What was the connection between Bendorf-Sayn, the Jacoby Institute, and a cousin?

Discovering that I had a distant cousin by the name of Felicitas Weinlaub pointed me in a bizarre direction that I never would have expected. And then it proceeded to dredge up far more questions than it ever answered… at least so far.

It was during a search for information about the paternal side of my family, the Weinlaubs, when I found a brief reference to a Weinlaub relative by the name of Felicitas. But what was unique was that she died in 1942 in a place called “Bendorf-Sayn”, while most German Jews who died in 1942 perished in concentration camps.

So, what or where was Bendorf-Sayn?

The first thing I learned was that Bendorf-Sayn was an insane asylum, and she died there as a patient.  But the real shock was learning that Bendorf-Sayn was part of a network of institutions and hospitals where the Nazis practiced euthanasia on mental patients and other poor souls who they deemed defective.

But the next revelation was a veritable “Pandora's Box” of grotesque issues, bringing up the subjects of eugenics, and euthanasia. And then, to my surprise, I learned that Hitler's rush to create a “Master Race” by “euthanizing” all those who didn't fit the Aryan template did NOT begin in Germany at all, but rather it began right here at home in the good ol' USA. It began as a purely American movement, created three decades before Der Fuehrer appeared on the scene. Yet it fit perfectly into his ultimate plans for “the Final Solution”.

You can find all of this in my original blog in far greater detail.

However further investigation, after my post, revealed that she was NOT euthanized as I originally thought.  But we'll get to that shortly.

While it’s true that she died in 1942 in an insane asylum in the town of Bendorf-Sayn, and is buried in the town's cemetery, known by the same name, the asylum was originally established as a Jewish hospital 70 years earlier, known as the “Jacoby'she Anstalt” or Jacoby Institute.

While most of her life still remains a mystery, I have since learned a little more about her, how and why she died. And much more about the foreboding facility where she succumbed.  Otherwise her tragic life still remains an enigma.

But more information only came to me after my original story was read by a sympathetic JewishGen member who put me in touch with Herr Dietrich Schabow.

Dietrich is essentially the keeper of the flame regarding the history of the Jacoby Institute. As a resident of the town, and having written detailed articles about it, he has become the “go to” person, if you want to know the true story about the Bendorf-Sayn/the Jacoby Institute and its history,.

When Dietrich answered my many questions, he sent me an incredible amount of supporting information, including personal descriptions of life inside the institution, by adding a level of texture and humanity to its sad history, which immediately changed my perception of it,

My original source of “mis-information” was the result of a Google search, referencing a book titled, “The Nazi Doctors – Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide” by Robert Jay Lifton. Ironically, when I read the book – which was only AFTER I wrote the story – I realized that Lifton had it right all along. But the Google reference had it wrong.

But not knowing any better in my original post, I claimed that Bendorf-Sayn was a notorious insane asylum where the German (Nazi) doctors performed euthanasia on the mentally and physically disabled Jewish patients who were housed there.

That was wrong! The truth was far more banal, yet no less tragic. First, there were NEVER any German doctors on staff at Bendorf-Sayn, and no one ever performed euthanasia on any of the patients. In fact, during the Nazi era – from 1940 on – very few Jewish patients remained there.

Instead of it being one of the “Nazi Killing Centers”, Bendorf-Sayn remained a Jewish institution, as it had begun some 70 years earlier. Only Jewish doctors were hired to administer and care for their strictly Jewish patients.

The Jacoby Institute actually became one of the Nazi's collection sites for Jewish mental patients, because in 1940 the Nazi Home Office, the “Innenministerium”, decreed that mentally ill Jews could no longer be housed together in hospitals with mentally ill non-Jews. As a result Bendorf-Sayn became a “transit camp” for those Jewish patients who were rounded up from other German hospitals.

But during their stay, only Jewish doctors treated them, and only Jewish nurses cared for them, until they were ultimately packed into cattle cars and sent east to the death camps in Poland.

“Euthanasia is too good for the Jews. For them we have something different in mind.” – a declaration attributed to an SS officer in nearby Koblenz. That was the reality of the situation.

In June 1940, the hospital's co-director, Dr. Laufer and his Jewish wife, who had worked as a nurse there, met the same fate, as they were both transported to a concentration camp along with their patients.

Fortunately for the other co-director, Dr. Rosenau, his wife was Gentile, and their children were educated as such. This according to Herr Schabow, who went on to say that the Nazi term for them was, “privilegierte Mischehe”, or privileged mongrels. As a result, Rosenau was able to remain at Bendorf-Sayn. But he was only allowed to treat Jews!!!

When the hospital was closed in November 1942, he was the only doctor remaining.

Regina Suderland (nee Hermanns) was also a “privileged mongrel”. The daughter of a Jewish father and a Gentile mother, she was only 15 years old when she moved with her parents to Bendorf-Sayn in 1941, after her father lost his job in Osnabrueck.

Regina Suderland

Her father, Benno Hermanns, became the Nursing Supervisor there, while Regina worked her way up to Practical Nurse.   

She remained for years as the last witness to what went on within the confines of the Jacoby Institute at Bendorf-Sayn.

When there was not a soul left in the hospital, after all of the patients and staff had “EMIGRATED”, as a report from the Gestapo in Koblenz put it, the young woman (Regina Suderland) lived on in the empty rooms with her family and that of chief physician, Wilhelm Rosenau. The beds always had to be freshly made up in case the Kemperhof hospital in Koblenz was destroyed by bombs.

She had said in a newspaper interview years later that Dr. Rosenau tried to help the ever-dwindling number of patients live with dignity. The “harmless ones” could move freely between activity rooms and the synagogue. There was even kosher food to eat. And the grounds were securely walled off from the street so that the patients wouldn't know what was going on outside.

Meanwhile, the tragic story of my cousin, Felicitas still remains a mystery. But since my initial post, I have learned from Dietrich that she was born in Graetz, Posen, Germany on Feb. 26, 1902. (Graetz happened to be a 19th century enclave for my Weinlaub ancestors). She was married to Adolph Cohn at the time of her hospitalization, which was June 11, 1941. Cohn's occupation is listed as “Merchant”. They were married on June 14, 1928 in Berlin.

Felicitas died on the morning of March 14, 1942. According to her medical records, she was a depressive paranoid who periodically refused to eat for fear of being poisoned. But the ultimate cause of her death was tuberculosis. 

She had only been there for 10 months.

As one of the few Jews to have died in the hospital after 1940, she was buried in a single unmarked grave in the northeast corner of the cemetery at Bendorf-Sayn.

While I've learned nothing about her life before her hospitalization, what's an even greater mystery is how she got to Bendorf-Sayn in the first place, because her husband's last known address was listed as Litzmannstadt which in Polish is the….Łódź Ghetto!

Łódź Ghetto, Poland