Austrian prosecutors' decision to allow defamation of Mauthausen inmates as 'criminals' causes outrage

The reasoning given by prosecutors in Austria for not pressing charges against a far-right monthly magazine which had called survivors of a former Nazi concentration camp as “criminals” and a “pest” has been met with outrage.

Oskar Deutsch, head of the Austrian Jewish community, said the article published in 'Aula' last year had been a “hideous inversion of victims and perpetrators”. He added that the Graz prosecutors’ decision not to press charges was like "whitewashing Nazi logic”. Deutsch called on the Austrian Justice Ministry to re-investigate the case.

An article last year in the magazine ‘Aula’, which is linked to the far-right Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ), was entitled “Liberated Mauthausen inmates as mass murderers”. The article also claimed that the released survivors of the Nazi camp had “plagued” the country by “robbing and looting, murdering and raping” and said they had been a “pest” (Landplage).

After a lawmaker of the Green Party lodged a complaint with prosecutors, the Graz Prosecution Service said that at the end of December the investigation had been ended and no charges would be pressed against the magazine.

In their reasoning, the prosecutors called it “comprehensible that the release of several thousand people from the Concentration Camp Mauthausen was perceived as a nuisance by the population affected by it” and added there was “some evidence of punishable acts” by some released camp inmates. The prosecutor’s statement added: “It is also an experience in life that there were lawbreakers among those incarcerated” in Mauthausen.

The former concentration camp in Upper Austria was the hub of a large network of camps built around the villages of Mauthausen and Sankt Georgen an der Gusen near the city of Linz. The camp operated from 1938, when Austria was annexed into the German Third Reich, to its liberation in May 1945.

Mauthausen was one of the largest forced labor camp complexes in the German-controlled part of Europe, with nearly 100 other sub camps located throughout Austria and southern Germany. Around 60,000 inmates, among them many Jews, died there. Of the estimated 320,000 prisoners incarcerated there, about 80,000 survivors were rescued upon the camps liberation.