Anna Boland stumbling block

In the Wetten parish chronicle from the 1940s, there is an entry marked "special deaths". Pastor Friedrich Brill, who penned the note, wrote about the death of Anna Boland:

"On Nov. 20 of this year [1943] Anna Boland died in Meseritz, Posen (institution for the mentally ill) 3 days after her transport from Grafenberg to Meseritz! 44 years old; cause of death unknown."

Anna Christine Boland, as she was called according to her birth certificate, was born on September 26, 1899 in Hamminkeln-Dingden and moved with her family across the Rhine to Wetten the following year. In the course of her life, she developed epilepsy. This was also the reason for her treatment at the Provinzial-Heil- und Pflegeanstalt Grafenberg in Düsseldorf, where she was admitted in July 1943. Anna was to be cured of her supposed "mental illness" at the Provinzial-Heil- und Pflegeanstalt Grafenberg in Düsseldorf.

The reason why she was transferred to the Obrawalde sanatorium and nursing home in Meseritz near Poznan, some 600 kilometers away, in November of the same year could no longer be reconstructed due to a lack of files. Instead of the planned treatment and no cure, she was deliberately killed in an apparent sanatorium far from home.

The date of her death on November 20, 1943 is documented by the entry made by Pastor Brill and the death register of the Obrawalde sanatorium and nursing home. The relatives were told that Anna Boland had died during the transport to Meseritz - a false report that was probably intended to conceal her murder.

The Obrawalde sanatorium and nursing home mentioned by Brill was originally built in 1904 as a mental hospital in the Prussian province of Poznan, around two kilometers from the district town of Meseritz. Among other things, the hospital grounds included wards, a gymnasium, a hospital church, a swimming pool, workshops, a butcher's shop and even its own rail connection to the Reichsbahn - originally planned so that patients could set off on excursions from there. From 1942, the railroad connection was used to receive patients on ambulance transports from the Rhineland, Westphalia, Berlin, Hamburg and Bremen late at night and to sort them between "fit for work" and "unfit for work" on the train tracks. In this case, no longer being "fit for work" was tantamount to a death sentence; these patients were killed within a few days to make room for new patients from other patient transports.

In most cases, the murders were carried out in specially equipped death rooms, where male patients were injected with morphine and then made to wait for their breathing to stop. Female patients, on the other hand, were preferably given a glass of water into which a lethal dose of the sleeping pill Veronal was dissolved beforehand. Many of those murdered were then cremated in the crematorium in Frankfurt an der Oder, around 100 kilometers away, or buried in two mass graves in the institution's own cemetery.

Mrs. Anna Boland's last freely chosen place of residence was her parents' house at Blumenheideweg 3 in Wetten. The Stumbling Stone there also commemorates her fate.