Even before the Anschluß, cities in Austria had attempted to capitalise on their ties to the Führer. Hitler’s plans for Linz are well known. He wanted to transform the city on the Danube into a cultural metropolis, with theatres, museums, art galleries and an enormous stadium. Tourism officials there saw a way to cash in on Hitler’s affection for his boyhood town. Linz styled itself first as the ‘City of the Führer’s Youth’, then as the ‘Hometown of the Führer’, and finally as the ‘City of the Foundation of the Greater German Reich’ (Gründungsstadt des Großdeutschen Reichs). When Hitler announced in March 1938 that he was personally adopting the city, it quickly became the ‘Adopted City of the Führer’. While the entire region of Upper Austria called itself the ‘Führer’s Home District’, individual Austrian towns highlighted their early support for Nazism. Graz was especially gratified when Hitler bestowed the honorary title ‘City of the People’s Uprising (Volkserhebung)’. It used this designation often in its own publicity. A Shell roadmap also referred to Graz as the ‘City of the People’s Uprising’, noting that the town had received this appellation from Hitler in recognition for its ‘self-sacrificing, tenacious perseverance in the fight for Greater Germany’.
Semmens (68)
Braunau am Inn
The house in which Adolf Hitler was born on April 20, 1889. According to Franz Martin, in his Braunauer Hauschronik
(Salzburg 1943), it originally consisted of two buildings, the owners
of which were can be identified from the 17th century. From 1826 it had
the address Vorstadt 219, being renamed Salzburger Vorstadt 15 in 1890.
The street name was changed to "Adolf-Hitler-Straße" after the anschluß.
The house itself had been half-owned by Franz Xaver and Helene Dafner
from 1888, who turned it into a guest house. On October 17 1890, Franz
Dafner died and his widow remarried in 1891 to Jacob Bachleitner. The
name of the guest house remained "Zum Hirschen" until December 18, 1912
when the property was sold to Josef Pommer from Laab near Braunau for
the price of 58,000 crowns and renamed the inn "Zum braune Hirschen."
This name proved problematic given the location of another guest house
called "Zum Goldenen Hirschen". Immediately after the occupation of
Braunau by American troops on May
2, 1945, a German battalion attempted to blow up Hitler's birthplace,
but American soldiers thwarted this attack. On November 1, 1945, "at the
place from which Hitler came into the world" an exhibition
was opened, showing the horror of concentration camps to the
visitors.
Hitler's
birthplace during the Nazi era and today. It was here in a room on the
first floor of that Hitler’s mother Klara gave birth to him on April 20,
1889.
The room in which Hitler was born, shown on the right in a 1938 postcard.
Before the anschluß...
...and the year after, still displaying the name Gasthof des Josef Pomme under the swastika
According to UPI,
the initials "MB" on the wrought iron front door are for Hitler's
private secretary Martin Bormann and provide the only evidence, other
than the reputation, of the building's history. Bormann bought the
house in 1938 from the Pommer family for an astonishing 150,000
Reichmarks (four times its actual value) for the purpose, according to Der Spiegel,
"in the hopes of eventually turning it into a monument on par with the
birthplaces of Stalin and Mussolini." The building was renovated and
transformed into a cultural centre with a Volksbücherei- the original
sign remains on the façade. The house was opened to the public on April
18 1943 as a library on the ground floor and as a gallery on the 1st and
2nd floors. From spring 1943 to late summer 1944 exhibitions took place
in the "Braunau Gallery in the Führer-Geburtshaus", where pictures and
sculptures were shown by artists from Braunau and the surrounding
area.
The stone memorial in front was erected a fortnight before the centenary
of Hitler's birth from a quarry on the grounds of the former Mauthausen
Concentration Camp, near Linz. The inscription reads: "For Peace,
Freedom and Democracy. Never Again Fascism. Millions of Dead Remind
[us]".
The rear of the house as it appears in Hoffmann's Wie die Ostmark ihre Befreiung erlebte - Adolf Hitler und sein Weg zu Grossdeutschland (1940) and today. On the right is the view from the balcony in 1938.
His
birthplace was returned in the early 1950s to the
former owners, who had bought the house during the annexation of
Austria, as part of a reserve comparison from the Republic of Austria.
In 2012, a Russian Duma deputy wanted to buy the house and demolish it.
After unsuccessful negotiations, the Ministry of Interior in 2016
considered expropriation of the owner to gain control over the use of
the building. In an interview in October 2016, the Austrian
Minister of the Interior, Wolfgang Sobotka, declared that the house was
to be demolished and a new building built. Sobotka referred to an
alleged recommendation by a historian commission. Hannes Waidbacher, the
mayor of Braunau who was sitting in the Historian Commission,
contradicted the fact that in the Commission's recommendation "nothing
was a demolition", but a "profound architectural transformation" was
recommended which would be the "recognition and symbolic power of the
building permanently." Cornelia Sulzbacher, head of the
Upper Austrian Provincial Archives, also surprised herself with the
statements of the minister and also said that there was only the
recommendation to change the appearance so that the house could no
longer be used as a symbol.
Adolf-Hitler-Straße in 1938 and today.
The
Stadttorturm, Salzburger Tor, adorned with the swastika before the war.
The mural on the building beside the gate commemorates the execution of
Johann Philipp Palm by the French on August 26, 1806 in Braunau. The
image on the right shows his arrest
beside a photo of an alley today.
The year before the Bavarian Elector was made King of Bavaria by
Napoleon and
ordered to support Napoleon in all his wars with a force of 30,000
men, making Bavaria a vassal of the French. This was
'The Time of Germany's Deepest Humiliation,' a term used continually by
Hitler throughout his career inspired by an event that occurred in
Braunau. After the pamphlet Deutschland in seiner tiefen Erniedrigung was
published earlier that year which strongly attacked Napoleon and the
brutality of his troops in Bavaria Palm, then a Nürnberg bookseller who
helped to circulate the pamphlet, was denounced to the French by a
Bavarian police agent. Napoleon had Palm arrested and handed over to a military
commission at Braunau, denying him any right of defence. After a mock
trial he was shot the following day without having betrayed the
pamphlet's author. It
has been stated that this statue erected to him in 1866 on the site of
his execution was one of the first public objects that made an
impression on Hitler as child. As he himself wrote on the first page of
Mein Kampf,this little frontier town appeared to me as the symbol of a great task. But in another regard also it points to a lesson that is applicable to our day. Over a hundred years ago this sequestered spot was the scene of a tragic calamity which affected the whole German nation and will be remembered for ever, at least in the annals of German history. At the time of our Fatherland's deepest humiliation a bookseller, Johannes Palm, uncompromising nationalist and enemy of the French, was put to death here because he had the misfortune to have loved Germany well. He obstinately refused to disclose the names of his associates, or rather the principals who were chiefly responsible for the affair. Just as it happened with Leo Schlageter. The former, like the latter, was denounced to the French by a Government agent. It was a director of police from Augsburg who won an ignoble renown on that occasion and set the example which was to be copied at a later date by the neo-German officials of the REICH under Herr Severing's regime.
