AFP
October 24, 2013
“What we envision is a virtual, floating museum over Munich,” Martina Bachmann, spokeswoman for the app development company based in the southern German city, told AFP.
“We want to put the fate of Nazi victims into the open, give the victims a face and a biography.”
For several years in dozens of European cities, pedestrians have been literally stumbling over the names of Nazi-era victims, in small plaques embedded in the street in front of their last known addresses.
The “Stolpersteine Muenchen” app is a virtual version of these memorials, a “digital monument against forgetting”, the company says.
When smartphone users approach a building where a Holocaust victim lived, a photo, birth and death dates, and other biographical details appear on the screen.
The app was fashioned after the “Stolpersteine” project started by Cologne sculptor Gunther Demnig in 1996 as a way to memorialise the genocidal acts of the Nazi regime on a human scale.
“Stolpersteine” — literally “stumbling blocks” — were envisioned as a more personal tribute than large Holocaust memorials.