Humanitarian Olga Stoss (95) is now one of the nine people to be honoured with an honorary citizenship for their special contributions to the city and the community.
Olga Stoss, a resident of the German city of Bad Homburg and a ninety-five-year-old humanitarian activist of Croatian extraction took part in a gala signing ceremony on 1 March at which she was named an honorary citizen of the city. Also taking part in the ceremony were Bad Homburg city council president Alfred Etzrodt, the mayor of Bad Homburg Alexander Hetjes, the mayor of twin city Dubrovnik Mato Franković, the former mayor of Bad Homburg, and other dignitaries.
Olga Stoss and her peer and city historian Gerta Walsh were unanimously proposed by the Bad Homburg city council in December last year, and subsequently named honorary citizens of the City of Bad Homburg.
It is the city’s highest honour and has to date been conferred to only a handful of Homburg residents in the German city’s long history.
Olga Stoss is a well-known humanitarian, a recipient of the highest German decorations, a “builder of friendship bridges” between Bad Homburg and Dubrovnik and Germany and Croatia in general. She is well known and respected among Germans, and among Croatians in Germany, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina. It is little wonder, then, that the news was well received in Croatia that Olga Stoss is now among the nine honorary citizens of the city of Bad Homburg, all the more so because the status recognises people that have made a special contribution to the city and the community.
In 1906 Louis Jacobi, the first director of the Saalburg Museum, was the first to receive the status of honorary citizen of the city. He as followed by the priest Wilhelm Burggraf (1957), mayor and county manager Georg Eberlein (1958), mayor Karl Horn (1962), and city councillor Alfred Engelhardt (1963). After a long break the honour was bestowed in 2010 on long-time head of parliament Maria Scholz, and in 2014 on former mayor and CDU party delegate Wolfgang Assmann. (http://fenix-magazin.de/)