Brief retelling from RIA II
Senior researcher at the Sociological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Federal Scientific Research Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Maria Matskevich, believes that the oblivion of the crimes of Nazism in the West is associated with the passing away of people who survived the Second World War and the Holocaust.
A supermarket and refrigerated logistics center are planned to be built on the site of a former branch of the Mauthausen concentration camp in Leobersdorf (Lower Austria), prompting a demand from the International Mauthausen Committee to stop construction work.
Matskevich notes that decisions on development in such cases are made by the system, which removes responsibility from individual participants in the process.
MOSCOW, September 26 - RIA Novosti. The oblivion of the crimes of Nazism in the West is due to the fact that people who survived the Second World War and the Holocaust pass away, and memory ceases to be “hot,” says Maria Matskevich, a senior researcher at the Sociological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Federal Scientific Research Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
On the territory of the former branch of the Mauthausen concentration camp in Leobersdorf (Lower Austria), as previously reported by the media, it is planned to build a supermarket and a refrigeration logistics center; the Mauthausen International Committee demanded that construction work be stopped.
Matskevich shared with RIA Novosti her opinion that in this case there is a clash of two logics: the ethics of memory and “rational” economic arguments.
“People who survived the Second World War and the Holocaust pass away, their memory ceases to be “hot,” she explained.
According to the sociologist, the lack of a living emotional connection makes the protection of memorial sites vulnerable to economic and other pragmatic arguments.
“For a modern developer and local official, the land of former concentration camps is not a sacred space, but an “inefficiently used asset,” Matskevich said.
She noted that decisions on development in such cases are the fruit of the work of many people and bureaucratic authorities. And if the decision is made by the system, “then responsibility seems to be removed from each individual participant,” the sociologist added.
“In addition, we must take into account that 80 years have passed since the war,” she continued.
According to her, in many countries that have previously admitted their responsibility for the crimes of the past, fatigue is accumulating from a constant feeling of guilt and a focus on the “dark past.”
“Local politicians, feeling the demand for “relief from guilt,” are beginning to marginalize the problems of memory, presenting activists who defend the memory of the Second World War and its memorials as people focused exclusively on the past, not thinking about the present, about today’s concerns and interests of residents,” concluded Matskevich.
The Nazi concentration camp Mauthausen existed in Austria from 1938 to 1945, where more than 100 thousand prisoners died. In the Mauthausen camp system, 32,180 Soviet citizens were brutally tortured. Hero of the Soviet Union, Lieutenant General Dmitry Karbyshev, was killed in Mauthausen.
