I’ve been debating whether to write a diary about this, because the people who really need to read this are not those who visit DailyKos. But even if those other people did read it, I doubt it would make a dent in their consciousness. So, I’m writing this because I need to.
I’ve been in Austria for about a year and a half, most of the time under either government- or self-imposed COVID-19 lockdown. When the latest government lockdown lifted, I decided to take a trip to a part of Austria I hadn’t seen yet, the lake area in Upper Austria, Ober Österreich. I booked a B&B in Ebensee, a small town at the base of the Traunsee. The whole area looked beautiful, lakes surrounded by mountains. I really hadn’t done much background reading before booking the place. I just looked it up on Google maps, read a bit of tourist type stuff and then got the heck out of my jail/apartment.
Once we settled into our B&B, I sat down with my computer and pulled up more information, just starting with Wikipedia:
Ebensee
With the Traunviertel, Ebensee since 1180 belonged to the Duchy of Styria held by the House of Babenberg from 1192, until in 1254 King Ottokar II of Bohemia finally allocated it to his Austrian duchy. Ebensee itself was first mentioned in a 1447 deed.
From 1596 on Emperor Rudolph II of Habsburg had a salt evaporation pond erected near the settlement, supplied with brine being delivered via a 40 km (25 mi) long pipeline from the salt mines around Hallstatt. Ebensee therefore was the primary production centre for salt in Austria. Historically, the site was chosen because of the rich forests, whose wood was used to boil the salt out of the brine. In 1883 the Belgian chemist Ernest Solvay established soda works of the Solvay company at Ebensee. Although a former industrial center in the larger Salzkammergut region, it has recently fallen on bad fortunes with the closure of some of the larger factories.
OK, interesting. There’s that House of Babenberg, and of course the Habsburgs. Wait, what’s this??
Nazi Concentration Camp[edit]
Main article: Ebensee concentration camp
In 1943, the SS established Ebensee concentration camp (codename "Zement") near the town, a planned emergency location for the Peenemünde research centre after the RAF Operation Hydra attack. It was part of the Mauthausen network. Slave laborers were worked to death digging tunnels for armaments storage. The camp was liberated by American soldiers in May 1945. Due to the extremely high death rates, Ebensee is considered one of the most horrific Nazi concentration camps.
OMG! I had no idea!
In fact, the site of this most horrific Nazi concentration camp is only about a kilometer up the road from the B&B where I was staying. There’s a memorial built on the site of mass graves of men who were brutally murdered towards the end of the war, as the American troops were closing in. The Nazis decided to get rid of as much of the “evidence” of their atrocities as they could before the Americans showed up.
Ebensee Concentration Camp
Ebensee was a subcamp of Mauthausen concentration camp established by the SS to build tunnels for armaments storage near the town of Ebensee, Austria, in 1943. The camp held a total of 27,278 male inmates from 1943 until 1945. Between 8,500 and 11,000 prisoners died in the camp, most from hunger or malnutrition. Political prisoners were most common, and prisoners came from many different countries. Conditions were poor, and along with the lack of food, exposure to cold weather and forced hard labor made survival difficult. American troops of the US 80th Infantry Division liberated the camp on May 6, 1945.
I felt compelled to go visit the memorial, to bear witness to the horrors, the misery, the brutality, the atrocities committed in this place of geographical beauty. These were ordinary people, men born into ordinary families, they grew up, maybe some of them started families, mostly worked at ordinary jobs, for the most part had ordinary goals for their lives. Just like ordinary Americans might.
But these men found themselves in the midst of overwhelming evil. Some of the men ended up in this camp because they objected, protested, maybe fought against this evil, and were branded “political prisoners”. Some were there because of their religious beliefs, some because of their national origin, some because of their darker skin or lack of blond hair and blue eyes. Etc.
Look around you. See your friends, your neighbors. See the people you work with or go to school with every day. See the people working in stores in your communities, the car repair guys, the hair dressers, the mail delivery people. Look at your kids, your parents, aunts and uncles. Notice the people in your life.
Yeah, all of those people were the kinds of people targeted by the Nazis in Germany and Austria.
