Monument of names

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Monument of names, Villach

The memorial of the names commemorates the victims of National Socialism in the city and the Villach district . It is located on Widmanngasse.

Association remembering

The memorial was erected on the initiative of the Remembrance Association , which carried out the research on the victims. The initiative group was founded in 1990, the association in 1996. Co-founder and chairman is Hans Haider (born 1943 in Berlin), a grammar school teacher who has lived and worked in Villach since 1973. He retired in 2002 and is working on the history of Nazi persecution in Carinthia. He sees the association as a counterpoint to the Carinthian Heimatdienst and the Ulrichsbergstreffen - “to give the culture of remembrance a different direction.” Other exponents of the association are Gottfried Berger, Werner Koroschitz, Andrea Launisch and Alexandra Schmidt, all of whom were also involved in the association's publications . The city of Villach provides the infrastructure for the club's activities.

The main focus of the association is the construction, maintenance and expansion of the monument. In addition, events are organized, publications are issued and tours through the city of Villach to the sites of National Socialist violence are offered, the latter especially for schools. On the occasion of the anniversary of the November pogroms in 1938 , a memorial event has been held every year since 1996. The association works across all victim groups and records the fates of the victims of the Holocaust and Porajmos as well as of those politically persecuted, of those murdered in the T4 campaign and other victims.

In 2016 the association was awarded the City of Villach's Culture Prize.

Construction, destruction, new construction

The memorial is intended to keep alive the memory of the women, men and children of the entire Villach district who were murdered by the Nazis between 1938 and 1945. The location is Widmanngasse in downtown Villach, opposite the Villach City Museum . The monument was unveiled in spring 1999. The monument was destroyed a total of 14 times. Hans Haider describes the investigation of the vandalism as follows:

“The police caught the perpetrators and it turned out that it was not, as was always claimed, a 'drunk shift'. They were youngsters from the right corner. You paid the damage and I didn't file a complaint because the boys were so young. Since then it's been quiet and I hope it stays that way. "

Since its construction, a commemorative event has been organized in front of the memorial every year in October, usually combined with a reading from texts by or about a victim. After a redesign, the monument was inaugurated again in 2008 with 252 names. In May 2013 the names of the murdered Sinti children from Carinthia were read out.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ kärnöl : Short biography of Hans Haider , accessed on December 11, 2017
  2. ↑ a b Harald Schwinger: "In the beginning we were attacked" , Kleine Zeitung (Klagenfurt), August 27, 2016
  3. ↑ Der Standard (Vienna): Villacher "Monument of Names" destroyed , The memorial is the permanent focus of unknown abusers, August 5, 2007
  4. ↑ Elena Moser: Memorial commemorates the victims of the Nazis ( Memento from March 23, 2014 in the Internet Archive ). In: kleinezeitung.at, accessed on January 3, 2017.
  5. ↑ The memorial expanded to include 252 names: the innocent were made guilty. In: Villach: city newspaper. Bulletin of the city of Villach. No. 22, December 2, 2008.
  6. ↑ Remember.at: On May 15, 2013 at 5 p.m. at the Villach Monument of Names: Reading: The Carinthian Sinti , accessed on December 11, 2017

Coordinates: 46 ° 36 ′ 47.3 "  N , 13 ° 50 ′ 40.3"  E