Sterbfritz is planning a memorial for Holocaust victims and fallen villagers

Sterbfritz is planning a memorial for Holocaust victims and fallen villagers

On August 15, 2025, an important meeting took place in Sterbfritz. The village association “Starwetz lives!” and the Sterbfritz local council are committed to building a memorial and learning center on the forecourt of the Evangelical Church. The aim of this memorial is to keep alive the memory of 32 Jewish citizens who were murdered in the Holocaust, as well as villagers who died in the Second World War. As gnz.de reports, Johannes Wiegelmann, the CDU member of the Bundestag, and Günter Frenz discussed the project with the planning committee to discuss the next steps.

The memorial is divided into three areas. First there is the “Community Square”, which is intended to symbolize the peaceful coexistence of Christians and Jews. The “Square of Destruction” will contain a list of 122 names – 90 fallen villagers and 32 Holocaust victims – and will be visualized using steel rods and sandstone blocks. Finally, the “Place of Approach” is intended to provide space for pause and reflection and includes a path made of oak planks that points to the role of the railway. According to the documentation in the village chronicle, many fates have already been recorded online and should now also be made visible in the townscape.

Holocaust and its consequences

The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the systematic murder of approximately six million European Jews by Nazi Germany between 1941 and 1945. This period was marked by unimaginable suffering and brutal methods of murder, including mass shootings and the use of gas ovens in extermination camps such as Auschwitz and Treblinka. Wikipedia states that the majority of the Jewish population in Europe, particularly in eastern Poland, was affected and large parts of the Jewish community were wiped out.

It is also known that the Nazi anti-Semitic policy, which began in 1933, involved carefully planned and extensive discrimination. These included laws such as the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which excluded Jews from civil rights, as well as anti-Semitic propaganda that led to widespread social consensus. As Britannica describes, this process was accompanied by brutal acts of violence, pogroms and the establishment of ghettos.

Commemoration and remembering

The memorial in Sterbfritz not only aims to come to terms with the past, but also to create a place for learning. In Sterbfritz there are currently no name plaques for the local fallen soldiers of the Second World War or the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. This gap should now be closed by combining both groups in an overall draft. The cost of the memorial is around 130,000 euros. Part of this sum has already been collected through donations and benefit campaigns.

The concept was rated particularly positively by Dr. Josef Schuster, the President of the Central Council of Jews, who emphasized the importance of such places of remembrance for the community. Johannes Wiegelmann also plans to present the project to Minister of State for Culture Wolfram Weimer in order to receive additional support. It is crucial that such initiatives are promoted to create strong awareness of the lessons of the past and to counteract a resurgence of anti-Semitism.