The site of the Alsace-Moselle Memorial in Schirmeck (Bas-Rhin) will soon host a new “memorial monument”. The president of the Grand-Est region unveiled this project on Tuesday, decided in tribute to the dead and missing from Alsace and Moselle during the Second World War. “This monument testifies that it is possible to make common and yet so unique stories coexist together”, welcomed Jean Rottner (LR), after the failure of the aborted project of the “wall of names” in 2017, carried by his predecessor Philippe Richert.
The prospect of seeing, in alphabetical order and on the same monument, the names of civilian victims, including deported Jews and “in spite of us”, among whom some had been able to participate in war crimes, had then aroused a lively controversy.
The “memorial monument”, whose final name will be decided later, will articulate “collective tribute and individual journeys”, according to Benoît Zeimett, head of the architectural firm that won the call for projects.
The chosen building, a mineral, monolithic mass, with a roof with protruding ends, will be anchored below the Alsace-Moselle Memorial, a historical museum inaugurated in 2005, and which before the pandemic welcomed 50,000 visitors per year.
Frédérique Neau-Dufour, president of the scientific committee which worked on the project, sees in the structure “a crossroads, at the crossroads of memory and history, of Alsace and Moselle […] emotion and science”.
Installed by end of 2024
Interactive and immersive terminals will allow visitors to scroll through and project by category the names of the various victims of Nazism, in these territories annexed by the Reich after the French debacle. Photographs, archives, testimonies, will shed light on some of the lives of the 40,000 victims identified, of whom approximately two-thirds are forcibly incorporated. A space will be dedicated to ceremonies outside the concrete cube. “It is a space dedicated to making known this very strange history for those who do not know it”, summed up the historian.
The names of Jewish victims, Gypsies, mental patients, homosexuals or Jehovah’s Witnesses who were also deported will also be displayed. “No volunteer either in the Wehrmacht or in the Waffen-SS will be present among the projected names”, cleared Frédérique Neau-Dufour.
The commissioning of the building is hoped for by the end of 2024, the year of the 80th anniversary of the Liberation. The Region will fully finance the project, the cost of which is estimated at nearly two million euros.