Elisabeth Emter geb. Koch

ELISABETH EMTER was born on November 14, 1908 in Ratshausen, Rottweil district.
She was married to KARL-HERMANN EMTER and had six children with him: Lieselotte (*1927), Berta (*1928), Hermann Jr.
(*1930), Eberhard (*1932), Franz (*1934) and Ernst (*1937).

Elisabeth Emter was arrested on January 29, 1940 and imprisoned in Freiburg for three months.
She was then deported to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. There she was given the prisoner number 3591 and was
stigmatized as a Jehovah’s Witness with the so-called purple triangle. Her son Hermann Emter says of her:

„She had brunette or brown hair. She went to secondary school in Ratshausen, where she was born.
Both her parents were Catholic. She became a Jehovah’s Witness in 1927 through my father. She
was a good cook, she was particularly good at making the Swabian goose nest: a layer of boiled potatoes,
a layer of sauerkraut, a layer of spaetzle and then the same again, depending on the number of people, with a melted butter and roasted onions on top.
Then I see my mother in front of me, I was only twelve when she died. Or sponge cake, hers wasn’t so fatty,
we didn’t have much to eat at the time. My aunt made it with eight eggs, my mother only used four, we didn’t have any more.
She did everything in the house by herself, didn’t let us children help. She worked until late at night.
I can still see her darning a hole in her stockings, then tapping the darned stuff with scissors
so it didn’t stick out. When she When she went shopping during the Nazi era, she always had two bags with her, one in each hand, so that she didn’t have to say Heil Hitler.
This was forbidden to the Witnesses.

She was a cheerful woman. Her father was already in a concentration camp, but she sang at work and everyone called her ‚the reckless Liese!‘.
No one would have believed she was capable of such consequences. She acted according to the Bible saying: He who does not hate father and mother for my sake is not worthy of me.

But as a child I was always afraid, I saw policemen behind every tree, I was very thin and couldn’t eat.
It was threatening for me. I noticed a lot at home. I couldn’t play. Always afraid. She was mentally chained,
I feel so sorry for her. She wrote letters from the concentration camp until six months before her death. The Jews had no choice,
the Bible Students had the choice. It was a terrible decision for her. She was a simple woman and could not do anything else.
She could not oppose the indoctrination – there were various groups of witnesses in the concentration camp too. Certain principles were drummed into her.

The family was lied to about the circumstances of ELISABETH EMTER’s death. It was only through the STOLPERSTEIN research that the relatives learned
that she was murdered by gas in a so-called psychiatric hospital in Bernburg near Dessau. ELISABETH EMTER was 33 years old.