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German town bans 'stumbling stone' memorials to Nazi victims

Bethany BellGermany Reporter
News imageGetty Images Small blocks of stone with brass on top are placed as part of a memorial on the pavement in front of houses where Jewish victims lived in Nijmegen in the NetherlandsGetty Images
'Stumbling stones' memorials - like the one in the Netherlands pictured - are often placed in memory of Jews and other victims of Nazi atrocities

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.

Germany's Education Minister Karin Prien told Bild newspaper the ban was a "scandal".

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

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

News imageReuters Ten brass plaques are placed among street stones on the floor in Berlin. In the background the Reichstag building can be seen.Reuters
'Stumbling stones' placed near the Reichstag in Berlin

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

The motion in the town council said that many 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 make it "impossible to step directly onto the memorial elements", the motion stated.

However, Karin Prien, who 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 told German paper Bild.

She said her own CDU party in Saxony also bore responsibility for the decision.

Charlotte Knobloch, a Holocaust survivor and president of the Jewish Community in Munich, said that removing memorials from the cityscape was "completely the wrong approach".

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

Knobloch said that she was not a supporter of the stumbling stones, but added 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, said that given the recent electoral successes of the AfD "it was certainly to be expected that something like this would happen".

The AfD recently 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 found fertile ground in the country's former communist east.