Problems arise with the remains of the Gusen camp. Although, as a result of pressure from Poland negotiations with private owners were partially initiated and finalized, some of the buildings of the former German concentration camp remain the subject of the bargain. The purchase case may significantly slow down, which is the fear of the Polish ambassador to Austria.
It was the largest underground German arms factory with the secret code name “Bergkristall”.
After the war, the Austrian state “was not interested in the camps in Gusen, where more people died than in the nearby Mauthausen concentration camp. Small housing estates were built in this area. In the 1960s, the remains of the crematorium would have been removed, if had it not been for the surviving prisoners from Italy and France, who bought the land and handed it over to the commune for the construction of the monument,” the newspaper “Wiener Zeitung” recalls.
It is mainly “thanks to local activists and Polish government agencies that several kilometres of underground corridors up to 7 meters high have been preserved. Especially the Law and Justice (the ruling party in Poland) put pressure on Austrian politicians and authorities,” the newspaper reports.
The Polish government “forced the purchase from private owners of the remains of the nearby Gusen I and II concentration camps, where forced labourers were detained in terrible conditions.”
“The only bone of contention is the purchase of the so-called +Jourhaus+, which served as the entrance to the concentration camp and the apartment building for SS officers and the walls of the SS torture prison. Apparently, the private owner demanded a double-digit sum of millions for it, much more than the Finanzprokuratur’s experts recommended as the upper limit of the purchase,” reports the “Wiener Zeitung”.
The Polish ambassador to Austria, Jolanta Róża Kozłowska, fears that the purchase of the objects “may be delayed for another few years”. In an interview with the Wiener Zeitung, she pointed out that the ambassadors of other countries where the prisoners came from, such as Italy, Spain, France, the Netherlands and Israel, are already “very concerned”.