Michelsberg

 If you lived in Wiesbaden in 1932, and were Jewish....you were in a fairly limited group....roughly 2,000....out of a city population 170,000.

In 1932, you could have smelled trouble coming, and maybe made some wild plan to leave your job, your business, your family, your home.....and find safer surroundings.  Few did that though.  None saw the necessity of doing that.  In the history of Germany up until that point....no one had ever gone to an extreme over the Jews.

By the summer of 1945....the Jewish population of Wiesbaden had been wiped out.  Books can be read on the topic.  Politicians will talk at length on it.  Historians will do seminars on the era.

There is a memorial of sorts to the 1507 Jews remembered from this era near the downtown area of Wiesbaden.  It's rather new.....finished in 2011.  It is in public sight, and has the names of the 1507 Jews were led out and exterminated.

The name of the site?  Michelsberg.

If there were a list of ten places that you ought to visit when walking around Wiesbaden....I'd put it on the ten.  It is an impressive memorial.

I've been by the site on two occasions in the last month.  It's rare that you ever see anyone around it.  I think most simply pass it by without notice.  Course, you can say the same for the Kaiser statue in the main park, and the WWI memorial by the Luisenplatz.

So if you are around Karlstadt's department store one day....remember, this is barely five minutes away, and worth a short walk to see.