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Gerhard Feige * 1926

Koppel 102 (Hamburg-Mitte, St. Georg)

HIER WOHNTE
GERHARD FEIGE
JG. 1926
EINGEWIESEN 1939
ALSTERDORFER ANSTALTEN
"VERLEGT" 1941
HEILANSTALT TIEGENHOF
ERMORDET 12.12.1942

Johann Adolf Gerhard Feige, born on 2. 11. 1926 in Lauenburg (Elbe), admitted on 11.3.1939 to the former Alsterdorf Asylum (Alsterdorfer Anstalten now Evangelische Stiftung Alsterdorf), deported to the Gau-Heilanstalt Tiegenhof (Dziekanka) near Gnesen (now Gniezno) on 27.11.1941, died there on 12.12.19411941

Koppel 102 (St. Georg)

Johann Adolf Gerhard (call name Gerhard) Feige was born on 2 November 1926 in Lauenburg an der Elbe. His parents, the motor vehicle driver Ernst Feige and his wife Luise Feige, née Stahmer, lived at Koppel 102 in Hamburg's St. Georg district when their son was admitted to the former Alsterdorf Asylum on 11 March 1939. The reason for the admission was noted by the Alsterdorf Asylum: ‘Idiocy with severe physical deformities (club feet)’. (‘Idiocy’ is no longer a common term for a severe form of intellectual disability).

Gerhard Feige's patient file is no longer available, so we do not know any further details about his childhood and family or his two years in the asylum.

Gerhard Feige was transferred to the Langenhorn sanatorium and nursing home in the north of Hamburg on 28 July 1941 together with 49 other men from the Alsterdorf Asylum in buses operated by the ‘Gemeinnützige Krankentransport-Gesellschaft’ (GeKraT). Three days later, at least 20 women followed them. These transports, which were mainly made up of particularly weak people who were unable to work, had been put together according to the registration forms that the asylum had previously sent to the ‘euthanasia’ centre at Tiergartenstraße 4 in Berlin.

Although Health Senator Ofterdinger had assured the director of the Alsterdorf Asylum, Pastor Friedrich Lensch, that this was merely a transfer to relieve the burden on the Alsterdorf Asylum and to make good use of the empty beds in Langenhorn, the Alsterdorf patients were transported to the Tiegenhof ‘Gauheilanstalt’ in several transports totalling more than 200 people between 26 September and 27 November 1941. (The Hamburg Euthanasia Memorial Book lists 206 people).

The Dziekanka psychiatric hospital near Gniezno had been occupied by the German Wehrmacht in October 1939 and was given the name ‘Gau-Heilanstalt Tiegenhof’. By the summer/autumn of 1941, the German occupiers had murdered the Polish patients in several operations. When the Hamburg transports arrived in Tiegenhof, they also met this fate. They were killed by overdoses of medication and neglect.
There were separate killing rooms in the Tiegenhof lodgings where the defenceless and exhausted victims were injected with lethal drugs, administered by enema or dissolved in soup.

According to the admission book of the Tiegenhof institution, Gerhard Feige was admitted there on 27 November 1941. He died just 15 days later on 12 December 1941 (not 12 December 1942 as engraved on the Stolperstein), allegedly from general circulatory and physical weakness. His death certificate, on the other hand, states ‘feeble-mindedness of considerable degree’ as the cause of death.

It is safe to assume that he did not die of natural causes.

Stand: October 2025
© Ingo Wille

Quellen: Adressbuch Hamburg 1939, Evangelische Stiftung Alsterdorf Aufnahmebuch; Archiv Szpital dla Nerwowo i Psychicznie Chorych Dziekanka Aufnahmebuch; Standesamt Gniezno Sterberegisterauszug Nr. 372/1941 (Johann Adolf Gerhard Feige). Michael Wunder, Ingrid Genkel, Harald Jenner, Auf dieser schiefen Ebene gibt es kein Halten mehr – Die Alsterdorfer Anstalten im Nationalsozialismus, Stuttgart 2016, S. 269 ff.