Heidenau council bans new Stolpersteine after AfD-CDU motion, sparking national backlash

The council of Heidenau, a town near Dresden in the German state of Saxony, voted on Thursday evening to ban any new Stolpersteine — the brass “stumbling stone” memorials to victims of Nazi persecution — from the town’s public streets and pavements, Reuters and the Associated Press report.

The motion passed by secret ballot with 13 votes in favour, six against and one abstention, and was jointly submitted by councillors of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the “Oberelbe Alliance for More Democracy”, The Jerusalem Post reports. Future commemorations are to be concentrated at a memorial site in the town’s Northern Cemetery instead. Supporters argued that many residents regard the cobblestone-shaped stones as inappropriate because they are embedded in the ground and can be walked on; the town administration had recommended rejecting the motion.

The decision drew a wave of criticism on Friday. Israel’s ambassador to Germany, Ron Prosor, wrote on X: “I’m ashamed”, noting that some Stolpersteine laid in Germany recall the fates of his own family members. “Germany needs a clear firewall against anti-Semitism – whether it comes from the right, the left or Islamist circles. Without exception.”

Germany’s education minister, Karin Prien of the CDU, called the ban “a scandal”, telling Bild: “Anyone who banishes Stolpersteine and memorial sites commemorating Jewish life from public spaces to the cemetery is prioritising death over life and rendering Jewish people invisible once again.” She said her own CDU in Saxony bore responsibility for the decision, the BBC reports.

Charlotte Knobloch, a Holocaust survivor and president of the Jewish Community in Munich, said removing memorials from the cityscape was “completely the wrong approach”, adding that decentralised remembrance which “permeates and shapes” public space was crucial to a genuine culture of remembrance. She told the Funke media group she was “appalled that a democratic party has chosen to support such a transparent manoeuvre by the extremist AfD.”

Gunter Demnig, the German artist who launched the Stolpersteine project, said that given the AfD’s electoral successes “it was certainly to be expected that something like this would happen”, accusing the CDU of “leaving their Christian roots behind.”

More than 130,000 Stolpersteine have been laid in some 1,800 cities across 33 countries, making the project one of the world’s largest decentralised memorials. Five stones have already been installed in Heidenau.