Otto Meinecke
The Stolperstein for Otto Meinecke lies in the pavement on Kleppingstraße in Dortmund, outside his former residence. This small brass-plated stone was created by artist Gunter Demnig. It commemorates a manufacturer and businessman born in Witten an der Ruhr in 1880, who lived in Dortmund by 1940. Its pavement setting is wheelchair accessible for visitors.
Paragraph 175 criminalised homosexuality under the Nazi regime, leading to his arrest in June 1938. He was detained again in December 1940 and deported to Sachsenhausen near Berlin in early 1942. At Sachsenhausen, the camp assigned him to the feared punishment commando at its brickworks. Nazi authorities marked him as “BV 175”, a category used against men accused of multiple homosexual relationships. He was murdered there in July 1942 during a targeted killing operation against homosexual prisoners. Dortmund later named a street after him in 2015, the first such honour in Germany for a homosexual victim of the Nazis.
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Spots like this one are the stops myTuur strings into tours through Dortmund. In the app, each story begins where you stand: walk up to a spot and it starts, read it on screen or listen as you go, then follow the route to the next one.
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myTuur is a free city-guide app. Its tours are built from spots, and each spot carries a story that starts when you get there, to read or to listen to as you like.