Business park plans for Nazi camp site spark ire in Austria

Plans to build a business park on the site of a former Nazi concentration camp have drawn outrage in Austria, with the Mauthausen Memorial calling for the site’s preservation.

Austrian media revealed this week that the real estate company of Andreas Ramharter, the mayor of Leobersdorf town in Lower Austria, sold a plot of land which houses the remnants of former labor camp barracks.

Around 400 women, mainly Russian, Italian and Polish, were forced to manufacture infantry munitions between September 1944 and April 1945 at the Hirtenberg site, an annex of the Mauthausen concentration camp complex.

The site is to be re-developed into a business park following a zoning change, Austrian media reported. The buyer paid more than 15 million euros ($16 million) to buy the private land from Ramharter’s company, the reports said.

Ramharter, who does not belong to any political party, tells AFP that the zoning change was approved in the 1980s before he was mayor.

He adds that his company sold the land in 2022 and until then worked in coordination with the authorities in charge “to examine the historical significance.”

A stele monument was erected this April near the site to commemorate the victims.

The Mauthausen Memorial was informed of the project in 2021, but its requests “to discuss the possibilities for commemorating the victims” were “ignored or rejected,” the organization’s spokeswoman Valerie Seufert tells AFP.

The group wants to protect the site “from development and destruction, so that the history of this place can be visible and the victims… can be appropriately commemorated.”

Criticism also came from other groups and political parties.