Hartheim Castle - Place of Learning and Remembrance

Lern- und Gedenkort Schloss Hartheim

Hartheim Castle, a castle situated in Alkoven in Upper Austria, functioned as a »euthanasia killing centre« from early 1940 onwards. Around 30,000 people were murdered there in gas chambers between 1940 and 1944. In 1969, memorial rooms to the victims were set up in the castle. The »Hartheim Castle - Place of Learning and Remembrance« was opened in 2004.

History

Until 1938, Hartheim Castle housed a nursing home for up to 200 mentally and physically handicapped people. In 1939, the owner - the Upper Austrian State Benevolent Society - had to yield the institution to the National Socialist authorities. In the spring of 1940, a »euthanasia killing centre« was set up there, as part of the so-called »Action T4«. The aim of this campaign, which was centrally organised in Berlin, was to kill mentally handicapped people.
The killings in Hartheim as part of the »Action T4« began in May 1940. Under the guidance of Dr. Rudolf Lonauer, a psychiatrist from Linz, the doctors, nursing personnel, police officers and members of the SS contributed to the murder of »life unworthy of life«. Among the first victims were patients of the psychiatric hospital which had been located in the castle until 1938. From May 1940, staff members of T4 transported thousands of patients from psychiatric hospitals in Austria and Bavaria to Hartheim. In all, approximately 18,200 people were asphyxiated with carbon monoxide in the centre's gas chamber. In August 1941, the National Socialist leadership ordered a halt to the operation, partly due to public protests of churches and families of the victims. The killings in Hartheim continued, however: at least 8,000 prisoners deemed incapable of working from the concentration camps at Dachau, Mauthausen and Gusen were murdered in Hartheim (»Aktion 14f13«). In a further »Aktion«, the personnel of the centre murdered forced labourers from Eastern Europe who were considered to be incapable of working.
In 1944/1945, towards the end of the war, the extermination facilities in Hartheim were dismantled and traces of the murders destroyed.

Alkoven, around 1940, Hartheim Castle with bus shuds, Wolfgang Schuhmann

Alkoven, 2003, The interior courtyard of Hartheim Castle, Ronnie Golz

Victims

Between May 1940 and August 1941, more than 18,200 patients from psychiatric hospitals were murdered at Hartheim Castle, as part of the »Action T4«. Between 1941 and 1944, an additional 8,000 to 10,000 prisoners from the concentration camps at Dachau, Mauthausen and Gusen, as well as forced labourers from Eastern Europe deemed »incapable of working« were murdered by personnel of the killing centre.

On March 12, 1938 the German Wehrmacht entered the Austrian Republic to a jubilant reaction from much of the population. The next day saw Austria’s »Anschluss« (»annexation«) to the Third Reich; the country was now known as »Ostmark«. Austrian Nazis immediately began to persecute the Jewish minority and opponents of the regime. From May 1938, German anti-Jewish legislation also applied to annexed Austria. Over 126,000 Jews, mainly from Vienna, had managed to escape the country by the end of 1939. The first deportations of Austrian Jews to occupied Poland began in the autumn of that year. By 1945, the SS had deported almost 48,600 Jews from Austria along with 16,600 others who had sought refuge abroad. They were deported to the occupied Eastern territories, where all but a few were murdered. Over 40,000 non-Jewish civilians died in the war, including more than 8,000 Sinti and Roma deported from the province of Burgenland. In 1945, the Allies divided Austria into four occupation zones. The Soviet occupying powers erected a »Liberation Monument« in Vienna. Representatives of the provisional all-party government made up of the socialists, communists and the conservative People’s Party used the inauguration of this monument on August 19, 1945 to declare Austria as »the first free country to fall victim to Hitlerite aggression«. For decades, this perspective was broadly upheld by politicians and the general public. However, the 1960s saw the start of bitter disputes on Austria’s involvement in National Socialism. The low point came during a demonstration in March 1965 when a far-right student fatally wounded the former concentration camp prisoner Ernst Kirchweger (*1898). Kirchweger became the first victim of politically-motivated murder in post-1945 Austria. Subsequently, the Austrian public became increasingly vocal in warning against a relativisation of the period 1938 to 1945. The country was rocked by a series of scandals related to the past of its political representatives, for example the »Waldheim Debate« between 1986 and 1992. The country was divided over claims that Kurt Waldheim (1918–2007), the Austrian President and former General Secretary of the United Nations, had been involved in war crimes in the Balkans. Waldheim responded that he had simply done his duty »like hundreds of thousands of other Austrians«. It was not until the early 1990s that the then Chancellor Franz Vranitzky (*1937) acknowledged Austria’s complicity in the Holocaust. The Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance was founded in 1963. This institution researches the history of the Holocaust and far-right extremism in Austria and has a small exhibition. For a long time, the permanent exhibition opened in 1970 at the former Mauthausen concentration camp was almost the only museum on the history of National Socialism in Austria. In 1983, the city council of Vienna voted to establish a »Memorial against War and Fascism«. Designed by the sculptor Alfred Hrdlicka (*1928), the memorial was inaugurated in 1991, the »Memorial to the Austrian Jewish Victims of the Shoah« followed suit in 2000 Laws governing compensation for confiscated property, compensation to former forced labourers and the work of a Historians’ Commission between 1998 and 2003 to investigate the expropriation of assets under National Socialism all point to a shift in Austrian national memory. In 2009, former deserters of the Wehrmacht were officially rehabilitated, and a memorial dedicated to them was unveiled in 2014.

Remembrance

Already in July 1945, shortly after the end of the war, the »US War Crimes Investigation Team« interviewed perpetrators and witnesses of the murders in Hartheim. In addition, the so-called Hartheim statistics were found, in which the parties involved had documented the murders.
After 1945, Hartheim Castle was returned to the Upper Austrian State Benevolent Society. In 1969, it established memorial rooms in the former reception room and the gas chamber. In 1995, the Hartheim Castle Association was founded. In 1997, upon initiative of the Association, the State of Upper Austria decided to renovate the castle and redesign it as an education and memorial centre on the topic of National Socialist »euthanasia« and its victims. In 2003, the »Hartheim Castle - Place of Learning and Remembrance« was opened with an exhibition entitled »The Value of Life«, which thematises the way in which societies have dealt with handicapped people from the beginning of industrialisation in the late 18th century until today.

Alkoven, 2002, Victims' spectacles which were buried next to the castle, Hartmut Reese

Alkoven, 2009, Remodelled cemetery and tomb, Ronnie Golz

Possibilities

Permanent exhibition with guided tours for school groups, temporary exhibitions, library, archive, documentation centre of the Upper Austrian provincial archive

Open

Monday to Friday: 9.00 a.m. to 3.00 p.m., Tuesday to Thursday: 9.00 a.m. to 4.00 p.m., Sundays and holidays: 10.00 a.m. to 5.00 p.m., closed on Saturdays

Contact

http://www.schloss-hartheim.at

office@schloss-hartheim.at

+43 (0)7274 653 654 6

Schlossstraße 1
4072 Alkoven

Alkoven, 2009, View into the exhibition »The Value of Life«, Ronnie Golz

Alkoven, 2003, Schloss Hartheim, Hartmut Reese

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