Ingrid Wecker traces the arc of discrimination and medical persecution leading to her father’s murder at the Sonnenstein killing facility.
Born in Hamburg in 1924, Ingrid Wecker was the daughter of police officer Friedrich Carl Riemann (1893–1941). Her mother Wilma Riemann (née Blumenthal, 1905–82) had Jewish roots. In 1941, her father was murdered at the Sonnenstein killing facility by the Nazi regime as a supposedly suicidal psychiatric patient. Up until that point, it was the existence of a non-Jewish husband that had protected Wilma Riemann and her two children Ingrid and Hubert. To ward off any future threats, Wilma Riemann went to court and won recognition as a “half-Jew”. This is how she and her children escaped being sent to a death camp. After the war, Ingrid Wecker campaigned for the recognition of Holocaust victims in Germany and also helped with rebuilding the Jewish community in Hamburg. She died in the town of Marne in 2008.