Memorial to the deportees and victims of the Holocaust and the National Socialist regime
The memorial consists of several faceless bronze figures tumbling out of an original Reichsbahn wagon. It commemorates the deportation and subsequent murder of people - Jews and others - from Kassel and the deportation of forced labourers during the Nazi era.
The Holländischer Platz campus is largely located on a former factory site of the Henschel company, which used forced labourers on a massive scale during the war years.
The artwork is intended to commemorate crimes that also took place at this site. It calls on us to remain vigilant in a time of great upheaval and to keep an eye on the development of urban society.
Since its inauguration in 1985, the memorial has lost none of its relevance. The ramp is a strong sign against right-wing radicalism and neo-fascism, against xenophobia, against anti-Semitism and against war and violence. All this has no place in our city.
Background
In the artwork "the ramp" E. R. Nele has processed traumatic childhood experiences. The daughter of documenta founder Arnold Bode had been able to observe the daily transport of forced labourers from her grandparents' flat in Kassel's Fiedlerstraße during the Second World War. The people crammed into cattle cars were transported to the grounds of the former Henschel works in Kassel.
The memorial was created for the exhibition "Stoffwechsel K18" (Metabolism K18), which took place on the Henschel grounds in 1982 as a critical complement to the documenta 7. On the initiative of some members of the Kassel University of Applied Sciences, the artwork was acquired and inaugurated on 8 May 1985, the 40th anniversary of the end of the war, on the campus of Kassel University.
Just a few days after the artwork was erected, the "ramp" was destroyed by an arson attack in May 1985. A fundraising campaign made it possible to rebuild and rededicate it in 1987. Since then, the memorial has stood in changing locations at the north end of the Holländischer Platz campus before it was inaugurated at its current - final - location on 5 October 2017
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