Text size
REFILING fixing typo in para 8
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 labour camp barracks.
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, told AFP on Thursday that the zoning change was approved in the 1980s before he was mayor.
He added 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 organisation’s spokeswoman Valerie Seufert told 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.
The use of the site as a business park is “a more than insensitive approach, not only for the relatives of the victims, but also for society in general, which has a right to be informed about the events and crimes of the past,” the Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance (DOeW) said.
The Social Democrats said it was “incomprehensible that in 2024, historically burdened properties… are still being treated so un-discerningly”.
The Greens called for a building ban on such properties.
kym-bg-jza/yad