AfD bans brass-covered memorials inside pavements for Nazi victims

A wave of criticism has been directed at officials in a town in eastern Germany after they decided to ban “stumbling stone” memorials dedicated to victims of the Nazi regime.

Since the 1990s, towns and cities across Europe, including in Germany and Austria, have embedded small brass plaques into pedestrian walkways to commemorate Jews, as well as the other victims of Nazi atrocities. Known as Stolpersteine in German, the plaques are often installed outside homes or workplaces where victims once lived or worked and are frequently financed through donations.

However, councillors from the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and the conservative CDU parties in Heidenau, near Dresden (State of Saxony), have voted to prohibit Stolpersteine in the town, as German media outlets report.

Some branches of the populist AfD are classified as right-wing extremist by Germany’s domestic intelligence service, such as the one in Saxony, which is a designation the party strongly rejects.

According to the motion passed by the town council, many citizens considered this form of commemorating Nazi victims inappropriate. The motion said memorials should instead be located at the city’s Nordfriedhof cemetery, making it “impossible to step directly onto the memorial elements”.

The decision quickly drew criticism from Germany’s Education Minister Karin Prien, herself a member of the CDU, who told local newspapers that the ban was a “scandal”.

“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 reporters.

Prien also said that her own CDU party in Saxony shared responsibility for the decision.

Charlotte Knobloch, a Holocaust survivor and president of the Jewish Community in Munich, said that removing such memorials from the cityscape was “completely the wrong approach”. She said she was “appalled that a democratic party would stoop to supporting such a transparent manoeuvre by the extremists of the AfD”.

In her native Munich, there are no Stolpersteine on municipal land. Instead, the city permits memorial plaques to be placed on public buildings. The initiative is not unanimously supported everywhere in Germany, with Knobloch herself admitting that she is not a great supporter of the project. Stolpersteine have also been repeatedly stolen or damaged across Germany for years. Nevertheless, she stated that the decision went too far.

As their name suggests, Stolpersteine are intended to be memorials that people literally stumble upon, prompting them to reflect on the history of the location.  Gunter Demnig, the artist who initiated the Stolperstein project, said that given the AfD’s recent electoral successes, “it was certainly to be expected that something like this would happen”.

He accused the CDU, which is an abbreviation for "Christian Democratic Union", of having moved away from Christian values. The party, he said, “should probably strike its C. Because they have apparently left the Christian behind.”

The move comes after the AfD recently secured major victories in state elections in Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.

By Nazrin Sadigova