Dorothea Dorthy Silberberg
* 1883

Dorothea Dorthy Silberberg, born on 7 Nov. 1883 in Grätz/Posen (today Grodzisk in Poland), murdered on 23 Sept. 1940 in the Brandenburg/Havel euthanasia killing center

Without Stolperstein

Dorothea Dorthy Silberberg was born on 7 Nov. 1883 in Grätz in the former [Prussian] Province of Posen as the daughter of the married couple Max Silberberg and Cäcilie, née Jacobi. Max Silberberg worked as a merchant. The parents were of the Jewish faith.

The first clues to Dorothea Dorthy Silberberg’s path through life can be found in her adulthood. She was unmarried and from the beginning of the 1930s, she lived in the “Ms. Clausen Private Institution” (“Privatanstalt Fräulein Clausen”) in Friedrichsfeld in the municipality of Prinzenmoor near Rendsburg, where she had probably been admitted between 1931 and 1933.

In Friedrichsfeld, a private institution for patients with nervous and emotional disorders was built on the site of a former glassworks in 1883. The female residents maintained the park around the main building and tended the extensive fruit and vegetable garden. The patients mostly came from “more refined” families, who could afford the upscale accommodation. A passage in a brochure of the institution stated, “The Friedrichsfeld estate, not far from the Eider, offers a quiet and healthy stay to ladies who are suffering from nervous and emotional disorders and do not want to go to a large institution but nevertheless cannot stay with their family.” Between 1910 and 1942, the two sisters Margarethe and Cäcilie Clausen managed their institution, capable of accommodating about 35 female occupants.

On 18 Sept. 1940, Dorothea Dorthy Silberberg, arriving from Friedrichsfeld, was admitted to Hamburg-Langenhorn “sanatorium and nursing home” (“Heil- und Pflegeanstalt” Hamburg-Langenhorn). This transfer was preceded by the following developments:

In the spring/summer of 1940, the “euthanasia” headquarters in Berlin, located at Tiergartenstrasse 4, planned a special operation aimed against Jews in public and private sanatoriums and nursing homes. It had the Jewish persons living in the institutions registered and moved together in what were officially so-called collection institutions. The Hamburg-Langenhorn “sanatorium and nursing home” was designated the North German collection institution. All institutions in Hamburg, Schleswig-Holstein, and Mecklenburg were ordered to move the Jews living in their facilities there by 18 Sept. 1940.

After all Jewish patients from the North German institutions had arrived in Langenhorn, they were taken to Brandenburg/Havel on 23 Sept. 1940, together with the Jewish patients who had lived there for some time, on a transport comprised of 136 persons overall. On the same day, they were killed with carbon monoxide in the part of the former penitentiary converted into a gas-killing facility. Only one patient, Ilse Herta Zachmann, escaped this fate at first (see corresponding entry).

It is not known whether, and if so, when relatives became aware of Dorothea Dorthy Silberberg’s death. In all documented death notices, it was claimed that the person concerned had died in Chelm (Polish) or Cholm (German). Those murdered, however, were never in Chelm/Cholm, a town east of Lublin. The former Polish sanatorium there no longer existed after SS units had murdered almost all patients on 12 Jan. 1940.

Also, there was no German records office in Chelm. Its fabrication and the use of postdated dates of death served to disguise the killing operation and at the same time enabled the authorities to claim higher care expenses for periods extended accordingly.

Dorothea Dorthy Silberberg has no known personal address in Hamburg, so that no individual place can be determined where she could be commemorated with a Stolperstein.

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