Swiss city places information boards next to Nazi memorial

City of Chur places information boards next to Nazi stone Keystone-SDA

The city of Chur in eastern Switzerland has erected four information boards next to the Nazi memorial in the Daleu cemetery. They are intended to place the grave in a historical context. The memorial stone dates back to 1938 and was part of a Nazi hero cult.

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The panels are now intended to shed light on the various aspects of the memorial stone, the city of Chur wrote in a press release on Tuesday. These include its creation, the political and historical background, the inscriptions and the role of the Volksbund Deutscher Kriegsgräberfürsorge (German War Graves Commission).

This organisation looked after fallen German soldiers and was very close to the Hitler government. Soldiers who died in Graubünden during the First World War are buried under the 13-tonne monument at the Daleu cemetery in Chur.

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Wide-ranging debate

The stone was discovered in 2023 by a journalist from Swiss public broadcaster, SRF. In an interview with the Swiss News Agency Keystone-SDA, she said she had read in an art history report about the involvement of a Nazi in the commission for the memorial. She then did some research and found out that the block was part of a death cult led by Adolf Hitler.

Shortly afterwards, Chur politician Angela Carigiet Fitzgerald initiated a political process. The question was how to deal with the stone: leave it, remove it, mark it as an anti-Nazi memorial or install additional information boards. In the end, after intensive debate, the city parliament decided in favour of the information boards.

The city government was then instructed to have the history of the Nazi stone comprehensively analysed. The findings of the cantonal research report on the history of fascism and National Socialism in Graubünden were also incorporated into the design of the information boards. The aim is to make history visible and enable a critical examination of the past, the city said.

Translated from German by DeepL/ts

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