Memorial for the Victims of the Gestapo
The Headquarters of the Gestapo in Vienna's Hotel Metropol
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 Metropol 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 Metropol. 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. According to a daily report of Gestapo Wien of mid-December 1938, up to then almost 21.000 political prisoners had been registered. More than half of the 22.000 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 memorial today
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. On the facade of the building on Morzinplatz a relief portrays the agonies suffered by the thousands held in Gestapo custody. 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. There is a glass case in the chamber containing documents on the activities of Vienna's Gestapo, e.g. a list of 150 prominent anti-Nazis arrested soon after the German invasion of Austria and sent to Dachau on 1 April 1938.
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