[s]hortly before 4p.m. that afternoon, Hitler crossed the Austrian border over the narrow bridge at his birthplace, Braunau am Inn. The church‑bells were ringing. Tens of thousands of people (most of them from outside Braunau), in ecstasies of joy, lined the streets of the small town. But Hitler did not linger. Propaganda value, not sentiment, had dictated his visit. Braunau played its brief symbolic part. That sufficed. The cavalcade passed on its triumphal progression to Linz.
Hitler's
visit inspired the stamp commemorating his 50th birthday which was
issued on April 13, 1939. It can be seen that the stamp and photograph
were taken at slightly different times along the route.
Linz
Hitler
depicted from the balcony of the town hall in Linz with the
Dreifaltigkeitssäule column behind. Hitler repeatedly called his years
in Linz the happiest time of his life, “a lovely dream.” Hitler, who had
attended school in Linz, intended to retire
here one day. With the invasion of the German troops on March 12, 1938, Adolf Hitler embarked on a “triumphal journey” from his hometown of Braunau to Vienna and spoke for the first time in Linz as Chancellor on Austrian soil. Only here, in view of the cheers in the population and the reluctant reactions from abroad, did he decide to immediately and completely complete Austria's annexation to the German Reich. Because of his emotional connection to Linz, Hitler took over the "sponsorship" of Linz that day (which also became one of the five führer cities ) and promised investments by the Reich. On March 13, 1938, Hitler signed the Act of union in the town's Hotel Weinzinger. Therefore, after the anschluß Hitler intended to develop his ‘home town’, Führerstadt Linz, into the cultural metropolis of the Danube region, which was to receive a university and become a centre at which the ‘three cosmologies of Ptolemy, Copernicus and Hörbiger (glacial theory)’ would be taught according to Fest (27). The expansion plans included a boulevard with magnificent buildings such as Opera, theatres and galleries, but especially the "Führer Museum", which was to house the world's largest art and art gallery. Linz was to surpass Vienna’s splendour, being expanded in size three or four times over. Trevor- Roper relates (421–3) his extravagant ideas for locating houses along the banks of the Danube and for a major new observatory built in classical style. There would be a new hotel (built in the Renaissance style) for exclusive use of the ‘Strength through Joy’ movement, new municipal buildings, a Party House, a new army headquarters, an Olympic Stadium and (fulfilling the teenage vision) a massive suspension bridge. At the heart of the city would be a central avenue running between two great squares. Along it would be new theatres, concert halls, restaurants, museums and libraries, not to mention a railway station, post office and an air-raid shelter. Linz was even to house Hitler’s tomb within a crypt beneath a tower (Taylor, 50–1). In addition, Linz would become an industrial and administrative centre with oversized Nazi Party administrative buildings. This would have meant extensive sweeping of the historical building stock on both Linz and Urfahrer. Apart from a few exceptions such as the Nibelungen Bridge , the bridgehead buildings and today's Heinrich Gleissner House , the plans pushed by Albert Speer were not put into practice. "Hermann Göring" Linz was built in 1938 as was the nitrogen works Ostmark. The residents of the village of St. Peter-Zizlau were relocated and the buildings were demolished for the construction of the factory site and for the construction of the port provided there.The Hitlers had moved house several times within Braunau, and had subsequently been uprooted on a number of occasions. In November 1898, a final move for Alois took place when he bought a house with a small plot of attached land in Leonding, a village on the outskirts of Linz. From now on, the family settled in the Linz area, and Adolf – down to his days in the bunker in 1945 – looked upon Linz as his home town. Linz reminded him of the happy, carefree days of his youth. It held associations with his mother. And it was the most ‘German’ town of the Austrian Empire. It evidently symbolized for him the provincial small-town Germanic idyll – the image he would throughout his life set against the city he would soon come to know, and detest: Vienna.Kershaw (7)
In the execreble TV mini-series Hitler: Rise of Evil Bloch is depicted as noticeably Hasidic even though he, like most Austrian Jews of the turn of the century, were among the most assimilated in Europe.
Hitler’s triumphant ride from Braunau to Linz took nearly four hours, since the Mercedes could barely work its way through the jubilant crowds. Fifteen kilometres out of Linz, Seyss-Inquart, Glaise- Horstenau and Himmler, together with other National Socialists, awaited the Führer. Here is is being driven through the hauptplatz where an enormous crowd had gathered at the market place to await Hitler’s arrival. Tremendous enthusiasm was evident in Ward Price’s impressive live radio report. Speaking in German on the Austrian broadcast services, the British journalist congratulated the Austrian people on the advent of this day.
Immediately
after the main square became renamed Adolf-Hitler-platz as shown in
these period postcards.
In
addition to prisoners of war and foreign workers, prisoners from the
Mauthausen concentration camp were also deployed in the industrial
plants mentioned. The existing shortage of living space was exacerbated
by the expansion of industry, the associated relocations and the influx
of workers. As a remedy, entire districts such as the Bindermichl or the
“New Home” with large residential complexes that still shape the
appearance of these districts were built. The necessary infrastructure
(schools, kindergartens) was not expanded. With the simultaneous
incorporations, the urban area was almost doubled and reached the
expansion that still exists today.Linz was also a centre of persecution: more than 100,000 people from all over Europe died in the nearby Mauthausen concentration camp and its subcamps. There were a total of three satellite camps of the Mauthausen concentration camp and 77 camps for forced labourers in the city of Linz. The 600 Jews had to leave Linz - 150 of them were murdered by the National Socialists. Hundreds of victims of Nazi euthanasia were found in the Niedernhart medical and nursing home in Linz, which is now the State Psychiatric Clinic Wagner-Jauregg , and from there were taken to the Hartheim NS euthanasia center relocated to Linz. Ultimately, those who had served the regime out of enthusiasm or out of loyalty had to suffer from the consequences of National Socialist politics. In Linz, the construction of air-raid shelters for the population was not forced until the end of 1943 for propaganda reasons. In November 1944, entire neighborhoods were still uncovered in air raids. Over 1,600 people died in the 22 bombing raids on Linz between July 1944 and April 1945, thousands of Linzers lost their lives as members of the German Wehrmacht .In Linz, tanks were built in the Goering factories and submarines were built in the area of the port.
On May 4 and 5, 1945, the city was under American artillery fire and Gauleiter August Eigruber settled in southern Upper Austria. The original plan to defend the city in house-to-house combat was abandoned. On May 5, at 11.07, the first American tanks arrived in the main square.
Standing
in front of the town hall in Linz. According to Kubizek (86), "[t]he
Town Hall, which stood on the square, he thought unworthy of a rising
town like Linz. He visualised a new, stately town hall, to be built in a
modern style, far removed from the neo-Gothic style which at that time
was the vogue for town halls, in Vienna and Munich, for instance."
