Irmela Mensah-Schramm

Irmela Mensah-Schramm (born December 5, 1945) is a human rights activist and retired special needs teacher known for removing and painting over neo-Nazi and other right-wing extremist graffiti in Berlin and throughout Germany.

She began doing this work in 1986 after seeing a sticker at a bus stop near her home in Berlin demanding the release of Nazi war criminal Rudolf Hess. Shocked when she returned and found that no one had removed it, she decided to scrape it away with her keychain. According to Deutsche Welle, she "refused an offer by the judge to avoid a trial if she donated €500 to non-profit groups, saying it would mean legally admitting she did something wrong."

Mensah-Schramm has been increasingly recognized for her work since beginning to receive global media attention in the early 2000s. She has been awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany among numerous other awards. Her extensive collection of neo-Nazi stickers which she has removed was placed on exhibition at the German Historical Museum in Berlin in 2016. As of October 2024, Mensah-Schramm was still active.

Background Mensah-Schramm was born in 1945 in Stuttgart, Germany, and moved to Berlin in 1967, where she began teaching students with severe disabilities. As of 2016, she had filled 82 such binders. These were exhibited in a room devoted to her work at the German Historical Museum as part of a 2016 exhibition titled "Instigated: Anti-Semitic and Racist Stickers from 1880 to Today". Her first exhibition of this type of material was at the Zehlendorf town hall in Berlin in 1995.

She also runs educational workshops that teach children and teenagers how to intervene creatively to efface neo-Nazi or other right-wing extremist graffiti when they encounter it.