Transit

Transit stands at Plärrer, Nuremberg’s major traffic junction outside the city wall, where street level meets the subway distribution floor. A six-metre funnel rises above the station’s light dome. Three thousand aluminium figures hold hands symbolically, their feet connecting the sculpture into one dense human form. You can see it from the street and underground.

Between 1939 and 1945, about 100,000 forced labourers from more than 40 countries worked across roughly 150 Nuremberg companies. Armaments factories employed many of them. Others worked in retail and city administration, including rubble clearance after bombing raids, while Plärrer served as a discreet meeting point. A two-decade process led from the city council’s 1987 decision to a 2005 design competition won by Munich sculptor Hermann Pitz.

Three panels use the words “forced labour” in twelve languages and acknowledge the injustice suffered by these workers. The city spent €50,000 on the memorial. Former forced labourers from the Netherlands, Poland and Ukraine attended its inauguration, giving the place a direct connection to surviving witnesses.