I prepared this post months ago but kept it in my drafts for quite some time. It covers a terrible topic, and if you are sensitive, then please read something else. I really hope that the word Past in the title of this post will still be correct when you read this. These days nobody knows what the current dictators (so called presidents) of our world will do the next day. I hope you are safe and take care!

As politics are usually controversial everywhere (including here on Hive), I kept this post in my drafts for so long. I just did not want to spill oil in the already high-burning right-left-fire or attract the people I don't like into my comment section. But actually, I never avoided calling people out for their bad opinions and getting them angry, so I decided not to care about attracting them to my posts on Hive either. There is a very nice mute function on Hive, and I use it from time to time.

The topic is just too important not to write about, and if someone gets angry about this, they have a huge problem on their own. Also, the current political climate all over the world scares me (a lot), and by creating this post, I hope to spread some awareness of what could come if citizens do not stand up against totalitarian regimes. There are countless of these regimes currently, and it gets worse every single day. Before we start, I want to mention the one-and-only post I was able to find touching on this specific topic here on Hive: Nuremberg Outskirts by @godfish. Also: I have added this post into the C/Lifestyle community because this is part of the everyday life of many Europeans if they recognize / acknowledge it or not.

Many of my followers are located in Europe, and most of them already know these important memorial stones called "Stolpersteine". They are 96mm x 96mm x 100mm brass blocks, placed in front of houses all over Europe and they include a very important message "between the lines":

Never again - Beware the beginnings!

These stones are memorials for deported, tortured, murdered people by the Nazi regime. They are placed into sidewalks in front of the houses where the victims have lived/worked before all the terrible crimes against them and remind future generations of what happened under this awful regime.

The engravings on each block (except the Stolerschwellen) begin with the words "Here lived," or "Here worked" followed by the person's name and details about what happened to them. By writing names and details about the crimes, this project counteracts the anonymity that came with mass deportation and mass extermination in the Nazis.

There are also wider blocks called Stolperschwellen (stumbling sills) with a length of 30cm - 100cm. These are placed at spots where there is not enough space to lay out one stone for each victim.

Some places would need hundreds of stumbling blocks. Also in front of destroyed important buildings or, of course, concentration camps, you can find these sills. In Hamburg, there are 4 different ones, and the photo above is of the one that's closest to my own home.

The Nazi regime was active only 80 years ago and yet many relativize the crimes or even argue that the "Erinnerungskultur" (remembering culture) is wrong and/or hurting the "view on German history". I don't know why it should be wrong to remember millions of victims. These people close their eyes to the crimes that many of our families committed back then.

The formally leader of the German party "AfD" - Alexander Gauland even called this period of German history a "Vogelschiss in der Geschichte Deutschlands" (a bird shit in the history of Germany) relativizing millions of victims and he is not alone with this point of view these days.

The murders alone are unimaginable - on top of the following numbers are more millions of victims in forced labour, genocidal rape, mass looting, kidnapping, human experimentation, sterilization, etc.

I think I don't need to go more into detail about the Nazi regime here. If you want to research more, then Wikipedia is a very good start. But please be aware that everything you read about this part of German history is awful, violent, dehumanizing, and frightening.

The project was founded in 1992 by the an artist from Cologne named Gunter Demnig as a non-profit and there are over 100k stones laid across all of Europe including Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Finland, France, Greece, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Italy, Croatia, Latvia, Lithuania, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Moldova, Romania, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, the Czech Republic, Ukraine, and Hungary. (source: Stolpersteine.eu) In Hamburg alone, there are 7141 Stolpersteine in total, and around 500 new ones are laid out every year. I went outside and documented a handful of these memorial stones for you here. It is really not hard to spot at least one on every street of Hamburg.