As can be seen in the original photo, when Hitler's car finally reached Linz, it was dark. He stepped out upon the small balcony of the City Hall in Linz and listened to the welcoming address by Seyss-Inquart. Thereupon, Hitler gave a speech that was frequently disrupted by thunders of applause from the audience below:
As can be seen in the original photo, when Hitler's car finally reached Linz, it was dark. He stepped out upon the small balcony of the City Hall in Linz and listened to the welcoming address by Seyss-Inquart. Thereupon, Hitler gave a speech that was frequently disrupted by thunders of applause from the audience below:
Germans! German Volksgenossen! Herr Bundeskanzler!I thank you for your words of greeting. But above all I thank you who have assembled here and testified to the fact that it is not the will and desire of only a few to establish this great Reich of the German race, but the wish and the will of the German Volk!May there be those among you this evening, our reputed international truth-seekers, who will not only perceive for themselves this reality, but admit it afterwards, too. When I first set forth from this city, I carried within me exactly the same devout pledge that fills me today. Try to fathom my inner emotion at having finally made this faithful pledge come true after so many long years.The fact that Providence once summoned me forth from this city to the leadership of the Reich, must have meant it was giving me a special assignment, and it can only have been the assignment of restoring my cherished home to the German Reich! I have believed in this assignment, I have lived and fought for it, and I believe I have now fulfilled it! May you all witness and vouch for this!I do not know when you yourselves will be summoned. I hope the time is not far off. Then you shall be asked to stand up to your own pledge, and it is my belief that I will then be able to point to my homeland with pride before the entire German Volk.The outcome must then prove to the world that any further attempt to tear this Volk asunder will be in vain. Just as you will then be under an obligation to make your contribution to this German future, the whole of Germany is likewise willing to make its contribution. And this it is already doing today!May you see in the German soldiers who are marching here this very hour from all the Gaus of the Reich fighters willing and prepared to make sacrifices for the unity of the great German Volk as a whole, and for the power and the glory and the splendour of the Reich, now and forever! Deutschland, Sieg Heil!
Fest
wrote how (526) Hitler had dreamed of this bridge rising 270 feet above
the Danube – making it unrivalled in the world. Sketches that have been
received show that Hitler had concrete ideas of a new bridge as early
as 1925. Eventually it was constructed according to plans by Karl
Schaechterle and Friedrich Tamms between 1938 and 1940, spanning 250
metres in length and thirty metres in width beside the site where the
first and for a long time only Linz bridge built in 1497. The old one
was torn down after the new one was completed. After the war the statues
at the end were thrown into the Danube. The actual origin of the name
"Nibelungen Bridge" given it by Hitler is unclear although according to
the myth of the “ Nibelungenweg, ” the Germanic mythical characters
Kriemhild and their brothers are said to have grazed the area of
today's Linz on the way to the Hun king Etzel . Further reference to
the Nibelung legend was seen in the four equestrian statues from the
sculptor Bernhard Graf Plettenberg six and a half meters in height of
Siegfried, Kriemhild, Gunter and Brunhild). Two other statues, "Hagen"
and "Volker", were supposed to decorate the stairs leading up to the
bridge but prevented from being executed due to the war.
With the construction of the Nibelungen Bridge, some buildings on both banks of the Danube were demolished to make room for the wider and higher bridge resulting in several historic buildings being torn down on the Linz main square directly adjacent to the Nibelungen Bridge in order to be replaced by the Brückenkopfgebäude (bridgehead buildings) that still exist today, built according to plans by Roderich Fick between 1940 and 1943. The two structurally identical buildings housed parts of the Linz Art University and the Linz tax office until May 2008.
With the construction of the Nibelungen Bridge, some buildings on both banks of the Danube were demolished to make room for the wider and higher bridge resulting in several historic buildings being torn down on the Linz main square directly adjacent to the Nibelungen Bridge in order to be replaced by the Brückenkopfgebäude (bridgehead buildings) that still exist today, built according to plans by Roderich Fick between 1940 and 1943. The two structurally identical buildings housed parts of the Linz Art University and the Linz tax office until May 2008.
A
couple of miles west of Linz overlooking the Danube is the
Burschenschafterturm (also known as the Anschlussturm) which had
orginally formed part of the Maximilian tower line built in the early
19th century fortifying the Danube. Today it serves as a memorial and
museum of the German fraternity. By 1917 the dilapidated structure was
acquired by Karl Beurle in 1917 in order to be designed as a memorial
for the fallen of the First World War. In 1932 the inscription "One
people, one empire" was affixed to the facade as shown on the left.
After Austria's annexation to Germany, on Hitler's fiftieth birthday in
1939 the inscription was expanded to "One people, one empire, one
leader" as shown in the postcard on the right. After 1945 it was
removed. The large red logo of the "Deutsche Burschenschaft"was added by
the current owner in 2006 without official approval whih led to questions raised in Parliament
in June 2018 and the Federal Monuments Office being instructed to
initiate proceedings. Nevertheless, in August 2018 the office suddenly
subsequently approved the attached logo on the grounds that there was
originally “plastic lettering at the appropriate place, which was
expanded during the time of the National Socialist regime. After the
Second World War, the lettering was knocked off and a 'circle' (logo of
the owners) was attached. ” However, none of these words and symbols
previously attached to the tower were approved by the preservation law.
Today the tower serves as "a memorial to those who died in both world
wars, a museum of fraternity history and fraternity ideas and a place of
remembrance that there is a spiritual bond that spans borders and
nationality, which encompasses the entire German people and cultural
space. " The Documentation Archive of the Austrian Resistance protests that the tower is instead serving as 'Greater German' propaganda
and is thus as a "permanent violation of the state treaty", which
Austria is obliged by law to stop, allowing "the ethnic (German national
to extreme right) milieu to this day a place of pilgrimage and place of
Great German propaganda".
Hitler revisiting Leonding, where from 1898 at the age of nine to 1905
he lived whilst attending the local
primary school and later a grammar school in nearby Linz, during the
anschluß at noon on March 13, 1938 with St. Michael's church in the background.
Hitler had been a choirboy at the church.
He
proceeded to pay his respects at his parents' grave; his brother
Edmund, who died of measles, was buried there too. The grave was
recently destroyed by the municipal authorities in 2012, when a relative
of Alois Hitler's first wife, Anna, did not renew the lease leaving the
grave to be dissolved. Robert Eiter, with the Upper Austrian Network
Against Racism and Right-Extremism, said the latest incident was on All
Saints day, on November 1, last year, when an urn was left with the
inscription "Unvergesslich" – German for "unforgettable" and alluding to
the ϟϟ, given both 's's had been highlighted in partiular. Eiter
described how "[a] lot of flowers and wreaths were deposited there from
people who clearly were admirers. It had to do with the son and not the
parents." Brunner, the mayor, said he was happy with the decision to
remove the tombstone and Eiter said most Leonding residents also
supported it.
Directly
across the street from the cemetery is Hitler's
house on Michaelsbergstraße16. It remains as it was with Hitler in
front March
1938 on the left and as it appeared, decorated during the Nazi era, on
the right. Apparently the house is now owned by the cemetery which uses
it as an office. It was in his house on February 2, 1900 that Hitler’s
younger brother Edmund, born in 1894, died. It has been claimed
that young Adolf was obseerved sitting on the fence at night, staring
up at the stars, after attending his brother's funeral. Kubizek
recalled in The Young Hitler I Knew (49-50) that "[w]hilst,
naturally, Adolf had no recollection of the first three children born in
Braunau and never spoke of them, he could clearly remember his brother
Edmund, at the time of whose death he was already eleven years old. He
told me once that Edmund had died of diphtheria." Welch (8) writes that
"it should be noted that as an adolescent he was disturbed by the deaths
of his younger brother Edmund (1900), his father (1903) and his beloved
mother (1908). Without delving too deeply into psychological
speculation about Hitler’s state of mind, some biographers have
suggested that these deaths (and his own survival) convinced Hitler that
he was marked out by destiny for a special future."
