Johanna Stegen
German heroine (1793–1842)
Johanna Stegen (11 January 1793, Lüneburg - 12 January 1842, Berlin) was a German woman of the Napoleonic Wars.
On 2 April 1813, German troops (made up of the fusiliers and volunteer Jägers of the 1st Pommerschen infantry regiment) clashed with Napoleonic troops near Lüneburg. In the course of the battle, the Prussian regiment risked running out of ammunition, and so Stegen rushed ammunition to them in her apron, thus significantly contributing to the Prussian victory. She was glorified soon afterwards in the patriotic poems of Friedrich Rückert. In 1817, she married the Prussian corporal Wilhelm Hindersin in Berlin - he had recently become a Royal Masterprinter in the war ministry. In her memory a young woman dresses as her once a year to clean the war monument in Lüneburg and to tell onlookers of her actions, and streets in Lüneburg and Berlin-Steglitz are still named after her.
Legacy
Johanna Langefeld, a Nazi concentration camp guard, was named for her.
“Johanna Stegen” enters the record as german heroine (1793–1842). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Johanna, Stegen and German can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 30, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q97737. VIAF identifies the subject as 90794237. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1793, 1842, 1813 and 1817.
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This entry incorporates text from “Johanna Stegen” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.