A series of more than 9 000 mini-memorials in Germany to people killed by the Nazis is for the first time to include an African, Mahjub bin Adam Mohamed, organisers said on Monday.
The 10cm-square brass plaques have been cemented into pavements all over the country since 1997 by an artist, Gunter Demnig.
They are placed outside apartment blocks where the victims lived before they were arrested.
Mahjub’s extraordinary story has already been told in a book by German academic Marianne Bechhaus-Gerst. As a boy he served in the German colonial forces in Tanzania and moved to Germany in 1929, working as a waiter and an entertainer, with bit parts in films.
Mahjub was arrested in 1941 on an allegation of miscegenation and died in 1944 in Sachsenhausen concentration camp, an appalling disease-ridden detention centre near Berlin.
The Mahjub plaque will be cemented into the pavement outside Brunnenstrasse house number 193 in Berlin on September 14, Demnig’s office said.
The art project is known as Stolpersteine, German for ”stumbling block”. Each contains a name and a date of death for passers-by to read.
Demnig says the plaques thwart the Nazis’ bid to wipe out all memory of the Jews, gypsies and outspoken people killed by Hitler’s regime. – Sapa-DPA