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Dr. John Rittmeister * 1898

Agnesstraße 30 (Hamburg-Nord, Winterhude)

Berlin-Plötzensee
13.05.43 Berlin-Plötzensee

Dr. John Friedrich Carl Rittmeister, born on 21 Aug. 1898 in Hamburg, executed on 13 May 1943 in Berlin-Plötzensee

John Rittmeister was the son of the merchant John Rittmeister and his wife Anna Elisabeth, née Lappenberg. He grew up together with his siblings, the twins Wolfgang and Edith, born in 1900, in a well-to-do Protestant family; the Rittmeisters lived in a villa at Agnesstrasse 30.

From 1910 until 1917, John Rittmeister attended the Johanneum high school. After passing his high school graduation exam (Abitur) in 1917, he volunteered as a soldier, being deployed in France and Italy during the First World War. Following the war, he studied medicine in Marburg, Kiel, Munich, and Hamburg. Due to the focus of his training and interest, the fledgling discipline of psychoanalysis, he got his first job as a neurologist in Zurich; later he worked in Münsingen (Switzerland). In his work as a physician and psychiatrist, he always kept sight of individuals and the improvement of concrete life situations.

Politically, he leaned toward socialism. The Soviet Union fascinated him, and in 1932, he seized the opportunity to travel this country for several weeks. Like many other intellectuals, he was delighted by the radical changes set in motion there. During his time in Switzerland, he maintained contacts with political and Jewish emigrants from Germany, organizing lecture and discussion evenings in the context of a Socialist workers’ and students’ group. This was frowned upon by the Swiss authorities, resulting in his residence permit not being extended anymore in 1937. He returned to Germany, initially working as an assistant medical director (Oberarzt) at the Klinik Waldhaus in Berlin Nikolassee. From 1939 onward, he headed an outpatient clinic for psychotherapy in Berlin – the only place in Germany still allowed to do work and research along the principles of psychoanalysis, albeit under Nazi supervision.

In 1937, John Rittmeister met Eva Knieper whom he married in 1939. Eva Knieper prepared at the Heilsche Abendschule, a night school, for taking her high school graduation exam (Abitur). She introduced John Rittmeister to her classmates Fritz Thiel, Ursula Goetze, Friedrich Rehmer, and Liane Berkowitz. This circle of friends, which included the Romance scholar Werner Krauss, rejected National Socialism for humanistic and social reasons. They met for private discussions and helped persecutees and forced laborers.

At the end of 1941, the Rittmeisters got to know the Harro and Libertas Schulze-Boysen couple. Harro Schulze-Boysen worked in the Reich Aviation Ministry (Reichsluftfahrtministerium), as a result of which he was well informed about the brutal reality of the Nazi regime and the objectives of the military strategy. He and his wife had begun forming a loose network with other Nazi opponents, such as Arved and Mildred Harnack. The group secretly distributed leaflets, also having established relations to Soviet diplomats in order to warn about the impending German invasion of the Soviet Union. Radio contact to Moscow worked only occasionally, though it did contribute to the subsequent exposure of the organization. John Rittmeister became the co-author of the leaflet entitled "Die Sorge um Deutschlands Zukunft geht durch das Volk” ("Worry about Germany’s future is spreading among the people").

The "Schulze-Boysen-Harnack Group” was exposed in the summer of 1942. Overemphasizing contacts to Russia, the Nazi propaganda dubbed it the "Red Orchestra.” On 26 Sept. 1942, John Rittmeister and his wife were arrested. Eva Rittmeister was initially released but re-arrested in early Jan. 1943. The death sentence against John Rittmeister was pronounced on 12 Feb. 1943 and carried out on 13 May 1943.

Sentenced to three years’ imprisonment, Eva Rittmeister was liberated from prison by the Soviet Army in Apr. 1945.

John Rittmeister was the only psychiatrist putting up active resistance against the Nazi regime. In 1993, the hospital then called "Allgemeines Krankenhaus Ochsenzoll” named part of its psychiatric clinic (house no. 17) after him and set up a memorial plaque there.

The city of Bernburg/Saale named a street after John Rittmeister in 1961. The street is an access road to the mental hospital where 9,400 mentally disabled persons were murdered in connection with the "euthanasia” program of the Nazi government in the years 1940 and 1941.


Translator: Erwin Fink
Kindly supported by the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung, Hamburg.

Stand: October 2018
© Ulrike Sparr

Quellen: StaHH 622-1/98; Personenstandsbuch Hamburg-Eimsbüttel; Schülerkarte des Johanneums; www.gdw-berlin.de/b17/b17-2-netz.php (einges. 21.08.07); www.gdw-berlin.de/b17/b17-ein1.php (einges. 21.08.07); www.bernburg.meyersch.de/index.php?open=geschichte&navi=gedenkstaette (einges. 26.10.07); AB 1940 (Bd.2); Karl-Heinz Biernat, Luise Kraushaar, Die Schulze-Boysen-Harnack-Organisation im antifaschistischen Kampf, Berlin 1972; Matthias Boentert, 60. Todestag von Dr. John Rittmeister, "Hier brennt doch die Welt", in: Deutsches Ärzteblatt 100, Ausg. 20, S. A-1339, B-1122, C1050; Walter Bräutigam, "Hier brennt doch die Welt – Aus dem Leben des Arztes John Rittmeister" in: 100 Jahre Allgemeines Krankenhaus Ochsenzoll, Hamburg 1993, S. 299–308; Totenliste Hamburger Widerstandskämpfer und Verfolgter 1933–1945 Hamburg 1968.