Memorial "Signs of Remembrance" at Stuttgart North Station

Wall with the dates of the deportations from Stuttgart

The tracks and on the right the wall with the names of the deportees

Wall with the names of the deportees

Memorial stone in the nearby Killesberg Park , which has been converted into a collection camp

The “Signs of Remembrance” memorial at Stuttgart North Station reminds us that more than 2,600 Jews from Stuttgart , Württemberg and Hohenzollern were deported from this location during the Nazi era between 1941 and 1944 . Almost all of these people were murdered during the Shoah (Nazi persecution of Jews) until 1945.

Location

It is an old freight railway area at the inner north station between Pragfriedhof and Nordbahnhofstrasse, on which the original rails and buffer stops can still be seen today. The five tracks are bordered by a 70-meter-long wall on which the names of the more than 2,600 Jewish residents of the Stuttgart region deported from the Stuttgart Gestapo office and of Sinti from all over southwest Germany can be read. At the head end of the track system there is another covered wall with information boards about the on-site tracking measures.

The individual deportations, trains and their destination

The first deportation train left this place on December 1, 1941 with around a thousand people for Riga to the Jungfernhof concentration camp . All but about twenty people were murdered.

The other collective deportations were:

• April 26, 1942 in the Izbica assembly camp near Lublin,
  • 285 people to Iżbica, followed by the murder in the Belzec and Lublin-Majdanek extermination camps , no survivors
• July 13, 1942 in the Auschwitz extermination camp
  • 40 people, no survivors
• August 22, 1942 in the Theresienstadt concentration camp
  • about 1100 people, including about 50 survivors
• March 1, 1943 to Auschwitz
  • 35 people, one of whom survived
• April 17, 1943 to Theresienstadt and Auschwitz
  • 20 people, 4 survivors
• June 17, 1943: 15 people to Auschwitz (most of them are murdered)
  • and around 10 people to Theresienstadt
• September 24: 2 people to Auschwitz
• January 11, 1944 : 80 people went to Theresienstadt
  • Deportation of so-called "mixed spouses", around 60 survivors
• November 30, 1944 further deportation of so-called "mixed spouses" to a transit camp in Bietigheim ;
  • some of them are transported to a warehouse near Wolfenbüttel
• February 12, 1945 further deportation of so-called "mixed spouses" to Theresienstadt (from Bietigheim)
  • almost all of the approx. 160 people survived due to the rapid end of the war.

Emergence

The memorial was planned by the architects Ole and Anne-Christin Saß and with the help of the association, which was founded for this purpose, to mark the remembrance e. V. , whose board was formed by Roland Ostertag , among others .

The foundation of the association was initiated by the Geißstrasse Sieben Foundation . Sixty years after the deportation of the Jews from the North Station in Stuttgart, the Geißstrasse Sieben Foundation published a memorial sheet. From the fact that the area was to be built over in connection with Stuttgart 21 , the initiative arose to preserve the tracks as a memorial. The place was cordoned off as a crime scene by a flutter tape action. Together with the Nordbahnhof information store, the Geissstrasse Sieben Foundation announced an international student competition for a memorial. After a workshop with over 50 students and their professors from Germany, Italy and Switzerland, the design by the architects Anne-Christine and Ole Saß received an award in May 2002. The City Council of Stuttgart has approved the realization of the memorial at the Inner North Station.

The work was supported by the Stuttgart citizens' project Die AnStifter . In the period from December 2004 to January 2006, the “donor” Beate Müller compiled over 2000 names of Jewish people who were deported from Stuttgart and who, with a few exceptions, did not survive the deportations. The names of these people were placed on the outer wall of the memorial. In the meantime, through further research, the names of around 300 other deportees could be found who were not yet on the memorial wall as of April 2008. On the wall are the names of Inge Auerbacher and her parents who survived the deportation to Theresienstadt.

The project cost a total of 500,000 euros, half of which was raised by the city of Stuttgart and half by donors. The memorial was officially opened to the public on June 14, 2006. The architect Ostertag said of the memorial "Signs of Remembrance": "We will have to be asked why it took us more than 64 years to face the past here."

See also

• Special trains to death , a traveling exhibition on the same topic
• Deportation of German Jews
• History of the railways in Germany
• Train of Remembrance (children on deportation trains)
• Geißstrasse Sieben Foundation

Further deportation memorials in (former) Germany in the context of train stations:

• Berlin - Memorial platform 17 , Berlin-Grunewald train station
• Hamburg - Denk-Mal freight wagon , Hamburg-Winterhude
• Cologne - Cologne Messe / Deutz train station
• Wuppertal - Obelisk in Wuppertal-Steinbeck train station (on the platform)
• Vienna Aspangbahnhof

literature

• Information boards in the memorial
• Signs of remembrance - memorial in the north station in Stuttgart. Background, career, realization. Karl Krämer Verlag, Stuttgart 2006, ISBN 3-7828-4047-X .
• Hermann G. Abmayr: Stuttgart Nazi perpetrator. From fellow travelers to mass murderers. "We have only done our duty for people and fatherland." Verlag Hermann G. Abmayr - Schmetterling Verlag, Stuttgart, 2009. 383 pages. ISBN 3-89657-136-2
• Ingrid Bauz, Sigrid Brüggemann, Roland Maier (eds.): The Secret State Police in Württemberg and Hohenzollern. Butterfly Verlag Stuttgart 2013. 477 pages. ISBN 3-89657-138-9 .
• 70 years of deportation, documentation of the commemoration on December 1, 2011 for people of the Jewish faith, Sinti and Roma deported from Stuttgart, Württemberg and Hohenzollern, published by Roland Ostertag and Martin Schairer in connection with the state capital Stuttgart, 2012
• Adrienne Braun: In the middle and outside. Stuttgart's quiet corners. Konstanz 2014, pages 109–114.
• Sigrid Brüggemann, Roland Maier: On the trail of Jewish life - seven forays through Stuttgart. Butterfly Verlag Stuttgart 2019. ISBN 3-89657-144-3 . Page 269–274.
• Heidemarie A. Hechtel: Preserving the city's memory for the future. Stuttgarter Nachrichten , June 8, 2006, p. 26.
• Heidemarie A. Hechtel: Place of shame transformed into a place of remembrance. Stuttgarter Nachrichten, June 16, 2006, p. 27.
• Günther Schlusche: Architecture of Memory. Nazi crimes in the European culture of remembrance. Nicolaische Verlagsbuchhandlung, Berlin 2006, ISBN 978-3-89479-352-4 .
• Maria Zelzer (Ed.): Stuttgart under the swastika. Chronicle 1933–1945. Cordeliers, Stuttgart 1983

Web links

Commons : Memorial at the Nordbahnhof  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Website of the Association of Characters of Remembrance e. V.
• Website of the Stuttgarter Jugendhaus gGmbH, facility "learning place memorial"
• Stuttgart in National Socialist Germany ( Memento from June 20, 2006 in the Internet Archive )

Individual evidence

1. ^ Ingrid Bauz, Sigrid Brüggemann, Roland Maier: The Secret State Police in Württemberg and Hohenzollern. Stuttgart 2013, pp. 293-304.
2. ^ Ingrid Bauz, Sigrid Brüggemann, Roland Maier: The Secret State Police in Württemberg and Hohenzollern. Stuttgart 2013, p. 293ff.
3. ↑ "Denkblatt" ( Memento of the original from January 30, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , ed. v. of the Geißstrasse Sieben Foundation.  

Coordinates: 48 ° 47 ′ 49.5 "  N , 9 ° 11 ′ 21.7"  E