Stop 8: Municipal hospital
Gotenstraße 1 – go to map – go to starting point
Here we are at the municipal hospital, the place where physician Dr. Eduard Schott started working as director in 1927. However, in December 1933, the city of Solingen decided to remove him from office. At the end of 1935, he was forced into retirement. Even before that, he became the target of repressive measures: On 6 April 1935, a huge poster hung resplendent at the hospital’s front, right next to the entrance, saying “in great blood-red letters”: “Out with Jew Schott” [in translation].
The unknown perpetrators had also put that same remark onto the garden wall of Dr. Schott’s official residence at Gotenstraße 16. Indignantly, the hospital’s administrative director Friedrich Bernhard Winterhof had the poster be removed. Winterhof reported the incident to the Mayor of Solingen afterwards – but not a single finger was lifted in favour of hospital clinician Schott across the entire city administration. One of the civil servants noted [in translation]: “There is nothing to instigate.” Eduard Schott reacted with a mix of incomprehension, disbelief and outrage to being personally patronised like that and to being forced into retirement. In a petition to the city administration, dated 21 October 1935, he protested [in translation]: “I have never felt anything but German and I will continue to do so until the end of my life. I have been a soldier for one and a half years.” In a request directed at the “Führer and Reich Chancellor”, he even attempted to obtain an exceptional permission so that he could continue working at the hospital.
Protest could be felt across the citizenry of Solingen as well. Friends and acquaintances of the family tried to mobilise Wilhelm Frick, Reich Minister of the Interior at the time. Entrepreneurs Otto Jagenberg, Wilhelm Schürhoff and Walter Osberghaus directed the following request [in translation] at Solingen’s Mayor Dr. Otto, who was a physician himself: “We would like to inform you that a petition regarding Prof. Schott is being prepared by the citizenry. May we kindly ask you to let us know whether we should address the petition directly to the Führer and Reich Chancellor so that it may reach you through the official channels or whether we may pass the petition to you personally so that you can forward it to Berlin?” It carried an additional note: „Personal consultation desired“. Deputy mayor Rudolf Brückmann harshly rejected the request: [in translation] he expressed that he would “neither support nor receive the advertised petition. I consider personal consultation in this matter redundant and ask you to refrain from requesting it.”
After emigrating to the USA, Professor Schott struggled with establishing himself vocationally. He had to resit his doctoral examination so that he could set up a medical practice in a small town near Boston. While the rest of the family had to stay in Weimar, his eldest daughter came to the USA in May 1940. Ilse Schott got divorced from her husband Eduard in 1942, presumably to alleviate the fate of those family members remaining in Germany. In 1943/44, the couple’s two sons and other daughter had to leave their respective schools and start working in the economy. Eduard Schott suffered a stroke in 1944, something that the part of the Schott family still living in Germany only learned after the downfall of the „Third Reich“.
The stroke accounts for why the doctor, 70 years of age and in frail health, turned down the offer to become the municipal hospital’s director once again, as had been proposed by the city of Solingen.
For the purpose of family reunification, the majority of the Schott family could relocate to the USA in 1946/47; the eldest son followed with his own family in 1951. Schott died on 6 July 1952 after suffering another stroke. In the presence of three of his grandchildren, a commemorative plaque was undraped on 10 November 2017 at the hospital of Solingen. On the initiative of Solingen’s regional IPPNW group (“International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War”), a Stolperstein remembering Eduard Schott was laid at Birkenweiher 43 in 2018.