WORTLAUT DER REDE STUART EIZENSTATS BEIM GEDENKTAG IM PARLAMENT

Wien (PK) - Die Parlamentskorrespondenz dokumentiert den Wortlaut der Rede, die Stuart E. Eizenstat als Hauptredner der Gedenkveranstaltung gegen Gewalt und Rassissmus im Gedenken an die Opfer des Nationalsozialismus am 4. Mai 2005 im österreichischen Parlament gehalten hat:

Mr. Federal President Fischer! Mr. President of the Parliament Khol! Mr. Federal Chancellor Schüssel! Minsters of the Cabinet! Your Eminence Cardinal Schönborn! U.S. Ambassador Brown – my ambassador –, and Excellencies from other countries! Excuse me for not addressing you in this majestic hall in German – but I am sure you would not want to hear my German.

It is a special privilege to be with you here, along with my wife Fran. Austria is to be congratulated for these public remembrances of a painful period in Austrian history. I feel a very special bond with Austria today. My country liberated Mauthausen 60 years ago. A decade later the United States helped end the Allied and Soviet occupation of Austria, securing your independence and avoiding the fate of a long divided Germany. And during my Holocaust restitution negotiations, on behalf of the U.S. Government, I was inspired by watching first hand how Austria was coming to terms with its past in a comprehensive and historic way.

What the American Army found 60 years ago, almost to the day, when they liberated Mauthausen caused a profound shock around the world. Some 66,500 prisoners remained, human skeletons, starved, beaten, worked to the verge of death.  The U.S. Army buried 15,000 persons in mass graves at Mauthausen after the liberation. And there were 3,000 deaths that occurred after the American liberation, from disease and starvation.

To this day, there remains a dispute over the number of prisoners and the number who died at Mauthausen from 1938 to 1945. The most recent estimates are that 200,000 prisoners passed through the camp, of whom between 105,000 and 119,000 died, roughly a third of whom, 38,000, were Jews. Thirty thousand alone died in the last four months of the war, with many gassed even as the Red Cross was evacuating survivors just before the liberation, in a last spasm of killing.

While the exact numbers may be in dispute, what happened at Mauthausen is indisputable.  Based upon the set of seven “death books” entitled “Totenbuch-Mauthausen” captured by the American liberators and introduced as evidence at the Nuremberg trials, first-hand accounts from survivors, exhaustive research by historians, including your own, Austria’s own Mauthausen Museum, and, yes, the death bed confession by Franz Ziereis, the commander of the camp, we know all too well the following:

The Mauthausen concentration camp was constructed on the orders of Heinrich Himmler and opened on August 8, 1938, only a few short months after the Anschluss.  It was located 20 kilometers from the town in which Adolf Hitler grew up, in Linz, Austria, at the site of the Wiener Graben granite quarry, leased by the SS from the municipal government of Vienna. The SS established it to supply slave labor to mine materials for the needs of Vienna itself, and also for the monumental buildings that were to be constructed after the war in the Führer’s honor, including a proposed Führermuseum in Linz to house the best of the looted art obtained by the SS, primarily from Jews throughout Europe. For the SS, Mauthausen served a dual purpose: the elimination of political prisoners and Jews and a source of profit from the slave laborers.  More than 10,000 SS guards served at Mauthausen, many of them Austrians.

Mauthausen was the only Class III concentration camp in the entire Nazi camp network, the most feared category for political prisoners, resistance fighters from Nazi-occupied countries, and those the Germans considered “criminals,” and later for Hungarian Jews, the last great concentration of Jews slaughtered by the Nazis.  It was a camp from which no one was expected to survive – Rückkehr unerwünscht and Vernichtung durch Arbeit: return not desired, extermination by work.

The level of cruelty by the Nazi guards remains even today, at this solemn hour of commemoration, almost beyond human comprehension.  People were murdered by every conceivable fashion, from gassing to starvation; from forcing people to hold hands and jump off the high cliffs overlooking the quarry, to spraying naked prisoners with water in the depth of the Austrian winter.

The work itself was unbearable.  Inmates were forced to carry huge stones on their backs up the infamous 186 steep steps, the Todesstiege or Stairs of Death, ascending to the top of the quarry, until they collapsed.  They were then shot and their records simply said “trying to escape.”  Perversely, all of this occurred in a camp with flowers planted along neat rows of brightly painted green and white-trimmed barracks.

