Hamburg’s new memorial to Nazi-era sex workers in its red-light district has been attacked as “tasteless” and “superficial” by local critics and a leading German memory campaigner.
The brass pavement plaque, reading “Disenfranchised – Excluded – Murdered”, was unveiled near the Reeperbahn amusement mile in memory of sex workers in the years 1933-1945.
While Nazi authorities cracked down in the rest of the country, sex workers were tolerated in Germany’s northern port city if they restricted themselves to a handful of defined areas, including the small Herbertstrasse.
Up to 250 women still work from windows in this street, blocked off from curious passersby with metal barriers at each end. Few of the tourists who snap selfies at the gates know they were erected on Nazi orders in 1933.
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“This corresponds with the National Socialists’ cynical and inhumane policy not to ban prostitution here, but to restrict it to barracks like this,” said Pastor Sieghard Wilm of the nearby St Pauli church, a co-initiator of the plaque.
District mayor Ralf Neubauer said the plaque’s QR code would lead people to a website explaining the fate of fascist-era sex workers.
“Many ended up in concentration camps and were forcibly sterilised,” said Mr Neubauer. “Even if they didn’t die, they came back broken from the war.”
Even before its unveiling, the memorial has attracted a large number of critics, including Gunter Demnig. His handmade concrete and brass Stolpersteine – or stumbling stones – remember individuals persecuted or murdered by the Nazis and can be found outside buildings from Berlin to Dublin.
He described Hamburg’s oblong, machine-made brass plaque as “tasteless”.
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In an open letter, Hamburg sex workers and a city historian ask “why the sex workers who work today in the Herbertstrasse… weren’t included in the planning for this memorial”. They also criticise the memorial for its focus on women, pointing to at least one non-binary sex worker from the period.
“Why is no one discussing that the barriers still exist, even though they were an invention of the Nazi regime?” the letter continues.
Most importantly, despite ample evidence of Nazi abuses against sex workers, “there are no sources we know proving that prostitutes were deported from the Herbertstrasse and murdered”.
“We welcome the basic idea,” the letter concludes, “but it just makes no sense on this site, given the National Socialist regime tolerated and even profited from prostitution here.”
Reacting to the criticism, organisers described the plaque “not as the end of the research but its beginning”.
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