Scott Haas
Aug 26, 2017 · 3 min read

Adolf Hitler Street was where my grandfather’s shop and home were located in Neumarkt, Germany. My grandparents raised my father, uncle, and aunt there until moving to the city of Fürth in 1938. The family moved because violence had increased towards the family and others of their community. A few years later, everyone in the family, except my father, was arrested and deported to Latvia. My father left Germany for New York City in August, 1941, on the last Children’s Transport permitted out of the country. My aunt and grandparents were murdered. My uncle survived incarceration, torture, and beatings, came to the United States in 1946, and became a prominent commercial real estate broker in NYC and active supporter of the Republican party.

When the war ended, Adolf Hitler Street was renamed Main Street. The renaming was part of a national order from the Allied command. The Allies, having won the war, decided that all streets, monuments, statues, and tributes with names linked to the Nazi movement were to be renamed or torn down.

The order came about, in part, because if it had been left to Germans at that time to decide, they may not have chosen the renaming or destruction. It wasn’t that people were pro-Nazi, but it wasn’t as if they were anti-Nazi either. The signs were a part of history. The firebombing of German cities had made victims of them, too. Many lost sons, brothers, and fathers in the war.

But it wasn’t open to debate.

Locals in Neumarkt had no choice but to go along with the new laws. However, they managed to preserve a monument to Dieter Eckart. Mr. Eckart, a local, born in Neumarkt, was a founder of the German Workers Party, which later became the NSDAP, better known as the Nazi party. He was hard-working, committed, idealistic, and deeply anti-Semitic. He wrote a lot, and inspired many.

Mr. Eckart was a very productive writer. He was the original publisher of the Nazi newspaper, the Volkischer Beobachter, which advocated exterminating the Jews. He also wrote the lyrics of the Nazi party anthem, “Deutschland erwache,”which became an anthem of the Nazi Party and includes the lyric, “Give foreign Jews no place in your Reich!”

During the war, Neumarkt was renamed: Dieter Eckart City.

That name was changed after the war, lost to history, but the monument honoring Mr. Eckart is still in the Neumarkt city park.

A few years ago, locals added a path in the park named after my aunt: Ilse Haas.

In October this year, locals are putting, “Stolpersteine,” on the sidewalk in front of what was my grandfather’s house on Adolf Hitler Street. These are slightly raised bricks that cause passersby to stumble and then face a little plaque. The bricks and plaques are seen in other cities, towns, and villages in Germany, and are placed strategically in front of homes from which people were deported and then murdered.

One could have left my grandfather’s street with the name given to it by the losing side, but that would make as much sense as naming buildings and putting up statues of Southern Confederates in this country.

Ultimately, streets have no names. They are imaginative. Constructs meant to create pride in people who led nations.

But what happens when that leadership fails?

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