6 Holocaust Memorials In Vienna

Before World War II, Vienna had the third biggest Jewish community in Europe after Warsaw and Budapest. Most of these 182,000 people were assimilated and contributed meaningfully to Vienna's culture, economy, and intellectual life – Sigmund Freud, Stefan Zweig, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Arnold Schönberg are just a few of the better-known figures.

On March 13, 1938, Hitler’s German troops invaded Austria without a fight. The image haunts Vienna to this day: a huge crowd of euphoric people cheering Hitler on Heldenplatz. Austria officially became the southeastern corner of Germany. This Nazi period resulted in the complete elimination of Vienna’s Jewish community.

In the months after the unification, Jewish people were subjected to awful humiliations by locals – they were ordered down on all fours and forced to clean the street with a brush while passersby mocked them. Jewish businesses were confiscated, Jewish employees fired, Jewish children expelled from public schools.

Before the Final Solution was decided in 1942, the intention of the Nazis was to expropriate all Jewish assets – apartment, savings, jewelry – and force every Jewish person to emigrate from Germany and Austria. This is why two-thirds of the Jewish community managed to flee from Vienna before the deportations began. Starting in October 1941, further emigration was prohibited and ultimately 65,000 Viennese Jews were killed in the concentration camps and extermination sites of Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, and Minsk, Maly Trostenets. By 1945, only a few hundred Jews remained in Vienna.

Today, Vienna has about 10,000 Jewish residents, comprising descendents of Holocaust survivors, Bukharan Jews from the Soviet Union (Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan) who came in the 1970s and 1980s, and Hasidic Jews from the United States and Israel. This latter group lives in District 2's Leopoldstadt, which is once more known as Matzo Island (Mazzesinsel).

A hard road to reckoning

What makes the legacy of the Nazi period particularly uncomfortable in Austria is the extreme brutality of the Austrian Nazis, who were regarded as extremists even by their German colleagues. For example, during Kristallnacht, on November 10, 1938, they set 42 synagogues and prayer rooms on fire across Vienna. Austrian Nazis also held many leadership positions, as with Adolf Eichmann, who oversaw the entire logistics of the Holocaust.

After the Holocaust, in the shifting politics of the Cold War, Western countries had no incentive to alienate Austria which was located in between the American and the Soviet spheres of influence. As a result, the persecution of Austrian Nazis quickly lost steam after the war and Austria started to view itself as a victim rather than a co-perpetrator of Nazi oppression. This rewriting of history continued for four decades, eventually erupting in the Waldheim Affair in 1986.

Kurt Waldheim was the Secretary General of the UN between 1972 and 1981 and during his campaign for Austria’s presidency in 1986 it came to light that he had lied about the unsavory aspects of his military record during World War II. He had hidden the fact that as a lieutenant, he was attached to a German High Command in the Balkans and, at the very least, witnessed tens of thousands of Jewish people being sent to Auschwitz. (He had claimed that he was medically discharged from the Wehrmacht and studying law in Vienna at the time.)

The Waldheim Affair prompted a reckoning with the past: Austrian politicians for the first time publicly recognized Austria’s shared responsibility in the crimes of the Third Reich. In 2000, the Austrian government created funds to compensate victims of the Nazi period. Most of these people were long dead, of course, but the Reconciliation Fund still received valid claims from more than 130,000 people who each got €1,500 to €7,500 depending on the severity of forced labor they had to carry out in Austria.

Public memorials also started to appear. Alfred Hrdlicka’s 1989 memorial on Albertinaplatz was the first in Vienna that specifically addressed the Holocaust and, as seen below, more have followed in recent years. There’s also more focus on educating the public. The House of Austrian History, which opened in 2018, presents an unvarnished picture of this Nazi period and Austria’s complicity in the Holocaust. Still, according to recent surverys, the level of antisemitism in Austria is still among the highest in Europe.

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1. Shoah Wall of Names (2021; location)

The most recent Holocaust memorial in Vienna is also its biggest. Located next to the Austrian National Bank, vertical granite slabs enclose a public garden and show the names and dates of birth of the 65,000 people who were murdered between 1938 and 1945. “The victims included Jewish children, women and men, members of the Roma and Sinti communities, children and adults who were deemed to have mental or physical disabilities,” says the entrance plaque.

Despite its restraint, the memorial is very moving. Especially at night, when soft light is cast on the victims’ names. The project is the result of decades-long planning work by Kurt Yakov Tutter, an Austrian-Canadian born in Vienna and whose parents were killed in Auschwitz.

2. Monument Against War and Fascism (1988; location)

Designed by the prominent Austrian sculptor Alfred Hrdlicka and located in the city center, this group of statues was the first major public memorial in Vienna that specifically referred to crimes against Jewish people. The Gate of Violence depicts those who died in concentration camps (left side) and all other casualties of the war (right side). Behind it is the bronze figure of an old Jewish man in a kippah. He's on all fours and forced to clean the street with a brush, as many Jews were in the months after the 1938 Anschluss.

The two statues in the back project a sense of hope. Orpheus pulls himself free from the underworld, while a granite slab is inscribed with excerpts from the 1945 Austrian declaration of independence from Nazi rule.

3. Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial (1998-2000; location)

Vienna’s best-known Holocaust memorial is located in the city center, where the oldest Jewish quarter once stood (the remains of the medieval synagogue can be accessed via the Museum Judenplatz on the square). The well-known English minimalist sculptor, Rachel Whiteread, designed a rectangular concrete block that resembles a permanently locked library. The spines of the books face inward, hence unknown, symbolizing that the life stories of the 65,000 Holocaust victims can’t be told and will always remain inaccessible.

4. Memorial at the Leopoldstadt Temple (1998; location)

The vast majority of Vienna's Jewish people lived in Leopoldstadt (District 2) before the Holocaust. Here stood the enormous Leopoldstadt Temple, designed in 1854-1858 by Ludwig Förster. The synagogue's oriental style, a quest for Jewish national architecture, inspired many synagogue architects across Austria-Hungary (Förster also designed Budapest's Dohány Street Synagogue, Europe's biggest).

During Kristallnacht, the "Night of Broken Glass," on November 10, 1938, the Nazis set the building on fire together with forty-one other synagogues and prayer rooms across Vienna. Only the small northern wing remained, which today houses a Jewish school and prayer room. In 1998, four white pillars were erected as a reminder and their size powerfully conveys the original scale of the synagogue.

5. Aspang Train Station Memorial (2017; location)

Until the 1970s, the Aspang train station occupied what's the Leon-Zelman-Park today in Vienna’s District 3. It was from there that in 1941 and 1942 most Austrian Jews, 47,035 men, women, and children, were transported to death camps and extermination sites in Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, and Minsk, Maly Trostenets. “For most of the Austrian victims of the Shoah, the way to extermination began right here, in central Vienna,” reads the information plaque. The memorial consists of a minimalist concrete railway that leads into a dark and hollow enclosure.

6. Keys of remembrance (2008; location)

While Leopoldstadt was Vienna's main Jewish quarter, (better-off) Jewish people also lived in the neighboring District 1 and District 9. Located in the latter, the elegant Servitengasse was majority-Jewish before its residents and shop owners were brutally evicted in 1938 and many later murdered. The small memorial, the result of local civil initiative, shows 462 keys with name tags behind a glass display lowered in the ground. It's a reminder of how many Jewish people once lived here.