Erfurt held its first memorial day for the victims of right‑wing violence. The Sunday event, featuring lectures and workshops on Domplatz, drew a good crowd and the mood was appropriate, according to a spokesperson for Blinde Flecken e.V. Erfurt, the group organizing the day alongside other initiatives.
According to organizers, three people in the state capital have fallen victim to right‑wing violence since the reunification. Nationwide, victim-support organization Ezra tallies at least twelve such deaths. Of these, only one case has been officially recognized by the state.
Heinz Mädel was brutally beaten
Heinz Mädel, 58, was verbally abused as gay and beaten on June 25, 1990, in Erfurt by two young women. The attackers, who had previously taken part in homophobic assaults, knocked him to the ground and stomped on his head and upper body. When a bystander from a nearby youth group, including neo‑Nazi skinheads, tried to intervene, one of the women hissed, “Since when do you help gays?” Mädel died from his injuries on July 1. (Chronicle on the Amadeu Antonio Stiftung website).
The other two victims are Ireneusz Szyderski (24), a Polish harvest worker who was assaulted by neo‑Nazis in 1992 and died on the way to the hospital, and Hartmut Balzke (48), who in 2003 was so badly injured in an attack by neo‑Nazis that he died two days later in a hospital.
City of Erfurt supports the event
The City of Erfurt has provided financial support for the day, the spokesperson added. The mayor of the state capital, Andreas Horn (CDU), stated: “With this memorial day we are, for the first time in Erfurt, making a visible commitment to remembering the victims of right‑wing violence and giving their fate a fixed place in the public consciousness of our city.”
The goal is to make the event an annual affair going forward. “What is important to us is that this remains in the hands of the initiatives moving forward,” the spokesperson said. Blinde Flecken was founded in 2019 after the murder of CDU politician Walter Lübcke. The founders decided at that time that talking about isolated cases needed to stop, and therefore they conducted deeper research into the Erfurt cases. Similar initiatives exist in other Thuringian towns.
