The memorial to the murdered Jews of Wiesbaden was opened to the public on January 27, 2011 on Michelsberg.
In 2006, the city council decided to hold an urban planning ideas competition to redesign the area around the former Heinrich Heine site on Michelsberg. Its primary aim was to create a dignified place to commemorate all the Jewish citizens of Wiesbaden who were murdered during the National Socialist dictatorship. Until then, there had only been an uninspiring memorial ensemble consisting of a pillar and three plaques commemorating the main synagogue of the Wiesbaden Jewish community, which was attacked, desecrated and set on fire by the brown barbarians on November 10, 1938.
The memorial was designed by the Berlin landscape architect Barbara Willeke and realized by the Wiesbaden urban development company at the exact spot where the magnificent synagogue, built by Philipp Hoffmann in 1869 in Moorish architectural style, once stood as the center of the liberal Jewish community, visible from afar. For some time now, it has been impressively commemorated by a virtual reconstruction created by a working group at the Wiesbaden University of Applied Sciences under the direction of Edgar Brück. The award-winning photorealistic 3D visualization in the form of a computer animation can be viewed in a special memorial and information room in the foyer of the town hall, as well as a permanent exhibition on the life, suffering and murder of Wiesbaden's Jews, designed and financed by the Active Museum Spiegelgasse.
While Frankfurt installation artist Vollrad Kutscher and Wiesbaden sprayer Yorkar7 have created an impressive and unprecedented artistic form of remembrance of the deportations that took place at the Schlachthof in the area of the new leisure and culture park, the memorial on the Michelsberg, which is almost overwhelming in terms of its architecture, size and purpose, serves to preserve the names of all Wiesbaden victims of the Shoah. Their historiographical research as well as the biographical data of those murdered was carried out by the city archive in cooperation with the Active Museum Spiegelgasse. Since its foundation in 1988, the latter has drawn the public's attention to the fate of Wiesbaden's Jews in a variety of ways, for example by laying "Stumbling Stones" in front of their last self-chosen residences and by compiling and presenting biographical "Memory Sheets".
The memorial on Michelsberg, which marks the site of the former synagogue, is divided into two corresponding areas by the street layout. All 1,507 names of the Jewish victims of Nazi racial madness from Wiesbaden that have been identified so far are collected on a volume of names illuminated at night. Their dates of birth and - where ascertainable - their dates of death are also recorded there. According to Jewish custom, it is a religious duty to remember the deceased by preserving their names. "Only those whose names are forgotten are truly dead," says an old proverb. As the Jewish people murdered during those terrible years were almost never given a grave of their own and there was therefore no place where their relatives could go to remember them, this building once again takes on a very special significance. A touchscreen makes it possible to call up further information on the fate of those murdered and the history of the memorial.
On January 27, 2011, the national and international day of remembrance for the victims of the Nazi regime, the memorial was gracefully handed over to the citizens of Wiesbaden by representatives of the municipal authorities. In the same year, it was awarded the Architecture Prize of the State of Hesse.
