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