How then do we properly honor the victims who died, those fortunate enough to survive, and their families and at the same time make this special Commemoration Day against Violence and Racism relevant to today’s 21st century world?  We know we can’t restore the past.  We cannot bring back to life musicians and writers, poets and artists, entrepreneurs, engineers and scientists, farmers and shopkeepers, ministers and rabbis and, yes, we can’t bring back to life mothers and fathers, and children never able to add their spark to the world. We cannot recreate the Yiddish language, which had been the transmission belt of European Jewish culture, now barely a whisper, or the heart of Jewish culture in Europe torn asunder.  All of these are irreplaceable.  But, permit me to suggest three ways of remembering, in many of which Austria is taking the lead, and commendably so:

First and foremost is to perpetuate the memory of those who suffered by telling the brutal and harsh truth of Mauthausen and of Austria’s complicated role in World War II.  And this Austria is now doing.  Countries like Austria which face their past, even many decades later, are stronger for it.  May I say, and this is important, please, that Austria is not alone among nations in struggling with the passage of time to confront the past.  It took my country, the United States, over 40 years to provide an apology and compensation for Japanese-Americans who were placed in forced internment in camps on the West coast of our country during World War II, under the false proposition that they were somehow friends of our enemy in Japan. And even more so, it was over 100 years from President Lincoln’s emancipation of American slaves before African Americans even obtained full and equal legal rights as citizens, and then only after a difficult, painful and sometimes bloody struggle against Americans who refused to face our country’s past, many of them in my part of the country in the South.  We have seen just within the last few weeks how Japan’s inability to fully face its past, the effort to rewrite some of their own textbooks to gloss over Japan’s own brutality to civilians during World War II, has caused tensions throughout Asia.

For decades after the War, Austria did not confront the full involvement of so many of its citizens in Nazi crimes against Jews and other enemies of the German Reich and in the confiscation of Jewish property, seeing Austria as the “first victim” of the Third Reich.  This was by the way a view reinforced by the Allies in the 1943 Moscow Declaration noting that Austria was, in the terms of the Declaration, “the first victim of Hitlerite aggression,”, although adding and “reminding” Austria of its “responsibility which it cannot evade for participating in the war on Hitler’s side.”  The qualifying clause was lost in the fog of history.

Neighbor turned on neighbor.  One of the people I met during our negotiations, Kurt Ladner, an Austrian Holocaust survivor, recalled that as a boy over the first weekend following the Anschluss, his next door neighbor, who only months before had allowed him to take chocolate from his Christmas tree, opened his window and shouted at him, “Heil Hitler: Kill all the Jews.”  Austria’s Jewish citizens were forced to flee, abandon or sell their property at cut-rate prices; 56,000 were killed.  The National Socialist Party in Austria had more than 500,000 registered members.

Clearly, Austria did suffer.  The Austrian government resisted forced unification with Germany.  The Nazis killed your own Chancellor.  You lost your independence.  I gained a perspective of the complexity of your history from two encounters.  During one marathon negotiating session with Chancellor Schüssel, he movingly told me that he was born in 1945 to a mother hiding from Allied bombs while carrying him, the same bombs which destroyed part of the magnificent hall behind us.  Madame Maria Schaumayer, my extraordinary negotiating partner in the slave labor talks, told me that when she was 8 years old, when Nazism swept across Austria in 1938, it led to the arrest of her father by the Gestapo immediately after the Anschluss for his opposition to Hitler and led to the confiscation of his property and the loss of his livelihood.  Living as a young girl near the Hungarian border, she told me of a haunting vision – the forced march of civilians in the bitterly cold winter of 1944-45. She said it was not until a half century later that she realized what she had seen were Hungarian Jewish slave laborers – a realization, I am sure, that helped motivate her to secure justice for slave laborers, which she did, with the chancellors backing, so well.

