German town bans 'stumbling stone' memorials to Nazi victims

German town bans 'stumbling stone' memorials to Nazi victims

A wave of criticism has erupted in Germany after the town of Heidenau, near Dresden in Saxony, decided to prohibit "stumbling stone" memorials for victims of the Nazis.

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

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

Known in German as Stolpersteine, the plaques are often installed outside the homes where the victims once lived or worked. They are frequently paid for through donations.

Now, however, councillors from the Alternative für Deutschland party (AfD) and the conservative CDU in Heidenau have voted to ban stumbling stones in the town.

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

The motion passed by the town council said many residents felt this kind of commemoration of Nazi victims was inappropriate.

It stated that memorials should in future be placed at the city's Nordfriedhof cemetery so it would be "impossible to step directly onto the memorial elements".

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 shared responsibility for the decision.

Charlotte Knobloch, a Holocaust survivor and president of the Jewish Community in Munich, said 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 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 essential to a genuine culture of remembrance.

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

Gunter Demnig, the artist who launched the Stolperstein project, said that given the AfD's recent electoral gains "it was certainly to be expected that something like this would happen".

The AfD recently won major victories in state elections in Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.

Some branches of the populist AfD are classified by domestic intelligence as right-wing extremist, 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.