Against Disavowal: The Speeches of the Relatives of the Persecuted

Liane Lieske: The Boundary of Acceptability is the Erosion of Human Rights

My grandmother, Erna Lieske, was born in 1900 as the illegitimate daughter of a maid in Pomerania. Her mother died at the age of 28 when Erna was only four years old. She grew up in extreme poverty under the care of her uncle and legal guardian, a day labourer. When he was killed as a soldier in World War I in 1916, Erna was left to fend for herself—alone at 16, in the midst of the First World War. In the following years, whenever she was unemployed, she was repeatedly charged with petty theft and convicted. However, whenever she had work, her employers described her as „diligent” and „highly respected because she was a good worker.” Both her employer and her landlord in Hamburg, where she had lived for years, advocated on her behalf—without success.

She gave birth to two children, in 1920 and 1924, both of whom were taken from her immediately after birth and placed in foster care or an orphanage. The father or fathers were gone. The deaconesses at the orphanage forbade her from having contact with her son and refused to let her see him. As a result, my father never knew his mother.

After serving all her sentences, Erna was not released. Instead, she remained in prison and, in 1938, was sentenced to preventive detention—branded a „dangerous habitual criminal” with an „uncontrollable tendency to repeatedly commit crimes.”

In 1943, she was deported from the Aichach women’s prison and detention facility to the extermination camp Auschwitz, where she was murdered four weeks later, two days after her 43rd birthday.

Today, we remember these victims, including my grandmother. When I first saw a Stolperstein (stumbling stone) for my grandmother ten years ago and read: „Erna Lieske, habitual criminal”, it felt like a slap in the face – yet another humiliation.

After a year of discussions with the artist Gunter Demnig, he decided – without consulting me – to replace it with a new Stolperstein, after securing a new sponsor. The new inscription read: „Erna Lieske, ‘protective custody’ and ‘preventive detention’”!

I hope that, through my short contribution, I have conveyed that my grandmother did not steal because of a character flaw, but out of sheer desperation. And yet, my siblings are ashamed of her and ignore both her and her tragic fate – despite the fact that family is supposedly so important to them.

This exhibition is an important step toward countering society’s neglect of these victims. But it is not enough. Four years after the Bundestag resolution, the German government must finally implement its commitment: to fund research on the fates of these persecuted groups and the still underexplored role of the institutions involved in their persecution – and to erect a memorial for these long-disavowed victims.

Respect for all victims of National Socialism, as well as for poor people and anyone who is different in today’s society, is a value we must uphold. Unfortunately, poverty is still something people are made to feel ashamed of—not those who force people into homelessness or unemployment, and not out of necessity!

So, when our finance minister [at the time Christian Lindner, FDP] publicly and without challenge says, „It annoys me that (…) in our country, people get money for doing nothing” – this is just one example – it is a step in the wrong direction.

The boundary of acceptability is crossed when human rights are eroded and human dignity is damaged – because this is an attack on democracy itself!

Mascha Krink: The Stigma of „Asocial” Seems to Automatically Carry the Word Shame

Dear guests, together with three other speakers, we want to shine a light on victim groups of National Socialism that were disavowed for far too long.

Today, on the occasion of this special exhibition opening, I have the honour of sharing the story of my grandparents, Herbert and Theresa Böhm. My grandfather was a carpenter by trade, born and raised in Trebnitz. During his travels as a journeyman, he met my grandmother in Lower Bavaria. They married and moved to Waldshut, where my grandfather traded raw materials. Their first two children were born there. However, due to the effects of the global economic crisis, my grandfather was forced to close his business. So, they decided to set out for Trebnitz, Herbert’s hometown, in hopes of starting anew. By tracing the birthplaces of their children, I was able to confirm that they indeed made it to Trebnitz. But the economic situation there was no better.

Like many others in the early 1930s, my grandparents wandered the streets in search of work – among hundreds of thousands affected by mass unemployment at the time. They were migrant workers, people who did not always have a permanent residence and spent their lives searching for work wherever they could, simply trying to survive. Poverty forced them into what society labeled „petty crimes”: begging and perhaps even small thefts to stay alive. During this time, my grandfather was arrested and convicted a total of eight times – eight times over the course of 15 years, locked away for a few weeks at a time because he had no money to pay the fine. Herbert and Theresa’s story represents many people of that era who were criminalized by a system that had no solutions for poverty—only punishments.

