Gree­ting by Lord Mayor Gert-Uwe Mende

Many gaps remain

42 memo­ri­al name plaques are added to the com­me­mo­ra­ti­ons by name at the Memo­ri­al for the Mur­de­red Jews of Wiesbaden

Gert-Uwe Mende, Michelsberg Wiesbaden

Lord Mayor Gert-Uwe Mende

When the Memo­ri­al for the Mur­de­red Jews of Wies­ba­den was dedi­ca­ted on Janu­ary 27, 2011, the names of 1,507 Wies­ba­den Jews mur­de­red in the Sho­ah were known. The car­ved stones on the memo­ri­al com­me­mo­ra­te them indi­vi­du­al­ly, by name. Befo­re 1933, the Jewish com­mu­ni­ty in Wies­ba­den had about 3,000 mem­bers. To date, the fates of about half of the Jews living in Wies­ba­den at that time have been reconstructed.

The num­ber of Wies­ba­den resi­dents who were disen­fran­chised, per­se­cu­ted and mur­de­red by the Nazi regime becau­se they were Jews remains unknown today. This is repre­sen­ted by the num­e­rous blank spaces among the names on the memo­ri­al. They show that the Nazi regime not only wan­ted to era­se the peo­p­le, but also any memo­ry of them. The emp­ty spaces are to be unders­tood as a sign that the memo­ry of the cri­mes of the Nazi era and their vic­tims, whe­ther their names are known or not, must never end.

In 2023, 42 new memo­ri­al name plaques will be added to the exis­ting names on the Memo­ri­al for the Mur­de­red Jews of Wies­ba­den. In addi­ti­on to the person’s name, they include their birth year and the year and place of their mur­der. The com­me­mo­ra­ti­on by name is sup­ple­men­ted by the “memoir sheets” of the Acti­ve Muse­um Spie­gel­gas­se for Ger­­man-Jewish Histo­ry Wies­ba­den, which tell the bio­gra­phies of the Jewish fami­lies who are com­me­mo­ra­ted on Michels­berg. During their rese­arch, the mem­bers of the Acti­ve Muse­um have again and again iden­ti­fied pre­vious­ly unknown Wies­ba­den Jews and thus con­ti­nue to make valuable con­tri­bu­ti­ons to the per­pe­tua­ti­on of the com­me­mo­ra­ti­ons by name.

On Febru­ary 14, 1945, the last Jews from Wies­ba­den were depor­ted to the con­cen­tra­ti­on camps. To this day, in the archi­ves the­re con­ti­nue to be clues to pre­vious­ly unknown bio­gra­phies that are inter­wo­ven with Wies­ba­den. The­r­e­fo­re, even after 78 years, the rese­arch still can­not be con­side­red complete.

With the publi­ca­ti­on of this web­site, the Jewish com­mu­ni­ty of Wies­ba­den, in coope­ra­ti­on with the city archi­ve, is making all the names of Wies­ba­den Jews mur­de­red in the Sho­ah that have been rese­ar­ched and com­me­mo­ra­ted at the memo­ri­al site available online for the first time. The ground­work for the fur­ther artic­les on the emer­gence of the Jewish com­mu­ni­ty, Wiesbaden’s Nazi histo­ry and the gene­sis of the memo­ri­al is the docu­ment “Mah­nung am Michels­berg”, published in 2017 in the second edi­ti­on by the Stadt­­en­t­­wick­­lungs-Gesel­l­­schaft Wiesbaden.

The web­site helps to put into con­text and under­stand the Michels­berg memo­ri­al by sup­ple­men­ting, updating and digi­tal­ly publi­shing the docu­men­ta­ti­on, naming the names of the mur­de­red Wies­ba­den Jews and trans­la­ting the web­site into seve­ral lan­guages. For this I would like to sin­ce­re­ly thank the Jewish com­mu­ni­ty of Wies­ba­den, the aut­hors who made their works available again, and all supporters.

 

Gert-Uwe Men­de
Lord Mayor of the Sta­te Capi­tal Wiesbaden