Elisabeth Hattemer

Elisabeth "Else" Hattemer (born Elisabeth Hemmes: 9 January 1870 – 19 December 1948) was a politician (Centre Party) and, between 1919 and 1933, a member of the regional parliament ("Landtag") in the People's State of Hesse ("Volksstaat Hessen"), as Hesse-Darmstadt became known between 1918 and 1945. Throughout this period she was the party's only female deputy in the assembly.

Life Provenance and early years Elisabeth Hemmes was born in Bensheim, then as now a prosperous mid-sized town located halfway between Darmstadt and Mannheim. (1840–1925), her father, was a teacher who later achieved notability as the director of the Royal Deaf-Mute Institute ("Bensheimer Großherzoglichen Taubstummenanstalt") and as the author of a pioneering six-year teaching programme for the deaf-mute. Despite her father's pedagogic career, when his daughter also became a teacher, she did so only in the teeth of her father's opposition. She taught English and French at secondary schools in Vallendar and Cologne. Another focus of her work was the Darmstadt regional theatre, of which she was a member of the supervisory board ("Verwaltungsbeirat"), and which was at this time enjoying a strong reputation both for staging classical productions and for some modern pieces that confronted contemporary morality and preconceptions.

Till 1939, when she moved house, Elisabeth Hattemer was living at an address in the Hermann Street ("Hermannstraße 43") which also accommodated the Darmstadt Caritas secretariat, the Children's Welfare office of the Darmstadt branch of the Catholic Women's Association, and its children's day-care center. Shortly before the outbreak of war the Nazi authorities, who always nurtured suspicions of any community involvement by "proxies" for the Roman Catholic Church, closed down the day-care center. A few years later, the failed assassination attempt against Hitler in July 1944 failed in its primary objective, but was highly effective in unnerving the government, which promptly dusted down a long list of people who had been politically active as non-Nazis before 1933. It turned out that many names on the list belonged to people who had fled abroad or died. Nevertheless, on the night of 22/23 August mass arrests took place across Germany. Elisabeth Hattemer's name was on the list and an attempt was made to arrest her. However, possibly aware of what was about to happen, she had taken the opportunity to move to live with her son in nearby Viernheim, which was sufficient to preserve her from arrest. After the war ended, in 1945, she continued to support her son with his youth work, and renewed her involvement with the Catholic Women's Association.