Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team

During the past two decades, the city has stepped up efforts to face up to the history of Jews in Vienna, including both positive and negative aspects, and to reexamine Vienna’s Jewish heritage. In addition to the Jewish institutions that have sprung up over the last few years – thanks to the support of the City of Vienna – a number of museums and memorials evoke the city’s Jewish heritage.

The camp was laid out in an irregular rectangle 400m by 600m, and was surrounded by a barbed wire fence intertwined with tree branches to block any view into the camp from the outside. A second outer fence consisting of barbed wire and anti-tank obstacles called `Spanish Horses’, was also constructed at a later stage. Watchtowers 8m high were placed at each of the four corners of the camp, and additional towers were built in the extermination area….

Housed in a wooden barrack, originally designed as a horse stable and because of her skill with languages, she was employed in the camp administration as a Lauferin, whose duties were as a messenger and interpreter.
 
According to a fellow prisoner, “These girls had to stand next to the guardhouse waiting for orders. Whenever Camp supervisor Mandel or overseer Margot Drechsler needed them they yelled “Lauferin, and the girl had to do as ordered on the double.”      

The Jews of the Sudetenland Bohemia & Moravia       1939 Map of Bohemia-Moravia The Sudetenland is the German name used in the first half of the 20th century for the western portions of Czechoslovakia inhabited mostly by ethnic Germans. Located on the border with Germany and Austria it encompasses the areas of Bohemia, [...]