Ella-Lingens-Straße

The street in the Seestadt Aspern was named after Ella Lingens on 28 February 2012 by the municipal council committee for culture and science. The doctor Ella Lingens and her husband Kurt concealed the young Jewish woman Erika Felden in their apartment for several months in 1941/42 to protect her from persecution by the NS regime. Together with the psychoanalyst Karl Motesiczky, the Lingens couple organized the escape of Polish Jews to Switzerland. Their act of resistance was betrayed. Ella Lingens was deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp. As a "Germanic" doctor in the hospital ward, Ella Lingens was assigned to the notorious camp doctor Josef Mengele. In this position, she managed to save several Jewish women and men from death in the gas chambers through false diagnoses. In December 1944, she was transferred to the concentration camp Dachau and experienced its liberation by US troops.