The mission was never coded. In the churches' own words, later inscribed on the memorial, the institute existed to obliterate the Jewish roots of Christianity, to delete every positive reference to the people of Israel and to Judaism from Holy Scripture, and to bring Protestant teaching and liturgical practice into conformity with Nazi ideology. It was founded under Siegfried Leffler and Walter Grundmann; from 1943 until it was dissolved in 1945 it was led by Georg Bertram, a New Testament professor from Giessen. The output was concrete. Staff produced a New Testament with the Old Testament discarded outright, the genealogies tracing Jesus to David struck through, Jewish names and places removed, and Old Testament quotations dropped unless they showed Jews in a bad light. A hymnal followed in 1942, Grosser Gott wir loben Dich, roughly half the length of the books it replaced. Zion, Jerusalem, Jehovah, the Temple and the Psalms had been taken out of the hymns.

The memorial's inner plate does not soften anything. The institute's staff, it says, perverted the word and spirit of the Gospel in the name of voelkisch theological scholarship, stirred up hatred against Judaism, and worked for the exclusion of Christians with Jewish ancestry from the Protestant Church. They helped justify the persecution and the murder of millions of their Jewish fellow citizens. Read that second charge slowly. Some of the people the institute wanted expelled were baptised members of these same congregations - families who sat in these pews, whose church was busy building the theological case for throwing them out and, beyond that, for what the state was already doing to them. The institute was disbanded in 1945. Its scholarship had helped supply a vocabulary to a machinery of murder, and for close to fifty years afterwards nothing in Eisenach said so.

Attempts to mark the place began in the early 1990s and kept stalling. A plaque on Bornstrasse 11 was proposed more than once and never got beyond planning. The breakthrough came sideways, out of an exhibition. In March 2018, while preparing a show on the institute at the Lutherhaus Eisenach, its scholarly director Jochen Birkenmeier wrote to church superintendent Ralf-Peter Fuchs and to Eisenach's mayor Katja Wolf, proposing another try. Both backed him; Fuchs suggested lifting it to the regional church level. Birkenmeier then wrote to Bishop Ilse Junkermann of the Evangelical Church in Central Germany, who agreed immediately and asked the successors of the founding churches to join in. On 18 June 2018 a joint delegation walked the ground and settled on the top of Bornstrasse rather than the building itself, which sits awkwardly up a steep incline and is easy to miss.

The chosen spot is a place where the road divides, and the designers used it. The memorial carries four words from the Darmstadt Statement, the Protestant confession of guilt issued in 1947: Wir sind in die Irre gegangen. We went astray. Marc Pethran of the Leipzig agency KOCMOC.NET drew it up, and Obornik Werbetechnik in Hildesheim built it - about two metres tall, made of Cor-Ten steel that weathers to a deep rust orange. Segments have been cut clean out of the plates, so the thing is defined by its absences. That is the point. The holes stand for the passages excised from the New Testament and the hymn book, and for the shared ground between Judaism and Christianity that the institute set out to destroy. The outer plate carries the four words. The inner plate explains, in German and English, precisely what happened here.

Six representatives of the regional churches unveiled the memorial on 6 May 2019. Eight successor bodies had commissioned it: the Evangelical Church in Central Germany, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Northern Germany, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Saxony, the Evangelical Church of Anhalt, the Evangelical Church in Hesse-Nassau, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Oldenburg, the Evangelical Church of the Palatinate, and the Evangelical Church of the Augsburg and Helvetic Confessions in Austria. There is a further weight to the address. Eisenach is a Luther town - he went to school here, and at the Wartburg on the ridge above he translated the New Testament into German in 1521 and 1522. Four centuries later, in the same small town, an institute went to work cutting that text apart. The memorial stands 240 metres from where they did it.