Austria in Maly Trostenets – the “Massif of Names” (2024)

• 1 This article touches on elements from: Lessing, Hannah, ‘So viele Jahrzehnte war Stille’, in Pia Sc (...)
• 2 For background information on how the monument came about: Schölnberger, Pia, ‘Ein österreichisches (...)
• 3 An overview of the criminal prosecution of the Austrian Nazi criminals can be found in Kuretsidis-H (...)
• 4 Dalhouski, Aliaksandr, ‘Zur Transformation des sowjetischen Gedenkortes bei Malyj Trostenez in eine (...)
• 5 See the project description at https://www.nationalfonds.org/detail-view/761 (5.8.2020). The contri (...)
• 6 Waltraud Barton (ed.), Maly Trostinec – Das Totenbuch. Den Toten ihre Namen geben. Die Deportations (...)
• 7 See the list of subsidised projects at https://www.nationalfonds.org/projects-sponsored/textsearch_ (...)

1The Austrian memorial to the Jews from Austria murdered in Maly Trostenets (also: Maly Trostinec, Russian: Малый Тростенец, Maly Trostenez; Belarussian: Малый Трасцянец), the “Massif of Names”, is a milestone in Austria’s culture of remembrance.1 Its installation and ceremonial inauguration in 2019 were long overdue.2 In terms of remembrance policy, the role of the former Nazi extermination camp near Minsk in Belarus was slow to be recognised. Although a number of Nazi atrocities committed by Germans and Austrians in Minsk and its environs were brought before the criminal courts after World WarII, the Austrian trials were often abandoned.3 This Nazi genocide site subsequently all but vanished from the public consciousness. A nuanced historical appraisal of events was further hindered by the clash of ideologies between the East and the West, which was also shaped by narratives at a national level, and in part continues to be so.4 It was only as a result of grassroots initiatives, particularly the IM-MER Association and its chairperson Waltraud Barton, that the former extermination site became anchored in Austria’s culture of remembrance and commemoration. The National Fund of the Republic of Austria for Victims of National Socialism, established in 1995, has backed these initiatives from the outset. It has subsidised annual pilgrimages to the Minsk “Forest of Remembrance”, a 2011conference on Maly Trostenets in Vienna,5 as well as a number of book and film projects. These include the moving documentary “Deported from Vienna to Maly Trostenets. Belated Remembrance” and the “Maly Trostenets Book of the Dead”.6 Latterly, the National Fund attached great importance to following and lending its support to the erection of the “Massif of Names” monument.7

• 8 Rentrop, Petra, ‘Maly Trostinez’, in Wolfgang Benz and Barbara Distel (eds.), Der Ort des Terrors. (...)
• 9 E.g.: Gerlach, Christian, Kalkulierte Morde. Die deutschen Wirtschafts- und Vernichtungspolitik in (...)

2The history of the extermination site dates back to the year1941, when the German Wehrmacht occupied Minsk following the German invasion of the Soviet Union. A ghetto was established for the Jewish population and a field office set up for the Commander of the Security Police and the Security Service (Kommandeur der Sicherheitspolizei und des Sicherheitsdienstes, KdS). In 1942, Eduard Strauch, the former KdS in Minsk, seized the 250-hectare Karl Marx Kolkhotz (“collective farm”) twelve kilometres to the southeast of Minsk to “cultivate it for the purposes of the occupying forces”. A “labour camp” was constructed on the “Commander’s estate” and its inmates used for slave labour.8 The Blagovshtschina Forest was situated approximately one kilometre away from the camp and went on to become the main site of the executions performed by the Security Police and Security Service in Minsk. The Nazis and their henchmen murdered tens of thousands of people there, among them Jews, Soviet POWs, suspected partisan fighters and others who had been declared “Untermenschen” (“subhuman”) in the Nazi-occupied Soviet territories. In 1941/42, Jews were deported en masse from the so-called Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, as well as from Austria, Germany, the Netherlands and Poland, and transported to Maly Trostenets in cattle wagons. The majority were asphyxiated in “gas vans” or shot and hastily buried in pits immediately upon arrival.9

• 10 Garscha, Winfried R., ‘“Ein unermüdliches Beharren auf Empirie und Nüchternheit”. Die Erforschung d (...)

3According to the latest research of the Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance, the number of Austrian Jews deported to Minsk/Maly Trostenets stands at 9,757. Of these, 9,735perished in the Holocaust.10 They are listed by first name on the “Massif of Names” in Maly Trostenets. The artist commissioned to design the memorial, Daniel Sanwald, describes the intention behind hisconcept:

• 12 The Shoah Victims Database of the Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance can be accessed at ht (...)
• 13 See the detailed list in Garscha, Erforschung, 148–151.
• 14 Garscha, Winfried R., ‘“In dieser Nacht hatten viele den Verstand verloren.” Deportationen nach Min (...)