The
former pub further down Michaelsbergstraße at number 1 where Hitler's
father died. Formerly the Gasthaus Stiefler, his favourite tavern in
Leonding, it is now an Italian restaurant. According to Fest,
The
former pub further down Michaelsbergstraße at number 1 where Hitler's
father died. Formerly the Gasthaus Stiefler, his favourite tavern in
Leonding, it is now an Italian restaurant. According to Fest,in January, 1903, he took a first sip from a glass of wine in the Wiesinger tavern in Leonding and fell over to one side. He was carried into an adjoining room, where he died immediately, before a doctor and a priest could be sent for. The liberal Linz Tagespost gave him a lengthy obituary, referring to his progressive ideas, his sturdy cheerfulness, and his energetic civic sense. It praised him as a “friend of song,” an authority on beekeeping, and a temperate family man. By the time his son gave up school out of disgust and capriciousness, Alois Hitler had already been dead for two and a half years. Nor could Adolf’s sickly mother have tried to force the boy into a civil servant’s career.In Mein Kampf Hitler described the number of times he had to retrieve his drunken father from here and trudge back with him home.
In my thirteenth year I suddenly lost my father. A stroke of apoplexy felled the old gentleman who was otherwise so hale, thus painlessly ending his earthly pilgrimage, plunging us all into the depths of grief. His most ardent desire had been to help his son forge his career, thus preserving him from his own bitter experience. In this, to all appearances, he had not succeeded. But, though unwittingly, he had sown the seed for a future which at that time neither he nor I would have comprehended. For the moment there was no outward change.G.M. Gilbert in his 1950 book The Psychology of Dictatorship (19) wrote how
Nevertheless, Helmut Heiber in his 1961 biography maintains that Alois was no drunkard, but a respected and generally upstanding man (10). Hitler's childhood friend, August Kubizek, said Adolf genuinely respected his father in his 1955 memoirs (38). That there was anything at all wrong in the Hitler family home is doubted by Werner Maser who in his 1974 book described Hitler’s childhood as ‘exceedingly happy’ (5). But even if Adolf did contend with a violent father and an over-protective mother (a situation which lan Kershaw accepts), the effects need not have been so decisive as the psychologists imply.[h]is father suffered from an uncontrollable addiction to alcohol which often led to the most painful family experiences for the boy, Adolf Hitler. How often did this boy have to fetch his father late at night out of the tavern, after the latter had been guzzling alcohol for hours on end. Hitler himself related to me in 1930 – when we were speaking about his family relationships (in connection with a blackmail threat), ‘Even as a 10 or 12-year-old kid I always had to go late at night to this stinking, smoky dive. Without being spared any of the details, I would have to go to the table and shake him as he looked with a blank stare. Then I would say, “Father, you must come home! Come now, we’ve got to go!” And I often had to wait a quarter of an hour, begging, cursing, until I could get him to budge. Then I would support him and finally get him home. That was the most terrible shame I have ever experienced. Oh, Frank, I know what a devil Alcohol is! Through my father it became my greatest enemy in my youth!’
Fischlham
This
building is notable for being the location of Adolf Hitler's first two
years of formal schooling, from 1895-1897, although it no longer serves
as one. The year his father retired from the customs service at the age of fifty-eight, the six-year-old Adolf entered the public school in the village of Fischlham, a short distance southwest of Linz. This was in 1895. For the next four or five years the restless old pensioner moved from one village to another in the vicinity of Linz. By the time the son was fifteen he could remember seven changes of address and five different schools. For two years he attended classes at the Benedictine monastery at Lambach, near which his father had purchased a farm. There he sang in the choir, took singing lessons and, according to his own account,16 dreamed of one day taking holy orders. Finally the retired customs official settled down for good in the village of Leonding, on the southern outskirts of Linz, where the family occupied a modest house and garden.
MauthausenShirer (9-10)
Located
twelve miles from Linz, Mauthausen concentration camp is sited on a
hill above the market town of Mauthausen, serving as the main camp of
nearly an hundred further subcamps located throughout Austria and
southern Germany. Mauthausen was one of the first massive concentration
camp
complexes in Nazi Germany, and the last to be liberated by the Allies.
The Mauthausen main camp operated from the time of the Anschluss from
August 8, 1938 using prisoners from Dachau concentration camp to begin
its construction of a new slave labour camp chosen because of the nearby
granite quarry, and its proximity to Linz. The granite mined in the
quarries had previously been used to pave the streets of Vienna, but the
Nazis envisioned a complete reconstruction of major German towns in
accordance with plans of Albert Speer and other Nazi architects, for
which large quantities of granite were needed. Mauthausen initially
served as a strictly-run prison camp for common criminals, prostitutes
and other categories of "Incorrigible Law Offenders". On May 8, 1939 it
was converted to a labour camp which was mainly used for the
incarceration of political prisoners. Unlike many other concentration
camps, which were intended for all
categories of prisoners, Mauthausen was mostly used for extermination
through labour of the intelligentsia – educated people and members of
the higher social classes in countries subjugated by the Nazi regime
during the war. The two largest camps, Mauthausen and Gusen I, were
classed as "Grade
III" (Stufe III) concentration camps, which meant that they were
intended to be the toughest camps for the "incorrigible political
enemies of the Reich". Mauthausen never lost this Stufe III
classification, and in the offices of the Reich Main Security Office it
was referred to by the nickname
Knochenmühle – the bone-grinder.
the new arrivals who had been set apart as unfit for work were lined up, half-naked, after disinfection and a shower, in front of the “wailing wall” next to the gatehouse. During the summer, the guards would wait until the exhausted prisoners col- lapsed in the searing heat; in the winter, they poured cold water over them several times until they had finally frozen into pillars of ice. In many camps, those who committed minor transgressions were punished by having to stand at the gate. While the Kommandos filed out, the offenders were brought to the gate in the early morning and forced to stand there, rigid and motionless, the entire day—a Stehkommando. Soon, some began to sway like drunks, and leaned their heads against the wall; others were forced to squat, their hands clasped behind their necks in a “Saxon salute.” If a guard came by, these prisoners summoned up the last bit of strength in an effort to stand at attention. Otherwise they would be kicked, or prisoners’ heads might be pounded against the stone wall until their noses were broken. Standing at the gate was a static mode of torture without technical aids, a torment of silence; the prisoners formed a public statuary in stasis, at a site dominated by the flow of people coming and going.
