Stumbling Stones on the streets of German cities

Tourists, in Germany today, can’t walk two feet down a city street without being confronted with memories of the Holocaust.

The following quote is the first sentence in a news article which you can read in full here: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2016/06/01/stolpersteine-memory-holocaust-victims-marks-path-along-european-streets.html

Begin quote

Reminders of Germany’s dark past confront 7-year-old Juri Hesselmann each morning as he walks to school with his father.

End quote

Stumbling stones on a Berlin street mark former locations of  Jewish residents who were killed in the Holocaust

In the photo above, notice the cobblestones in the street on the right hand side. These cobblestones were laid hundreds of years ago, and millions of Germans have walked these streets in the past.  Now a German citizen can’t walk two steps out of his house without being confronted with guilt about the Holocaust.  When will this end? NEVER!

The following quote is from the news article:

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The first Stolpersteine  in Berlin were placed in 1996. Memorializing 50 Jewish residents of Berlin’s Kreuzberg district, they were the creation of German artist Gunter Demnig as part of an art project that examined Auschwitz, the German death camp in Nazi occupied Poland, where 1.1 million people were gassed, shot, beaten, or died from disease and hunger.

These first Stolpersteine were considered illegal. But the Berlin authorities later relented.

In the 20 years since, Demnig has placed nearly 60,000 Stolpersteine throughout Europe, from Norway to Greece, with more than 7,000 in Berlin alone. Astonished by the demand for these memorials, Demnig has acknowledged that the job has consumed his life.

Demnig now has an assistant, Michael Friedrichs-Friedlander, who was especially moved by the 34 plaques he made for orphans and their caregivers. These plaques were placed in front of an orphanage in Hamburg.

“They were between three and five years old,” Friedrichs-Friedlander told the German government broadcaster Deutsche Welle. “I couldn’t sleep for weeks.”

The plaques serve as constant reminders to the residents of neighborhoods like Juri’s that the Nazi death machine took so many Jews from the neighborhood. They force residents to think. How would they react if they had a Jewish neighbor who vanished in the night? What would you do if your neighbor were taken away today?

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I have an alternative suggestion. Every resident of Germany should place a plaque, with the name of a Jew who cheated him or her, on the street in front of his or her residence.

Note that the news article mentions that 1.1 million Jews were killed at Auschwitz. This is down from the 4 million deaths that were originally claimed at Auschwitz.  However, this does not change the sacred 6 million number of Jewish deaths.

The following quote is also from the news article cited above:

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According to Helmut Lolhoffel, a spokesman for the Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf Stolpersteine project, there were 13,200 Jewish residents deported from this area of Berlin and murdered by the Nazis. The Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf area includes Juri’s neighborhood. Altogether there were 55,000 Jews deported from Berlin and killed.

Lolhoffel, 72, whose parents were Nazis, said that Germans must forever commemorate the victims of the Nazis.

“The Stolpersteine are our permanent reminders,” said Hesselmann, noting that their importance grows as the number of survivors who can tell the story of the Holocaust shrinks.

End quote

My photo above shows the Kaiser Wilhelm Church, which was built at the end of the 19th century; it was destroyed by British bombs in November 1943. Part of the ruins have been preserved as a memorial. A new modern church and a tower have been built beside it.

I have a section on my scrapbookpages.com website about Berlin: http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Berlin2002/index.html

 

 

Should “stepping stones” be placed on the streets of Munich?

Stepping stones on city sidewalks in Germany show the names of dead Jews who were killed in the Holocaust

The photo above is at the top of a  newspaper article with this headline:

“Munich Jews feud over Holocaust remembrance”

The article was recently published at: http://www.thelocal.de/20151126/munich-jews-feud-over-how-to-remember-holocaust

This quote is from the article:

For the one side it is a desecration of the names of those sent to their deaths by the murderous Nazi regime. For the other it is the largest and most democratic commemorative project in the world.

The argument centres on Stolpersteine – stumbling stones – small bronze plaques set into the pavement in front of the last place of residence of people murdered in the Holocaust.

A familiar sight in Berlin since 1996, Stolpersteine can now be found in 1,000 German municipalities and in 20 different European countries.

The photo below shows stepping stones on a street in Berlin.

Stepping stones on a street in Berlin

Of the roughly 6 million victims of the Holocaust, 55,000 now have Stolpersteine as permanent markers of their murder.

But Munich stubbornly remains out of step. Not a single Stolperstein can be found on the southern city’s streets – despite the fact that at least 4,500 of the city’s Jews died in the genocide.

