GERMANY:Millions of Germans have neighbours they encounter every day but have never met. These are the neighbours deported to Nazi camps six decades ago, never to return.
Today, their names are preserved in stolperstein ("stumbling stones"): brass plaques the size of small cobblestones in the pavement in front of their former homes.
Some 12,500 of these plaques have been installed around the country by artist Gunter Demnig. His philosophy: "A person is only forgotten when their name is forgotten."
Plans to lay a stolperstein in the town of Waiblingen, near Stuttgart, however, threw up a tragic moral tale that is a stumbling stone in its own right.
The stone was intended to remember Dr Walter Müller who, with his wife Marianne, lived in Waiblingen in the 1930s.
Elderly locals remember the Müllers as a popular couple who never missed a party and who zipped around the countryside in a sports car with leather seats.
Dr Müller worked in the local hospital and, in 1930, aged 30, joined the SS. According to local historian Hans Schultheiss, Dr Müller was a "fanatical national socialist" who once wrote that he was "proud to be part of the master race".
In 1933, as Nazis around the country were attacking Jewish- run businesses, Dr Müller led a torchlit march to the house of a Jewish work colleague chanting "Jews Out!" Weeks later, local authorities received an anonymous tip that Dr Müller was himself Jewish on his father's side.
His mother, a poor shop assistant from the nearby town of Heilbronn, had become pregnant after an affair with a wealthy Jewish businessman.
Under pressure from his parents, the father refused to recognise the child and the mother eventually had Walter adopted.
Ashamed of his past, Dr Müller named his adoptive parents as his birth parents in official documents. When contacted by the authorities about the discrepancy, he feared the consequences of the truth.
Under the Nuremberg Laws he was considered Jewish and would no longer be able to practise as a doctor. He went to a local field and shot himself in the heart, confessing all to Marianne in a suicide note and urging her to keep his secret and remain a true Nazi.
Dr Müller was given a full SS funeral with a guard of honour and Marianne Müller kept silent. From 1969 on, she received a special widow's pension after authorities decided her husband was "removed from his post because of Nazi persecution".
In 1987, she took his secret to the grave. Seven years ago, the local authorities agreed to pay for the upkeep of the grave.
It was only when a plan emerged to honour Dr Müller with a stolperstein that historian Hans Schultheiss related how he had come across the truth in old records while researching Waiblingen's Nazi past.
"This is a first-class tragedy. He was victim and perpetrator in one," says Schultheiss. "On the one hand, he was driven to kill himself by the circumstances. He would have lost his job and been persecuted for racial reasons.
"On the other hand, because of his actions while he was alive I'm not sure he should be remembered in this way."
Local authorities agree with Schultheiss and have abandoned the plans to give Dr Müller a stolperstein.