Berlin Stolpersteine Data: Comparing Memorial Databases

December 2025 Update: I’ve refreshed the data for this analysis. The landscape has changed dramatically—Wikidata’s coverage has improved so much that it now exceeds the Berlin-specific database. See updated numbers below.

Here are two datasets documenting Berlin’s Stolpersteine memorial plaques. In 2020, their coverage differed dramatically. Four years later, Wikidata has caught up—and surpassed—the Berlin-specific database.

🔸 Wikidata reference 🔹 Stolpersteine-berlin dataset View on Observable

Background

In the night of Nov 9 to 10, 1938, Nazi Germany’s SA forces carried out a devastating pogrom. The event came to be called Kristallnacht, “The Night of Broken Glass.”

Last week, as I walked in the street in the evening I noticed that some of the brass plaques had candles and roses next to them, a silent and unattended vigil in the street. It was in remembrance of Kristallnacht. The picture below is mine:

These plaques are Stolpersteine—the world’s largest decentralized memorial, with over 100,000 brass-topped concrete cubes installed across Europe by artist Gunter Demnig:

“A Stolperstein (pronounced [ˈʃtɔlpɐˌʃtaɪn]; literally “stumbling stone”, metaphorically a “stumbling block”) is a sett-size, ten-centimetre (3.9 in) concrete cube bearing a brass plate inscribed with the name and life dates of victims of Nazi extermination or persecution.”

“Today, Stolpersteine are being realized for Jews, Sinti and Roma, people from the political or religious resistance, victims of the “euthanasia” murders, homosexuals, Jehovahs Witnesses and for people who were persecuted for being declared to be “asocial”.”

(Wikipedia)

The Data: 2020 vs 2025

These are two public records of the location and number of Berlin’s Stolpersteine:

• the Wikidata database,
• and the dataset produced by stolpersteine-berlin.de, referenced in the daten.berlin.de catalogue. It describes itself as “a liaison office between the artist Gunter Demnig together with his team and the local Stolperstein-groups.”

In 2020, there were only about 1,780 Wikidata records in Berlin, overwhelmingly in the west of the city. Stolpersteine-berlin had 3,307 records, many including several family members at the same address.

By 2025, the situation has reversed. Wikidata now has more Berlin records than the Berlin-specific database, thanks to community contributors adding nearly 35,000 geocoded entries across Europe.

The Wikidata dataset spans not only all of Germany, but all of Europe:

Technical Notes

The stolpersteine-berlin.de site now provides a JSON API with pre-geocoded coordinates. The old XML endpoint I used in 2020 no longer exists.

For Wikidata, a SPARQL query retrieves all Stolpersteine with coordinates:

SELECT ?item ?itemLabel ?coords WHERE {
  ?item wdt:P31 wd:Q26703203 .
  OPTIONAL { ?item wdt:P625 ?coords }
  SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en" }
}

Originally published November 2020. Updated December 2025 with fresh data.