No one can precisely date when Austrians began to face the full picture of your wartime involvement, but there clearly were at least two precipitating events which occasioned a rethinking, combined with politically courageous actions by several of your leaders.  Former SS-Obersturmbannführer Walter Reder returned to Austria in 1985 to an official reception, following his lengthy imprisonment in Italy for Reder’s responsibility in the killing of 1,830 victims, mostly older people, women, and children in the Italian village of Marzabotta, near Bologna.  This caused an uproar in Italy, in your own country Austria, and internationally, leading to a first major debate in public about your role in World War II.  Further momentum came from the revelations in 1986-87 about the role of former UN Secretary General and Austrian President Kurt Waldheim in the German Army, and an international panel was appointed by your Government in 1988 to review Mr. Waldheim’s participation in the war.

Then several courageous Austrian political and religious leaders acted out of conscience and conviction.  In 1987, Austrian Cardinal Franz König gave a speech implying that as Christians and Austrians his fellow citizens shared responsibility for crimes against Jews.  Chancellor Franz Vranitzky made dramatic statements at the 50th anniversary of the Anschluss in 1988 and again in the Austrian Parliament, this Parliament, in 1991, that “many” – and I am quoting him – “Austrians welcomed the so-called Anschluss, supported the National Socialist Regime,” and “participated in the machinery of suppression and persecution of the Third Reich, some of them at the forefront,” and thus, in his words, bore “moral co-responsibility.”  In 1994, Federal President the late Dr. Thomas Klestil bowed his head to the victims and declared to the Israeli Knesset that Austria “mustn’t be spared from encountering the historical truth, the whole truth” and that, in his words, “too often one has spoken only about how Austria has been the first nation to lose its liberty and independence to National Socialism and way too seldom we have also spoken about the fact that some of the worst henchmen … had been in fact Austrian.”

Austria has moved commendably beyond these stirring words to institutionalize the telling of truth in a soul-searching way.

On October 1, 1998, at Chancellor Schüssel’s initiative, the Austrian Government created a Historical Commission chaired by Professor Dr. Clemens Jabloner, which produced a comprehensive report on all aspects of Nazi-era confiscation in Austria.

With the inspiration of Simon Wiesenthal and the leadership of Vienna Mayor Michael Häupl, a moving memorial to Austrian victims of the Holocaust was unveiled at Judenplatz in October 2000.

More broadly, Austria is to be congratulated for its active participation in the 20-nation Holocaust Education Task Force, which promotes teaching of the Holocaust in school systems throughout the U.S. and Europe, preserving monuments and sites, like Mauthausen, providing training for police and military, and encouraging tolerance – the very essence of the Commemoration Day Against Violence and Racism you have set forward today.  So future generations of Austrians will be exposed to your country’s complete wartime history, its suffering under the heel of the German Nazis and the extent to which many of its citizens caused others to suffer.  And Austria will become an even more tolerant and stronger society in the process.

A second way of remembering is to honor victims by doing justice to living survivors and their families during their lifetimes.  Beginning in the 1990’s, Austria has taken a leadership role in the world in doing just that.  We know that the Holocaust was not only history’s gravest and most systematic genocide, it was also the greatest theft in history – the massive confiscation of bank accounts and art, apartments, personal effects, insurance policies, and brutal, uncompensated slave labor, like that performed at the granite quarry at Mauthausen.  Austria has taken giant steps to rectify this wrong.

The National Fund mentioned by President Khol, created in June 1995, well before – may I emphasize: well before! – there was international pressure to do so, and so ably run by Hannah Lessing, will soon celebrate its 10th anniversary.  Inspired by Chancellor Vranitzky, the Fund has paid 28,000 people who were expelled from Austria or suffered here, over 140 million Euros, plus another 150 million dollars in personal effects and leased apartments from our negotiations.

The Austrian delegation headed by your distinguished diplomat Hans Winkler, was the first country in 1997 to agree to donate into a new Nazi Persecutee Relief Fund gold which had been looted by Germany from your Central Bank, and which after the War was recognized by the Tripartite Gold Commission as belonging to your country.  Ambassador Winkler said at the time that “We all have a moral obligation to the survivors of the Holocaust, and to make their remaining days better.”  I can say with absolute certainty that taking this position on behalf of your government led the other Tripartite Gold Commission countries, some of whom were reluctant to give their gold back, to contribute it for the benefit of surviving victims.

