A Brass Plaque and a Story of Persecution
Walk along Mühlenstraße in Cottbus and your foot may catch on a small brass plaque set flush into the pavement. This is a Stolperstein—a "stumbling stone"—one of Gunter Demnig's memorial plaques that mark the last voluntary homes of Nazi victims across Europe. The one at number 37 commemorates three people: Gertrud Levy, Berta Lippmann (née Levy), and Max Krohn. Their names, birth years, and fates are engraved into the metal: deported, murdered, gone. This is not a museum with curated displays or guided interpretation. It is a mark on a street where real people lived, where a family business once operated, where a decision to help friends had fatal consequences.
What You Are Standing On
The plaque at Mühlenstraße 37 documents three separate lives, each ending in the Holocaust. Gertrud Levy, born in 1902, was arrested in 1939 after helping three Polish-origin friends who had been deported to Poland in October 1938 by sending them clothes and selling their abandoned household furniture—acts that violated Nazi foreign exchange regulations. She died by suicide in Cottbus Women's Prison on 25 March 1939, held there since January of that year.
Berta Lippmann, born in 1892, was Gertrud's sister. She had married Julius Lippmann, a businessman, and together they co-owned the Levy & Lippmann furniture and goods business at this address. The couple lived at Neustädter Straße 15 with their son Herbert. As Nazi laws tightened around Jewish business ownership in 1938, their enterprise failed. In October 1941, Berta and Julius moved to Berlin. In January 1943, Berta was deported to Auschwitz, where she was murdered. Their son Herbert escaped to Australia.
Max Krohn, born in 1872, was a businessman who remained in Cottbus. At seventy years old, he was deported to Theresienstadt on 24–25 August 1942, then transported to Treblinka on 23 September 1942, where he was murdered.
How to Find It and Understand Its Place
Mühlenstraße runs through the old city; you can reach it by taking Line 3 to the Altmarkt station, which is also home to the Wendisches Museum nearby. The plaque is modest and easily missed if you are not looking for it. That is partly by design: the Stolpersteine project aims not to monumentalize but to interrupt, to place remembrance at ground level, where people walk. You stand on history here rather than observe it from a distance.
Visit at any time of day. The plaque itself requires no opening hours, no admission fee. If you are in Cottbus to see other sights—the Oberkirche St. Nikolai with its panoramic spire, the Staatstheater with its art nouveau interior, or Branitzer Castle with its English gardens—add this walk to your itinerary. Spend as long as you need to read the names and dates, to imagine the lives they represent, and to understand what happened in this city under Nazi rule.
Nearby and Connected
The Wendisches Museum, just steps away on Mühlenstraße itself, documents the culture and traditions of the Sorbian people of the region. The Altmarkt area holds the Apothekenmuseum, a record of pharmacy life across three centuries. If you are following the threads of Cottbus's Jewish history and Nazi persecution, these sites together offer context for the lives memorialized by the Stolpersteine scattered across the city—plaques that mark homes, workplaces, and the ordinary addresses where extraordinary tragedy unfolded.
This is a place to pause, to remember, and to let the weight of names and dates settle. Plan to spend time here—not hours, but enough to absorb what the brass plaque tells you about one city's past.