'Grief, anger, rage': Former Nazi camp site becomes business park, sparking anger in Austria

A few crumbling concrete blocks in an overgrown field are all that remains visible of what was once a sprawling Nazi forced labour complex around the Austrian town of Leobersdorf.

Now, plans to build a business park on the site, including a cold storage warehouse and a store operated by 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," Erich Strobl, head of a local campaign to preserve part of the site, told AFP.

After Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938, the Weinberglager complex was used for thousands of prisoners of war and forced labourers.

It later included the Hirtenberg subcamp of the Mauthausen concentration camp — one of Austria's largest camps exclusively for women.

Around 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.

But Bertrand Perz, a historian specialising in the Mauthausen camp, told AFP the Hirtenberg site remains "historically important," partly because "women prisoners in Mauthausen have been marginalised in the culture of remembrance".

Plans to build a business park on the plot about 40 kilometres (25 miles) south of Vienna, including on land that once formed part of the concentration camp, were made public in 2024.

'Grief, anger, rage'

Archaeological 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 grey columns already rise from the ground, Josef Pumberger, a board member of the Mauthausen Committee Austria, told AFP 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 a company linked to the local mayor, Andreas Ramharter, which sold it in 2022 and 2023 for more than €15 million, according to local media reports.

Austrian company TRA LEO GmbH & Co KG, which bought the plot, told AFP 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 stressed that it would be located "not directly on the site of the former concentration camp, but on an adjacent plot of land".

Stele memorial

In the aftermath of the Second World War, Austria long 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, the historian, said a debate like the one now taking place over the Hirtenberg site "would have been impossible in the 1980s," adding that there is now "more sensitivity" towards 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.

The far-right FPÖ, founded by former Nazis, topped Austria's 2024 parliamentary election, though it failed to find partners to govern. But it is part of the governing coalition in five of the country's nine states.

In central Leobersdorf, locals approached by AFP had either not heard about the development or did not want to talk about it.

A stele memorial 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."