Johanna Decker

Johanna Decker (19 June 1918 - 9 August 1977) was a Roman Catholic missionary doctor from West Germany who was murdered by "drunken terrorists" / "nationalist guerrillas" (sources differ) in Southern Rhodesia (as Zimbabwe was identified in British government sources of the time), during the so-called Rhodesian Bush War.

Life

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. In 1922 Ignaz Decker was transferred to nearby Amberg. It was here that she attended the junior school and the Lyceum of the Poor School Sisters ("Lyzeum der Armen Schulschwestern ") between 1928 and 1934. The school has subsequently been renamed to celebrate its notable former pupil as the "Dr. Johanna Decker School". She was an exceptionally capable student, good at drawing and able to play the piano. It was still unusual for girls to attend a university, but after a further three years at the "Oberrealschule" (senior school) in Amberg she passed her Abitur (school final exams) in 1937, which opened the way to university-level education. She embarked on her medical studies at Munich later in 1937.

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 Munich. 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 1944 she moved to the main municipal hospital Mainz where initially she was assigned to the department for internal medicine. She was then transferred to a little 35 bed psychiatric section, set up with support from then local university, which in 1946 became a fully fledged Psychiatric Clinic. In 1948 Decker qualified in Neuromedicine. (Neurology and Psychiatry were not, at that time, treated as separate disciplines.) In 1949 she set herself up as a psychiatric practitioner in Mainz (Stephanstrasse 1), although there is no reason to believe that her longer term intention to become a medical missionary had changed.