Minna Heinze, geb. Holst (1894 – 1944)

Minna Heinze was born in Beckdorf in the district of Stade in 1894. After leaving school, she worked as a domestic servant and as a land and factory worker. In the early 1920s, she moved to Hamburg-Barmbeck where she met her future husband, a widowed employee of the Reichsbahn (German Reich Railway). She married in 1921 and gave birth to two children.

Her support of a neighbouring Jewish family and dissident remarks led to her being interrogated by the Gestapo. Due to insomnia and anxiety, Minna Heinze was admitted for observation to the Department of Psychiatry of the University Hospital Hamburg-Eppendorf in 1938 and transferred from there to the State Hospital and Nursing Home Hamburg-Langenhorn. After her discharge in late 1938, she lived with her family again, but was re-admitted to Langenhorn in 1940. Now divorced from her husband, she was moved to the Hadamar State Hospital in a collective transport in June 1943. Minna Heinze died here on 6 March 1944, a victim of the decentralized »euthanasia« campaign. It is unclear whether the management of the institution let her starve to death or killed her with a lethal injection. Her relatives were informed that she had died of »influenza«. In Hamburg, she is commemorated by a Stolperstein (a stumbling stone).