In spring 1940, in the midst of the horrors of the Nazi regime, Herbert and Theresa were denounced by „neighbours” who had reported them to the welfare office. They were violently taken away and placed in a so-called labour institution. This was not a place designed to help people get back on their feet. It was a place where those who did not fit the image of the „national community” were made to disappear. As if this wasn’t punishment enough, their seven children were taken from them. The state revoked their parental rights and imposed a ban on contact. The inhumanity of this decision is almost beyond words – the family of our father, who was only two years old at the time, was not only torn but systematically destroyed. After three months, my grandmother Theresa was released from the labour institution and fought relentlessly to get her children and her husband back. But her fight was in vain. By that time, her husband Herbert had already been deported to a concentration camp as an „asocial”. First Sachsenhausen, then Ravensbrück—places that we now associate with suffering and death, places where human rights had no meaning. Herbert did not survive this hell.

Theresa, my grandmother, returned to a life marked by loneliness, loss, and pain. She fought for years to reclaim her children, yet she was never granted custody again. Alone and deeply scarred, she died of cancer at just 43 years old. A woman who wanted nothing more than to be a mother lost her battle against a system that never gave her a chance.

My siblings and I grew up with a father who was deeply insecure, almost torn apart by his past. This legacy still affects each of us in different ways. As a child, I often felt that I had to comfort him.

For 30 years, I have studied the history of my grandparents. I have conducted research, examined archives, and investigated. What I know today is this:

My grandfather was systematically exploited and murdered in concentration camps. His „crime” was that he was poor and lived outside the norms of society.

Despite all my research, I have not been able to determine the exact date of his death. The death registers in Ravensbrück were destroyed by the Nazis during their „retreat”.

Together with my youngest son, my sister, and the remarkable playwright Dirk Laucke, we created a podcast documenting our ancestors’ fate. We travelled across several federal states in Germany, interviewed historians, and retraced our grandparents’ journey.

Yet, despite all our research and the podcast about our „asocial” stigmatized grandparents, most of my family shows little interest in their fate. With the stigma of „asocial”, the word SHAME seems to automatically follow.

After World War II, my father’s three sisters married American G.I.s and emigrated to the United States. Decades later, their grandchildren contacted me – having found my email in a museum while searching for their great-grandfather. When I shared my research with them, they abruptly cut off contact. Even they seemed to carry a deep-seated shame – a painful reminder of how urgent it is for society to finally confront and process these stories so that we can understand how they happened – and that personal shame is completely misplaced.

My grandparents’ story is not an isolated case. It reveals the cruel reality of a system that branded people as „inferior” simply because they did not fit its mould. It shows how the Nazis persecuted people living in poverty or those who did not conform to the prescribed norms, labelling them „asocials” or „criminals”. Those we learn about today, through this important travelling exhibition, were victims of a regime devoid of compassion.

This travelling exhibition is, in my view, a crucial step toward raising awareness of people like my grandparents. Their fate reminds us that history is not just shaped by grand political events, but also by the life stories of individuals who were caught in the machinery of exclusion and oppression.

To conclude, I want to emphasize: Remembering and making these stories visible is more than an act of commemoration. I believe many of us, under the political conditions of that time, could have been stigmatized and persecuted as „asocial” or „criminal”.

We must always remain aware of how fragile human freedom and dignity can be.

Daniel Haberlah: There Are Many People We Will Never Learn About Because No One Has Taken On Their Stories

The memory of the National Socialist era in my family is largely shaped by my great-grandmother. That may sound far-fetched to many of you – great-grandparents – but for me, it is different. I grew up in a household with my parents and my great-grandparents. Unlike many of her generation, my great-grandmother had no hesitation in talking about her family, her childhood, and her youth during National Socialism and the war. My grandmother, my mother, and I grew up with these stories. One of them, among many others, was about Irmgard Plättner. That is the woman I want to tell you about today. When I was a child, my great-grandmother told me that Irmgard Plättner had been killed in the Ravensbrück concentration camp. She said that the reason she had been sent there was that she „did not want to work”. As a child, I believed this, but to be honest, I never really understood it. It always seemed strange to me. Why would a German woman, married to a Wehrmacht soldier, be sent to a concentration camp by the Nazis? And even more puzzling: because she „did not want to work”? Hadn’t I learned in school that women in Nazi Germany were not even supposed to work? At the time, I simply accepted it. My great-grandmother was over 80 years old, and I knew from school about how her generation tended to reinterpret their past under National Socialism. I did not think she was lying, but maybe her memory was playing tricks on her, or she didn’t know the real reasons, or she was simply mistaken—after all, it had been a long time.

