On Tuesday evening, September 30, 2025, the traveling exhibition "Homeless People under National Socialism" was officially opened with the start of a three-part lecture series. The exhibition can be seen in the C-building of the university in front of the library.
The exhibition was officially opened with a lecture by Alfons Ims entitled "The life of the Ims family in the Palatinate". Around 40 people were present in the university auditorium that evening.
At the beginning, Prof. Dr. Andreas Rein introduced the traveling exhibition. He emphasized the perseverance of Alexander Wilking, a student on the Bachelor of Social Work course, in bringing the exhibition to the HWG LU and actively implementing the project. The Dean of the Department of Social and Health Care, Prof. Dr. Peter Rahn, also spontaneously had the opportunity to address greetings to Alfons Ims and the audience.
The lecture was opened by Ims with the words "I let speak. Now follows a language that you must endure." This was followed by an audio recording of SS brigade leader and racial hygienist Arthur Gütt explaining the "Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring" - the content of which was largely determined by Gütt. He placed particular emphasis on "congenital imbecility". Dehumanizing Nazi jargon and words of "charity" - towards future generations - alternated in the SS doctor's recording. This law provided the basis for forced sterilizations and murders in Nazi Germany, to which hundreds of thousands fell victim.
In Ims' lecture, biographical strands of his family were presented chronologically and in parallel to the political developments and the escalation of dehumanizing language of the Nazi eugenicists. Ims' grandfather (born in 1868) suffered an enormous social decline. He had to give up his profession as a tailor and came to Kaiserslautern to work as an unskilled or casual laborer in the local industry. As a result, Alfons Ims' father, Heinrich Ims (born 1900), lived in poverty from birth. During the economically difficult times of the Weimar Republic, he, his wife Anna and their seven children became a welfare case. The situation deteriorated dramatically during the Nazi years: due to the father's previous political activities and the family's social situation, the whole family was now treated as "asocial pests of the people, morally inferior and congenitally feeble-minded":
Anna Ims was forcibly sterilized and all the children were taken to children's homes. Ims' half-sister narrowly escaped sterilization. Anna Ims died in 1943 at the age of 39; she had been suffering from pyelonephritis for a decade before her death. Six months later, Alfons Ims' father and his mother, Ludwina, married. Ludwina came from the middle class. For her, the marriage meant a serious social devaluation. After the end of the war, the children remained in orphanages and were only able to return home thanks to Ludwina's intervention. The mother fought until 1951, when the last twin brothers of Alfons Ims were released; they were 15 years old at the time and had received no schooling.
The lecture ended with a brief look at the present day. The topicality of the subject was underlined by the continuing denial, silence and shame of the victims, but also by the creeping, eugenically effective formulations in current day politics. "There is no present without the past," said the speaker.
The lecture series continued on Tuesday, October 7, 2025 at 18:00 with the lecture "The colony of asocial tenants" by Prof. Dr. Thomas Wagner from the Mannheim University of Applied Sciences. The topic was the history of Ludwigshafen's oldest emergency housing area, the "Bruchwiesenviertel", which existed between the mid-1920s and 1970s.
The small series of events concluded with a lecture by Merle Stöber, a doctoral student at the Institute for Conflict and Violence Research at Bielefeld University, on the topic of "Social Darwinist conditions. Deadly violence against homeless people". The lecture will take place on October 20, 2025 at 19:00 in the Auditorium of the C-Building (Room C0.007, Ernst-Boehe-Straße 4-6).
Text: Johannes Geißler I Photo: private
