Holocaust Memorials - Monuments, Museums and Institutions in Commemoration of Nazi Victims

in detail

The Lüneburg sanatorium was opened in 1901 as an institution of the Province of Hanover. In the autumn of 1941 the so-called "children's department" of the Lüneburg State Sanatorium and Nursing Home was set up and existed until the end of 1945. The children and adolescents with disabilities and behavior deviating from the norms came from the facilities of the Rotenburg W. Inner Mission, the Johannistal / Waldniel facility, from Bremen, Bremerhaven, Hamburg or from other places in Lower Saxony. There is evidence that 425 children and young people died in the "children's department", of which around 300 to 350 are believed to have been murdered. The Lüneburg state institution also served as a transit facility for the central killing centers. In a first transport, which took place in March 1941, 120 men were transferred to the Pirna-Sonnenstein killing center. For the month of April 1941, three more transports to Herborn and from there to the Hadamar killing center can be documented. A total of 475 men and women were transferred from the Lüneburg sanatorium and nursing home to "Action T4". In 1943 around 300 patients were transferred to Pfafferode as part of "decentralized euthanasia". Many of them were murdered with drugs. In 1944, one of a total of 11 "foreigner collection points" was set up in the Lüneburg institution. In addition to Lower Saxony and Bremen, the catchment area also included Schleswig-Holstein and Hamburg. Over 100 patients of foreign origin died as a result of inadequate and undersupply, around 100 were relocated to an as yet unknown location, where they were most likely murdered. From 1944 to 1947 the machine hall of the institution was used as a hospital. After 1948 to 1949, the deaths of the "Children's Department" Lüneburg and its participation in "Aktion T4" were prosecuted. In a second investigation between 1962 and 1966, "euthanasia" killings were established. Nevertheless, the three preliminary investigations against two doctors and a nurse were closed. There was never a trial and consequently no conviction.

In 1998 there were first considerations for a memorial on the site of what was then the State Hospital of Lüneburg. The planning of a memorial was approved by the clinic management and prepared by a working group. The Psychosocial Association Lüneburg e. V. and the Geschichtswerkstatt Lüneburg e. V. on. On November 25, 2004 the facility was opened as an educational and memorial center for "Victims of Nazi Psychiatry". In 2007 psychiatry was communalized. The memorial has since been tolerated by the Lüneburg Psychiatric Clinic. In 2013, a memorial complex was inaugurated on the former institutional cemetery, today's Northwest Cemetery. Here brain specimens from murdered children and adolescents were buried. Since 2014, the memorial has been offering an inclusive educational program entitled "Human dignity is touchable". In connection with the redesign of the memorial, a new sponsoring association was founded in 2015, the "Euthanasia" Memorial Lüneburg e.V .. In 2020, an education center was inaugurated in an old gardener's house, in which the memorial's various educational offers are carried out. A documentation center with a new permanent exhibition will be built in a former bathhouse by the clinic's water tower by 2023. Five special exhibitions from the memorial can be borrowed: "Memory rooms" (2020), "Still, blunt, busy with peeling potatoes, relocated - women as victims of T4" (2018/2019), "Forced sterilization in Lüneburg and the surrounding area" (2017), "Den Victims of a Face, Reproducing the Name "(2013/2014) and" Artists in Nazi Psychiatry "(2013).