Museum for Contemporary History and Ebensee Concentration Camp Memorial

Zeitgeschichte Museum und KZ-Gedenkstätte Ebensee

Ebensee concentration camp was established by the SS in 1943 as a satellite camp of the Mauthausen concentration camp. The camp was located around four kilometres outside the township of Ebensee in the Upper Austrian Salzkammergut region. Thousands of concentration camp prisoners had to conduct forced labour building underground tunnel systems for German war production. In 1946, a cemetery for the victims of the concentration camp was laid out. In 1996, a permanent exhibition on the history of the Ebensee concentration camp was inaugurated; in 2001, a museum was opened.

History

The SS set up Ebensee concentration camp as a satellite camp of Mauthausen in November 1943. The National Socialists were planning to relocate the rocket testing site in Peenemünde on the Usedom island to a bomb-proof location underground, following Allied air raids on several production facilities on the site in August 1943. The new tunnel systems close to Ebensee were to provide a secure environment for continuing the development of »Vergeltungswaffen« (»retaliation weapons«), the »V-1« and »V-2« rockets. German propagada cultivated the myth of these weapons in order to create hope that they could bring about a turning point in the war.
Most of the Ebensee prisoners had come from satellite camps of Mauthausen. Thousands of them died of the strenuous labour in the tunnels. In June 1944, transports with Jewish prisoners began arriving. Due to war production needs, the finished tunnels were not used for rocket production but rather for the housing of a Steyr-Daimler-Puch AG petroleum refinery.
At the beginning of 1945, thousands of prisoners, mainly Jews, came to Ebensee in »evacuation transports« from German concentration camps in the east. Further prisoners came from other Mauthausen satellite camps. In May of that year, the number of inmates peaked at 18,500. The overcrowding led to catastrophic living conditions and the death rate rose dramatically. In April 1945 alone, around 4,500 people died. On May 6, 1945, US Army troops liberated Ebensee concentration camp.

Ebensee, 1945, Survivors of the concentrazion camp a day after their liberation, National Archives, Washington D.C.

Ebensee, May 6, 1944, The crematorium shortly after the camp's liberation, Zeitgeschichte Museum und KZ-Gedenkstätte Ebensee

Victims

Around 27,000 prisoners passed through the camp between 1943 and 1945. Of those, between 8,500 and 11,000 perished. The prisoners, all men, came from over 20 European countries. Polish, Hungarian and Soviet prisoners made up the largest groups. Most of them were as political prisoners in Ebensee; around thirty per cent of the inmates were Jewish.

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 1946, a cemetery for the victims of the concentration camp could be set up upon an initiative of survivors. The cemetery was, however, situated outside of the township. In 1952, the cemetery was relocated to a plot of land in the vicinity of the former concentration camp premises, to the site where the sick bay used to stand. In all, over 4,000 victims of Ebensee concentration camp are buried on the cemetery. Numerous monuments commemorate the different victim groups and the fate they suffered.
In 1946, the community of Ebensee made the historic camp premises available to construction purposes. Today, only the entrance gate remains, attached to which is a memorial plaque. The rest of the former camp premises is now a residential area.
In 1994, the Resistance Museum Ebensee Association installed a »memorial tunnel« in one of the underground tunnels. Since 1996, a permanent exhibition on the camp history has been on display there. In 2001, the Museum for Contemporary History Ebensee was opened. The municipal museum deals with the political history of the Salzkammergut region between 1918 and 1955.

Ebensee, 2005, View of the cemetery for the victims of the camp, Corradox

Ebensee, 2009, Former entrance gate of the concentration camp, Marco Steiner

Possibilities

Photo und documentation archive, contemporary history library, educational programmes for school groups, guided tours, temporary exhibitions and lectures series

Open

Museum: Tuesday to Sunday 10.00 a.m. to 5.00 p.m.,
Memorial tunnel May and June Saturday and Sunday from 10.00 a.m. to 5.00 p.m., July to September Tuesday to Sunday from 10.00 a.m. to 5.00 p.m.

Contact

http://www.memorial-ebensee.at

museum@utanet.at

+43 (0)6133 560 1

Kirchengasse 5
4802 Ebensee

Ebensee, 1992, Memorial wall at the victims' cemetery, Zeitgeschichte Museum und KZ-Gedenkstätte Ebensee

Ebensee, 2000, Memorial tunnel in Ebensee and the permanent exhibition, Zeitgeschichte Museum und KZ-Gedenkstätte Ebensee

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