Stumbling Stones in Hamburg

Since 2006, volunteers have been researching the histories of the people remembered by the Stumbling Stones and publishing them on the project’s website. The aim is to reconstruct complete biographies of these people beyond the information on the “stone” itself (name, date of birth, address, date of deportation and place to which they were deported, arrest, date of death). From the beginning, the results of this research on former Hamburg residents have been published as books as part of the project Stumbling Stones in Hamburg – Biographical Search for Traces. The institutions that initiated this project, the Landeszentrale für politische Bildung Hamburg and the Institute for the History of the German Jews, manage and finance this project to this day.

In the meantime, 4600 biographies have been written by over three hundred authors. These have been published in 23 volumes, generally organized by neighborhood, and, in the case of newer biographies, directly on the initiative’s homepage, providing access to information about these people and their lives. The website also contains a database of all stumbling stones dedicated to date. The database can be searched by name, district, neighborhood, or street. Both the books and the website provide background information, a comprehensive glossary of Nazi terminology, and timelines of the persecution of various groups. Over 2350 of the biographies have been translated into English, mostly with the support of the Hermann Reemtsma Foundation. The project is continually growing as new biographies are added every month.

Most of the Stolpersteine in the Hamburg project’s database have been placed on Jewish Places’ interactive map, marking the sites where Jews who became victims of the Nazi terror had lived or worked. For this cooperation, key data were transferred to the Jewish Places maps, with links to the long biographies on the Stumbling Stones in Hamburg website. This connected the cartography of Jewish Places with the extensive biographical material uncovered by the Hamburg initiative’s research.