A few crumbling concrete blocks in an overgrown field are all that remains visible of what was once a sprawling Nazi forced labor complex around the Austrian town of Leobersdorf.
Now, plans to build a business park on the site, including a cold storage warehouse and branch of the discount supermarket chain Lidl, have sparked anger in the Alpine nation, which long neglected to address its Nazi past.
“For me, it’s a sad feeling, because a place burdened by history is being built over, sacrificed to the economy,” said Erich Strobl, head of a local campaign to preserve part of the site.
Photo: AFP
After Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938, the Weinberglager complex was used for thousands of prisoners of war and forced laborers. It later included the Hirtenberg subcamp of the Mauthausen concentration camp — Austria’s second-largest women’s camp.
About 400 women, mainly from the Soviet Union, but also from Italy and Poland, were imprisoned at the Hirtenberg subcamp between September 1944 and April 1945, and forced to manufacture infantry munitions at a nearby factory complex.
Although some factory ruins survive, the camp barracks and most other structures were gradually demolished, repurposed or destroyed after the war.
However, Bertrand Perz, a historian specializing in the Mauthausen camp, said the Hirtenberg site remains “historically important,” partly because female “prisoners in Mauthausen have been marginalized in the culture of remembrance.”
Plans to build a business park on the plot about 40km south of Vienna, including on land that once formed part of the concentration camp, were first revealed in 2024.
Archeological investigations have identified surviving traces of the former camp complex, but Austria’s Federal Monuments Office concluded that the remains were “not sufficient” for monument protection.
With the bulldozers now moving in, activists have renewed their calls for the site to be preserved.
“A former concentration camp must not be built over with new structures,” the International Mauthausen Committee said.
Standing in front of the site, where gray columns already rise from the ground, Mauthausen Committee Austria board member Josef Pumberger said he felt “grief, anger, rage, that something like this can happen in Austria in the year 2026.”
The project has also attracted controversy, because the land was previously owned by Leobersdorf Mayor Andreas Ramharter, who sold it in 2022 and 2023 for more than 15 million euros (US$17.46 million), according to local media reports.
Austrian company TRA LEO GmbH & Co KG, which bought the plot, said it had offered to support the creation of a memorial on the site.
Lidl confirmed plans to open a store in the planned business park, but said it would not be directly “on the site of the former concentration camp, but on an adjacent plot of land”.
In the aftermath of World War II, Austria presented itself as a victim of the Nazis, ignoring the complicity of many Austrians.
It was only from the late 1980s that the country where Adolf Hitler was born began to examine its responsibility in the Holocaust.
Perz said a debate like the one today around the Hirtenberg site “would have been impossible in the 1980s,” adding that there is now “more sensitivity” toward former Nazi sites.
However, in contemporary Austria, demands for remembrance are increasingly clashing with “the opposite tendency, namely to say: ‘Now this really has to stop,’” he said.
A stele monument was erected in 2024 to commemorate the victims of the Hirtenberg camp, but for Pumberger, that is not enough.
“It is very important to have tangible evidence of the buildings in which the Nazis imprisoned people, tortured them, killed them,” he said. “Otherwise it becomes a virtual act of remembrance, or one that exists only in books and photos and films.”
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