Beyond the memorial character of these stones, they also encourage collaborative activities involving survivors, descendants, locals, schools, and historical societies. They are utilized as a team effort to remember and educate, to never let anything like that happen again. Every region of Germany has its own official days when the stones are cleaned and candles are lit to remember the victims. The most prominent ones are: - 27th of January - "Tag des Gedenkens an die Opfer des Nationalsozialismus" (Memorial Day for the Victims of National Socialism) - 9th of November - "Reichsprogromnacht" (November Pogroms / Kristallnacht) - 7th of April Yom HaShoah - "Tag des Gedenkens an die Schoah und das Heldentum" (Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day)

Of course, people clean the stones outside of the official times as well. The 3 stones in front of our home are usually shiny, and you can not avoid spotting them. It is not much work to clean them. You can get brass cleaning solutions in any hardware store or drugstore for a small money. With that, you clean and polish the stone as written in the instructions, and this procedure takes around 5 minutes. Based on the stain and dirt, this could take a bit more, but in my opinion, it is worth it!

There is also an Android app where you can see many (not all) of the registered stones near you, including the engraved details. The Stolpersteine non-profit is building up a database with more information about the people and their story but unfortunately it is not ready yet.

One common criticism (which I’ll get into below in this post) is that these stones aren’t directly funded by the German government. But there are several reasons for that: practical, political, and symbolic. The Stolpersteine project began as a grassroots initiative. Public involvement is meant to be part of the remembrance itself. Anyone who donates a Stolperstein is making a conscious statement against forgetting.

In Germany, cultural funding is also handled at the federal and local level, not centrally. That’s why many cities help co-finance the stones. Some individuals and local groups feel that government-led commemoration of individual victims of National Socialism could come across as too impersonal. The Stolpersteine are meant to stay personal and community-driven to avoid that.

That said, there is indirect support. Broader programs that support remembrance work, like those run by the "Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung" (Federal Agency for Civic Education) or "Stiftung Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft" (Foundation Remembrance, Responsibility and Future) receive money from the German government. They often play a big role in funding Stolersteine and more related efforts.

And now let's briefly cover the critics of this (in my opinion) important initiative. While the Stolpersteine project has been widely praised, it has also received some criticism. I keep the right-wing opinions out of here for obvious reasons.

1. Some people argue that placing memorials on the ground (where people may step on them) disrespects the memory of the victims. For example, statues or memorials on walls instead of public sidewalks could have been and more appropriate.

2. There are huge complaints based on financial aspects as well:

• While the project is non-profit and driven by volunteer individuals, the stones are often financed privately. Relatives, local initiatives, or other individuals collect donations to pay the production and placement of the stones. This places the burden of memorial on private citizens, instead of the German government. Unstandably, it is problematic that relatives of victims need to pay the stones, especially given the historical injustices they suffered. But as written above there are federal agencies and foundations helping out.
• This also raises concerns that this way of financing the stones could create gaps based on resources instead of historical need.

Despite all of these criticisms, many see the voluntary funding model as a strength. They say that it encourages active engagement and personal responsibility in remembering the past.

I still remember the moment my mother first told me the story behind these stones when I was a child. In school and media I already heard about the Nazi regime but from that day on my perspective on life changed a lot. Suddenly, I began to notice these stones everywhere around me, and this opened my eyes to the scale of the crimes committed against humanity.

I grew up in a part of Germany where Neo-Nazis had been common and downplayed for decades. I always stayed true to myself and my morals. I got issues in school, in my free time, everywhere, but it was just not right to stay silent.

Today, this is not a regional phenomenon anymore - it is a global one. In Germany Nazis even have their own political party, the AfD, which has become the second-largest party in our parliament. There are now increasing efforts to initiate proceedings to ban the party because it has officially been classified as an extreme right-wing party in Germany. The classification is temporarily suspended because AfD filed a lawsuit against it, but most of us know: They are racists and nationalists reaching for power, money, and do not care about individuals. But if you want to see a huge collection of Nazi speech by members of this party: click here (the page and quotes are in German obviously).

I am not so sure that history will not repeat itself because these times remind us pretty often of the beginning of Nazi Germany, but these kinds of projects make it harder to ignore the truth and the crimes done. Conservative political parties lean more and more to the right, and even the "Christian German Union" (most seats in the German parliament) forgot that their praised Jesus was a refugee himself.

Sometimes I just wanna hide in a forest, forget humanity and all the hate, stupidity, violence we see and experience on a daily level. But this would not be right.

I think it is a good idea if you share some of the of these stones that are located your place if there are some. Let us create a memorial post down in the comments 👇