Melk & The Final Solution

When planning our visit to Austria, I hadn’t planned to go to any WWII death camps, nor had I really given a lot of thought to the Jewish history of the many places in France, Germany, and Austria we intended to visit. But after learning about the history of the Jews in Dijon, our first stop, it seems that legacy is unavoidable.

As it turns out, Melk has been the biggest shock so far — a part of the Anschluss that, frankly, I didn’t know. What we’ve since learned is that, with a total of 14,390 men imprisoned here by April 1945, Melk is one of the largest labor/concentration camps in Austria. And now, we’ve seen what’s left of it.

The day is once again cold and windy as we walk up a hill beyond the old town of Melk in search of the camp. It’s not easy to find; no one here talks about it, and it doesn’t appear on any tourist brochures or websites. We ask the woman working the front desk, and she directs us to a military installation called Birago-Kaserne at 22 Prinzlstrasse. There, we are greeted by an armed soldier. We say we want to visit the camp. He checks with another guard. I trade my passport for a key. We walk farther up the hill and around a corner.

The key opens a small gated area with some grass and some small monuments surrounding a brick building. It’s small, too, like a house, but has a large chimney. This is the crematorium. We go inside and find the names — 4800 who died here — and dozens of tributes by families and nations who remember them. In Hebrew. In French. Norwegian. Italian. Russian and Polish.

It’s disturbingly quiet, except for a gardener outside mowing the grass. We are the only visitors.

A modest exhibition tells the story: After Germany annexed Austria in March 1938, it used Austrian industry to support the Reich’s war machine. Companies such as Steyr-Daimler-Puch AG — the largest metal-working company in Austria, reincorporated as Reichswerke Herman Goering  — were made to manufacture tanks, guns, aircraft engines, and ball-bearings.

Labor was scarce, so the Reich built labor camps, including Mauthausen farther west on the Danube to serve as labor camps for the German/Austrian war machine. Then they built “sub-camps” — more places to hold deported political prisoners, Jews and other men of all nationalities and races. 

Melk was opened in April 1944 with an initial population of several thousand prisoners, mostly from France. More came in May, June, July and so on — 1575 from Poland, 1432 from Hungary, etc. — all men. About one-third were Jewish.

For a year, thousands of men were made to dig underground tunnels and build underground war production facilities. The code name for this action was Quarz. Food was scarce. They were cold and sick. More than 4800 died in Melk, the vast majority of whom were cremated.

When Soviet and Allied troops began to close in on Melk in 1945, Himmler ordered the remaining prisoners into the tunnels they were forced to build and that he wanted to blow up. The camp physician, Dr. Joseph Sora, and district authority Leopold Cornvall, stopped this plan. Instead, most of the surviving men, about 7400, were sent to Mauthausen. 36 died en route. The SS shot those left behind, who were too ill or weak to make the trip.

The names of the dead are all too familiar: Friedmann, Spiro, Simon, Weiss. Today, as Molotov cocktails were thrown into a synagogue and Jewish cultural center in Berlin in response to the war in Israel, we remember them.