Johanna Decker

Johanna Decker (19 June 1918 – 9 August 1977) was a Roman Catholic missionary doctor from West Germany who was murdered in Rhodesia, during the Rhodesian Bush War.

Life Provenance and early years Johanna Maria Katharina "Hanna" Decker was born in Nuremberg where Ignaz Decker (1876–1947), her father, worked as a tax and customs official. Her mother, born Maria-Anna Jäger, came originally from Tirschenreuth in the extreme east of Bavaria. She embarked on her medical studies at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München in October 1937.

Career choice and training Decker engaged actively in the church's youth work, and by 1939 the idea of joining the missionary medical service had matured in her mind. It was in 1939 that she signed up with the Missionary Medical Institute ("Missionsärztliches Institut Würzburg") in Würzburg, while continuing to pursue her medical studies at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. After her father's retirement the family moved to Heimstetten on the edge of Munich. As a student, for financial reasons, Hanna Decker continued to live with her parents. In 1942, at the height of the war, she passed her national medical exams and received her doctorate. She was then conscripted for work in a succession of hospitals and clinics, not necessarily working in her chosen disciplines. There was a year working in Obstetrics at a midwife training institution. In 1950 she was sent by the Missionary Medical Institute to Bulawayo, then part of the British colony of Southern Rhodesia. After arranging for a successor at her little surgery in the Stephanstraße, she left Mainz on 15 August. She stayed a couple of weeks in Würzburg and then took the train from Munich to Rome on 1 September 1950. With 24 other missionaries, on the morning of 6 September 1950 she enjoyed a private group audience with the pope. That afternoon she set off in a plane chartered by the missionary service. Stops along the way included (but were not limited to) Malta, Khartoum, Entebbe, Ndola and Johannesburg. Later it was established that Johanna Decker had been killed by a single shot, Ploner's death involved eight shots. As the war intensified, the murder of Hanna Decker resonated widely in southern Africa and western Europe, putting an abrupt end to the history of the St. Paul's Mission Hospital.