Tuesday afternoon, 5 p.m., Hartheim Castle. Hardly ever do so many ambassadors and representatives come together in one place at the same time as here. Germany, Spain, France, Poland, the Czech Republic, Lithuania… It is a given for everyone to make the journey to Hartheim on October 1st every year and commemorate.
To commemorate what happened. 30,000 people were gassed and burned here in the Renaissance Hartheim Castle. Hartheim is called “Little Auschwitz”. What was brought to perfection in Auschwitz was tested here: the industrial murder of people. In the case of Hartheim, it was people with disabilities and then, when the capacity of the gas chambers in the Mauthausen, Dachau and Ravensbrück concentration camps were at capacity, concentration camp prisoners.
- Also read: Remembrance Day in Hartheim – “It was said that only rubbish would be burned”
Failure of post-war justice
As every year, there is a guest speaker at the commemoration, this time it was the actor Nikolaus Habjan, who has been on the road with his puppet theater play “F. Zawrel – Hereditarily Biologically and Socially Inferior” for twelve years. Zawrel was a survivor of the child euthanasia project “Am Spiegelgrund” in Vienna – from where thousands of children were transported to Hartheim. The piece addresses Zawrel’s life, but also the post-war justice system and the casual treatment of the murderers.
Habjan also dedicated his speech to this. In this he took up the actions of doctors and nurses. Doctors and nurses who also worked in Hartheim. People who committed cruelty to other people – before or after killing them. Habjan also discussed the failure of the post-war justice system – also thanks to her minister Christian Broda. When the crimes came to trial, they were often simply warned off; in the best case scenario, they were allowed to continue practicing their professions. In his speech, Habjan emphasized remembering, “because it has happened and it is still happening and will continue to happen if nothing is done about it,” he quoted a poem by Erich Fried. He supported this with recently publicized cases of – the presumption of innocence – Nazi trivialization of a magistrate employee who was filmed dancing with his right hand outstretched, and with singing an SS song at a funeral a few days ago.
Governor Thomas Stelzer, who represented Upper Austria at the commemoration, warned that these crimes were “just a human lifetime ago.” He spoke of the abyss that was signposted in Hartheim and that today there should be no tolerance for destructive agitators: “If the EU’s only success was to secure peace, then it would be worth all the effort.”
Afterwards there were donations of words from church dignitaries, the Jewish, the Protestant and the Catholic communities – following the tradition from which this day of remembrance arose. And since Hartheim became a place of learning and remembrance exactly 20 years ago, embassies have also been paying their respects to the murdered.
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Image: (Private)
Source: Nachrichten
