Johanna Geissmar

Johanna Geissmar (1877 to 1942) was a German-Jewish pediatrician from Mannheim who trained in medicine at Heidelberg, where she studied from 1909 and graduated in 1915, after the university had only recently begun to admit women. She worked in a Heidelberg hospital during the First World War and from 1920 ran a children's practice in Heidelberg. In April 1933 she was deprived of her licence under the Nazi boycott of Jewish doctors and had to close the practice, and she later lived in the Black Forest. Deported in October 1940 to the Gurs internment camp in southern France, she and the nurse Pauline Maier cared for many sick and fainting internees in the women's camp under appalling conditions, and the patients called her an angel in hell. In August 1942 she was transported to Auschwitz, joining the transport voluntarily so that she could keep caring for her patients. She is remembered by a plaque in Lenzkirch-Saig, a Stolperstein in Heidelberg, a television film and a school in Mannheim that bears her name.