Sofsky (62)
Inside
the courtyard. Beginning with the main camp at Mauthausen, the number
of subcamps expanded over time and by the summer of 1940 Mauthausen and
its subcamps had become one of the largest labour camp complexes in the
German-controlled part of Europe. Although initially the camps of Gusen
and Mauthausen mostly served the local quarries, from 1942 onwards they
began to be included in the German war machine. To accommodate the
ever-growing number of slave workers, additional subcamps were built.The camp population did not rise significantly until March 1940, with the transfer of the first Polish prisoners from Buchenwald. About eight thousand Poles were incarcerated in Mauthausen that year, augmented from 1940 to 1942 by some seventy-eight hundred Republican Spanish prisoners. Although the mortality figures the first year resembled those in Sachsenhausen, the annihilatory pressure in subsequent years at Mauthausen far exceeded that in any other main camp. Because of a dysentery epidemic as early as September 1939, a special sick bay was set up and during the two following years, prisoners sick with dysentery were gathered together in a room of Block 20. The only beds were for personnel. Some of the sick lay on the barracks floor; initially, it was covered with a thin layer of straw, and later with paper sacks filled with straw and smeared with pus, blood, and excrement. Between 1939 and March 1945, up to twenty weakened prisoners were weeded out in regular selections once or twice a month and then killed by an injection into the heart. In nearby Gusen, this was done almost on a daily basis.
As at other Nazi concentration camps, the inmates at Mauthausen and its subcamps were forced to work as slave labour, under conditions that caused many deaths. Mauthausen and its subcamps included quarries, munitions factories, mines, arms factories and plants assembling Me 262 fighter aircraft. In January 1945, the camps contained roughly 85,000 inmates. The death toll remains unknown, although most sources place it between 122,766 and 320,000 for the entire complex.
On
the left is the so-called Todesstiege (stairs of Death) from which
prisoners were forced to carry roughly-hewn blocks of stone – often
weighing as much as 110 pounds- from the quarry which was located at
its base up 186 steps to the top of. With one prisoner behind the other,
many exhausted prisoners collapsed in front of the other prisoners in
the line, and then fell on top of the other prisoners, creating a domino
effect; the first prisoner falling onto the next, and so on, all the
way down the stairs. Such brutality was not accidental. The SS guards
would often force prisoners – exhausted from hours of hard labour
without sufficient food and water – to race up the stairs carrying
blocks of stone. Those who survived the ordeal would often be placed in a
line-up at the edge of a cliff known as the Fallschirmspringerwand-
"The Parachutists Wall." At gun-point each prisoner would have the
option of being shot or pushing the prisoner in front of him off the
cliff.  |
| Soviet guarding stairs after the war |
In June 1941, 348 Dutch Jews arrived in Mauthausen. Three weeks later, not a single one of them was still alive. Most had fallen victim to a method of killing that was considered a Mauthausen specialty: “parachute jumping.” In the stone quarry called Wiener Graben, boards were placed on the prisoners’ shoulders and loaded down with extremely heavy stones. Then the prisoners were forced to ascend the “death stairway,” a series of 186 stairs fashioned of irregular rocks at the edge of the abyss. After a few steps, the stones fell off the boards, crushing the feet of those climbing up beneath them. Many lost their balance on the rock stairs, plunging down the rock face after being giving a helping shove by a supervisor. Others committed suicide by hurling themselves to their deaths, or were pulled down by their fellow prisoners. In these excesses managed from a distance, the perpetrators needed to do little or nothing. They could calmly watch what was happening. Their triumph was less the act of killing itself than the mortal agony that gripped the victims. The victims toiled to the point of exhaustion; the perpetrators waited. The victims ran for their lives, collapsed, dragged themselves to their feet again, and fell once more. The executioners observed the event, laughing. The end was preprogrammed and unavoidable. All tribulation and torment were ultimately in vain. But the perpetrators acted as though their victims still had a chance. They let the victims wriggle and run—and were always there, watching and waiting. The mortal agony gave them a kick; it was a source of amusement. And the less they had to do themselves, the greater was the triumph of power. Prisoners were harassed to death, without the perpetrators having to expend much physical effort—just a voice, a shout, a command barked from a distance. The word was lethal. Thus, many deeds of excess were carried out less on orders than through orders.
Sofsky (238-239)
Soviet
PoWs at the camp. In Mauthausen, only thirty escapes were reported over
the four-year span from 1938 to 1942; in 1943, there were 44; in 1944,
226 escapes were documented, followed in early 1945 by 339, though only
31 of these were from the heavily fortified base camp. Of the 639
prisoners who escaped Mauthausen, at least 165 were recaptured.Hunts took place after attempted escapes and during the death marches that marked the final stage of the concentration camp system. One of the most infamous was given by the SS the name of the “Mühlviertel rabbit hunt” when, on the night of February 2, 1945, some 500 Soviet POWs, many of them officers, broke out of the camp by throwing wet blankets and pieces of clothing over the electrified barbed wire fencing, thus shorting out its circuitry. Using fire extinguishers, they managed to capture a guard tower, and were able to put a second out of commission by machine-gun fire. A total of 419 prisoners escaped from the camp area. But many only got a few metres from the camp. They left a trail in the snow and were soon captured and beaten to death or shot. The SS then ordered a large- scale hunt with instructions “not to bring back prisoners captured to the camp alive.” Along with the camp SS, units of the Wehrmacht, the SA, and the Nazi party, groups of Hitler Youth, the Volkssturm, local fire departments, and many civilians from the surrounding area took part in the search. A form of mass hysteria had spread throughout the population because the escapees had been labelled “dangerous criminals.” So a general hunt was declared: one and all could join in to track down the Russians. A report prepared by the gendarmerie in Schwertberg a few weeks later gives a graphic account of events:
The slush in the street turned red from the blood of the men who had been shot. Everywhere people encountered them—in homes, car sheds, stables, up in the loft, down in the cellar—if they weren’t dragged out and killed at the next house corner, they were shot right on the spot, no matter who happened to be present. . . . A few had their heads split open with an axe. . . . The bodies remained lying where they fell. . . . Intestines and genitals were exposed to open view. The next morning, the murdering continued. Again, blood was shed, atrocities were committed that one could never have expected the Mühlviertel population capable of. . . . At the Lem villa, there was a certain Mr.———. . . . During the evening, his wife had heard some suspicious sounds in the barn while feeding the goats. She went and got her husband, who dragged an escaped prisoner from his hiding place. . . . The farmer then stabbed the poor man in the neck with his pocket knife, and blood began to gush out. His wife joined in, punching the dying man in the face.
Of the five hundred who originally escaped, only seventeen survived the Mühlviertel massacre.
(233-234)
Mauthausen
was the last big camp to be liberated, when the Americans arrived on
May 5 as seen on the left. Two days earlier the SS and other guards
started to prepare for evacuation of the camp. The following day, the
guards of Mauthausen were replaced with unarmed Volkssturm soldiers and
an improvised unit formed of elderly police officers and fire fighters
evacuated from Vienna. The police officer in charge of the unit accepted
the "inmate self-government" as the camp's highest authority and Martin
Gerken, until then the highest-ranking kapo prisoner in the Gusen's
administration (in the rank of Lagerälteste, or the Camp's Elder),
became the new de facto commander. He attempted to create an
International Prisoner Committee that would become a provisional
governing body of the camp until it was liberated by one of the
approaching armies, but he was openly accused of co-operation with the
SS and the plan failed. By now all work in the subcamps of Mauthausen
had stopped and the inmates focused on preparations for their liberation
– or defence of the camps against a possible assault by the SS
divisions concentrated in the area which in fact occurred by remnants of
several German divisions, only to be repelled by the prisoners who took
over the camp.
