On 30 August, a new memorial to German deserters will be unveiled in Stuttgart, Germany. The memorial is being funded by selling sponsorships in units of 50 Euros. The memorial is going to be dedicated in front of the Stadttheater (near the Killesberg Hochpark) until a permanent location can be found. I will not be able to attend that event and document it in the same detail as I did for the unveiling in Ulm. See this link for more information in German on the event and the speakers.

I will not be able to attend that event and document it in the same detail as I did for the unveiling in Ulm. If anybody would like to document the event for this blog, their report would be welcome.

Meanwhile, an initiative in Tübingen to have an unnamed square in the newly-renovated French quarter (Französisches Viertel) named in honor of German deserters passed in July. The journalist Hans-Joachim Lang discovered in 2004 that a nearby location had been used for at least three executions of deserters in the spring of 1945. Several political parties opposed the initiative, citing "political reasons". The majority won out, however. There are no buildings which will have the new name, "Platz des unbekannten Deserteurs" ("Unknown Deserter Square") as an address.

Over twenty new sites of memory have been added to sites-of-memory.de from the Ruhr industrial area of Germany. I did not have the time to search the down town areas. I focused entirely on cemeteries in Dortmund, Bochum and Essen. Memorials from Mühlheim will follow soon.

I was surprised to not find monumental memorial complexes for the bombing in Dortmund or Essen. They have large cemetery sections for their war dead, and they are mostly civilians buried there, but no large memorial complexes focused on the bombing like in Darmstadt or Pforzheim or even a special section for the bombing victims like in Stuttgart or Karlsruhe.

The new memorials also include some new additions to the section on civilian accidents involving mines and a factory and several new gravesites for concentration camp victims, Soviet POWs, and other victims of the Nazis. There is also a well-hidden memorial to policemen and citizens who fell combatting the revolutionary disturbances in Essen in 1920.

Travel to all these sites was backed by a research grant from American Public University.