the residents who were considered ‘weak in labour, in need of care or particularly difficult by transporting them to other sanatoriums and nursing homes. On 16 August 1943, 228 women and girls from Alsterdorf and 72 girls and women from the Langenhorn Sanatorium and Nursing home were ‘transferred’ to the ‘Wagner von Jauregg-Heil- und Pflegeanstalt der Stadt Wien’ (also known as the ‘Am Steinhof’ institution) in Vienna on one of these transports. Emilie Warnecke was among them.

During the first phase of Nazi ‘euthanasia’ from October 1939 to August 1941, the institution in Vienna was an intermediate institution for the Hartheim killing centre near Linz. After the official end of the murders in the killing centres, mass murders continued in previous intermediate institutions, including the Vienna institution itself: through overdosing of medication and non-treatment of illness, but above all through food deprivation.
By the end of 1945, 257 of the 300 girls and women from Hamburg had died, 196 of them from Alsterdorf. Emilie Warnecke was one of them.

In the Vienna institution, Emilie Warnecke was said to have behaved quietly at first, but was ‘not suitable for any work due to her clumsiness’. At the beginning of 1944, she fantasised in the guard room about a Fritz whom she would marry. She cried ‘miserably’.
There is only a brief entry in the patient file for 19 February: ‘Weak, deteriorating.’ She still weighed 39 kg.

A few days later, on 4 March 1944, Emilie Warnecke allegedly died of ‘marasmus and pulmonary tuberculosis’ (marasmus = debilitation), the latter with a question mark.

Emilie Warnecke was 68 years old.

Stand: January 2025
© Ingo Wille

Quellen: Adressbuch Hamburg 1885, StaH 332-5 Standesämter 1874 Geburtsregister Nr. 3489/1876 (Henriette Wilhelmine Emilie Warnecke), 1898 Geburtsregister Nr. 3104/1877 (Gustav Ferdinand Emil Warnecke), 1945 Geburtsregister Nr. 3132/1879 (Carl Franz Max Warnecke), 860 Sterberegister Nr. 9/1922 (Anna Margarethe Warnecke), 962 Sterberegister Nr. 1381/1930 Heinrich Emil Christian Warnecke; Evang. Stiftung Alsterdorf Archiv, Sonderakte 218 Emilie Warnecke. Michael Wunder, Ingrid Genkel, Harald Jenner, Auf dieser schiefen Ebene gibt es kein Halten mehr – Die Alsterdorfer Anstalten im Nationalsozialismus, Stuttgart 2016, S. 283 ff., 331 ff.