On
May 1 the inmates were rushed on a death march towards Sankt Georgen,
but were ordered to return to the camp after several hours. The
operation was repeated the following day, but called off soon
afterwards. The following day, the SS guards deserted the camp, leaving
the prisoners to their fate. On May 5, 1945 the camp at Mauthausen was
approached by a squad of US Army Soldiers of the 41st Reconnaissance
Squadron of the American 11th Armoured Division, 3rd US Army. The
reconnaissance squad was led by Staff Sergeant Albert J. Kosiek whose
soldiers disarmed the policemen and left the camp by which time most of
the SS had already fled; around thirty who remained were killed by the
prisoners, and a similar number were killed in Gusen II. By May 6 all
the remaining subcamps of Mauthausen, with the exception of the two
camps in the Loibl Pass, were also liberated by the Americans.
After
the war Austrians from the nearby towns were ordered to come to the
camp, forced to wear their best clothes to bury the bodies. Graves were
then dug by them here on the main camp's sportplatz, used by the SS as
its football pitch. In fact, in Mauthausen and Gusen, there were
national soccer teams
of Germans, Spaniards, Yugoslavs, and Poles; in 1943 and 1944, they
competed almost every Sunday afternoon and the guide I spoke to remarked
how locals would regularly visit to watch the games. Roughly 2,600
would be buried here, eventually being exhumed and either repatriated or
reburied elsewhere.
Gusen
concentration camp memorial site, used by the SS as a satellite camp of
Mauthausen concentration camp located only a few miles away. The three Gusen concentration camps in and around the village of St
Georgen/Gusen held a significant
proportion of prisoners within the camp complex, at times exceeding the
number of prisoners at the Mauthausen main camp. In
the five years of the camp's existence, approximately 60,000 to over
70,000 prisoners from all over Europe had been incarcerated within the
Gusen camp system, half of whom, approximately 35,000, were sent to the
quarries and due to the horrific living and working conditions, died.
The size of the Gusen camp had a special position in the Mauthausen camp
system and is comparable with the large main camps in the Nazi regime,
particularly with regard to the size and number of prisoners. Camp
construction began in December 1939 beside the leased quarries. Several
hundred German, Austrian and later Polish prisoners from the Mauthausen
camp were marched several kilometres to Gusen on foot and by May 1940
built the majority of the camp where the prisoners' living barracks were
located at Gusen I and SS accommodations south of the camp. On the day
of its establishment on 25 May 1940, the first transport of about 1,000
Polish prisoners arrived in Gusen. As the number of prisoners in Gusen
rose steadily, prisoners were constantly busy with the camp expansion.
The camp was initially fenced with a barbed wire fence and wooden
watchtowers. In the summer of 1940, prisoners had to build a three-metre
stone wall and stone watchtowers. Inside the stone wall was a barbed
wire fence charged with high current, with patrolled guards in between.
The entrance to the camp was the so-called Jourhaus, where the camp
management offices and a prison, called a bunker, were located.
Production sites for quarries, such as stonemason halls and a stone
crusher, were gradually built in the north and east of the camp. These
were later partially used from 1943 for use by the armaments industry,
the Steyr-Daimler-Puch AG and Messerschmitt AG. From 1941 prisoners had
to move a siding from St. Georgen an der Gusen station to the quarry. A
clothing magazine of the Waffen SS was built west of the protective
custody camp.
The
Gusen camp was officially run as a subcamp of the Mauthausen main camp,
but differed in several points from the other subcamps. Until 1944, the
camp had some autonomy from the main camp. For example, prisoners in
Gusen were numbered separately until early 1944, whereas in other
satellite camps there was a common number registration. Gusen’s first
camp leader, Karl Chmielewski, had extensive autonomy. Gusen was by far
the largest satellite camp. Of the approximately 95,000 prisoners who
died in the Mauthausen camp system, around a third of the prisoners in
the Mauthausen main camp, another third, around 35,000, died in Gusen
and the rest in the other satellite camps. Due to the high death rates
in Gusen, the camp was designated by prisoners as an extermination camp.
Conditions were truly horrific- there was an extreme lack of food with
heavy physical labour, often no medical care and poor hygienic
conditions that caused illnesses such as diarrhoea, typhoid, spotted
typhus or tuberculosis. Detained inmates had very little chance of
survival and the camp was used until 1942 primarily for the murder of
the inmates. Prisoners were also often murdered in the most barbaric
manner. From autumn 1941 to January 1942 for example, up to 300
prisoners were "showered" with ice-cold water at the same time. Sick and
weak prisoners often died immediately of circulatory failure. Other
inmates who survived the action often died of pneumonia over the next
few days. Roughly 2000 prisoners were transported in transports in
August 1941, December 1941, February 1942 and from April 1944 as part of
Action 14f13 to the Hartheim killing centre about 25 kilometres away
where they were gassed. In March 1942 a group of Soviet prisoners of
war was gassed in barracks using Zyklon B. In April 1945 another 650
disabled prisoners were murdered the same way. In 1942 and 1943
prisoners from Gusen were murdered in so-called gas vans; whilst
commuting between Gusen and Mauthausen around thirty prisoners were
murdered by the exhaust gases or Zyklon B. 
Beside
the double muffle crematorium oven from Topf & Sons, installed
at the end of January 1941 to remove the bodies when previously the
bodies had been brought more into urban crematoriums Linz and Steyr.
Prisoners were also frequently ill-treated or died from vaccine trials
that SS doctor Hellmuth Vetter tested on prisoners on behalf of IG
Farben. In retaliation for the defeat in Stalingrad, more than an
hundred Soviet prisoners were murdered in March 1943.
By
late April 1945 the SS began to destroy the camp administration
documents to remove evidence prior to the arrival of American soldiers.
However, prisoners were able to hide some documents, in particular the
death books with the names of the murdered prisoners, and thus prevent
them from being destroyed. On the morning of May 3, as in the Mauthausen
main camp, a special police unit from the Vienna Fire Service came to
the camp to guard the prisoners. Members of the Volkssturm had already
been brought into the camp as security guards. On May 3, only a few work
commands were sent to work, which mainly had to take care of the
dismantling of the machines. At noon the guards, air force soldiers and
SS officers left the camp in the direction of Linz leaving the camp to
be administered by the prisoners themselves. On May 5 Louis
Häfliger, a delegate from the International Red Cross, drove to the
front line and met a 23-man spy team of the American Army under the command of
Sgt. Albert J. Kosiek near St. Georgen an der Gusen. Häfliger told him
about the Mauthausen and Gusen camps and guided them first to Gusen and
then on to Mauthausen. 
