Memorial to the Victims of National Socialist Tyranny on Morzinplatz

Mahnmal für die Opfer der NS-Gewaltherrschaft am Morzinplatz

Since 1951, a memorial stone on the site of the former Gestapo headquarters commemorates those who were imprisoned here. In 1985, the City of Vienna set up an official monument here, this time dedicated to all victims of National Socialist tyranny.

History

Following Austria's »Anschluss« (»annexation«) to the German Reich, the Gestapo set up headquarters in Vienna and branch offices in Innsbruck, Salzburg, Klagenfurt, Linz, Eisenstadt and Graz. These offices persecuted political opponents in Austria and implemented the anti-Jewish laws of the National Socialist state.
The Vienna headquarters were established on Morzinplatz in the former »Hotel Metropol« and were headed by Franz Josef Huber. In 1939, the Vienna headquarters had over 840 staff members, making it larger than the Berlin Gestapo office. Between 1938 and 1945, Viennese personnel took about 50,000 people into »protective custody«. The inmates were abused and tortured in the basement of the building, which served as a prison. Many of the prisoners were then deported to concentration camps. The Vienna headquarters also participated in the deportation of about 45,000 Viennese Jews to extermination camps in occupied Poland.
In 1945, bomb impacts destroyed the Gestapo building on Morzinplatz.

Vienna, around 1870, The Hotel Métropole, later the headquarters of the Gestapo in Vienna, public domain

Vienna, 2010, The memorial and its surroundings on Morzinplatz, wikipedia commons, Filmbuster

Victims

According to its inscription the memorial is dedicated to »the victims of fascism«. An inscription on the monument refers to the victims of the Vienna Gestapo, which had its headquarters in direct vicinity of the monument on Morzinplatz. About 50,000 people were temporarily in »protective custody«: communists, social democrats, Jews, monarchists, members of various religious groups, »asocials«, criminalised people and homosexuals.

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

On April 11, 1951, the Concentration Camp Society In Memory of Victims of the Gestapo set up a memorial with the following inscription: »Never forget – Here stood the house of the Gestapo. To Austria's faithful it was hell. For many of them it was the forecourt of death. It sank into ruins like the Thousand Year Reich. Yet Austria rose up again and with her our dead, the immortal martyrs«.
In the 1980s, the City of Vienna funded an official monument which replaced the memorial stone. It presents a bronze figure, which is surrounded by granite stones from the former concentration camp Mauthausen. The inscription from the previous memorial was preserved. The monument was inaugurated on November 1, 1985, by Viennese mayor Helmut Zilk and the working group of Concentration Camp Societies and Austrian Resistance Fighters.
In 1968, the »Leopold Figl-Hof« was built on the premises of the former Gestapo headquarters. Today, located in the basement of the building is a commemorative site dedicated to the victims and the history of the site between 1938 and 1945.
The monument on Morzinplatz specifically points to two victim groups under National Socialism: On the upper stone slab a red triangle, which concentration camp inmates were marked with, commemorates political prisoners, while a yellow star symbolises the Jewish victims. Since the end of the 1990s, several initiatives have lobbied for the mention of other victims groups on the monument.
In 2005, the City of Vienna decided to construct a »Monument to the Homosexual and Transgender Victims of National Socialism in Vienna« on Morzinplatz, thus creating the first public memorial for this victim group in Vienna. The winner of the competition in 2006 was the »The Pink Square« concept by artist Hans Kupelweiser. However, the plans have not been realised.

Vienna, 2010, Detialed view of the memorial, wikipedia commons, Filmbuster

Open

The memorial is accessible at all times.

Contact

http://www.nachkriegsjustiz.at

info@nachkriegsjustiz.at

+43 (0)1 534 369 031 5

Morzinplatz
1010 Wien

Vienna, 2006, View of the memorial, wikipedia commons, Gryffindor

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