The men who ended up in this camp were ripped from their families and lives and sent to live, work and die in unimaginably horrific conditions:
Prisoners worked on 11-hour shifts unless they were working in the tunnels, when they worked in one of three 8-hour shifts.[5]:20 Lice infested the camp, and sawdust from mattresses caused prisoners to suffer.[5]:17 Food rations consisted of coffee for breakfast, hot water with spoiled potatoes for lunch; and a piece of bread with water for dinner. Prisoners were always hungry. Those who worked within the camp did not have to labor as strenuously as those assigned to work outside the camp.[5]:18–19 Many companies were employed to oversee the work on tunnel construction, including Dywidag, Hinteregger und Fischer, Stuag, Fohmann, Holzmann und Polensky, Wiener Brückenbau, Dr. Müller, Heckmann und Langen, Universale Bau AG., Rella & Co., Hofmann und Maculan, Walther, Grossdeutche Schachtbau, Fröhlich und Klüpfel, H. Koppers, Siemens Schukkert, Siemens Bauunion, Beton und Monierbau, Ferrobetonit, Latzel und Katscha, Swietelsky, Brandl, Roth, Hitler, and Herbsthofer. These companies provided civilian workers who each supervised several prisoners in the work. The SS, wanting to please the companies, sought to provide them with the number of prisoners they requested, even if those prisoners were dying.[5]:20 SS soldiers and appointed prisoners called Kapos also oversaw prisoners with varying degrees of brutality.[5]:20
I walked up to see the memorial. As the Wikipedia article noted, homes—mostly upper middle class Austrian homes—have now been built on the site of the camp, with only a small area, the mass grave site, remaining for the memorial.
I felt an overwhelming sense of horror and grief as I entered the memorial site. It’s a very understated memorial. Just some plaques describing what was there, crosses marking specific grave sites, a couple sculptures, and rows of names of men who had been killed there.
For me, the horror was compounded by the neighborhood that has taken over the rest of what was the concentration camp property. Neat well-maintained homes with carefully landscaped yards. The lilacs were blooming, tulips everywhere, everything carefully cultivated. Everything in its place, as though the obsessive control of plant growth could wipe out the memory of the suffering and anguish of the men who lived, worked and starved to death there. The people living in Ebensee today are the children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren of the Austrians who closed their eyes and hearts to the abject suffering right in their midst.
Besides, it was good for business! Think of all the companies that profited from the slave labor provided by the Nazis. (Are you listening, Mark Zuckerberg??)
These things do not go away. You can never cover up and forget atrocities. The dark miasma lingers in the air, in the soil, in the flowers and trees, in the vegetable gardens that produce food that people eat. Food that is fertilized by the blood and flesh of men that died in great pain and grief.
One of the most awful attempts by the locals to forget what their forebears allowed to happen there is the cute children’s playground practically at the entrance of the memorial built over the mass graves:
Really? REALLY??
What happened to the children and grandchildren of the men who were murdered there??
This pretty neighborhood was built on sacred land. It was not done to honor those men who were murdered there. It was done in an attempt to forget them. One wonders what the price will be………
When I returned to the B&B, I was in a very dark place in my mind, many thoughts and feelings swirling around. All of a sudden, everything crystalized into a blinding rage.
In America today, 70+ million people are likely capable of committing or allowing the same kind of atrocities to be committed that occurred in Ebensee only 80 yrs ago. It is not an exaggeration. People who allow themselves to be goaded into hating and fearing others in a completely irrational manner are capable of atrocities.
This is what America is facing. While congressional Democrats dither around playing nicey nice games of bipartisanship with people who fomented a violent insurrection against our Democracy, state and local governments controlled by rethuglicans are laying the groundwork that will allow them to remove rights of those they have arbitrarily decided to hate. Once people have no rights and no voice, there is no limit to the degradation rained down on them by those in power.
For people of color, this is not new. We have watched black people, brown people and Asian people beaten and murdered on our television screens just in recent months. Around 100 years ago, white Americans lynched Italian immigrants. Before that, Irish people were despised in America. Chinese, Japanese, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, WOMEN, and on and on. No group of people is safe from the reptilian hate and fear that the Patriarchy stirs up in whatever version of white male base is in power at the time.
Austrians have to answer for their own past, but my country is America. Do we really want to keep racing down this same road?? We have been there before—kidnapping and slavery of Africans, genocide committed against Native Americans, war crimes committed around the world, as recently as during the Bush administration, the kidnapping and separation of vulnerable children from their parents for months to YEARS by the previous maladministration.
Since the dawn of its existence, Homo sapiens has continuously recycled this history of intra- and inter-species violence. This is going on right now. How much bigger does it have to get? How much more suffering do we have to inflict? Are we so incapable of insight, of consciousness?? Do we have no collective memory whatsoever??
Call or write your Democratic congress people. Demand that they stop negotiating with terrorists. Demand that they do their job to protect our democracy and the rights of ALL people in America and around the world.