Memorial to the Greek victims of Stein

Introduction

KremsMachtGeschichte invites you to learn about and engage with the history of National Socialism in Krems. As you move through the city you connect various historical sites with each other. A simple stroll creates a personal narrative that brings the places, themes and histories into the present and enables you to keep the past alive in your critical memory.

What does it mean to “make history”? In 1938 Krems became the capital of the Gau, or Nazi administrative district, of “Lower Danube”. This was a time when Krems was making history, but history of a kind many would like to forget today. Today, when we remember, when we name perpetrators and tell the stories of victims, when we make resistance visible and point out continuities, we’re participating in the writing of history in our society. History isn’t just written in schoolbooks and by historians and at universities; it’s continually being produced by our everyday actions. History happens in the here and now.

24 historical sites, marked by green pennants, form the stations of the KremsMachtGeschichte tours. Every site stands for a different event that has something to tell us about destruction, persecution and crime, as well as about responsibility, solidarity and resistance. Some roads lead to memorials that glorify the past and that today need some historical correction. Prominent positions in the cityscape are taken up by the court and the prison, places where Nazi violence was once inflicted but that today contribute to the functioning of democracy. Many sites of past events are unrecognisable as such today; only through your imagination can they come back to life.

The information about each place can be called up with any smartphone by using the QR codes on the pennants. Texts and images can also be found in the catalogue which is displayed at various places in the city. By taking a walk through the city, you’re already making some history. En route from site to site, the historical picture gradually becomes more intricate. Common themes emerge, each of which groups the sites in a new way and connects them with our contemporary world. The themes include “on Jewish life”, “on resistance”, “on persecution and punishment” and “on remembering”. The short texts under these titles give some initial ideas that you can question and add your own stories to on the empty pages of the catalogue.

The Stein Penal Institution was the largest prison in “Ostmark” (the Nazi name for Austria) during the Nazi period. Among the inmates were political prisoners originally from Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Croatia, Greece and other countries. 300 Greek prisoners were brought to Stein in 1944 after the withdrawal of the Wehrmacht from Greece.

On 6 April 1945, on the instructions of the prison director Franz Kodré and against the wishes of guards with Nazi sympathies, all the prisoners were to be released. Under the pretext of suppressing a revolt, soldiers of the paramilitary terror organisation SS, its military wing the Waffen-SS, the regular armed forces Wehrmacht and the conscript militia Volkssturm carried out a massacre in the prison and in the nearby streets in order to prevent the freeing of the prisoners as ordered by the prison management.

The memorial in front of the Stein Penal Institution commemorates the 150 Greek prisoners who were murdered in the massacre on 6 April 1945. It was erected by the Greek Antifascist Committee Vienna and unveiled in late August 1946. At the handover ceremony, the Krems mayor Franz Riel promised to “pass it on intact to future generations as a symbol of the international antifascist struggle.”

Until 2015, when the street sign was put up for “Gerasimos-Garnelis-Weg”, which commemorates a survivor and co-initiator of the monument, the Greek Antifascist Committee’s monument was the only publicly visible sign of commemoration in front of the Stein Penal Institution of the people murdered in the massacre. In 1965 a memorial plaque was put up in the courtyard, and since 2018 there has also been the artwork 6.4.45 by Ramesch Daha on the exterior wall of the Penal Institution in memory of the victims of the massacre.