KZ Melk und Projekt 'Quarz'

In the public historical consciousness, it is little known that from 1944 to 1945 there was a subcamp of the Mauthausen concentration camp in the city of Melk. Over the course of a year, more than 14,000 concentration camp prisoners were deported to Melk for the construction of a massive underground factory under the code name 'Quartz'. This was intended to allow the armament companies Steyr-Daimler-Puch AG and Flugmotorenwerke Ostmark to continue production shielded from Allied bombings. Almost 5,000 people died due to the murderous working and living conditions. In the first part of the book, Bertrand Perz addresses the political, military, and economic interests that lay behind the 'Quartz' project and illustrates how the enforcement of these interests by ministries, the SS, and armament and construction companies affected the living conditions of the prisoners. The second part of the book provides a detailed account of the post-history of the Melk concentration camp and the 'Quartz' project from 1945 onwards for the first time. Initial impulses for the establishment of a memorial site at the former crematorium came from survivor associations. These efforts faced long-standing resistance from large parts of Austrian society to engage with its own past, as well as the state-official victim thesis. From the 1980s onwards, the history of the camp came into focus within historical research. Concurrently, civil society initiatives emerged that continue to actively shape the commemoration of the victims of the Melk concentration camp to this day. Christian Rabl explains why the preservation of the former crematorium was so contested and why the memorial site in Melk took a long time to gain national significance in Austria. He outlines the obstacles that had to be overcome to establish an appropriate culture of remembrance and professional knowledge transfer.