A few days ago Gunter Demnig returned from Serbia. As before in 26 other countries, he laid stumbling blocks for victims of National Socialism. There are now 80,000 pieces. The stones with the brass plates, embedded in the sidewalks, are reminiscent of former residents of neighboring houses. In July, a scientific volume was published that classifies Demnig's decades of work and looks to the future, entitled “Stones of Stumbling”. That was unintentionally prophetic. Because a stumbling block planned for tomorrow, Sunday, in the small Luxembourgish community of Junglinster makes the latently open basic question of the decentralized memorial topical: Who deserves a stone?
Demnig's Foundation defines victims on its website as “people who were persecuted, murdered, deported, expelled or driven to suicide during the Nazi era”. This includes not only Jews, but, according to Demnig, “all groups of victims”; in an interview with this newspaper he mentions forced laborers and deserters. In Junglinster, however, in addition to four stumbling blocks for Jewish victims, eleven stumbling blocks for forced recruits are to be laid at the same time. This refers to young Luxembourgers who were forcibly drafted into the Wehrmacht, among others, during the German occupation.
Mil Lorang, who published about the time of the German occupation in Luxembourg, does not consider the forced recruits to be victims of National Socialism. Rather, they are victims of a war crime under the Hague Land Warfare Regulations. He refers to the ordinance on compulsory military service in Luxembourg of August 1942, according to which Luxembourg conscripts received the same basic training, the same wages and the right to the same promotions and awards as their Reich German comrades. The German-Luxembourg agreement on reparation and care for war victims of 1959 also differentiates between “victimes du nazisme” and “victimes de guerre”.
Bernard Gottlieb is a member of the Jewish community in Luxembourg and is of the opinion that laying stumbling blocks for forced recruits, identical in metal, size, color and design, would equate very different fates.
That creates a European precedent.
The former Luxembourg diplomat Victor Weitzel criticizes the equation of the victim groups as "historical revisionism".
Controversial stumbling block laying began as a school project
The historian Sonja Kmec from the University of Luxembourg made a more differentiated statement to this newspaper. “The stumbling blocks that were placed in front of the houses of the people who were deported and killed as Jews do not just refer to the Holocaust. They refer to everyday life before, to the anti-Semitism of the neighborhood or their paralysis during the persecution. On the contrary, the forced recruitment led to violent strikes and protests. This symbolism is "the exact opposite of the stumbling blocks".
The controversial stumbling block laying began as a school project in Lënster Lycée. As the headmaster Tom Nober explains, this enabled the pupils to actively deal with the subject of National Socialism. He refers to a committee that planned the transfer, with the participation of various victims' associations and the community. The spokeswoman for Education Minister Claude Meisch announced that the aim was to commemorate the residents “who were victims of National Socialism in different ways and for different reasons, and to remember their individual fates”.
The former president of the Consistoire Israélite de Luxembourg, Claude Marx, had written to Demnig in June and pointed out that forced recruits could involuntarily have aided the genocide of the Jews. Nevertheless, Demnig is going to Junglinster tomorrow. For him, the fifteen people whose names are engraved on the plates are all victims. None of the eleven forced recruits returned home. Eight fell, two perished in Russian captivity. One, Fränz Wehr, had evaded confiscation, was arrested on May 14, 1944, was taken to a prison in Frankfurt am Main and shot there on May 23, 1944. He was 21 years old.