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The Headquarters of the Gestapo in Vienna's Hotel Metropole
A particularly dark chapter of Vienna's history took place where today the
modern apartment block Leopold-Figl-Hof stands. Where now cars and trams
roar past and pedestrians hurry on their way, once stood the Hotel
Metropole with the address Wien 1, Morzinplatz. It was an elegant hotel,
with four stories and a broad portal of columns at the entrance. The rooms had
upholstered doors to insure absolute privacy.
When the Nazis took power in Austria in March 1938, new masters moved into the
Metropole. It became the Viennese headquarters of the Nazi secret police
(Gestapoleitstelle Wien). Heinrich Himmler, as Reichsführer
of the SS and head of the German police in the Reich Ministry of the
Interior the main organiser of Nazi terror, arrived at Vienna Airport on 12
March 1938 with his staff of hand-picked Secret Service (Sicherheitsdienst -
SD) and Gestapo officials, who began immediately with their work of
persecuting opponents of National Socialism.
In the first waves of mass-arrests in March and April 1938 political
functionaries and civil servants of the preceding "Austro-Fascist" regime were
arrested, as were many Communists, Socialists, well-known opponents of Nazism
and Jews. About 40 % of more than 18.600 inmates arriving in Dachau Concentration Camp in 1938 were
Austrians. Later, the Gestapo headquarters in Vienna was also given the task of
assembling transports, Jewish men, women and children were kept at the assembly
points and deported from there to the gas-chambers. During the war many
individuals, forcibly brought to Austria from all over Nazi-occupied Europe to
work as slave labourers, were also delivered to the Gestapo officials at
Morzinplatz. Most prisoners who entered the former hotel did not do so under
the portal, but through a back door in the Salztorgasse. From there they were
led straight down into the cellar, the site of the Gestapo's prison. In order
to extract "confessions", the Gestapo subjected the detainees to frightful
torments, which sometimes lasted for weeks. Some of the incarcerated died at
the hands of their torturers, others committed suicide or were sent to a
concentration camp. In Vienna, too, the word Gestapo expressed the quintessence
of Nazi terror.
The hotel was destroyed in the last weeks of the war. In the
Leopold-Figl-Hof erected on its site, a memorial has been installed to
commemorate the sufferings of the countless victims. The entrance to the commemorative chamber in the
Salztorgasse is almost exactly on the spot where the back entrance to the
Gestapo headquarters once was. A line of footprints drawn on the floor shows
the steps taken by men, women and children into the Gestapo hell and they also
end there.
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