A Physician's Life and Legacy in Stone
Walk through central Offenburg and pause at a small brass plaque set flush in the pavement on Wasserstraße, where Dr. Hertha Wiegand once ran her medical practice. The Stolperstein—or "stumbling stone"—bears her name and the years 1890–1944, marking the ground where she treated women and children, where she built a reputation for modern medical practice and social engagement, and from where she was torn away during the Nazi persecution of Jews. This memorial sits in a real street, in a real neighbourhood where you can still sense the ordinary life interrupted.
Who You Are Remembering When You Visit
Hertha Wiegand was born in 1890 in Ettenheim to a Jewish family, earned her medical degree from Freiburg University, and in 1915 married Otto Wiegand, a Protestant physician from Dessau. They established their joint practice in Offenburg after the First World War—a remarkable partnership at a time when few women practiced medicine at all. After Otto's death in 1925, she continued alone, becoming known across the region for her work as a women's and pediatric physician.
In 1933, the Nazi regime moved to close her practice. By 1938, she had lost her medical license under the Nuremberg Laws. Though she was temporarily protected from deportation due to her mixed marriage, she received a deportation order on 10 January 1944. While being transported to Theresienstadt concentration camp, she took an overdose of sleeping pills. She died two days later in Karlsruhe on 12 January 1944.
Where to Find Her Memory and What It Means
The Stolperstein on Wasserstraße (placed in 2003 and replaced in 2013) is the physical anchor of her remembrance. You can stand where her practice once was and read the inscription—a deliberate interruption in the everyday rhythm of the street, designed to make you stop and think.
- Visit the memorial plaque on Wasserstraße in central Offenburg, where the medical practice operated from 1928.
- The Hertha-Wiegand-Schule at Ortenauer-Klinikum, named in her honour since 2016, continues her work in healthcare and carries her name forward into the present.
- Consult the Offenburg city archive for additional documentation of her life and career.
The Stolperstein is maintained as part of a larger network of such memorials across Germany, each one a refusal to let a victim of Nazi persecution be forgotten or erased from the landscape.
When and How Long to Spend Here
The memorial itself takes minutes to find and stand before—it is open to view at any time, day or night. But the encounter invites reflection. Visit during the day if you want to read the plaque clearly and feel the texture of the street where she lived and worked. Many visitors to Offenburg's Stolpersteine combine a walking route through the town, stopping at several memorials to build a fuller picture of the community's Jewish history and the human cost of that period. The Museum im Ritterhaus on Ritterstraße offers broader context on local history, culture, and art.
Nearby in Offenburg
Wasserstraße lies in Offenburg's Stadtmitte (city centre), near other memorials and institutions worth a visit. The town itself offers walking routes through its wine country and the Black Forest foothills. If you are interested in exploring the wider memory landscape of the region, Offenburg has additional Stolpersteine dedicated to other victims—among them memorials to Arnold Baum, Berta Hammel, Carl Hermann Günner, Hans Baum, and Leonie Kahn. Standing before these stones in sequence is a way to honour not a single life, but a community.
Finding Hertha Wiegand's memorial is an act of witness. Once you know her story, the brass plaque becomes a place where history and the street you walk on intersect—a reason to pause, remember, and carry her name forward.