4The surnames of those murdered and their dates of deportation and death are documented in the “Shoah Victims” database of the Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance12 and the abovementioned Maly Trostenets “Book of the Dead”. According to these most recent findings, only 22 of all those deported from Austria survived.13 The tiny number of survivors also underlines the significance of Minsk/Maly Trostenets as an extermination site. More Austrian Jews were murdered at Maly Trostenets than at any other Nazi extermination site, with the exception of Auschwitz-Birkenau.14

• 15 Mehany-Mitterrutzner, Christa, ‘Vernichtung – Deportationen nach Maly Trostinec, 1942. Aus dem Arch (...)
• 16 For more information see: DÖW, ‘Vernichtungsort Maly Trostinec’, online at http://www.doew.at/erinn (...)
• 17 The Bericht über die Deportation in Wien sowie die Vernichtungsaktionen und den Zwangsarbeitereinsa (...)

5Although there is now biographical information available for several Austrian victims of Minsk/Maly Trostenets,15 little is known about the majority of the Austrian victims. At least a few of them shall be mentioned here as examples. Wolf Seiler, born in Vienna in 1895, was one of the few who survived. He was deported from Vienna to Minsk aboard the first deportation train in 1941 and appointed “camp elder” of Maly Trostenets within the system of Jewish self-administration at the camp.16 In 1944, Seiler managed to flee with his family and survived the Holocaust. One of the rare surviving eyewitness accounts exists due to him.17 Another Austrian who survived Maly Trostenets, Isaak Grünberg, paints a grim picture of the camp at Maly Trostenets. In witness testimony provided in 1962, Grünberg stated that he was deported to Maly Trostenets in October1942. He described the conditions in thecamp:

The Austrian memorial “Massif of Names” situated at the site of theformer Nazi extermination site MalyTrostenets, nearMinsk

© Konstantin Kostyuchenko. Provided by: National Fund of the Republic of Austria for Victims of National Socialism.
Printed with the kind permission of Daniel Sanwald.

• 19 For more information on this sensational and complex trial and Sebek’s witness testimony cf.: Stadl (...)
• 20 Schneider, Gertrude, Exile and destruction. The fate of Austrian Jews 1938–1945, Westport, Connecti (...)

6Another account is by the Viennese Jew Julie Sebek. At a trial in Coblenz she testified against the former Head of the Gestapo in Minsk, Georg Heuser, who had risen to the position of Head of the State Office of Criminal Investigation in Rheinland-Palatinate after the war. Heuser was one of the few Nazi criminals to be convicted of his crimes.19 Finally, the historian Gertrude Schneider, born in Vienna in 1928 and deported to Riga ghetto with her family at the age of thirteen, brought some of the few survivor testimonies by Jews deported to Minsk to the attention of the wider public. These include the story of the Trausel siblings, who were put to work outside the ghetto and found an opportune moment to flee with a group of Russian Jews. Schneider also documented the fate of Isaak Grünberg, who was deployed as a mason in the camp and managed to flee Maly Trostenets with his two daughters by going into hiding in the forest until the camp was liberated by the RedArmy.20

• 21 The following information with further references can be found in additional detail in: Stadlbauer, (...)

7It should not remain unmentioned here that many Austrians were also involved in the Nazi atrocities committed in Maly Trostenets and its surrounding areas, some of them in high-ranking positions in the SS and the police apparatus stationed there.21 For example, the Head of DepartmentV (criminal police) of the KdS in Minsk, Johann Kunz, was an Austrian, as were many of his staff. There were also Austrians on the staff of the campSS, such as the SS-Hauptsturmführer Willibald Regitschnig. Josef Wendl, driver of one of the infamous “gas vans”, was Viennese. Some of those mentioned were put on trial in Austria after the war but the proceedings were either suspended or, in the case of Josef Wendl, ended with a jury acquittal.

• 22 Cf. the closing communiqué of the conference “Gedenken für eine gemeinsame europäische Zukunft”, 30 (...)
• 23 The names and locations can be searched in FOGIS, the geo-information system of the National Fund, (...)
• 24 The Shoah Wall of Names Memorial, currently under construction in 2020, is intended to contain the (...)
• 25 Van der Bellen, Alexander, ‘Ein Zeichen gegen die Namenlosigkeit’, in Schölnberger, Das Massiv der (...)

8The “Massif of Names” is the first national memorial to be erected at the site of the former extermination site in Maly Trostenets. Plans are currently underway to develop the location into a “European Site of Education and Remembrance”.22 As such, the Austrian memorial is also a physical manifestation of efforts to cultivate remembrance of Nazi atrocities at a pan-European level. At a national level the people deported to Maly Trostenets are remembered in a number of ways; stones of remembrance have been placed at their former home addresses throughout Austria, for example.23 The names of the victims murdered in Maly Trostenets will also be engraved on the new memorial to the Jewish children, women and men from Austria who were murdered in the Shoah, which is currently under construction in Ostarrichi Park in the 9^thDistrict of Vienna.24 At the opening of an exhibition on Maly Trostenets at the House of Austrian History in 2019, Austrian President Alexander van derBellen remarked that the “Massif of Names” sends “a message to combat namelessness”.25 This sentiment also applies to the Shoah Wall of Names Memorial in Vienna. Both memorials will continue to exist as part of a shared culture of remembrance, in Austria and Europe as a whole, once the last survivors of the Shoah have fallen silent.