Holocaust Day 2025 - 80 years on

In July 1945 the 5th Sherwood Foresters occupied part of Styria in Austria, near the border with modern Slovenia.  They were taking over from the Red Army and sent patrols out into the countryside.  Outside the town of Leibnitz they discovered an underground arms factory, and just a few hundred yards away the remains of a work camp and a mass grave containing twenty bodies.  The location was a subcamp of Mauthausen concentration camp, also in Austria.  According to the official records, published in America in 2008, there were 655 prisoners here, mostly Russians and Poles.  Apparently, conditions in the camp were relatively good – a mere 78 deaths during its year of being in production.  Only eight of the twenty bodies could be identified, they were French and the bodies repatriated, the other twelve were reburied locally.  The rest of the dead had been cremated.

Their experience does not begin to compare with those of the soldiers who liberated Auschwitz, Belsen or other camps, and certainly not that of the inmates of the death camps and their relatives.  But this is the ‘long tail’ of the Holocaust that goes almost completely unmentioned   Is there a risk that the media focusses too much on Auschwitz?  On crimes against humanity so extreme that they remain almost inconceivable, so that we lose sight of the fact that the death camps were just the most extreme feature of the mass brutalisation of a society, and of the dehumanisation of the majority of the European population in subservience to a twisted ideology.  All in less than fifteen years.

At Leibnitz, since I visited the site back in 2018, the secret factory has been opened as a memorial to the events there.  So at least locally these forgotten victims of the Holocaust are being remembered.  https://archaeoregion.at/en/memorial-aflenz-wagna.