Andrea Butorin, Journalistin, 1981

How a Seeland family loses all four sons to Nazi Germany

Bieler Tagblatt

2nd place

Local

2021

Andrea Butorin

The author tells the story of the Emsländers from Tschugg in the Bernese Seeland, a poor family with many children. The father was a German citizen, which was to seal the eventual fate of the four of his sons who’d survived to adulthood. In 1934 Arnold Emsländer was charged in court for indecent behaviour. The court acquitted him, presumably due to mental incompetence (the source information is patchy). Nevertheless, the destitute Arnold was deported to the German Reich – his ostensible homeland – where he was declared “feebleminded” and, after spending six years in an institution, died in a gas chamber. The Nazi regime murdered a total of 200,000 mentally and physically disabled adults and children, whom they declaired “unworthy of life.” Arnold’s brothers Ernst, Adamir and Rudolf were conscripted into the Wehrmacht to fight in World War II. Ernst died in France, Adamir in Russia, and Rudolf went missing without a trace. The article says of their mother: “She died in 1958 at 84 years old, having survived all her sons by many years.”