Marginalization and local commemoration of Third Reich victims

This thesis considers two case studies concerning German sites of public memory for the commemoration of the victims of the Nazi regime that took place in different historical periods. The city of Stuttgart established the Birkenkopf Memorial in 1953 as the city rebuilt itself. The development of the site and many of the debates surrounding it took place in the immediate post-war years. Freiburg im Breisgau’s Platz der Alten Synagoge, on the other hand, opened to the public in August 2017, over 70 years after the war ended. Nevertheless, similar controversies surround Freiburg’s memory site today. I analyze both of these case studies comparatively and against the national narrative of German public memory of the National Socialist era in their respective time periods