Delegations from numerous countries commemorated the liberation of the Mauthausen concentration camp on Sunday. The chairman of the Mauthausen Committee Austria, Willi Mernyi, insisted on the lasting validity of the Mauthausen Oath, in which the building of a just, free world is praised at the ceremony, which was under the theme of “Destroyed Diversity”. The Linz diocesan bishop Manfred Scheuer denounced anti-Semitic incidents in a church service.
Between 1938 and 1945, around 200,000 people from more than 70 nations were interned in Mauthausen and its 49 subcamps, almost half of them were murdered or died as a result of the cruel prison conditions. The liberation of the concentration camp in the first days of May 1945 by US troops has been commemorated every year since the end of the war. Thousands of guests from all over the world usually come to the world’s largest concentration camp liberation ceremony, including survivors of the death camp – now very old.
The event was broadcast live on the network
Due to the corona, the celebrations on the occasion of the 76th return of the liberation were less extensive than usual this year. Only comparatively small delegations laid wreaths on site. For this, the event was broadcast live on the Internet, as in the previous year, when it was not even possible to be present, also on ORF III. In videos, in which contemporary witnesses and survivors had their say, the individual groups of victims were remembered – among them Jews as well as Roma and Sinti, Jehovah’s Witnesses, people with different sexual orientations or political prisoners, so-called “protective prisoners”.
Official Austria was represented by the Green Government members Vice Chancellor Werner Kogler, Climate Minister Leonore Gewessler and Health Minister Wolfgang Mückstein as well as representatives of state politics. Federal President Alexander Van der Bellen and LH Thomas Stelzer (ÖVP) had already laid a wreath in the memorial on Friday, as did Defense Minister Klaudia Tanner (ÖVP).
Mauthausen-Schwer as an obligation
At the beginning the Mauthausen oath was read out in several languages, in which it says among other things: “We will tread a common path, the path of indivisible freedom of all peoples, the path of mutual respect, the path of cooperation in the great work of construction a new, fair, free world for all. We will always remember the great, bloody sacrifices with which this new world was fought for from all nations. “
“The Mauthausen oath is not an oath from a bygone era,” said Mernyi, “not an idea that cannot be achieved”, but rather it is “an obligation” and “a very specific assignment, not to anyone – to us”. As long as there is injustice, “as long as there is not the same respect for all people, this oath is valid”. He hopes that the liberation ceremony, which will be organized by the Mauthausen Committee Austria in cooperation with the Comité International de Mauthausen and the Austrian camp community, will take place on May 15 in 2022 “without pandemic restrictions and with a large number of participants”.
Linz bishop criticized anti-Semitism
The commemoration of the individual monuments was only possible on a small scale and individually this year. Before the official liberation ceremony, however, an ecumenical service was celebrated in the memorial chapel. The Linz diocesan bishop Manfred Scheuer criticized anti-Semitic incidents: “At this hour we lament and condemn the attacks on synagogues in the past few days” and “all incidents of anti-Semitism in the past weeks and months, especially those that caused the suffering of the victims von Mauthausen ridiculed and the commemoration was degraded at the liberation ceremony, ”said Scheuer. And: “We lament the violence and the dead in the Holy Land and pray for peace in Israel.”
The orthodox archpriest Alexander Lapin denounced “hatred, violence, contempt and indifference towards fellow human beings or whole peoples”. All too often man himself thinks he is God. “We are not God. We are not the ones who are allowed to shape the world and people in their own image. Because then we rape people and the world, ”warned the evangelical superintendent Gerold Lehner.
There was a special honor before the celebration for contemporary witness Anna Hackl: She received the Order of Bravery of the Russian Federation from the Russian Ambassador Dmitri Ljubinski – on behalf of her deceased mother Maria Langthaler. In the course of the so-called “Mühlviertler Menschenhatz” – a brutal chase after a major escape from the concentration camp in February 1945 – the family had hidden two Soviet prisoners and thus saved their lives.