Charlotte Knobloch, President of the Jewish Community of Munich and Upper Bavaria (IKG), is fiercely opposed to the cobblestone memorials.

The 82-year-old Knobloch is herself a Holocaust survivor and, writing to the city parliament in 2014, criticized the Stolpersteine as “dishonorable and impious.”

Memorials to the Holocaust should never be placed on the ground, Knobloch argued, because they remind survivors of the dead and injured Jews who lay on the floor of concentration camps and the ruthless German soldiers who would step on them.

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Oh no! The ruthless German soldiers stepped on the dead Jews?  Where were the dead Jews that were used as stepping stones?

The photo above shows Fritz Klein, a German soldier who is stepping on the dead bodies at Bergen Belsen.  Is this what Charlotte Knobloch is talking about?

In my humble opinion, Munich should NOT have stepping stones.  Leave the poor suffering Germans some pride.  Jews are now returning to Germany, and the Germans are being shoved out of the way, so that the Jews can take over again.

I have a section about Munich on my website at http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Munich/index.html

My 2007 photo taken in Munich

The news article continues with this quote:

Constitutional right

“1,000 other communities in Germany looked at Stolpersteine before approving them and said they were in accordance with regulations for public space and the German Constitution,” says Swartzberg, a journalist who has lived in Germany for four decades.

“Munich agreed that all forms of decentralized commemoration are permissible but not Stolpersteine. We say this distinction can’t be made.”

End quote

To sum up:  The German people have no rights, not after killing 6 million Jews.  The Jews are back and they rule Germany. Every street in Munich must have stones on the sidewalks to honor the Jews who were killed in the Holocaust.

My 2007 photo of a Jewish Synagogue in the heart of Munich

 

Vergangenheitsbewältigung is failing in Germany and anti-Semitism is on the march

According to a news article which you can read in full here, “With anti-Semitism on the march, Germany’s politicians and opinion makers are grappling with what went wrong with the country’s seven-decade-long struggle to come to terms with its past, or as they call it, Vergangenheitsbewältigung.”

In other words, the Germans can never bow low enough to the Jews; they can never build enough monuments in honor of the Holocaust; nor can they ever pay enough restitution to the Jews.

I previously blogged about this on this blog post: https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2014/07/05/american-pastor-jobst-bittner-thinks-todays-germans-have-original-sin-and-collective-guilt-for-the-holocaust/

I also blogged about the number of German Jews who were killed in the Holocaust: https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2011/02/02/how-many-german-jews-were-killed-in-the-holocaust/

This quote is from the news article cited above:

Since the Holocaust, Germany has measured its progress by how the country treats Jews. For example, the government provided generous funding to rebuild Jewish communities and allowed Jews from the former Soviet Union to relocate to Germany. But with a rising tide of anti-Semitism in recent months, there are now questions about how significant the culture of Holocaust remembrance has been in preventing hatred of Jews.

The wave of modern anti-Semitic rhetoric and violence inundating Germany in recent months jolted Chancellor Angela Merkel and religious and political leaders to participate in a “Stand-Up: Jew-Hatred-Never Again!” rally organized on Sept. 14 by the Central Council of Jews in Germany in the heart of Berlin’s government district, not far from the country’s national Holocaust memorial.

Today’s Germans cannot walk three feet without literally stumbling on Stolpersteine, which are stumbling stones honoring individual Jews who lost their lives in the Holocaust, as well as some Jews who survived the Holocaust.

Stumbling stones in Heidelberg in honor of two German Jews Max and Olga Mayer

Thanks to Hitler and the Transfer Agreement, the Jews now have their own country, but they don’t have to live in it. The Jews can live in any country in the world, where they can set up their monuments and museums.

In spite of this, the Jews still want to live in Germany.

This quote is from the news article:

The list of anti-Semitic incidents [in Germany] between July and early September is long. Protests against Israel’s Operation Protective Edge in Gaza led seamlessly to Molotov cocktails tossed at a synagogue in Wuppertal, a city in western Germany, on July 29 — the first torching of a Wuppertal synagogue was during the Hitler era in 1938. Anti-Israel protesters attacked Jews for wearing kippot on the streets of Berlin in a couple of incidents in July. And that’s just a taste.

German authorities recorded 184 anti-Semitic incidents in June and July. According to a study by German human rights NGO Amadeu Antonio Foundation, there were 25 anti-Semitic incidents in August.

To me, the two photos below illustrate why Jews and Germans should not live in the same country. The first photo shows a Jewish Museum in Berlin and the second photo shows the entrance into the Museum through a traditional German building.

Jewish museum in Berlin

Traditional German building right next to the Jewish Museum