Education and Remembrance Site for the Victims of Compulsory Welfare under National Socialism Farmsen

From 1933 until well into the post-war period, the Farmsen care home was used as an institution for detaining up to 2,100 welfare recipients who were considered ‘asocial’, including beggars, homeless people, sex workers and alcoholics. The director of Hamburg’s welfare institutions, Georg Steigertahl, housed them in cramped conditions as cheaply as possible and exploited their labour. Oskar Martini, the head of Hamburger’s state welfare system, bore political responsibility for this. Many of the institution’s residents were incapacitated; the civil servant Käthe Petersen served as the collective official guardian for the women. After the Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases took effect in 1934, many of the residents were also forcibly sterilised. Some rebelled against these violent measures or tried to escape, while others took their own lives out of desperation.

After the end of the war in 1945, very little changed for the victims of compulsory welfare. They remained incapacitated and were not allowed to leave the institution. The people responsible for their suffering, by contrast, faced no consequences and generally retained their positions. Today the grounds house a nursing home, a day care centre for children, residential groups for people with mental illnesses and other facilities.

In the 1980s, the Project Group for the Forgotten Victims of the National Socialist Regime and other initiatives in Hamburg began drawing attention to the ‘other side of welfare’, the ongoing persecution of marginalised people after 1945 and the lack of any compensation. The first state commemoration ceremony in Farmsen took place on 27 January 2013; it was organised on the initiative of the Wandsbek District Assembly. In 2019, the two successor companies to the Hamburg Office of Welfare Institutions – F&W Fördern & Wohnen AöR and Pflegen & Wohnen Hamburg GmbH – announced their intention to establish an education and remembrance site at the Farmsen complex for the victims of compulsory welfare under National Socialism in Hamburg to coincide with the 400-year anniversary of welfare care in Hamburg. Memorial blocks known as Stolpersteine have already been placed in commemoration of the residents who died in the institution.