German town bans 'stumbling stone' memorials to Nazi victims

ByBethany Bell Germany Reporter.

Key points

• Germany's Education Minister Karin Prien informed Bild newspaper the ban was a "scandal".
• Charlotte Knobloch, a Holocaust survivor and president of the Jewish Community in Munich, remarked that removing memorials from the cityscape was "completely the wrong approach".
• The AfD lately secured major victories in state elections in Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.
• But now councillors from the Alternative für Deutschland party (AfD) and the conservative CDU in Heidenau have voted to ban stumbling stones in their town.
• The plaques, called Stolpersteine in German, are often placed outside the houses where the victims applied to live or work.

There has been a wave of criticism in Germany after the town of Heidenau, near Dresden in Saxony, decided to ban "stumbling stone" memorials to victims of the Nazis.

Since the 1990s, plenty of towns in countries throughout Europe, including in Germany and Austria, have embedded small brass plaques in the streets in memory of Jews and other victims of Nazi atrocities.

Meanwhile, the plaques, called Stolpersteine in German, are often placed outside the houses where the victims applied to live or work. They are frequently funded by donations.

Meanwhile, the AfD in Saxony has been classified as extreme-right by German intelligence, a designation the party rejects.

According to The motion in the town council, numerous citizens felt that this form of commemoration of Nazi victims was inappropriate.

Memorials should in future be placed at the city's Nordfriedhof cemetery to create it "impossible to step directly onto the memorial elements", the motion stated. First UK plaque for Holocaust victim unveiled.

Nevertheless, Karin Prien. This person is a member of the CDU, criticised the decision.

"Anyone who banishes Stolpersteine and memorial sites commemorating Jewish life from public spaces to the cemetery is prioritising death over life and rendering Jewish people invisible once again, " she informed German paper Bild.

She remarked her own CDU party in Saxony additionally bore responsibility for the decision.

Speaking to the Funke Media Group, she remarked she was "appalled that a democratic party would stoop to supporting such a transparent manoeuvre by the extremists of the AfD".

According to Knobloch, she was not a supporter of the stumbling stones, but went on that "decentralised remembrance – which is not banished from public space but, on the contrary, permeates and shapes it" was crucial to a genuine culture of remembrance.

In her own city of Munich, there are no Stolpersteine on municipal land. Instead, the city allows memorial plaques on public buildings.

Gunter Demnig, the artist who initiated the Stolperstein project, remarked that given the recent electoral successes of the AfD "it was certainly to be expected that something like this would happen".

For context, the AfD lately secured major victories in state elections in Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.

Some branches of the populist AfD are classed as right-wing extremist by domestic intelligence, a designation the party strongly rejects.

Its anti-immigration, "Germany first" and Russian-friendly agenda has discovered fertile ground in the country's former communist east.

Taken together, the developments around german town bans ' stumbling stone' memorials to Nazi victims point to a situation that is still moving, and the coming days should bring more clarity.