If you look down on the sidewalk in Germany, you might spot small brass plaques remembering Jewish victims of Nazism. The project's creator was in Argentina to see the project unrolled for the first time outside Europe.
Image: Facebook/Stolpersteine
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A German school in Argentina on Monday became the first site outside Europe to host a Stolperstein memorial to the victims of Nazi persecution.
The brass plaques, known as stumbling stones, are seen throughout Germany, particularly in Berlin, and most commonly commemorate Jewish victims of the Holocaust. They are often placed outside the last freely-chosen homes of victims, usually headed by a "Here lived," "Here worked" or "Here taught."
The German school was founded in response to the Nazification of German schools in the cityImage: picture-alliance/dpa/A. von Wagner
The Stolperstein project is the work of artist Gunter Demnig, who embarked on it in 1992. Demnig originally tried to place the 10x10 centimeter (4x4 inch) brass plaques on the walls of the buildings, but struggled to obtain permission from their owners. Instead he would obtain permission from councils and place them on the ground.
As a result, passers-by have to bend down to read the inscription, something which has become seen as a "symbol of respect" for the victims.
Demnig has laid about 61,000 of the discrete plaques in the footpaths of more than 1,200 European towns but until Monday the project had never left the continent.
International Holocaust Remembrance Day is January 27. Numerous memorials across Germany ensure the millions of victims are not forgotten.
Image: picture-alliance/AP Photo/M. Schreiber
Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site
A large sculpture stands in front of Dachau. Located just outside Munich, it was the first concentration camp opened by the Nazi regime. Just a few weeks after Adolf Hitler came to power, it was used by the paramilitary SS Schutzstaffel to imprison, torture and kill political opponents of the regime. Dachau also served as a prototype and model for the other Nazi camps that followed.
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Wannsee House
The villa on Berlin's Wannsee lake was pivotal in the planning of the Holocaust. Fifteen members of the Nazi government and the SS Schutzstaffel met here on January 20, 1942 to devise what became known as the "Final Solution," the deportation and extermination of all Jews in German-occupied territory. In 1992, the villa where the Wannsee Conference was held was turned into a memorial and museum.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa
Holocaust Memorial in Berlin
Located next to the Brandenburg Gate, Berlin's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe was inaugurated 60 years after the end of World War II on May 10, 2005, and opened to the public two days later. Architect Peter Eisenman created a field with 2,711 concrete slabs. An attached underground "Place of Information" holds the names of all known Jewish Holocaust victims.
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Memorial to Persecuted Homosexuals
Not too far from the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, another concrete memorial honors the thousands of homosexuals persecuted by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945. The 4-meter high (13-foot) monument, which has a window showing alternately a film of two men or two women kissing, was inaugurated in Berlin's Tiergarten on May 27, 2008.
Image: picture alliance/Markus C. Hurek
Documentation center on Nazi Party rally grounds
Nuremberg hosted the biggest Nazi party propaganda rallies from 1933 until the start of World War II. The annual Nazi Party congress, as well as rallies with as many as 200,000 participants, took place on the 11-square-kilometer (4.25-square-mile) area. Today, the unfinished Congress Hall building serves as a documentation center and a museum.
Image: picture-alliance/Daniel Karmann
German Resistance Memorial Center
The Bendlerblock building in Berlin was the headquarters of a military resistance group. On July 20, 1944, a group of Wehrmacht officers around Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg carried out an assassination attempt on Hitler that ultimately failed. The leaders of the conspiracy were summarily shot the same night in the courtyard of the Bendlerblock. Today, it's the German Resistance Memorial Center.
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Bergen-Belsen Memorial
The Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Lower Saxony was initially established as a prisoner of war camp before becoming a concentration camp. Prisoners too sick to work were brought here from other concentration camps, and many also died of disease. One of the 50,000 people killed here was Anne Frank, a Jewish girl who gained international fame after her diary was published posthumously.
Image: picture alliance/Klaus Nowottnick
Buchenwald Memorial
Located near the Thuringian town of Weimar, Buchenwald was one of the largest concentration camps in Germany. From 1937 to April 1945, the National Socialists deported about 270,000 people from all over Europe to the camp and murdered 64,000 of them before the camp was liberated by US soldiers in 1945. The site now serves as a memorial to the victims.
Image: Getty Images/J. Schlueter
Memorial to the Sinti and Roma Victims
Opposite the Reichstag parliament building in Berlin, a park inaugurated in 2012 serves as a memorial to the 500,000 Sinti and Roma people killed by the Nazi regime. Around a memorial pool, the poem "Auschwitz" by Roma poet Santino Spinelli is written in English, Germany and Romani. "Gaunt face, dead eyes, cold lips, quiet, a broken heart, out of breath, without words, no tears," it reads.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa
'Stolpersteine' — stumbling blocks as memorials
In the 1990s, artist Gunter Demnig began the project to confront Germany's Nazi past. The brass-covered concrete cubes placed in front of the former homes of Nazi victims show their names, details about their deportation, and murder, if known. As of early 2022, some 100,000 "Stolpersteine" have been laid in over 25 countries across Europe. It's the world's largest decentralized Holocaust memorial.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa
Brown House in Munich
Right next to the "Führerbau," where Adolf Hitler had his office in Munich, was the headquarters of the Nazi Party, called the Brown House. A white cube now occupies the place where it once stood. In it, the "Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism" opened on April 30, 2015, 70 years after the defeat of the Nazi regime.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/Sven Hoppe
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The Stolperstein was laid at the Pestalozzi School in Buenos Aires to honor its role as a refuge for those persecuted by National Socialism.
"The school gave me a sense of security and made the trauma of exile a lot easier," the plaque reads.
The quote belongs to Margot Aberle Strauss from Hamburg who, in 1938 and at the age of 10, fled Nazi Germany to Argentina with her Jewish family and entered the 5th grade of the Pestalozzi school. Between 1933 and 1945, about 35,000 German Jews and other persecuted people fled to Argentina. The school became a home for hundreds of Jewish children.
"It's an exception: we usually want to mark the places where the Nazi crimes and persecution began, but we think it's also very important to focus on the places where the people who had to leave their countries were located," Anna Warda, a leading member of the Stolperstein project, said in an interview with Spanish news agency EFE.
German ambassador Jürgen Mertens said at the laying ceremony that the plaque recognized the school as "a place of arrival, reception and shelter for the victims." The Pestalozzi School was founded in 1934 as an alternative to the existing German schools in Argentina, which had become connected to the Nazis.
