Another memorial to deserters has been opened in Stuttgart. Photos and a report on the dedication ceremony are now available at sites-of-memory.de. Despite my previous announcement that I would not be able to attend, I did manage to go.

This memorial is intended to not only memorialize the more than 15,000 men executed for deserting the ranks of Wehrmacht during the Second World War, but to acknowledge and honor all deserters from all wars. That aspect was emphasized at the memorial ceremony by the presence of both a Wehrmacht deserter and a recent American deserter from the "Global War on Terror." The two men, Ludwig Baumann and Chris Capps, are shown in the photo as they posed right after unveiling the memorial, a design by Aulendorf sculpture Nikolaus Kernbach.

This memorial was the result of 11 years of work by peace organizations supported in part by German labor unions. The current location memorial is considered temporary until a location near the city center can be found. Efforts to get the memorial placed there have been unsuccessful so far. The city leadership has rejected the memorial in principle. Mayor Wolfgang Schuster, for example, has said that the memorial to the victims of the Nazis can be considered to include deserters. He argued that we do not need memorials for individual groups of victims.

This memorial is an example of how any form of subversion is a threat to authority - even if the authority claims to oppose the authority being undermined or attacked by the specific subversion in question.