Show the Invisible

_{(4 min read)}

With the help of a good map you can find traces you barely can see in reality. This short story starts with our first Halloween special about digitalizing of graveyards and documenting their inhabitants. One of our readers told us his story how he utilized the available data about a grave to learn more about its history. A little bit later we had an Experts Voice special with this reader and at the end of this trip covering also history in geodata processing he pointed us towards another story to preserve history using geodata.

Germany has a dark history when one part of the citizens persecuted another part. The perpetrators documented their crimes in records and these papers are the only possibility to conduct research into a victim’s history. We are talking about the massive deportation of Jewish people, disabled persons and political dissenters during the Third Reich. Long time only the old files were available and edited to memorial books. You had to scan up to 50,000 entries to find information about residents in your local street.

But who is actively visiting archives to learn about history of former residents? To make the victims visible the German artist Gunter Demnig invented the cobblestone-sized Stolperstein (“stumbling block”). They are placed at the sidewalk in front of the buildings where people got deported. A brass plate on top is giving information about name, birthday, date of deportation and date as well as location of murder. This small memorial is not about to stumble physically, but stumble mentally by seeing the brass plates with engraving again and again. Until now, about 100,000 Stolpersteine had been laid in 21 countries in Europe making the project the world’s largest decentralized memorial.

Due to the fact that there are so many Stolpersteine existing you can better understand the – but yet – intangible size of this crime. However it is hard to put all information about the victims into a small memorial. Telling about the lives is important to not forget that these people were common people like you and me. Therefore the Stolpersteine got digitalized in a Stolpersteine Guide and you can find the locations and links to the history using a smartphone app or a web interface. While clicking on the locations you find the names and biographies (which are sometimes quite comprehensive) of the former inhabitants of the buildings. Additionally photos of the Stolpersteine are added as well as of the people or the surrounding if available. And like every good documentation, the reference source such as municipal archives or associations is given.

But as always it seems that the set of data is not complete. For example for the region of Braunschweig there are no entries available despite the fact that you can find a lot of Stolpersteine there. Additional to the Stolpersteine Guide also a crowd-sourced activity called Historic Place exists and maps the Stolpersteine (among others) as well as links additional documentation to them. There you can find Braunschweig’s Stolpersteine with some additional information.

Zooming out the overview of the History Place map shows the large number of entries but it’s still hard to get. The project Mapping the Lives initiated and maintained by the non-profit organization Tracing the Past e.V. is doing it slightly different: After zooming a little bit in a so-called heat map is shown in addition to the pure numbers of the amount of victims showing the distribution of the residencies. With the help of the heat-map it is easier to understand that this crime of deportation happened in more or less every neighborhood and not only on single locations. If you look at the same location on the other platforms you could get the impression that only few people suffered by the crime because much less entries can be found. This is because only 1% of all victims got a Stolperstein (as you can see in the Historic Place database) and on top of that not all Stolpersteine got digitalized by the corresponding Stolpersteine Guide. 99% of all victims stay invisible!

The American Roderick Miller founded the association to make them visible after stumbling across a Stolperstein in his street after moving to Berlin. He wondered if victims have lived in his building, too but haven’t got a Stolperstein. He started to research on that digging deep into analogue memorial books figuring out that there are many more destinies documented than remembered. The national archives are doing a good job but they are heavily under-staffed and under-funded to digitalize and process all the data in addition to all the other topics they have on their plate. With the Tracing the Past association he tries to digitalize all available analogue data of the German Minority Census 1939 and store it in a searchable database and visualize them in a map view. So far, more than 950,000 entries got processed, nearly ten times the Stolpersteine existing. Currently a moderated crowdsourcing platform shall be set up to give private individuals, such as relatives, the opportunity to share information about persecuted people and in this way contribute to their memory in the digital and public space.

As we told in other features about the importance to incorporate multiple data sources by different stakeholders and try to reference the data to each other also this digression is telling the same story. It would be good if these activities joined forces or at least shared resources to reach the same goal. Especially in this case it is always an issue that we remember the perpetrators but not the victims. This story is about “never forget” and therefore a good reminder for “never again” which is currently more important then ever. Let’s continue to work together and join our data, knowledge and experience!