Angel of Peace (Mannheim)

[3] In August 1949, the Union of Persecutees of the Nazi Regime (VVN) applied for a memorial plaque to commemorate the resistance fighter, Lechleiter, and those executed with him at Georg-Lechleiter-Platz.

In the course of the debate on the motion, the circle of victims of Nazi mentioned on the commemorative plaque was extended to include all those who were persecuted for political, religious or racial reasons, those imprisoned in concentration camps, those deported from Mannheim and those that died elsewhere.

[4] In August 1950, the Social Democratic Lord Mayor Hermann Heimerich wanted the victims of the World War to be included; he also questioned the suitability of Lechleiter-Platz in Schwetzingerstadt.

Heimerich strove for a uniform commemoration day for the fight against Nazi and for all the civilian and military victims of the war, stating that it was an obligation to political renewal and peaceableness.

After liberation, Marcks created the memorial Fahrt über den Styx at the Hamburg-Ohlsdorf cemetery, and his designs were to be based on his sculpture Die Trauernde in Köln.

The director of the Mannheimer Kunsthalle, Walter Passarge, saw an "excess of suffering" in "the painfully restrained expression of the austere temperament with the huge, 'spellbinding' eyes".

In front of about 5000 visitors, Lord Mayor Heimerich referred to the historical significance of Schillerplatz as the "probably most venerable square" in the city with the pre-war location of the Mannheim National Theatre, the site of the premiere of Schiller's "Robber", in which the poet had juxtaposed the ideal of noble humanity with tyranny.

After which the Bishop Julius Bender and the Apostolic Protonotar Wilhelm Reinhard as representatives of the Archbishop of Freiburg, the rabbi Robert Raphael Geis spoke.

When the city administration learned that the soldiers' associations were preparing a big ceremony in the cemetery, they cancelled the event at the Angel of Peace in order not to intensify the separation.

[17] For the historian Christian Peters, it is "more than just a nuisance" that former members of the Waffen-SS called on the Mannheim population and thus also survivors of the Holocaust to an event at which the victims of persecution and resistance were also remembered.

[18] On the tenth anniversary of the end of the war, an "hour of reflection" took place at the Angel of Peace on 7 May 1955, to which Lord Mayor Heimerich invited the Protestant theologian Helmut Gollwitzer.

[22] In 2008, Sebastian Parzer stated that Heimerich, as a person persecuted even by the National Socialists, possessed a "different instinct", which was evident, for example, in his dealings with the Jewish community of Mannheim.

"The talk of the victims, the public thematization of the special role of the persecuted, disturbed the process of integrating millions of followers of National Socialism into German democracy," said Peters in 2001.

[25] As early as November 1954, the Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung saw the Angel of Peace "falling for the fate of intellectual isolation; without the community that gathers around it every year, it stands in a vacuum, lacking the unifying function“.