Stumbling Stones in Chemnitz
Hulda Hedwig Heinke
Hedwig Heinke, née Felber
Born: 24.12.1884
Died: 10.07.1940
Laying location:
Footpath opposite Hauptstraße 137a in EubaStumbling stone laying on:
14 June 2023
Photos of the laying of the Stumbling Stones
Life path
Former labourer Hedwig Hulda Heinke was one of over 70,000 people who were discriminated against by the Nazi state due to mental illness or disability and murdered in one of the "euthanasia centres". She was born on Christmas Eve 1884 in Euba, the daughter of a butcher. Her parents had five other children, whom they brought up in the Lutheran tradition.
Hedwig Heinke moved to Chemnitz in 1900. On 8 December 1907, she married the machinist Ernst Willy Heinke in Euba. Their marriage remained childless. The couple lived in Ebersdorf for a while before moving back to Chemnitz in February 1913. The couple initially found a flat at Zeppelinstraße 24, later moving to Further Straße 42.
Hedwig's health deteriorated in the late 1920s. She suffered from a progressive disease of the nervous system. As a result, the now unemployed woman, aged 45, was admitted to the municipal mental hospital in Chemnitz-Hilbersdorf on 30 January 1930. The doctors treating her confirmed the underlying condition.
Her condition did not improve in the following months, so she was transferred to the state sanatorium and nursing home in Zschadraß on 30 July 1930. She was never to return to Chemnitz.
According to the judgement of the Chemnitz district court, her marriage was divorced in November 1934. Ernst Heinke entered into a new marriage in March 1935.
On 10 July 1940, Hedwig Heinke and 87 other patients from the Zschadraß state institution were transferred to "another institution" ("Aktion T4"), as it was written on the patient's accompanying card. This meant that they were taken to the Pirna-Sonnenstein killing centre, where they were most likely to be murdered with gas on the same day. To conceal the circumstances of her death, the "T4 Centre" in Berlin sent her surviving relatives a death certificate with false information. According to this, Hedwig Heinke died on 24 July 1940 in Grafeneck (Württemberg), where there was also a killing centre. Whether the urn with the alleged ashes was sent to Chemnitz has not yet been clarified.
Ernst Heinke continued to live in Chemnitz, where he died on 29 October 1947.
Here lies the stumbling block for Hulda Hedwig Heinke:
Stumbling Stones in Chemnitz
It is a project against forgetting: stumbling stones have been laid in Chemnitz every year since 2007.
Embedded in the pavement, the memorial stones commemorate the tragic fates of fellow citizens who were persecuted, deported, murdered or driven to their deaths during the National Socialist regime.
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