Finding Ivy: A life worthy of life

The ‘Finding Ivy’ project began 15 years ago in 2011.

Dr Helen Atherton, a lecturer in learning disability nursing at the University of Leeds in England, had travelled to Schloss Hartheim near Linz in Austria. The dark history of Schloss Hartheim is that it was a killing centre between 1939 and 1941, when the Nazi state carried out a mass killing programme (known as ‘Aktion T4) of tens of thousands of disabled people in Germany and Austria. Hartheim was the only killing centre in Austria, although there were five other such places in Germany.

Helen had travelled to Hartheim, now a memorial and documentation centre, as part of a group seeking to learn more about this disturbing history.

Looking at a memorial which listed those who had been killed at Hartheim, Helen noticed the name Ivy Angerer, who was recorded as having been born in the small town of Broughty Ferry in Scotland. It was a mystery how someone caught up in this dreadful programme could have been born in the United Kingdom. Subsequent enquiries revealed that nothing more was known about Ivy other than her name and place of birth.

Thus began Helen’s journey to ‘find Ivy’. Using documents held in German, Austrian and British archives, ancestry records, and numerous other sources, she pieced together the story of Ivy Angerer. She had been born in Scotland to German/ Austrian immigrant parents, who subsequently moved back to Austria where their much-loved daughter, who had a moderate learning disability, eventually met her tragic fate aged 29 at Hartheim in 1940. Members of her family in Vienna, who had always kept Ivy’s memory alive amongst themselves, were traced and worked with the project, supplying documents, photographs and family memories. 

Further research revealed that 13 people in all who had been born in the UK were murdered in the Aktion T4 killing programme. Working closely with Florian Schwanninger, Director of the Hartheim Memorial and Documentation centre, Simon Jarrett, a historian of disability at the Open University, and a team of committed researchers in Austria and Germany, Helen led the quest to unearth the life stories of each of them. The results are what you see in the exhibition today. Along the way families of most of the 13 victims from across the world have been traced, and have enthusiastically supported and contributed to the project. 

We also tell the wider story of the Aktion T4 programme and its aftermath.

Like all victims of the Nazis these 13 people were killed simply because of who they were. They were killed because they were disabled or because they had some form of mental illness. We hope that this exhibition restores to them at least some dignity and worth, and shows them as the human beings they were, loved by their families and simply, like everyone else, living their lives.