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The German town of Heidenau has voted to stop installing future stumbling stones commemorating people persecuted by the Nazis. The decision followed objections from supporters of the memorial stones, who said they should be walked on and exposed to the elements. Critics accused the council of weakening the memory of Holocaust victims, while the local decision was shaped by cooperation between the far-right AfD and the conservative CDU.
The German town where the right has banned new ‘stumbling stones’ for Nazi victimsAt the entrance, closer inspection reveals a single brass plaque embedded in the pavement honouring the former mayor Paul Gröger, whom the Nazis hounded into killing himself.
But last week at the same town hall, the council of Heidenau voted to halt the laying of future stumbling stones. , the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party joined forces with the conservative Christian Democratic Union of Germany’s chancellor, Friedrich Merz, to help form the majority. Anne Nitschke accused the local council of trying to drive the memory of Holocaust victims out of the town centre.
“They want to drive the victims’ memory out of the city centre, just like the victims themselves were driven out,” said Anne Nitschke of AKuBiZ, a citizens’ group coupling history education with pro-democracy work in Saxony state, ais that you stumble across them every day and then think about who lived here and who was forced to leave,” said Nitschke, 40. The vote came in a month in which the anti-immigrant, pro-Kremlin AfD widened a lead at the top of the national polls,Like the other mainstream parties, Merz’s CDU has ruled out cooperation with the far right in a stance known as the “”.
But political realities have often made the AfD an unavoidable partner in municipal policymaking, particularly in the former communist east. Supporters of the stumbling stones ban criticised that their placement on the ground meant they were walked on and exposed to the elements. They called for a “memorial space” in a Christian cemetery north of town “for the victims of war, terrorism, dictators and forced displacement”.
Nitschke noted that the council had not made any plans or committed funding for such an endeavour, and said the broad spectrum cited served to deny the “singularity of the Holocaust”. Merz’s national CDU referred queries to the Heidenau chapter, which did not respond to a request for comment. The AfD began as a Eurosceptic party 13 years ago and has morphed into an increasingly nationalist force. It has long targeted memory culture as detrimental to patriotism.last year.
? It’s easy enough to walk around them if you don’t want to step on them,” said Christine Bauer, 85, who uses a rolling walker to move about town.
“I’m a child of the war and remember its awful aftermath,” said Bauer, who worked on Elbe river ships until she retired. “It’s not as if the town council didn’t have bigger problems to worry about now,” she added, mentioning affordability. “There are so many victims no one cares about,” she said, citing people killed in traffic accidents. “We had nothing to do with the war and at some point it has got to come to an end.
But when I express my opinion, I’m insulted as a Nazi. ”are laid before a Nazi victim’s last home or workplace and inscribed with stark biographical details: date of birth and the date and circumstances of their death. Heidenau has five, all laid personally by Demnig. He reacted angrily to the town council’s decision, calling it a “unprecedented” and wrong.
Four plaques are laid just a few minutes’ walk from the Heidenau railway station in honour of the Reiner family. Its Jewish patriarch, Maximilian, ran a local department store until he was deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1943.refused to run up the swastika flag at the town hall and was removed from office. In June, Nazi officers spirited him away to the Hohnstein concentration camp, where they beat and tortured him. In August, he took his own life.
He died a broken man aged 50, five years after his return to Heidenau. Juliane, 29, a music teacher who declined to give her last name, said she found it moving to learn about the victims through theBut 28-year-old Philipp, a cook, said he supported the town council’s ban.
“It’s not relevant to me – it’s in the past. So there’s no point in dwelling on it now. At some point, you’ve got to put it behind you. ” He said Germany’s memory culture had been imposed from abroad.
“Other countries just want Germany to constantly have to justify what it did. ”
Heidenau Stolpersteine Nazi Victims Holocaust Remembrance German Politics
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