Memorial
to the Americans hidden away in an alcove. In the camps, the US
soldiers disarmed the fire brigade guards and sent them to
Gallneukirchen in a prisoner convoy. This officially released the
approximately 20,000 prisoners in Gusen. There continues to be much
speculation about the days before liberation. There is said to have been
an order to murder all prisoners prior to possible Allied liberation
although no document of such an order was ever found. There had been a
rumour that the prisoners were to be driven into the cellar building
gallery and blown up there. Louis Häfliger claimed to have prevented
this explosion although historians doubt his claims.
According to other reports, the camp commander of Mauthausen, Franz
Ziereis, his wife, the Gauleiter of Oberdonau August Eigruber or a
prisoner prevented the explosion. The only thing that is certain is that
explosives were attached to the tunnel entrance. However, historians
suspect that this was intended used to destroy the production facilities
to prevent then from falling into the hands of the Allies. After the site was handed over to the Republic in 1955, Austria decided to destroy the remains to build housing estates. The location of the crematorium oven was a special case as a visible memorial to the survivors and initially it was planned to relocate this memorial site to Mauthausen along with the crematorium furnace which would have destroyed the last memorial in Gusen. The French and Polish embassies and the International Mauthausen Committee protested; victims themselves were forced to buy the land to finally set up a monument around the crematorium furnace in 1965. It was financed by the survivors' associations and planned by former Gusen prisoners. It's currently in the middle of the residential area of Gusen, and remains little accepted by the local population.
Dürnstein
Dürnstein from a Nazi-era postcard. One
of the most-visited tourist destinations in the Wachau region,
Dürnstein was first mentioned in 1192 when, in the castle seen above the
town, King Richard I of England was held captive by Leopold V, Duke of
Austria, after their dispute during the Third Crusade. Richard the
Lionheart had offended Leopold the Virtuous by casting down his standard
from the walls at the Battle of Acre, and the duke suspected that King
Richard ordered the murder of his cousin Conrad of Montferrat in
Jerusalem. In consequence Pope Celestine III excommunicated Leopold for
capturing a fellow crusader. The duke finally gave custody of the king
to Henry VI, Holy Roman Emperor, who imprisoned Richard at Trifels
Castle. The castle itself was eventually almost completely destroyed by
the troops of the Swedish Empire under Field Marshal Lennart Torstenson
in 1645.
Supposed painting by Hitler of the town gate, dated 1921, which was to have gone up for auction at the Ludlow Racecourse in Shropshire in 2017 and was expected to get £6,000. In the end, the paintings sold collectively for £97,672, which included another scene believed to be of Dürnstein. An Austrian expert issued certificates of authenticity for the pictures, which once belonged to a British soldier who was stationed in Essen in 1945; on the back of this painting is stamped "H.O.A. Horvath, Archiv für NS Zeitgeschichte" (Archive for NS contemporary history). As can be seen today and when compared with images from the Nazi-era below, the scene shown in the painting bears little resemblance to how it currently appears. In any event, as Dutch journalist Bart FM Droog contends, such a claim is rubbish and most of the works attributed to Hitler worldwide are not authentic because the style and materials of the works do not match. According to him, "[t]he majority of 'Hitlers' which surfaced after 1945 can be dismissed at first sight as forgeries.“I don’t want people to be buying this rubbish – almost all alleged Hitler artworks and other Hitler items offered by auction houses are fakes. Between 1910 and 1913 Hitler only produced watercolours depicting Viennese city sights, and only signed these works with 'A. Hitler' or 'A.H’. From his WWI period only one authentic Hitler work is known – a very clumsy watercolour portrait of one of his army comrades, made in 1915. But as far as we can tell, Hitler only ever painted in watercolour, whereas the portraits sold by Mullocks are also in oil and pencil."
Melk
Hitler stopping before Melk, with the abbey in the background. The photograph on the right of the same motorcade comes from an album in the private collection of H. Blair Howell. Here
in January 1944 a Mauthausen subcamp was established in the abandoned
Wehrmacht Freiherr-von-Birago pioneer barracks. Approximately five
hundred prisoners arrived at the camp on April 11 as the vanguard for
what was to end up being 7,000 prisoners. In fact, according to Hans Maršálek, the camp reached its maximum capacity on January 30, 1945, with 10,352 prisoners
from at least 26 countries held in Melk as, from September 1944,
prisoners were brought from the Natzweiler main camp and, from January
1945, from Auschwitz. The larger national groups included Poles,
Hungarians, French, Soviet citizens, Germans, Italians, Greeks, and Yugo
slavs. However, there were also in Melk prisoners from Albania, Egypt,
Denmark, Portugal, Turkey, the United States, and other countries. About
a third of the prisoners were Jews. The last prisoner transport reached
the camp on January 29, 1945: among the 2,000 prisoners from Auschwitz
were 119 children between the ages of nine and 15.
The
camp was then opened on April 20–21, 1944 and the prisoners were
accommodated in 18 blocks to labour for Quarz GmbH, a subsidiary of the
armaments company Steyr-Daimler-Puch. Prisoners excavated six
underground caverns, each several hundred meters long, near Lossdorf to
be used as sites for the production of ball bearings. They also laid
rails, poured concrete for the approaches to the cavern, constructed
barracks for equipment and machines, laid cables and water pipes, and
transported building equipment and machines from the Lossdorf railway
station to the construction site. Despite the enormous effort, by the
winter of 1944–1945, only a fraction of the planned cavern could
commence production. Production eventually ceased on April 1, 1945, as a
result of the advance by Soviet troops by which time there were around
7,500 prisoners in the camp. On March 12, 1945, a group of 34
Scandinavian prisoners were transferred by the Red Cross back to their
home countries via Mauthausen and Neuengamme as the remaining camp
prisoners were then evacuated to Ebensee, Mauthausen, and Gusen. On
April 11, a transport to Mauthausen of 1,500 youths and sick prisoners
was put together, and thirty to forty seriously ill prisoners were
murdered in the infirmary. Two more transports left Melk on April 13,
with 1,440 prisoners in total sent to Ebensee travelling by goods train
and barge. The last transport of 1,500 prisoners left the camp on April
15 in the direction of Ebensee. The Melk subcamp existed officially
until April 19, 1945. After
the war a
constant stream of German Bohemians and Moravians moved into Austria,
and were given a camp in Melk by the Russians. However, as Giles MacDonogh relates in After the Reich (296), "it was
grossly overstretched and they ended up becoming a burden to all the
Allied zones. The response was to demand the expulsion of ‘Reich’
Germans."
St. Pölten
Adolf Hitlerplatz from a period postcard,
so-named from 1938-1946, and today. Today rathausplatz, it had been
renamed Marschallplatz after the war until 1955. Neugebäudeplatz too had been
renamed at the same time Platz der SA. As early as March 11,
1938, there were pro-Austria rallies in St. Pölten, and the Austrian
army began arming itself against the invasion of German troops.
