Politics of memory | Heidenau pushes Nazi victims out of the city center

One of the five stumbling blocks laid so far in Heidenau commemorates the former mayor Paul Gröger. Photo: dpa/Robert Michael The decision of the Heidenau city council not to have any more stumbling blocks laid has brought the small Saxon town into the international headlines. After the resolution passed at the end of last week, in which city councilors from the AfD, CDU and the BDO voters' association helped gain a majority, the US news channel CNN reported "outrage" that the East German city had "banned" the Holocaust stumbling blocks. The British BBC also reported.

Organizations that keep the memory of the Holocaust alive expressed their horror. The International Auschwitz Committee sees the decision as a “shabby attack on memory.” The International March of the Living organization, whose educational programs in Poland and Israel take part in thousands of young people every year, describes the Council decision as a “wake-up call”. It raises the "disturbing question" of whether the memory of the Nazi victims is being "pushed out of public life" due to political interests.

The council resolution stipulates that the laying of stumbling blocks in public streets and sidewalks will be “rejected” in the future. Instead, a “memorial area” is to be created in a municipal cemetery where “the victims of war, terror, dictators, expulsion and especially of National Socialism” will be remembered indiscriminately. Mayor Conny Oertel later explained on Facebook: “The important thing is not in what form we remember, but that we remember.”

This is contradicted by historians such as Martin Clemens Winkler, who researched Nazi forced labor in the Hasag arms company for a long time in Leipzig and now works at the Langenstein-Zwieberge concentration camp memorial in Saxony-Anhalt. In a lengthy post on the Bluesky social network, he emphasizes that the “spatial practice of commemoration” impacts the understanding of National Socialism. The relocation of commemoration to central cemeteries has a "long tradition and a relieving function" and was already observed among the victims of the concentration camp death marches. A ban on further stumbling blocks like those in Heidenau is intended to "prevent the victims' places of residence from recalling concrete historical connections and thus also address the social dimension of the Nazi crimes."

The initiative for the Heidenauer Stolperstein ban came from the AfD and its city councilor Daniel Barthel, a man who, according to the Antifa research team in Dresden, was once "politicized in the Nazi scene of Saxon Switzerland" and was associated with the Nazi comradeship Skinheads Saxon Switzerland (SSS), which was banned by the Saxon Interior Minister in 2001. During his time as an AfD local politician, he was already noticed for two memory policy initiatives. Shortly after his election to the city council in 2019, he requested that Ernst-Thälmann-Straße be renamed Heidenau. The motion was the first notable activity by the AfD, which had recently become the strongest force in the local elections. He initially received a majority with the help of the FDP and BDO; Of the six CDU MPs, three abstained and three voted against. After a citizens' initiative, the decision was revised at the beginning of 2020; the street still bears the name of the KPD politician who was murdered in the concentration camp.

"That would cause a step backwards in the culture of remembrance and hinder committed work on remembrance politics."

At that time, Barthel had already mobilized against stumbling blocks and requested that a memorial plaque be installed instead of such a memorial for the former Heidenau mayor Paul Gröger. The SPD politician was imprisoned by the Nazis in June 1933 in the early concentration camp at Hohnstein Castle in Saxon Switzerland. He had previously refused to hoist the swastika flag at the town hall. He was severely mistreated in prison. After his release, he took his own life in August 1933. A stumbling block laid in 2021 commemorates him. Four more were relocated in Heidenau in February 2023. They are reminiscent of the department store operator Maximilian Reiner and his family, who were deported to a concentration camp in 1943 and emigrated to the USA after the war.

The initiative came from students. A new proposal, to which the council majority of conservatives and right-wing extremists responded by banning stumbling blocks, hardly came from civil society. In February 2025, a community initiative suggested laying stumbling blocks for Martha and Fritz Goldstein. The Heidenau couple were expropriated by the Nazis in February 1938 and deported to the Soviet Union. The non-Jewish wife later emigrated to the USA. Her Jewish husband returned to Heidenau after the end of the war, became a registrar, but died shortly afterwards at the age of 50 due to the hardships he had endured. The biography can be found on the portal gedenkplaetze.info, which has been operated by the Pirna association Akubiz since 2009.

The association is also committed to the laying of stumbling blocks and was significantly involved in the Heidenau initiative for the Goldstein couple. With this form of commemoration, “citizens take on responsibility in the form of sponsorships,” clean and maintain the stumbling blocks regularly, “and thus continually commemorate the people behind the names,” explains Anna Nitschke from Akubiz.

The AfD has declared that it wants to prevent such civil society and anti-fascist engagement, and the CDU is also skeptical or even hostile towards it, as its attacks on democracy projects show. The approach of the Heidenau council majority therefore also represents an attack on the citizen-supported culture of remembrance. Although the application for the new stumbling blocks even contained an offer to cover the costs of work by the city's building yard, they were initially put off for months, criticizes Akubiz. Now came the fundamental rejection. The association criticizes that the decision will “cause a regression in the culture of remembrance and hinder committed work on remembrance policy.” In addition, the commemoration is being put on hold because it will probably take years until a concept for the planned memorial site in the Heidenau cemetery is drawn up. And its dedication to the “victims of war and dictatorships, especially of National Socialism” carries the danger of “driving forward a relativization of National Socialism through equation.”

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