Are there missing monuments?

After a war, the heroes of the war – the fallen soldiers – are commemorated. They are glorified rather than mourned. It is more difficult to commemorate the civilian victims and those who were persecuted and murdered, as was the case under the NS regime. Immediately after World War II, monuments were erected for those who had offered political and armed resistance – those, therefore, who through their resistance made an important contribution to reconstitute Austria as a sovereign nation within its 1938 borders, according to the Moscow Declaration. Soon, however, these efforts came to a halt. It was not until the 1990s that initiatives of civil society would take care of the countless forgotten Nazi victims and give them back their names. Not all victims, however, have been registered so far. These initiatives often direct their attention to local victims.

Yet, there were many men and also women who were abducted to Carinthia by the NS regime and found their death here. One of the largest groups of victims are the Soviet POWs, interned in the camps of Wolfsberg and Spittal. Thousands of them found their death. Abducted civilian and forced labourers were often deported to concentration camps for trivial transgressions and vanished without a trace and without a name. Sometimes, a forbidden love affair was the justification.

Collective remembrance of the many civilian victims which the war claimed locally is also very hard.

In addition, the winter of 1918 and 1919 brought severe hardship to the Carinthian population. The scope of the tragedy is often overlooked these days and so too is the cause: the Spanish flu. Carried into the villages by returning soldiers, it led to countless deaths amongst a population already worn out by the war. In the Lavant valley alone it claimed over 340 lives. During the fights at the southern Carinthian border in 1918 and 1919, about 280 men and women lost their lives on the German-Austrian side.