Stumbling block for student Athanas Berow

On March 17, the city of Erlangen laid another "stumbling block". Located in front of the property at Gabelsbergerstraße 5, it commemorates the student Athanas Berow, a member of the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität (FAU) student victim group. During the Third Reich, they too were deported to concentration camps.

After the brutal persecution of the members of the "Left Student Group" in the winter semester of 1932/1933, which took Rudolf Benario and Hanns Kohn to Dachau concentration camp, where they were murdered, Athanas P. Berow was another victim of Nazi terror in Erlangen. Berow, or Berov or Beroff, was born on September 16, 1920 in Pisanitsa, Bulgaria. The Greek Orthodox Christian died in 1945.

Berov had studied at the Faculty of Natural Sciences in Sofia from 1939 to 1940. From the 1941 trimester up to and including 1943/1944, he was enrolled at the Faculty of Medicine in Graz. On June 24, 1944, for unknown reasons, he enrolled in Erlangen to continue his medical studies in the summer semester. He had his room at Gabelsbergerstraße 5.

The political upheaval in his home country was presumably his undoing. On August 27, 1944, his home country Bulgaria terminated its membership of the Three Power Pact and withdrew as an ally of the German Reich. On September 6, it broke off its political relations. Two days later, Hitler's Germany declared war.

It is possible that his arrest in Erlangen on November 8, 1944 was connected to these political events. Berow was sent to Dachau concentration camp by the Nuremberg Gestapo on November 9. On December 6, he was sent to Buchenwald concentration camp as a political prisoner and used for the heaviest quarry work. He was transferred to Ohrdruf concentration camp in Thuringia on February 15, 1945, where he was lost. He was presumably murdered there.

In December 2005, the town council decided to join the nationwide "Stumbling Stones against Forgetting" campaign. Since then, 55 such Stumbling Stones have been laid in sidewalks throughout the city.

The following video shows the laying of the Stolperstein on March 17, 2023.