Kreuzstadl Memorial

The Kreuzstadl Memorial in Rechnitz remembers the victims of the Southeast Wall construction. In the night of 24/25 March 1945, around 180 physically weak Hungarian Jewish slave laborers were murdered an buried by 15 members of the National Socialist party comradeship party held in Schloss Bátthyány. Despite an intensive search and excavations, the mass grave has still not been able to be discovered. Rechnitz is a symbol for one of the most hideous atrocities in Burgenland during the National Socialist era and for the displacement after the war. The memorial location Kreuzstadl works against forgetting through documentation, photographs, case studies and biographies. An open-air exhibition structure was drafted, which should be permanently accessible. Kreuzstadl was to serve as a place of remembrance and mourning for the relatives, descendents and future generations – instead of a grave. Through a private donation initiative by Marietta Torberg, Karl Prantl and David Axmann in 1993, it was possible to acquire the ruins of the Kreuzstadl and hand them over to the Federal Association of Jewish Cultural Communities. In the meantime, this ruin has become a symbol of remembrance.