Outrage in Austria over the construction of a shopping center in a former Nazi concentration camp

Plans to build there a commercial area, with a cold store and a supermarket, sparks outrage in the Alpine country, which has long avoided fully confronting its Nazi past.

“I feel sad because it is being built on a place steeped in history, sacrificed for the sake of the economy,” Erich Strobl, who heads a local campaign to preserve the site, told AFP.

After the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in 1938, the Weinberglager camp, located about 40 kilometers south of Vienna, was used to concentrate thousands of prisoners of war and forced laborers.

Later, it also incorporated the Hirtenberg women’s subcamp, dependent on the Mauthausen concentration camp.

About 400 women, mostly from the Soviet Union, were detained in Hirtenberg and were forced to manufacture infantry ammunition between September 1944 and April 1945 in a nearby factory.

Although the ruins of the factory still remain, the camp barracks were demolished.

Bertrand Perz, a historian specializing in the Mauthausen field, explains that Hirtenberg is “historically important”, especially because “the women prisoners of Mauthausen were marginalized in the collective memory.”

The commercial zone project was announced in 2024.

In December of that same year, the Austrian Federal Monuments Office considered that the remains discovered during archaeological investigations were insufficient to justify its declaration as a protected monument.

Now that the excavators have begun to work, calls to preserve the place as a memory space are increasingly insistent.

“A former concentration camp must not be covered by construction,” demands the International Mauthausen Committee.

Standing in front of the works, where concrete pillars are already rising, Josef Pumberger, board member of the Mauthausen Austria Committee, says he feels “pain, anger and rage that something like this could happen in Austria in 2026.”

The controversy is also due to the fact that the land belonged to the local mayor, Andreas Ramharter, who sold it for more than 15 million euros, according to several media outlets.

Contacted by AFP, Ramharter declined to comment.

The Austrian company TRA LEO GmbH & Co KG, which acquired the land, claims to have supported the creation of a memorial.

The Lidl supermarket chain confirmed its intention to open a store, although it specified that it would be located “not directly on the site of the former concentration camp, but on an adjacent plot.”

Perz recalls that a debate like the one surrounding this project “would have been impossible in the 1980s.”

In the decades after the war, Austria presented itself as a victim of Nazism, hiding the complicity of numerous Austrians with Hitler’s regime, born in the country. It was not until the late 1980s that he began to question this interpretation of his history and recognize his share of responsibility for the Holocaust.

However, the historian points out, the demands in favor of the duty of memory increasingly clash with “the opposite tendency, which consists of saying: now this has to end.”

At the same time, The far-right party FPÖ, founded by former Nazis, continues to consolidate its presence on the political scene of the country and has repeatedly participated in government coalitions over the last two decades.

In 2024, it took the lead for the first time in a legislative election and currently governs through coalitions in five of Austria’s nine federal states.

In the center of Leobersdorf, residents interviewed by AFP either had not heard of the shopping area or did not want to comment on it.

In 2024 a commemorative stele was erected there. But it is not enough, Pumberger believes.

“It is very important to have tangible evidence of the buildings in which the Nazis imprisoned, tortured and killed people,” he says. “Otherwise, memory becomes virtual or only subsists in books, photographs or movies.”