Anger in Austria over Building on Former Nazi Camp Site
Activists say the project would erase traces of a camp where about 400 women were imprisoned and forced to make munitions.
- Activists are protesting plans to build a business park on the former Hirtenberg concentration camp site near Vienna, where forced laborers manufactured munitions during World War II.
- Controversy surrounds the project because local mayor Andreas Ramharter sold the land for $17.5 million in 2022 and 2023, while critics argue the site once held around 400 women prisoners requiring preservation.
- The International Mauthausen Committee stated, "A former concentration camp must not be built over with new structures," while Lidl stressed its store would occupy an adjacent plot, not the camp site.
- Standing at the site, Mauthausen Committee Austria board member Josef Pumberger told AFP he felt "grief, anger, rage, that something like this can happen in Austria in the year 2026."
- Historian Bertrand Perz said debates over Nazi sites were impossible in the 1980s, though demands for remembrance increasingly clash with the "opposite tendency" of those saying, "Now this really has to stop.
13 Articles
13 Articles
Work on a commercial area, including a cold store and a Lidl supermarket, has begun on the remains of a forced labour camp.
A business park and a Lidl supermarket are planned for the site of a former Nazi forced labor camp in Austria. Activists are fighting to preserve the last traces of the camp.
The construction of a commercial building on part of the former Nazi concentration camp site in Austria has raised many concerns. Erich Strobl, the head of a local campaign to preserve part of the site, said it was "sad that a place so deeply marked by history is now being built on and sacrificed for the economy."
‘Grief, anger, rage’: Austria’s Nazi past collides with business plans at former camp site
LEOBERSDORF (Austria), Aug 28 — A few crumbling concrete blocks in an overgrown field are all that remains visible of what was once a sprawling Nazi forced labour complex around the Austrian town of Leobersdorf.Now, plans to build a business park on the site, including a cold storage warehouse and branch of the discount supermarket chain Lidl, have sparked anger in the Alpine nation, which long neglected to address its Nazi past.“For me, it’s a …
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