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Critiquing the beheading of Britain’s first Holocaust memorial
Author(s): Franks, Leo
Date: 2026
Topics: Holocaust: Memorials, Arts and Culture: Visual Arts, Main Topic: Holocaust Legacies and Memorial, Memory, Memorials (other than Holocaust memorials)
Abstract: Fred (né Fritz) Kormis’s Memorial to Prisoners of War and Concentration Camp Victims is a peculiar, neglected sculpture group. Encaged in a park in north-west London, the sculpture group emerged from Kormis’s own experience of internment as a German prisoner in the First World War. This article suggest that this group constitutes a Holocaust memorial and that, thanks to the fact that it was constructed in 1969, it is Britain’s first. This article presses on the tension between this memorial and its environment in London: a tension that manifests itself in the awkwardness of the memorial’s relationship to Britain’s history of Holocaust memorials, eruptions of antisemitic violence against the memorial, and historical neglect of the memorial by the authorities that might have been charged with its upkeep.