AfD, Merz's Party Win Halt to Town's Holocaust Plaques

A small town in eastern Germany has touched off a fight over how the country remembers the Holocaust. The council in Heidenau, near Dresden, voted Thursday to block any new "Stolpersteine"—small brass "stumbling stone" plaques set into sidewalks to mark the last chosen homes of people murdered or persecuted by the Nazis. The stones, which have the name of a victim, are slightly raised from the rest of the surface, per Deutsche Welle; artist Gunter Demnig began the international project more than 30 years ago. Instead, future remembrances are to be limited to a central memorial at a local cemetery, Reuters reports.

The motion was jointly backed by the far-right Alternative for Germany and the center-right Christian Democratic Union, the party of Chancellor Friedrich Merz, despite city administration opposition to a blanket ban. The AfD has repeatedly questioned Germany's remembrance culture; co-founder Alexander Gauland once dismissed the Nazi period as an aberration in an otherwise successful 1,000 years. The Heidenau vote is intensifying scrutiny of the CDU's pledge to maintain a strict separation from the AfD. Jewish leader Charlotte Knobloch said she was "appalled" that a democratic party had endorsed what she called a transparent AfD maneuver. Supporters of the ban argue the ground-level plaques are disrespectful because people walk over them.