Margarete H. (1900 – 1940)

Margarete was allegedly a difficult child. After finishing school, she did not train for any job, left home in Gdansk and lived in France and Luxembourg. She was treated for confusion in various sanatoriums. After the police admitted her to a Berlin hospital, the director of the institution applied for her to be forcibly sterilized in 1936. The Hereditary Health Court in Berlin agreed to suspend her sterilization as long as she stayed in a closed institution.

Thereupon Margarete's guardian got her admitted to a private institution in Bernau and then secured her transfer to the Eberswalde State Hospital in 1936. For Margaret, this meant the death sentence: in July 1940, she became the victim of a targeted campaign of murder directed against Jewish psychiatric patients in the German Reich and was killed with carbon monoxide gas, together with many other Jews in the T4 killing centre in Brandenburg an der Havel.

Her murder was deliberately concealed from her relatives and the authorities. In February 1941, the Hereditary Health Court in Berlin received the faked notification from a »Chelm Insane Asylum« that Margarete had supposedly died there on 6 November 1940.