Rombach and Plappert

Sibilla Agnes Rombach

Sibilla Agnes Rombach was born in 1922. She grew up in Brühl, a small town of about 20,000 inhabitants, connected by rail to nearby Bonn and Cologne. Her parents divorced, but Sibilla had a good relationship with her mother and stepfather. After completing the first level of schooling – the Volksschule -meaning that she attended school for eight years, she apprenticed at a pastry shop. 

Sibilla wanted to escape the traditions, restrictions, and expectations of the small Catholic town where she grew up. So, beginning at age 17, she regularly took the train to Bonn to meet with friends and to make new friendships, very much to the disapproval of her parents.

Beginning in 1939, the authorities arrested Sibilla several times. Although the exact charges are not known, most likely the arrests were for her “licentious lifestyle” –  a term used by the Nazis mainly against women whose life and sexual behavior did not comply with their standards of decency.

In August 1940, Sibilla left her parents’ home to meet a young soldier she knew. Her mother reported her missing to the police. Sibilla’s love affair with the soldier failed, but she didn’t want to return home. She stole some money and clothing in order to survive. The police caught her, sent her to prison and subsequently to a reformatory. After two years, the authorities released her. Sibilla then found a job as a seamstress. However, she frequently left her workplace during work hours to meet with friends. 

In April 1943, her mother sought help from the police asking for her arrest. The criminal police detained Sibilla in May and ordered her to be taken into preventive custody. She was interned as an asocial in the Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp.

Life in concentration camps was unbelievably terrible for everyone. But all camps had an internal hierarchy and the so-called asocials were among those prisoners at the very bottom. Often even more than other prisoners, they faced humiliation and degradation on a scale that exceeded anything they had experienced before in the prisons, workhouses, or reformatories. The terror was completely arbitrary, and the threat of death was everywhere.

Regardless of the dissonance between Sibilla and her mother regarding Sibilla's lifestyle her “death left a void in the family. Her mother could not get over the loss of her daughter. By contrast, the institutions and people who had destroyed Bella’s life continued to work for decades without any repercussions.”

On the initiative of Sibilla's cousin, Edith Fischer, a “Stolperstein” (stumbling/tripping stone) was laid on February 5, 2019. Edith wanted to keep her cousin’s memory alive by installing the stone at her last freely chosen place of residence in Brühl.

Eugen Plappert

Eugen Plappert was born in the Southern German town of Fellbach in 1887. In his teenage years he completed an apprenticeship as a belt maker. In his spare time, he devoted himself to weight training.  From 1907 to 1909, he completed his military service in the city of Weingarten. In 1910, he was sentenced to eight days in prison for resisting the authorities. He married Magdalene Sturm in 1911; the couple had three sons.

Their closest neighbor, Christian Wirth, was a fanatical National Socialist who served as the inspector of the euthanasia institutions, commander of the Belzec extermination camp and commander-in-chief of several other extermination camps. “He and the always rebellious Plappert had a private feud.”^[1]

In August 1914, Eugen again served his nation in the military, fighting in France. He was temporarily buried during an attack. Afterwards, due to a “mental disorder following a grenade explosion and burial in the field”, the army sent him for psychiatric treatment in several institutions; he soon retired from military service. 

Between 1915 and 1918, Eugen worked for a local company. During this time, he was convicted again for resisting state authority. In 1920, he was found guilty of indecency and usurpation of authority and sentenced to two years in prison and five years loss of honor. This conviction was followed by 16 more arrests through 1935. Eugen stood trial a total of 20 times. Among the charges listed in the criminal records are: manslaughter, negligent bodily harm, resistance, receiving stolen goods, theft, and carrying a firearm without a license. He served his last sentence of one year in prison on October 14, 1936. During this period, he underwent 23 medical examinations, but doctors could not decide whether or not he was of sound mind.

After his last sentence, he did not commit another crime, but nevertheless criminal police arrested him as a career criminal during the March Action of 1937.^[2]  The authorities sent him to Dachau concentration camp and later on to Flossenbürg concentration camp. “There are many indications that his neighbor, Christian Wirth, had arranged and personally carried out the arrest of his former neighbor out of old enmity.”^[3]

Eugen didn’t survive the concentration camps. The Nazis murdered him in 1942. He was already over 50 years old, which put him at a particular risk because of his age. But, he was also weakened from the harsh living and work conditions in camps. In Flossenbürg, weak and even extremely frail prisoners were placed in the darning work detail and had to undertake forced labor. Eugen was assigned there as a Kapo^[4]. 

^[1] www.stolpersteine-cannstatt.de/biografien/eugen-plappert-reichenbachstrasse-38-kein-vorbild-dennoch-ein-opfer

^[2] By the order of the head of the German police, Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler 2,000 “Gewohnheits- und Berufsverbrecher” (habitual and career criminals) as well as “Sittlichkeitsverbrecher” (moral offenders) had to be arrested nationwide. On March 9, 1937, the criminal police carried out these mass arrests (“March Action”) and those arrested were deported to concentration camps.

^[3] www.stolpersteine-cannstatt.de/biografien/eugen-plappert-reichenbachstrasse-38-kein-vorbild-dennoch-ein-opfer

^[4] A Kapo was a prisoner in a Nazi camp who the SS guards assigned to supervise forced labor or carry out administrative tasks.

^[5] From spring 1941 onwards, thousands of concentration camp inmates became victims of an already ongoing mass crime, the “euthanasia murders”. Members of medical commissions, who had been carrying out “selections” on people with disabilities since the beginning of 1940, now traveled to the concentration camps. Together with the respective camp administrations, they designated prisoners to be murdered using carbon monoxide gas in the euthanasia killing centers in Bernburg, Sonnenstein and Hartheim. They selected prisoners who the National Socialists deemed “no longer fit for work”,  as well as Jews, asocials and career criminals for deportation to death. The mass murder, to which up to 20,000 people fell victim, was given the cover name 14f13. The file number 14f13 stood for death in the camp (14f) and gas (13). The action was the first step towards the genocide of the European Jews and served to forcibly eliminate the sick and those unfit for work from the concentration camps. 

^[6] www.stolpersteine-cannstatt.de/biografien/eugen-plappert-reichenbachstrasse-38-kein-vorbild-dennoch-ein-opfer