Stolpersteine commemorate the Flieder family

Laid on June 30, 2026, in Hanover

Stolpersteine as a memorial to the Flieder family and a reminder to future generations. Photo: Heimann.

The Stolpersteine commemorate Ida Dehn’s parents, Abraham and Ruchla Flieder, and Ida’s brothers Chin (b. 1919) and Isaak (b. 1922), who were victims of Nazi persecution. The Stolpersteine were laid at Marktstraße 38 in Hanover, where house number 38 stood until its destruction during World War II; the Flieder family had lived there since 1918.

Peter and Paul Dehn, who had initiated the installation of the Stolpersteine for the family of their mother and grandmother Ida, were particularly pleased to see two groups of students who had come with their teachers to lay flowers in honor of the victims of the Nazis. This is an important sign that the injustices of the Nazi era will not be forgotten and that the message will be carried forward: crimes like those committed by the Nazis are intolerable and must never happen again.

hannover.de reported (in German).

With the help of her employers, Ida, just 17 years old, was able to embark on the long journey of escape to Australia in late 1938. In Hanover, she had to leave behind her parents, two brothers, and a half-brother and his family in Belgium. All of them fell victim to the Nazis’ racial hatred.

In a brief speech, Peter Dehn commemorated the family of his mother, Ida Dehn, the sole survivor of the Flieder family. He described the circumstances of the time, which left many Jewish people in Germany with little more than a choice between flight and death, and linked this to the fates of his relatives.

The so-called “Judenaktion” also had specific ties to the history of the Flieder family; following the November Pogrom of 1938, the Nazis imprisoned 30,000 Jewish men in concentration camps to force their imminent departure. Part of this anti-Semitic injustice was that the Nazi Reich confiscated all the property of those expelled from the country, liquidated it, and used the profits from this “Aryanization” to fill the war chest.

Among other things, Peter Dehn mentioned his own associations with media reports. The way Belarusian police used armed force in 2021 to force refugees into the no-man’s-land bordering the Baltic states reminded him of the fate of his grandfather and his youngest uncle. In October 1938, they were transported—along with 17,000 Polish Jews living in Germany—to the eastern border of the Nazi Reich and, at gunpoint, forced into no man’s land toward Poland.