Cologne, Germany - The German city of Cologne published
Monday the design for a future memorial to honour the men who
deserted Nazi Germany's armed forces, or paid with their lives for
being conscientious objectors.
The memorial will be only the second civic monument in a public
space to pacifists in a country where many people who lived through
the war and are now dying out still regarded deserters as traitors.
Only Berlin has a public monument, in the form of 100 mirrors in a
park where 230 German men were executed by firing squad 1944-45.
Cologne's memorial will take the form of a pergola with an
inscription along its roof line, said Marcel Odenbach, head of the
panel that chose the design. It was designed by Ruedi Baur of
Switzerland.
'We should be proud of these men,' said Georg Quander, the city's
culture supremo. The monument is to be completed by September 1, the
70th anniversary of Germany's commencement of the Second World War.
Deserters who refused to fight for Nazi Germany were socially
shunned even after Germany's defeat and it took years for their
personal rejection of the Nazi war effort to be seen in a new light.
In 2002, Germany's legislature declared the judicial convictions
of the deserters and objectors void.
The Nazis routinely charged military personnel who ran away from
their units with treachery and sentenced 30,000 of them to death.
In all, 20,000 were shot, said Karola Fings of Cologne's museum of
Nazi crimes. Others had their sentences commuted, but may also have
died in concentration camps or in 'punishment battalions' which were
exposed to extreme danger.
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