May 12



AUSTRIA:

Austrian Nazi death camp brings out its history at last

Mauthausen the latest to open a visitor centre

[Ian Traynor in Mauthausen]

A pale grey motor powering a fan was used by the Nazis to extract fumes from
the Austrian gas chamber in which 3,500 concentration camp inmates were
murdered. On a hillside above the Danube yesterday, the fan and the motor
were put on public display for the first time since the second world war.
Along with postcards and scribbled notes, scraps of documents and tools,
computerised archives and recorded interviews with former inmates, the gas
chamber fan is part of a museum opened yesterday at the Mauthausen
concentration camp near the city of Linz that Hitler fantasised about making
his imperial capital.

Mauthausen is perhaps the grimmest place in Austria, a hilltop fort where
altogether more than 100,000 people, from countries from Spain to Russia,
perished.

In a country that is good at forgetting, the concentration camp was for a
long time neglected. But Mauthausen is also one of the biggest visitor
attractions in Austria, bringing in more than 250,000 people every year - as
many as troop through the Hapsburg palaces and museums of Vienna.

Thousands of people from all over Europe converged on the site yesterday to
remember and mark the anniversary of its liberation by American troops in
1945, 58 years ago to the day.

And despite decades of Austrian amnesia about its role in the Holocaust, the
new museum - an impressive squat structure of plain concrete blocks, steel
and glass, located just outside the camp itself - has been built in record
time by the Austrian government at a cost of £5.7m.

Its opening yesterday puts Austria alongside Germany, Poland, Hungary and
the Czech Republic in the vanguard of an unprecedented boom in Holocaust
tourism and exhibition-staging.

Last week at the Nazis' first concentration camp, Dachau, north of Munich,
the Bavarian prime minister Edmund Stoiber opened a new museum and learning
centre, eight years in the making.

Next year in Budapest, Hungary is to get its first Holocaust museum. In
Poland, a £40m Jewish history complex is to be built on the grounds of the
old Warsaw ghetto, razed by the Nazis 60 years ago last month. The biggest
death camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau, seems to be in a permanent state of
development.

In Theresienstadt in the Czech Republic, funds are being poured in to
restore the Nazi transit camp that suffered colossal damage in last summer's
heavy flooding.

Three years ago, Berlin got a stunning new Jewish museum; and the German
political and cultural elite is still debating the pros and cons of a
gargantuan Holocaust memorial for the centre of Berlin.

"Internationally, there is a great amount of fascination," says Jerzy
Halbersztadt, the director of the Warsaw Ghetto project. "These new museums
reflect that same phenomenon."

"The generation that lived through it is dying out and so approaches are
changing," says Bertrand Perz, who was in charge of part of the new
Mauthausen exhibition. "It is all about how to portray a historical era.
It's more about education and art rather than just preserving these places."

The projects are attracting some of the biggest names in international
architecture. Daniel Libeskind famously designed Berlin's new museum in the
form of a broken Star of David. Frank Gehry, acclaimed recently for the
Guggenheim in Bilbao, has drawn up blueprints for the Warsaw ghetto project.

The new approach also takes advantage of the latest technology. The
centrepiece of the Mauthausen museum is an oral history project, recording
interviews on audio or video with 800 survivors.

"We wanted to move the administration buildings and the visitors' centre out
of the camp itself, because the survivors and their relatives were making
big demands that the camp should be left in peace," says Doris Wagner, an
Austrian interior ministry official who was responsible for seeing the
project through.

The template and the inspiration for this building bonanza in central Europe
was the Holocaust Museum in Washington, which also made full use of modern
electronics and cyber-communications. It has drawn 19 million visitors, 85%
of them non-Jewish, in the decade since it opened. "It captured the
imagination," says Mr Halbersztadt.

But one problem with this modern, narrative approach to telling the story of
the Holocaust concerns "authenticity", with staged or restored artefacts
from the camps emboldening Holocaust-deniers in their allegations that
material evidence of the crime has been cooked up.

The argument over authenticity makes the fan and motor, exhibited yesterday
for the first time, particularly valuable.

Forensic detail on the ghastly piece of machinery was recorded at the time
by an American special agent, Jack Taylor, who was interned at Mauthausen
for two months after parachuting into Austria and being captured.

But the fan disappeared, hauled away by freed Czech prisoners in 1945, and
lay unremarked in a cellar at Theresienstadt for decades, until it was
installed - unadorned and essentially untouched - in the new Mauthausen
exhibition.