On April 25, 1945, members of SS and Police Regiment 13 shot eleven members of a Slovene family in the Upper Austrian township of Bad Eisenkappel. The family lived on the remote Peršmanhof farm which was an important base for the partisan resistance against the National Socialist regime.
Since 1981, there has been a small museum at Peršmanhof. In 1983, a memorial to the Carinthian partisans was set up in the property's forecourt.
History
On April 25, 1945, a few days before the war ended, a family was massacred on the remote Peršmanhof farm. Peršmanhof was one of the largest farms in the region and an important base for the partisan resistance movement. Beginning 1940, several safe bases for partisans and resistance fighters of the Yugoslav »Liberation Front« were set up in Carinthia. From the summer of 1942 on, members of the Slovene minority in Carinthia became involved in the resistance against the National Socialist regime. Since Austria's incorporation into the German Reich in 1938, they had been subjected to a policy of suppression and expulsion. The official »Volkstumspolitik« (policy on German nationality) entailed the forcible expulsion of about 50,000 Slovenes from Southern Carinthia. When members of the SS and Police Regiment 13 stormed Peršmanhof on April 25, 1945, over 100 partisans managed to flee. In place of the partisans, members of the regiment shot eleven members of the Slovene-born Sadovnik family who lived on Peršmanhof. Afterwards, they burned the farm down. Three children of the family survived the attack.
Victims
Members of SS and Police Regiment 13 shot eleven members of the Slovene-born Sadovnik family, among them four adults and seven children.
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
At the end of the 1940s, the residential house of the Sadovnik family was rebuilt and relatives lived there. In 1981, the »Association of Carinthian Partisans« leased the building and opened a small museum in it in 1983. The museum's exhibition contains information about the history of the region's resistance struggle against National Socialism. Moreover, it deals with topics such as the expulsion of the Carinthian Slovene minority under National Socialism and the 1945 massacre. In 1983, a memorial to the Carinthian partisans was set up in the museum's forecourt. It shows three bronze figures, two men and a woman, in a fighting pose. The memorial had first been erected in 1947 in the nearby town of Völkermarkt. In 1953, however, it had been destroyed by nationalists.
Possibilities
Exhibition on the topics of expulsion of the Slovenes after the »Anschluss« in 1938, resistance movement and its activities with a special focus on Carinthia, persecution and expulsion of Carinthian Slovenes, documentation on the Peršmanhof massacre, guided tours for groups and meetings with survivors (by appointment)
Open
Beginning of May until the end of October: Friday to Sunday and on holidays 10.00 a.m. to 5.00 p.m. and by appointment