My great-grandmother, born in 1925, was, for decades, the last living witness to this story. Her brother, Irmgard Plättner’s husband, had already passed away in 1976. My great-grandmother herself died in 2013, just before I turned 18. Even though I started studying history in 2014, it wasn’t until 2020 that I encountered this story again. My great-grandparents left behind many things of sentimental value. These items are very important to my grandmother, my mother, and me. Among them is a photo album belonging to my great-grandmother’s brother. In this album, there are several photos of Irmgard Plättner. When I looked through the album again, I thought: Maybe now is the time to uncover or research this story. This also meant confronting the truthfulness of my great-grandmother’s account—and the possibility that she had not told the truth. Many who research their family history during National Socialism are familiar with this feeling.

But my great-grandmother had not lied. Irmgard Plättner was born in 1921 as Irmgard Kastner in Braunschweig. She was initially an illegitimate child, later a child of divorce. At 15, she became a welfare case and was sent to a girls’ home in Braunschweig and later to a mother and infant home in Hanover. As she became pregnant at 16 years old and gave birth to an illegitimate child. The child was taken from her and placed with a foster family. From 1940, she lived with my great-grandmother’s family in a working-class district of Braunschweig. She and my great-granduncle, Hermann Plättner—nicknamed Menne—became a couple. In April 1942, shortly after their wedding and just after her husband was drafted into the Wehrmacht, Irmgard was arrested by the Secret Police („Gestapo”) for the first time for „refusing to work”. She was sentenced to three months in prison. After serving her sentence, she was released. In March 1944, she was arrested again—this time for „idling at work” („Arbeitsbummelei”). She was sent to a forced labour camp in Watenstedt-Hallendorf near Salzgitter—a so-called “labour re-education camp,” though it had nothing to do with re-education. From there, already in poor health, she was likely transferred to Ravensbrück concentration camp in May 1944. Her health deteriorated further there, and at the end of February 1945, she died—or rather, she was left to die and thus murdered—just weeks before the end of the war. She was only 24 years old. Irmgard Plättner was one of the victims of Nazi persecution as a so-called „asocial”. But my great-grandmother never used the word „asocial” when she spoke about her. To her, Irmgard Plättner was simply a person—just like herself, her friends, and her relatives. The only difference was: Irmgard died, and they did not.

The only reason you are hearing this story today is pure chance. Irmgard Plättner had two friends in the concentration camp. One of them was Ilse Kuhl, whom she had known since her youth in Braunschweig. After surviving Ravensbrück, Ilse Kuhl told my family—and Irmgard’s parents—about her fate. Irmgard’s husband did not learn of her death until 1949, when he returned from Soviet captivity. He then tried to have his wife recognized as a victim of National Socialism within the framework of West Germany’s compensation policy. His request was unsuccessful – as you can probably guess by now. But his application has been preserved, containing crucial information and sources that we probably wouldn’t have today. Without Ilse Kuhl and my great-granduncle, this story would likely have been lost.

Unlike many other families, mine never resisted confronting this history. On the contrary: they always supported me and were very interested, within their means. The more I uncovered, the more they wanted to know. However, I also realized that many people are completely unaware of this persecution. At one point, someone assumed without question that Irmgard must have been Jewish, because why else would she have been persecuted?

But Irmgard Plättner’s story is not unique. What is unique is that I was able to reconstruct large parts of it—but even so, her life remains fragmentary, like a mosaic. We will never truly know what she felt or thought. The only personal record we have is a photo with the inscription: „In eternal remembrance of your Irmchen”.

History is the science of what remains. Without Irmgard’s fellow prisoner, her story might have been lost entirely after the war. Without her husband’s compensation claim, we might have no documentation of her fate today. And without my great-grandmother telling me about her in 2010, and without me researching it, who knows if anyone would have ever cared?

This highlights how random the preservation of individual persecution biographies can be, particularly for those labeled „asocials” and „habitual criminals”. Not every fate can be reconstructed. As you visit this exhibition, keep in mind: there are many stories we will never know—because no one preserved them, and because no evidence remains. For this reason, it is all the more important that both research and public remembrance give these stories the attention they deserve.

I hope this exhibition will help make a significant contribution – but, as we have already heard today: This is only the beginning, not the end, of our historical and societal reckoning with this topic. I say this as a descendant, as a historian, and as a citizen of the Federal Republic of Germany.

Thank you.