Key facts
- Heidenau, a town near Dresden, has banned "stumbling stone" memorials to Nazi victims.
- The ban was supported by the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party and the conservative CDU.
- Germany's Education Minister Karin Prien called the ban a "scandal".
- Holocaust survivor Charlotte Knobloch criticized the decision, calling it the "wrong approach".
- The motion stated memorials should be placed in the town's Nordfriedhof cemetery.
- The AfD in Saxony has been classified as extreme-right by German intelligence.
The German town of Heidenau, located near Dresden in Saxony, has voted to ban "stumbling stone" memorials, known as Stolpersteine, which commemorate victims of Nazi atrocities. The decision, driven by councillors from the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party and the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), has sparked widespread criticism.
The motion passed by the town council suggests that future memorials should be placed in the town's Nordfriedhof cemetery, with the stated aim of making it "impossible to step directly onto the memorial elements." The council's justification was that "many citizens felt that this form of commemoration of Nazi victims was inappropriate."
Germany's Education Minister Karin Prien, a member of the CDU, condemned the ban as a "scandal." She stated that "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 also noted that her own party in Saxony bore responsibility for the decision.
Charlotte Knobloch, a Holocaust survivor and president of the Jewish Community in Munich, expressed her dismay, calling the move the "completely the wrong approach." She criticized the decision as a "transparent manoeuvre by the extremists of the AfD" and suggested that while she is not a supporter of the Stolpersteine, "decentralised remembrance – which is not banished from public space but, on the contrary, permeates and shapes it" is crucial for a genuine culture of remembrance. Munich itself allows memorial plaques on public buildings instead of Stolpersteine on municipal land.
Gunter Demnig, the artist behind the Stolperstein project, noted that such actions were perhaps to be expected given the recent electoral successes of the AfD in eastern Germany. Some branches of the populist AfD have been classified as right-wing extremist by German domestic intelligence, a designation the party rejects.