Memorial to the Children of Bullenhuser Damm in Hamburg

In Schnelsen on Hamburg’s northern edge, several residential streets are named after Jewish children murdered in the city by SS officers in 1945. One of them was 12-year-old Roman Zeller from Poland. A small square bearing his name now holds a memorial to him and the nineteen other young victims killed alongside him.

The twenty boys and girls commemorated here were deported from across Europe to the Neuengamme concentration camp just outside Hamburg, where they were subjected to medical experiments. They were later murdered in the basement of the former Bullenhuser Damm School in the city of Hamburg, as the perpetrators tried to hide their crimes in the final days of the war. The group included children from Poland, France, the Netherlands, Italy, and Czechoslovakia.

The memorial on Roman-Zeller-Platz was created in 2001 by Russian artist Leonid Mogilevski. Initiated and funded by local residents, it consists of a bronze relief mounted on a brick pilaster. The relief depicts the faces of the twenty victims in a naturalistic style. Their names are inscribed on a plaque below. On another plaque on the reverse, additional context is provided about their fate.

Unlike larger Holocaust memorials in the city, this one is scaled to a suburban neighborhood square. Its focus on a specifically identified group, presented through individual likeness rather than abstraction, distinguishes it from more generalized commemorative sites. 

Each year on April 20, the anniversary of the young victims’ deaths, students from local schools, together with community and church groups, hold a public memorial ceremony at the square.