Carl F. Riemann
* 1893

(Downloads: The detailed biography of Carl Riemann with background information in german (pdf, 15 pages, 280 KB))

Carl Friedrich Riemann, born 20.9.1893, from 1934 stays in psychiatric institutions, murdered on 7.3.1941 in the Pirna-Sonnenstein killing center

Grindelallee 138, Rotherbaum

Carl Friedrich Riemann was born on September 20, 1893 as the son of a merchant in Herford/Westphalia. He grew up with six siblings, attended a forestry school after school and then worked as a hunter in the Magdeburg area from 1913.

In 1920, Carl Riemann met the then fifteen-year-old Wilma Blumenthal, born on October 22, 1905, who came from a Jewish family. He married her on May 16, 1923 against his father's wishes. Their daughter Ingrid was born on August 2, 1924 and their son Hubert on November 24, 1928.

Carl Riemann took part in the First World War and was awarded the Iron Cross I. and II. Class and the Wounded Badge. He then belonged to a Freikorps (Freikorps were paramilitary units that mainly fought left-wing uprisings).

In search of a secure career, he turned to a former superior, who offered him a transfer to Hamburg as a company officer in a letter dated September 8, 1919. On November 5, 1919, Carl Riemann joined the Hamburg police force. He was employed as a police sergeant and initially did patrol duty. He was employed as a police sergeant and initially did patrol duty. On December 1, 1920, he was promoted to police lieutenant.

Carl Riemann was first tasked with training trainee officers in the main police department and was then transferred to the 3rd wheeled patrol unit as a platoon leader (Zugführer) on May 1, 1921 “due to his special knowledge and skills”. Among other things, the six armored cars of the Hamburg police force belonged to the Radfahrbereitschaft. When the Communists (KPD) instigated the “Hamburg Uprising” from October 23, 1923 to October 26, 1923, Carl Riemann was deployed in Bramfeld and Barmbek as the driver of an armored car train. A contemporary photograph of this deployment, showing Carl Riemann in the turret of an armored car, still hung in the police office in the town hall in the 1940s.

The Riemann family lived with Wilmas’s Jewish parents in a large old apartment with six and a half rooms at Grindelallee 139, where he was listed in the Hamburg address books from 1925 to 1931 as “Riemann, C., Pol.-Leutn(ant).” listed.

He was not promoted after 1931. He “belonged to the SPD as a member, as which he also represented the interests of democracy in the sense of the Weimar Constitution among the civil servants”, according to a statement by the Special Aid Committee dated May 25, 1949. According to a statement made by daughter Ingrid on August 26, 1948, who in the meantime bore the married name Wecker, her father was now a member of the SPD and belonged to the “Danner group, the then chief of police, and Captain Georges, the current head of the Hamburg police”.

On September 30, 1930, Carl Riemann retired for health reasons.

His family later blamed his mental illness primarily on the hostility within the police officer corps, which was directed against his marriage to his Jewish wife. The consequences of his war experiences may also have played a role.

In 1930, Carl Riemann bought a small, remote house in Asendorf in the Lüneburg Heath (Lüneburger Heide), where he worked as a gamekeeper. But even there, problems increasingly arose, as Carl Riemann took action against poachers and - according to his daughter Ingrid later - made no secret of his political convictions.

Carl Riemann's state of health also affected his marriage. Arguments between him and his wife became increasingly frequent, which led to Wilma Riemann and the children moving back to Grindelallee 139.

At the end of November 1934, Carl Riemann rode his bicycle to his family in Hamburg. He had previously announced his suicide in a letter, and in a second letter he announced his journey to Hamburg. The contents of these letters reached the Hamburg police by unknown means. Carl Riemann was initially admitted to Harburg Hospital, then transferred to Langenhorn State Hospital on December 19, 1934 and then to Friedrichsberg. The diagnoses were “schizophrenia” and “paranoid delusions”. Daughter Ingrid experienced him as a suffering and frightened person during visits: “He was terrified of the doctors and often screamed: ‘They're torturing me’, didn't eat and assumed that everything was poisoned. Then he talked about death rays and railed against Hitler ...”. Unhealed, he was transferred to Lüneburg Hospital on January 21, 1936; the doctors considered it necessary for him to stay in a closed institution.

When his daughter Ingrid visited him in Lüneburg, “I didn't recognize him. At first he ducked away from all the guards, and he always said: 'I'm afraid of the doctors, they'll do something to me. I'm afraid of the doctors'. And then he was given electric shocks.”

On October 19, 1939, Carl Riemann was incapacitated by the Winsen/Luhe district court under file number 4 E 4/39 due to mental illness in accordance with the German Civil Code (BGB). According to Ingrid Wecker, a country constable from the Heide was appointed as guardian, who sold the house in Asendorf.

On March 7, 1941, Carl Riemann and 116 other male patients were taken from Lüneburg to the Pirna-Sonnenstein killing center on a direct transport of “Aktion T4” and presumably murdered in the institution's gas chamber on the same day or the following day.

The family was given March 24, 1941 as the date of death on the death certificate.

The surviving relatives were now concerned with ensuring their own survival, as the deportation of Jews from Hamburg had begun in October 1941 and Wilma Riemann no longer had the protection of a privileged mixed marriage following the death of her husband. She successfully exploited a loophole in the new family legislation to change the status of a “full Jewess” to that of a “first-degree half-breed” by claiming in court that she was actually the daughter of an “Aryan” captain who had previously lived with her grandparents as a lodger. This meant that she was not included in the deportations and her children were considered “second-degree half-breeds”.

After the war, she had to reclaim her real birth name.

The exhibition “We don't need Jews here - Hamburg's Jewish police officers - repressed, persecuted, forgotten (1918-1952)” paid tribute to Carl Riemann's fate, among others.

Translation Beate Meyer