Nevertheless, by the evening, thousands of St. Pölten residents
celebrated with Nazi flags in the streets. The St. Pölten National
Socialists gathered and appointed Hans Doblhofer as Kreisleiter,
Franz Pfister as deputy district leader and Franz Hörhann as mayor, an office he would hold until August 20 of that year before becoming an official of the German Labour Front and district chairman of Kraft durch Freude. He would die on March 16, 1974 in his hometown. Pfister had played a key role in sending former St. Pölten deputy maypor Viktor Müllner to Dachau concentration campt for nearly five years before being released in in 1942. Pfister had also 'aryanised' the Arkaden Kino which had been owned by Olga Sattel until 1938. A letter from the property transfer office to Pfister from December 14, 1938 rewarded him with the 'purchase' of the theatre in recognition of his activities as a Nazi party member since 1922 (number 11,288) when such activities were illegal at the time and he himself had lost his business, "Purgstaller Holzwarenindustrie," in the aftermath of the attempted 1934 coup.
Before
midnight, the Nazis occupied the town hall. A day later, the Wehrmacht
marching into Austria came to St. Pölten on its way to Vienna, where it
was greeted with cheers. Here Hitler
is seen arriving at the main train station March 14, 1938, and at what had been
the Hotel Pittner where he had lunch with Heinrich
Himmler, Wilhelm Keitel and Martin Bormann whilst travelling from Linz to
Vienna, March 14, 1938
The
Nazis set about after the anschluß to establish a Groß-St. St. Pölten.
Although Krems became the Gau capital of Lower Austria, which had been
renamed "Niederdonau", Nazi planners intended St. Pölten to become a
"Gauwirtschaftsstadt" because it had industry, rail connections and
large available areas. One spoke of “Groß-St. Pölten ”and attached
numerous towns to the city. Under National Socialist rule, not only the
huge air force base in nearby Markersdorf was built, but also the
"Spratzern camp" (later the Kopal barracks) and other army facilities.
Furthermore, the construction of a Reichsautobahn from Salzburg via St.
Pölten to Vienna began and the railway network was expanded. There were
residential buildings such as the "Volkswohnhausanlage" built from 1938
to 1940.
In
the course of the war, the conversion of industrial production to
armaments also took place to a large extent in St. Pölten. Numerous
companies, including the largest, increased their production and number
of employees considerably. Since not only the Jews had disappeared from
the city, but also large parts of the remaining male population having
enlisted into the Wehrmacht, women and forced labourers were also used
on a large scale in St. Pölten. This happened in almost all businesses
in the city, and - as in the camp for Jews deported from Hungary in the
Viehofner Au - there were at least 400 deaths or murders.
The
resistance against the Nazi regime in St. Pölten increased
significantly compared to the rest of Austria, even if it had no
concrete political or military success. The Catholic resistance was
mainly limited to illegal religious instruction, the Jehovah's Witnesses
refused to serve in the army and towards the end of the war, the
non-partisan resistance group Kirchl-Trauttmansdorff of approximately
400 conspirators primarily was set up which included members of the
upper class; their aim was to hand over the city to the Soviet troops
without a fight. However, the group was infiltrated and betrayed and so
on April 13, 1945, twelve members were sentenced to death and shot in
Hammerpark, where a memorial commemorates them today. The most
significant were the resistance groups that emerged from the previously
strong labour movement.
In
June 1944, the first air raids by Allied bombers took place with the
station being the main target. The heaviest bombings took place at
Easter 1945 leaving 591 dead and 142 of the 4260 houses were completely
destroyed. 3500 people were made homeless and large parts of the
infrastructure (such as gas and water supply) were hit. The early months
of 1945 saw St. Pölten's Nazi leaders urging its citizens to fight to
the last man, resulting in the murder of prisoners, deserters and
resisters. On April 14, 1945 the Red Army finally launched the attack on
St. Pölten. After the rapid capture of the city on April 15, the front
ran for three weeks to the west of St. Pölten. During the assault,
roughly six hundred civilians died, 24,000 escaped and only about 8,000 people
remained in the city. Whilst the contact between the St. Pölten and the
Soviet soldiers on the one hand should have been friendly given Soviet
claims to believe it to be a liberation from the Nazi regime and the end
of the war, it ended up suffering from the usual Soviet army behaviour
of looting and rape. By the end of the war, 39% of St. Pölten's building
stock was destroyed or badly damaged.
At the Soviet cemetery to the north of the town
Amstetten
The town hall on the former Adolf-Hitler-Platz. Today this tiny village is infamous as the place where Josef Fritzl imprisoned, raped and kidnapped his daughter Elisabeth for twenty-four years in a fallout shelter, fathering seven children with her. After the horrific story died down eventually, the town returned in the news after it was revealed that Hitler was still listed as an honorary citizen.
On March 14, 1938, as he passed through the town during the anschluss, local authorities took it as an honour and awarded Hitler the honour. A torchlight procession through Amstetten had taken place three days earlier on March 11th. Nazi district leader Wolfgang Mitterdorfer wrote three days later how "[a]ll houses in the district that do not yet have a completely correct swastika flag must get one as quickly as possible." The people of Amstetten were asked to hand over objects from forbidden parties and to remove everything that "reminds of the unfortunate past" from public buildings. Weapons were also to be handed over to the gendarmerie. For the upcoming referendum on April 10 on the anschluss, speakers were arranged and it was declared that there was "no right to vote for the Jews." New offices were also created, such as those of the SS in the Amstettner town hall. The local paper carried advertisements and notices for "Aryan representatives ... wanted" and "belonging to the possession of every comrade is the book Hitler: Mein Kampf ... " It wasn't until May 2011 that the local Green Party sponsored the move to strike his name from the honours list which was passed by a large majority in the town council. But two members of the far-right Freedom Party, formerly led by Jorg Haider, abstained, arguing simply that Hitler’s suicide in 1945 had de facto made him lose his honorary citizenship.
The Seegrotte in Hinterbrühl bei Mödling has changed besides the flags it flies. Under the Nazi regime, Amstetten served as the setting for the abuse and arrest of political opponents as well as the increasing disenfranchisement and expropriation of Jews and gypsies. At least sixteen of 43 Jews were deported and murdered. In the Amstetten hospital, as in the Mauer-Öhling nursing home, forced sterilisations were carried out on so-called Erbkranken (hereditary patients). Mauer-Öhling also served as a transit station, and from autumn 1944 also as the scene for numerous euthanasia murders. At the same time in parallel to the extermination program, the Nazi officials responsible for Amstetten pursued a comprehensive expansion programme for the city, which included housing estates, schools and impressive Nazi buildings. Only a few of these were realised due to the war, although industrial and rail systems in particular were expanded. From November 1944, Amstetten was the target of bombing raids. The construction of air-raid tunnels, which was pushed ahead in 1944, could only be implemented through the use of forced labourers, who were of great importance for trade and agriculture. In order to be able to repair the strategically important railway facilities in the urban area, a subcamp of the Mauthausen concentration camp was set up in March 1945 with up to three thousand male and 500 female prisoners.
Traismauer
A few miles outside the town is this doleful memorial to four borthers killed days after the end of the war. On May 14, 1945 four boys from nearby Radlberg aged between 9 and 14 were killed after finding ammunition and handled it resulting in an explosion in which the four boys were killed. A fifth boy survived seriously injured. To commemorate this misfortune seventy years earlier, members of the nature group Unser Radlberg and other volunteers set up this memorial at about the point where the accident occurred. It was unveiled and blessed on Sunday, August 23, 2015.
