page_title: Martha Goldberg
section_title: Commemoration of Victims
hierarchical_section_title: Martha Goldberg / Impact and Commemoration / Commemoration of Victims
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Stolperstein zum Gedenken an Martha Goldberg in Bremen-Burgdamm, Bremerhavener Heerstraße 18
context_page_description: Martha Goldberg, née Sussmann was a German woman and social activist, and one of five Jewish victims murdered by National Socialists in Bremen and the surrounding area during Reichspogromnacht. She was married to Dr Adolph Goldberg, also Jewish, whose practice was based in Burgdamm. Martha Goldberg was well respected due to her social conscience. For more than four decades she supported fellow citizens who were in need in a variety of ways, particularly those she encountered through her husband's medical practice. She and her husband were killed by a member of the Sturmabteilung.
  Although the circumstances of her murder and its legal treatment in both the Nazi era and post-war period are documented in preserved trial records, the process of accounting for her personal fate did not begin until the 1980s. In Bremen, tributes to those murdered include the naming of a public square after the Goldbergs, and the naming of a nursery after Martha Goldberg.
context_section_description: A process of coming to terms with the persecution of Jews during the Nazi period began rather hesitantly in Bremen at the end of the 1970s and first became accepted by the majority of the population in the 1980s. Accordingly, a plaque by the Bremen sculptor Claus Homfeld was first installed in 1982 at the Kolpinghaus on Kolpingstraße in the Schnoor district of Bremen, commemorating the synagogue that was set on fire and destroyed by National Socialists in 1938.
  Also in 1982, not far from this former main synagogue of the Jewish community in Bremen the Memorial for the Victims of Reichskristallnacht was installed in front of the Landherrnamt building, in memory of Martha and Adolph Goldberg and the other three Jewish victims of Reichspogromnacht in Bremen and the surrounding area. The memorial was created according to a plan by Hans D. Voss, an informalist artist from Bremen. It is rendered in unadorned, cubic blocks of died-black concrete, and bears a commemorative plaque, with the inscription shown below in translation:
  After an initiative by school children, a square between Bremerhavener Heerstraße and the corner Kellerstraße in the Bremen district of Burglesum was renamed Goldbergplatz in 1985. The Goldberg's home and doctor's practice had been nearby, on Bremerhavener Heerstraße, called Bahnhofstraße at the time.
  In 1985, a memorial stone in Goldbergplatz was dedicated to the couple. It was set into the raised natural stone surface of a large, raised, circular flower bed. The memorial stone, which is made of granite, bears the inscription which has been translated below:
  The nursery of the Jewish community in the district of Bremen-Schwachhausen, founded in 1997, bears the name Martha Goldberg.
  On the anniversary of the murder, that is to say on 10 November 2005, the artist Gunter Demnig from Cologne laid two "Stolpersteine" in memory of the Goldbergs in Burgdamm, in the pavement outside the house at 18 Bremerhavener Heerstraße (previously 144 Bahnhofstraße), where the Goldbergs lived and Adolph Goldberg's doctor's practice was based. Demnig gave the brass top plate of the "Stolperstein" for Martha Goldberg the inscription shown below in translation:
  To commemorate the victims of Reichspogromnacht and as a reminder of the crimes of National Socialism, the Nacht der Jugend (Youth Night) has taken place in Bremen each November since 1998. Thehistorical town hall (a world heritage site) opens its doors to young people in particular, but also to older people. The event, which consists of a multitude of cultural and musical contributions, is put on regularly by several hundred young people, and attended by up to 2,500 visitors. The fate of the five Jewish victims of Reichspogromnacht from Bremen and the surrounding area – Martha and Adolph Goldberg, and Heinrich Rosenblum, Leopold Sinasohn, and Selma Swinitzki – is always discussed, and has been thematized already in different ways.
  Together with the Jewish community, members of the Bürgerschaft of Bremen commemorate the local victims of Reichspogromnacht each year on 10 November, in a memorial at the Landherrnamt as well as in a central memorial ceremony in the town hall. There are remembrance ceremonies each year on 10 November at the memorial in Goldbergplatz, and some further memorial events also take place at other locations and memorial sites in Bremen, organized by institutions and societies such as the Association of Prosecutees of the Nazi Regime.
caption: Stolperstein in memory of Martha Goldberg.
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