On Sunday, August 29, 2021, the artist Gunter Demnig will lay stumbling blocks in memory of Martha Ndumbe (12:40 p.m., Max-Beer-Straße 24) and Ferdinand James Allen (1:40 p.m., Torstraße 176-178).
More than 8,500 stumbling blocks have already been laid in Berlin over the past 20 years, but so far only one Berlin stumbling block commemorates a person with an African history. The stumbling blocks for Martha Ndumbe and Ferdinand James Allen should therefore also be an impetus to focus more on the life and persecution of Black Germans under National Socialism.
Martha Ndumbe was born in Berlin in 1902. After a difficult childhood, she worked as a prostitute in Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s and was arrested several times. After the National Socialists took power, the conditions for people who were discriminated against as »asocial« became more severe. After a long period of imprisonment, Martha Ndumbe was sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp on June 9, 1944. She lost her life there on February 5, 1945.
Ferdinand James Allen was born in Berlin in 1898. Little is known about his childhood. During the First World War, he and his father, as British citizens, were interned as »enemy aliens« in Ruhleben. Due to recurring epileptic seizures, Ferdinand James Allen was placed in the Wuhlgarten Municipal Sanatorium and Nursing Home from the mid-1920s. After the National Socialists took power, Ferdinand Allen was forcibly sterilized there and finally killed on May 14, 1941 as part of the T4 murder campaign in Bernburg.
The two stumbling blocks were initiated by Robbie Aitken, who as a professor at Sheffield Hallam University, researches, among other things, the Black community in Germany and claims for compensation by Black Holocaust victims. The ceremonial transfer is a cooperation between the Dekoloniale Memory Culture in the City and the Stolpersteine Coordination Office in Berlin. Robbie Aitken, Mnyaka Sururu Mboro (Berlin Postkolonial) and Anab Awale (Initiative Black People in Germany ISD) will speak. Artistically, the laying will be accompanied by Sauti é Haala .