The key facts

  • Blücherplatz square in Kreuzberg was renamed Eva-Mamlok-Platz on October 16, 2026.
  • Eva Mamlok, born in Berlin on May 6, 1918, took part in underground resistance to the Nazis from the age of 14–16.
  • In 1934 she was sent to 'protective custody' in the Moringen women's concentration camp; in 1942 she was deported to the Riga ghetto, in October 1944 to Stutthof, where she died in December 1944.

Renaming of the square

On October 16, 2026, Berlin's Blücherplatz square in the Kreuzberg district was officially given the name Eva-Mamlok-Platz — in honor of Eva Mamlok, a young Jewish woman from Berlin who took part in the resistance to Nazism and died in a concentration camp. The new square is home to the Berlin Central and Regional Library (ZLB), Germany's largest public library. The square is also the venue for the annual multicultural street festival, the Carnival of Cultures.

Who was Eva Mamlok

Eva Mamlok was born on May 6, 1918, into a Berlin Jewish family that ran a wholesale wine business and belonged to the Jewish middle class of the Weimar Republic era. When Hitler became chancellor in 1933, she was 14 years old. She was a member of the Socialist Workers' Youth (SAJ); after this left-wing political youth organization was banned the same year, she joined the underground resistance. According to Inge Berner (1922–2012), the only surviving member of her later resistance group, as a teenager Mamlok climbed onto the roof of a department store on Blücherplatz and wrote the slogan 'Down with Hitler.' Cultural scholar Alexandra Weltz-Rombach, who has worked extensively with the network of historians 'Gruppe Eva Mamlok,' noted that Mamlok was caught at the time but not arrested — the arrest came a year later. The department store, then called Tietz, was renamed Hertie after being 'Aryanized' by the Nazis.

Arrest and imprisonment

Mamlok first appeared in official documents in November 1934, when she was arrested for taking part in commemorations of the socialist leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht at Berlin's Friedrichsfelde cemetery. The authorities determined that the 16-year-old girl held 'views hostile to the state' and placed her in 'protective custody pending further orders' — the regime's euphemism for imprisonment without trial. She was sent to the Moringen women's concentration camp in Lower Saxony, where she remained until May 1935. After her release, she continued anti-Nazi activities, facing persecution both as a political dissident and as a Jew.

The underground and the resistance group

In underground circles, Mamlok met Peter Simsen (1914–2004); they remained a couple until his emigration to Argentina in 1937. The only known surviving photograph of Eva comes from his personal archive. In 1939 she gave birth to a daughter, Tana; the father's identity is unknown. The child was placed in a Jewish orphanage in Berlin and in 1942 was deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, where she was killed. From 1940, Mamlok, as a Jew, was required to perform forced labor at the Berlin firm F. Butzke Schrauben-Industrie, where she met other women who shared her opposition to Nazism. Together they formed an informal resistance network known as the 'Eva Mamlok Group' — Jewish and non-Jewish women who distributed anti-Nazi leaflets, wrote slogans against Hitler, and shared banned books — from Thomas Mann to Lion Feuchtwanger — which, according to Weltz-Rombach, are today part of Germany's educational canon. Mamlok and other members of the group were arrested for distributing this banned literature.

Deportation and death

On January 13, 1942, Mamlok was deported from Berlin to the Riga ghetto in occupied Latvia. According to Inge Berner, she continued her resistance there as well: for example, she arranged for a cake with a miniature camera hidden inside to be sent from Berlin in order to document the persecution in the ghetto. In October 1944 she was sent to the Nazi concentration camp Stutthof, where she died in December of that year.

The meaning of the renaming and remembrance

Blücherplatz was named after Prussian field marshal Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher, famed for his campaigns against Napoleon in the battles of Leipzig (1813) and Waterloo (1815). 'There are more than enough memorial sites for Blücher,' Weltz-Rombach noted. 'And perhaps it is time to put an end to the old Franco-German enmity, which is of course embedded in the name Blücher with its Prussian tradition, and to establish a different form of remembrance in its place.' Weltz-Rombach, a Berlin director, producer and curator, learned about Mamlok in 2011, when a 'Stolperstein' (stumbling stone) was laid in her memory, and has been researching her biography ever since: in 2024 an exhibition was held, and a podcast series with young Berliners was launched. Participants in the workshops study Mamlok's history in the places where she was active and, according to Weltz-Rombach, can easily identify with her, since she became politically active in her teenage years. 'Above all, she is of course a role model — an example of how one would like to act oneself and how brave one would like to be,' she said. According to her, women's resistance was often more everyday in nature than 'planting bombs,' and such stories have only recently begun to attract more attention — as exemplified by the 2024 exhibition and a database of women resistance members. 'There are definitely many names we do not know that await further research,' Weltz-Rombach concluded.