Stolpersteine ​​in Charlottenburg: Remembrance of the November pogroms of 1938

Stolpersteine ​​in Charlottenburg: Remembrance of the November pogroms of 1938

On Sunday morning, November 9th, 2025, around 40 people gathered in front of the Charlottenburg District Court to honor an impressive bronze sculpture. This sculpture, created by Jewish-Ukrainian sculptor Vadim Sidur in 1966, depicts “murdered people lying on top of each other.” It is part of the commemoration of the victims of the Holocaust and casts a shadow on the role of the judiciary in the Nazi regime.

The Treblinka Memorial, which can be seen here, commemorates more than 800,000 Jews and around 2,000 Sinti and Roma who were murdered in the Treblinka extermination camp from 1942 onwards. This memorial was erected directly in front of the district court in 1979 to reflect the involvement of the judiciary in the atrocities of the Third Reich. Historian Jacek A. Młynarczyk estimates that at least 780,863 people were killed in Treblinka, a synonym for the cruel implementation of the “final solution to the Jewish question,” as the Nazis called their systematic extermination of Jews.

Remembrance and processing

The Stolperstein walks that took place on this day are an important commemorative event that commemorate the November pogroms of 1938. These pogroms were characterized by the looting and destruction of synagogues, shops and homes of the Jewish population. In Charlottenburg there are over 4,000 stumbling blocks that commemorate all people persecuted by the Nazis, including Jews, Sinti and Roma, homosexuals, social democrats, communists and black people.

Although there is a long list of applications for further stumbling blocks in Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf, no new applications will be accepted for the time being. For a long time, society did not engage with the history of the Nazi judiciary, but the process of coming to terms with it is slowly beginning. It is a necessary task to process and remember the crimes of the Holocaust and those who were complicit in the justice system.

The Treblinka memorial

The Treblinka memorial complex, located on the site of the former Treblinka II extermination camp, was built between 1958 and 1964. The memorial stone, which consists of uncut granite blocks and is eight meters high, stands on the site where the gas chambers once were. Annual commemorations have been held since 1964, first in April or May and now on August 2, to commemorate the 1943 prisoner uprising.

The erection of the memorial was the result of almost nine years of construction and was designed by the sculptor Franciszek Duszeńko and the architect Adam Haupt. The central memorial stone not only tells of the terrible past, but also of the need to keep the memory of the victims alive. Historically, Treblinka was one of three extermination camps set up by the Nazis as part of Operation Reinhard.

In the context of these historical memories, it is important to recall the atrocities of the Holocaust, which claimed the lives of more than six million Jewish men, women and children, as well as millions of other people. This systematic, state-sponsored murder has gone down in history books as Shoʾah or Ḥurban and remains a central theme in the discussion of anti-Semitism and the Nazi past.

With the stumbling blocks, the memorials and the annual memorial events, we contribute to keeping the memory of the victims and responsibility towards history alive.

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