Stolpersteine: The ‘Stumbling Stones’ of Holocaust Victims

With hundreds of things to see in Berlin, few tourists pay attention to what lies under their feet. The barely four inch by four inch blocks of brass embedded in the pavement are easy to miss at first. But once you know they exist, you begin to come across them with surprising frequency. Each stone is engraved with the name, date of birth and fate of an individual who has suffered under the Nazi regime. Known as “Stolpersteine”, or “stumbling stones”, there are over eight thousand of them in the German capital, and tens of thousands of them are spread across Germany and other European countries, making it the largest decentralized monument in the world. Two Stolpersteine outside of a building in Heidelberg, Germany for Max and Olga Mayer. They both escaped Germany in 1939 via Switzerland and Spain to the USA and survived the Holocaust. Photo credit: The Profitcy/Wikimedia The idea was first conceived by German artist Gunter Demnig in 1992 to commemorate individual victims of the holocaust. Each block, which begins with “Here lived”, is placed at exactly the last place where the person lived freely before he or she fell victim to Nazi terror and was deported to an extermination camp. Demnig has now laid over 70,000 stones all over Europe and Russia. He personally oversees the installation of each one—a task that keeps Demnig on the road for 300 days a year. Unlike other holocaust memorials that focus only on Jews, the Stolpersteine honor all victims of the Nazi regime, including Jews, Sinti, Roma, Afro-German, the disabled, the dissident, and the gays. It remembers those who were murdered in camps, as well as those who survived, but also those who escaped by fleeing to Palestine, the US or elsewhere. For this reason you will find Stolpersteine even in countries that were never occupied by Nazi Germany, such as Switzerland and Spain.