On Friday afternoon, 16 October 2026, from 14:00, Blücherplatz in Berlin-Kreuzberg officially became Eva-Mamlok-Platz. The ceremony, in front of the Central and Regional Library (Amerika-Gedenkbibliothek), included the unveiling of a memorial marker. DW published the same day a portrait of the woman whose name the square now bears: a Jewish Berliner who opposed Nazism from her teens until her death in a concentration camp. The adjoining Blücherstraße is not being renamed.

Eva Mamlok was born on 6 May 1918 into a wine-trading family. She was 14 when Hitler became chancellor. After the Socialist Workers’ Youth was banned, she went underground. Inge Berner, the only survivor of her later group, said Eva climbed onto the roof of the Tietz department store on Blücherplatz and painted “Down with Hitler”. She was caught then, but not arrested until a year later.

In November 1934, aged 16, she was detained after a commemoration of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht at Friedrichsfelde Cemetery. The authorities used “protective custody” — prison without trial — and sent her to the women’s camp at Moringen until May 1935. She kept resisting. In 1939 she gave birth to a daughter, Tana, placed in a Jewish orphanage and murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1942.

At the F. Butzke screw factory, where she was forced to work, she and other women formed what later became the “Eva Mamlok Group”: leaflets, slogans, banned books. On 13 January 1942 she was deported to the Riga ghetto. In October 1944 she was sent to Stutthof, where she died on 23 December, aged 26. The old square was named for the Prussian field marshal Blücher, who beat Napoleon.

District mayor Clara Herrmann said, according to dpa, that the new name makes Jewish and female resistance visible and is also a present-day commitment against antisemitism. The district assembly had voted the renaming on 25 June 2025. The library on the square, Germany’s largest public library, is, for researcher Alexandra Weltz-Rombach, a fitting site: the group shared banned books that now sit in the school canon.

This article is a memory report, not a compressed history lesson and not a comment on Berlin politics today.

Image: Jörg Zägel, Amerika-Gedenkbibliothek, Blücherplatz, Berlin-Kreuzberg, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons; the library on the renamed square, archive, not the 16 October 2026 ceremony.

Sources consulted: Who was Eva Mamlok? Berlin square renamed after Jewish anti-fascist resistance fighter - Deutsche Welle; Blucherplatz in Kreuzberg in Eva-Mamlok-Platz umbenannt - Berlin.de / dpa.