Stumbling Stone Römmelgasse 13

This small brass memorial plaque (Stolperstein or stumbling stone) commemorates:

* Marie Anna Fetzer, born 1908, admitted 10 May 1933 to Winnenden Mental Hospital, ‘transferred’ 30 May 1940 to Grafeneck, murdered 30 May 1940, Action T4.

Marie Anna Fetzer was admitted a mental hospital in Tübinger and later Winnenden. Then on 30 May 1940, she was moved to Grafeneck. A month later, her father received a letter stating that his daughter had died unexpectedly on 20 June due to her rheumatoid arthritis with heart inflammation. This was a lie. Marie Anna was murdered on the day she arrived at Grafeneck. She was 32.

She had a son, Siegfried Waldemar Fetzer, from whom she was separated when she was institutionalized. Ten days before she was killed, she wrote to her father about her son: "I also want to see my golden darling again, this is my greatest wish ... I want to be a proper mother to him and want to be near him again as a happy being." Her son survived, and he attended the installation of this stolperstein for his mother.

Grafeneck was the first place in National Socialist Germany where people were systematically murdered. These murders were part of the "Euthanasia Program" (Aktion T4) to remove the disabled from the gene pool: in 1940, in Grafeneck alone about 10,000 people were killed with carbon monoxide gas. This method of killing large numbers of people was expanded and modified to the systems used in the mass exterminations in various locations from 1942 onward.

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