Austria was the first country, and virtually the only one in the world, to transpose into your national law our Washington Principles on Art from our Washington Conference in 1997 dealing with looted art.  Under the leadership of Minister for Education and Cultural Affairs Gehrer, Austria has been a leader in returning Nazi-era art from your federal museums to their owners.  And I hope that, as she has urged, Austria’s non-federal museums and collections will take similar action.

Austria also recognized that there were flaws and gaps in the seven post-War restitution laws passed between 1946 and 1949.  Inspired by Chancellor Schüssel and led by Maria Schaumayer and Ernst Sucharipa – our dear friend, who lies in a hospital in Vienna today, and we pray for his recovery –, we were able to negotiate in record time several sweeping agreements covering slave laborers (almost exclusively, by the way, non-Jews from Eastern Europe), personal and real property, insurance, and improved pensions and social benefits.  Austria continues to implement these agreements with commendable efficiency.

There remains over 200 million dollars still unpaid into the General Settlement Fund for property claims, as President Khol mentioned, with thousands of worthy people now having waited over four years from our agreement.  This is because there is not yet “legal peace” for Austria in our courts in the United States as a result of at least one major case.  The attorneys and their supporters refuse to recognize that they are hurting the cause of survivors around the world by not dismissing the case.  The delays are, frankly, an indictment of our own protracted legal system, which seems oblivious to the hardship continued delay is causing.  And I hope that all the parties, including the U.S. judges responsible for this unconscionable postponement of justice, will be inspired by today’s commemoration to act immediately.  I intend to intervene on my own in the case to stress the human dimensions of the delay.  If the case can be disposed of, I hope that Austria will swiftly move to implement the General Settlement Fund and will expedite the research and processing of now some 20,000 claims.  In the meantime, I also hope Austria will proceed to expeditiously implement parts of the property agreement unrelated to legal peace, like in rem restitution of publicly owned property, and also hope that all the Länder and major cities in Austria will opt into the in rem restitution process.

It is critically important on this special day for Austria to rededicate itself to support and sustain the tiny, struggling, but vibrant Austrian Jewish community that has emerged in the years after the War.  While we provided some benefits to the Austrian Jewish community in our negotiations, permit me to say that more needs to be done financially and otherwise by the state to insure their health and survival.  And I am very pleased to learn that progress is being made here and that this may help also expedite achieving legal peace in U.S. courts. The Austrian Jewish community should be nurtured and protected as a critical link between your past and your future.

Moreover, it is painfully evident that anti-Semitism in Europe did not end with the liberation of Mauthausen or with the end of World War II, as acts against Jewish property and citizens have re-emerged in countries like France, much of it from Europe’s disaffected Moslem youth.  As I know you are committed to do and are doing, all forms of anti-Semitism, by word or deed, from whatever quarter, should be forcefully condemned and, where appropriate, punished.  There is heartening evidence that anti-Semitism is now being addressed by the European Union and its member states with forcefulness and vigor, with your country, Austria, taking the lead.  The OSCE Specialized Meetings on Combating Anti-Semitism met first in this great city, Vienna, in June 2003.  You actively participated then and in the 2004 meetings in Berlin and, I know, will play a major role again in the June 2005 meeting in Cordova.

A third and last way to remember is by converting this Commemoration Day Against Violence and Racism into an action agenda.  As a proud member of the European Union, and by virtue of your wartime history, Austria has a special call on the world’s conscience to protect human rights wherever they are at risk and to speak out forcefully to prevent genocides around the world.  It is clear that the world has still not fully learned the lessons of Mauthausen and of the Holocaust when we consider the killing fields of Cambodia, the ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, the genocide in Rwanda, and now another in Darfur.  Austria has the moral stature to speak to the world.

What we saw together with Austria was justice for victims which depended upon the exposure of hard truths and the dissemination of knowledge. Austria today is delivering justice, it is delivering truth, and it is disseminating knowledge. You have come further faster in recent years than any country in the world in confronting its past. In the process the Republic of Austria is writing a happier chapter in your country’s long and illustrious history and returning Austria where it belongs, to its place in the center of Europe.

I am privileged to have been a part of your historic process which continues to unfold. This indeed is the best commemoration for the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Mauthausen and for this special day against violence and racism.

Thank you for permitting me to address you.

(Schluss)