Dejudaization Institute Memorial

The institute's stated mission was to obliterate the Jewish roots of Christianity, to delete every positive reference to the people of Israel and Judaism from Holy Scripture, and to bring the Protestant Church's teachings and liturgical practice into conformity with Nazi ideology.

Repeated attempts to put up a memorial plaque on the building of the institute's former offices at Bornstrasse 11, the Church of Thuringia's former seminary, never got beyond the planning stage, though.

In the run-up to the preparations for the special exhibition Study and Eradication: The Church's 'Dejudaization Institute', 1939–1945, Scholarly Director and Curator of the Stiftung Lutherhaus Eisenach Jochen Birkenmeier proposed undertaking a renewed attempt to put up a memorial plaque or stele in a letter of March 27, 2018, to Eisenach-Gerstungen Church District Superintendent Ralf-Peter Fuchs and Eisenach Mayor Katja Wolf.

The location at a fork in the road additionally made it possible to incorporate the words "We went astray" from the "Darmstadt Statement" in the memorial's design.

Among other things, this is to be understood as a reference to the 'dejudaization' of the texts of the New Testament and the Protestant hymnal as well as the destruction of the common foundations of Judeo-Christian belief by the "Dejudaization Institute".

The memorial bears the German inscription "Wir sind in die Irre gegangen…" (We went astray...) on the outer plate, a quotation from the "Darmstadt Statement", a Protestant confession of guilt from the year 1947.

This institute's mission was to obliterate the Jewish roots of Christianity, to delete every positive reference to the people of Israel and Judaism from Holy Scripture, and to bring the Protestant Church's teachings and liturgical practice into conformity with Nazi ideology.

The institute's staff perverted the word and spirit of the Gospel in the name of völkisch theological scholarship, stirred up hatred against Judaism, and strove for the exclusion of Christians with Jewish ancestry from the Protestant Church.