Senator Perminov called the construction of a supermarket on the site of a concentration camp in Austria «banalization of evil»

The construction of a supermarket on the territory of a former concentration camp is historically unjustified and morally unacceptable, Senator Sergei Perminov told RIA Novosti, commenting on plans to build a store on the territory of a former branch of the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria.

According to Spiegel, they plan to build a supermarket and a refrigeration logistics center on the territory of a former branch of the Mauthausen concentration camp in Leobersdorf (Lower Austria), the international Mauthausen committee demanded to stop construction work.

“The construction of a commercial facility on the territory of a former concentration camp is historically unjustified and morally unacceptable. The dispute, in which the International Committee of Mauthausen (CIM) demands an immediate halt to work, goes far beyond the scope of a local urban planning conflict. This is a clash between the commercial pragmatism of the 21st century and the sacred duty to the victims of Nazism of the 20th century,” Perminov noted.

According to him, the attempt to transform a space where the Nazis subjected prisoners to forced labor and violence into an everyday shopping area is a classic example of the “banalization of evil” in the modern post-truth world.

“Product shelves, logistics ramps and refrigeration units literally replace the landscape of human tragedy. Consumer comfort is built on soil soaked in tears and blood,” the politician emphasized. Perminov noted that Austria had been painfully moving for decades from the concept of “the first victim of Hitlerism” to the recognition of its own historical responsibility for the crimes of Nazism. The Leobersdorf case demonstrates a dangerous regression.

“Memory is based not only on the strength of the surviving walls, but also on the very fact of the tragedy that occurred in these geographical coordinates. Demolition of authentic fragments erases physical evidence of crimes. When the image of the camp goes away, the next step is historical oblivion and justification of Nazism,” he emphasized.

In conditions where there are almost no living witnesses left, the earth, walls and foundations of the former camps take on the role of the main “witnesses”. The utilitarian decision of the Austrian authorities conceals serious political risks for future generations, Perminov said. “Austria and Europe are failing the test of preserving humanistic values. No economic expediency can justify burying the memory of the Holocaust into asphalt,” the senator noted.

Perminov emphasized that a society that agrees to buy everyday goods where the destruction of humanity took place is committing collective amnesia.

“The demand of the International Mauthausen Committee to stop construction is not a whim of activists, but a desperate attempt to save contemporaries from moral deafness, to put a barrier of memory in the way of the revival of European Nazism. Austria is obliged to prove that its slogan “Never again” is a conscious position of generations, and not an empty political declaration that can be forgotten,” the parliamentarian concluded.