MEMORY INSCRIBED IN THE LANDSCAPE: NEW MEMORIAL SITES
AT GUNSKIRCHEN AND AFLENZ
Memoria
xIn October 2026, two new memorial sites linked to the Mauthausen camp system opened in Austria. Gunskirchen, in Upper Austria, and Aflenz, in Styria, lie more than 200 kilometers apart and have very different histories as camps. Yet both projects face a similar question: how can one commemorate a place where, more than 80 years on, the material traces of the crimes are almost invisible?
The new Gedenkort Gunskirchen (Gunskirchen Memorial Site) opened on October 6 on the grounds of the former subcamp, which in the final weeks of the war became a place of unimaginable suffering. In April 1945, more than 20,000 people, almost all of them Jews, were sent there after death marches. The unfinished camp in the forest was severely overcrowded and lacked sanitary facilities, food and water. According to the memorial site’s own materials, some 250 people died there every day. On May 4, 1945, the camp was liberated by soldiers of the US Army’s 71st Infantry Division.
Today the forest has almost completely covered the traces of the camp. This is why the designers chose to intervene in the terrain as little as possible. Glass steles along the route take visitors through five main themes: the journey to Gunskirchen, how the camp operated, the prisoners’ living conditions, liberation, and the postwar history of remembrance. The aim is not to reconstruct the camp but to help visitors read a place where only fragmentary remains have survived.
The digital layer is an integral part of the project. QR codes lead to an extensive archive of photographs, documents, testimonies, and audio and video material. There are also 360-degree views and 3D models, and the entire trail can be walked virtually. Survivor testimonies carry particular weight, among them those of Edith Eger, Shaul Spielmann and Daniel Chanoch. Some of the recollections have also been recorded by present-day actors and other well-known figures, so that the witnesses’ voices can continue to be heard in the future.
The campaign for a fitting memorial went on for many years. As early as 2010, the Mauthausen Committee Austria, together with Survivor Daniel Chanoch, began pressing for its creation. Chanoch himself, who died in 2024, did not live to see the project realized.
On October 18, twelve days after Gunskirchen opened, the new Aflenz Memorial in Styria opened to the public. This was the site of the Leibnitz-Aflenz subcamp, set up in February 1944 to serve the German armaments industry. More than 900 prisoners were forced to extend underground tunnels in an existing quarry, where armaments were later produced. At least 78 prisoners died in the camp. Before the war ended, the camp was liquidated and the prisoners were driven on foot toward Ebensee. Those who were sick or unable to march were murdered.
Here, too, no buildings from the former barracks camp remain visible. For decades, the land was farmed. The project, based on a concept by the artist Milica Tomić and the landscape planners of studio boden, deliberately refrains from re-creating structures that no longer exist. Instead, new paths trace the former camp boundaries and mark the sites of the roll-call square and one of the barracks. Visitors can thus read the former camp space simply by moving through the landscape.
One unusual feature of the project is that it treats the soil itself as a historical source. Archaeological excavations and soil analyses revealed traces of plants that grew here while the camp was in operation. Some of them are now being sown again. The landscape is thus not merely a backdrop for the memorial; it becomes part of the memorial itself.
During work on the former roll-call square,
a prisoner’s number tag bearing the number 38882 was also found. It belonged to Albin Gietka, born in 1910 in what is now Poland,
a prisoner of Auschwitz (no. 155318), Mauthausen and, from July 1944, Aflenz. Research to date indicates that he survived the war.
Multilingual information panels, QR codes and an audio guide accessible to visitors with disabilities complete the Aflenz site, and regular educational activities are planned there as well. The project grew out of archaeological research carried out by the Archäologisch Soziale Initiative Steiermark (Archaeological Social Initiative Styria) in cooperation with Kunst im öffentlichen Raum Steiermark (Art in Public Space Styria) and local municipalities.
Gunskirchen and Aflenz stand for two different historical experiences. In the final weeks of the war, the first was above all
a place of mass death for people driven there on death marches. The second was bound up with slave labor for the armaments industry. Yet both new memorials reflect a similar shift in how such places are approached. They do not try to fill the void with reconstruction. They preserve the landscape and, at the same time, give visitors the tools to read it.
In Gunskirchen, this invisible history is revealed above all through the voices of Survivors and the digital archive. In Aflenz, the paths, the archaeology and the earth itself speak. In both cases, remembrance becomes a process of discovering the place and what still lies hidden beneath its present-day surface.
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