Where Memory Has Failed

...Nevertheless, often their actions do appear to have been motivated by anti-Semitism...

...But the SS swiftly quashed all official inquiries and used the camp as a tool to intimidate the townspeople...

...peered into windows, looking for a sign that signaled concern, a sign that the outside world had not abandoned them...

...Thetown's residents could not bear the sight of the freed inmates, refused to answer questions about the abominable occurrences of the previous seven years, and retreated into their homes...

...But the author believes that without peril to themselves the villagers could have at least made eye contact with the prisoners, who "almost in vain...

...The blank faces they encountered "added to their abiding sense of isolation...

...That approach to the past has not changed...

...another who spoke of the mistreatment of Mauthausen's inmates was incarcerated for eight months in Buchenwald...

...The director there cowed the locals into submission by threatening with immediate imprisonment anyone who spoke of the gassing activities...

...As in Mauthausen, Hartheim's residents could not be unaware of the killings...

...At other times, the Austrians transformed their countryside into killing fields on their own initiative...

...The unfortunate resident who had to walk along a path running through the facility to reach the center of town very soon "learned to control his movements, to stop and start on command, to keep his neck stiff, to fix his gaze straight ahead, and pass to the opposite side as quickly as possible...

...While those were sins of omission, there were crimes of commission as well...

...In Hartheim, a number of inmates were gassed to death at the Hartheim Castle...

...Again, the stench of burned corpses was impossible to dismiss...

...The locals thus became accomplices of the Nazis...

...There was a terrible odor in the vicinity of the castle and, in the words of one resident, "tufts of hair flew through the chimney onto the street...

...Similarly, the people of Melk failed to object in any fashion to the construction of a branch camp...

...Many residents seized the opportunity to kill," however, using guns, pitchforks and knives...

...Built alongside a quarry in 1938 by inmates from Dachau and Sachsenhausen, the camp supplied the SS with a steady (and free) source of construction material...

...To be sure, the SS initially faced opposition from local authorities who objected to the camp's cruel treatment of inmates and the drunken brawling of its offduty guards...

...For the most part, it did...

...Horwitz' relentless exposure of how easily the Nazis stilled the voice of conscience in Austria leads him to argue something close to collective guilt...

...A Jewish adage has it that "the secret of redemption lies in remembrance...

...Because they played a part in the murder of half the Jews who died in the Holocaust, Horwitz says, "Austrians have been especially sensitive to the need to maintain a comfortable distance between themselves and events associated with their nation's involvement in the Third Reich...

...it is an indication of the Austrians' skill at suppressing unpleasant memories...

...The one nurse who asked to be transferred did so not because she objected to the gas chambers, but because she found cleaning the rooms "through which the victims passed" beneath her dignity...

...By 1943 Mauthausen served as the hub for 49 camps, and by the war's end it had claimed 119,000 victims, onethird of whom were Jews...

...Horwitz does not fully succeed, either, in demonstrating that the villagers' reticence and violence were directed particularly at Jews...

...Reviewed by Jacob Heilbrunn Contributor, "Commentary," "National Interest" Are Austrians exceptionally antiSemitic...

...This was particularly the case during the death marches to Mauthausen, when the SS forced its captives to plod through village after village on the way to the camp...

...Collective guilt allows individuals to shirk responsibility for their crimes by shifting the blame onto an entire nation...

...Horwitz' compelling book helps us to understand why Austrians have to face up to the challenge of remembrance, and why Austria has not emerged from the shadow of death...

...Horwitz scrupulously notes that SS threats against interference were not empty, as a few rare individuals quickly learned: One Austrian who gave prisoners bread was interned in Dachau and murdered...

...In Redl-Zipfl the people accepted with little anguish a rocket site built by slave labor...

...Since prisoners were also killed at Mauthausen's branch camps, the SS had to win the silence of villagers living in oudying areas, too...

...As the prisoners transferred from Mauthausen trudged through the town, they looked to its residents "for acknowledgment of their own presence...

...The Nazis did not attempt to conceal the existence of Mauthausen...

...And "Concentration Camp Mauthausen" was listed in the public telephone directory throughout the War...

...The recent Waldheim affair, he says, is not an isolated incident...

...That is not to say that Austrians are collectively guilty for the Holocaust, but that they have an obligation to excavate the past from willful oblivion...

...The SS announced to the public that the emaciated escapees were criminals and extended to the populace the hitherto jealously guarded right to murder...

...The lure of higher wages, writes Horwitz, reconciled the castle's maintenance men and bus drivers to their duties...

...Merchants sold wares to the camp, and the head of a nearby crematorium "successfully fought off unwanted competition from the Linz crematorium, which vied for the extra business...

...Indeed, there is no avoiding the feeling that anti-Semitism has always been especially virulent in Austria, and the feeling is reinforced today by the nation's evading and distorting its Nazi past...

...The Austrians' enduring refusal to confront that disreputable part of their history is of a piece with their silence during World War II, Horwitz concludes, and suggests that the country remains deeply anti-Semitic...

...The great merit of In the Shadow of Death lies in its meticulous documentation of the actions of individual Austrians during the Holocaust...

...Furthermore, collapsing the distinction between the guilty and the innocent by condemning the whole population annuls the exemplary behavior of the handful of Austrians who did aid prisoners...

...Horwitz's depiction of Austrians frenziedly slaying Russian prisoners who escaped from Mauthausen in February 1945 is horrifying and utterly convincing...

...On the contrary, they publicized it...

...In post-Anschluss Austria, the SS has continued to receive the silence and acquiescence it elicited during the War...

...Most watched the processions in mute horror, a few had the compassion to offer the prisoners bread or fruit, but a significant number of Austrians seized the opportunity to initiate a massacre: "It was as if local men were taking advantage of a breakdown of order to participate in the killing they had previously been denied...

...Horwitz cites a London Times article of March 1938 that reported: "Gauleiter Eigruber, of Upper Austria, speaking at Gmunden yesterday, announced that for its achievements in the Nationalist-Socialist cause his province was to have the special distinction of having within its bounds a concentration camp for all the traitors of Austria...

...Two families hid inmates...

...He traces the way their attitudes evolved from passive acceptance of the camps to active participation in the murder of Jews and other inmates...

...yet some villagers, Horwitz shows, regarded it as nothing out of the ordinary, and the monks of the Melk monastery overlooking the camp discreetly held their peace...

...That is unfortunate...

...One reason was that many townspeople profited from Mauthausen...

...If the prisoners survived from carrying 110-pound blocks of granite on their backs up the 186 steps leading out of the quarry, or were not forced to leap into the canyon by the guards and kapos, or trustees, then an extensive killing facility including a gas chamber and crematoria awaited them in the quarry...

...To the SS it "mattered little what people thought as long as the camp gained their silence...

...Gordon J. Horwitz, in focusing on the role played by the townspeople living next to one of the Third Reich's most brutal death centers, Mauthausen, presents a disturbing portrait of the Austrians' complicity in concentration camp operations...

...Mauthausen is located on the Danube in Upper Austria...

...The Nazis carried out their monstrous crimes with equanimity in full view of the Austrian citizens...

...His book leaves the impression that because all the inmates were helpless and weak, the locals felt they could disregard and maltreat them with impunity...

...it obscures the fact that guilt, like innocence, is a personal matter...

...Still, the director had no trouble hiring employees...

...Horwitz begins his account with the liberation of Mauthausen by the 71 st Division of theU.S...

...Third Army...