80 years later

Photo N.1

Salzburg, August 2025.
Some people are stepping on a stumbling stone near Mozart’s house. Here Otto Kemptner was arrested by the nazists and deported first to Dachau concentration camp and after to Buchenwald, where he died on 3rd May 1944. These kind of monuments reminds us of more than six million people murdered by the Nazis regime in WWII. Thousands of tourists come to Salzburg every August, and most of them do not even look at the street they are walking through. It seems that the victims are once again forgotten. Anyway, the stumbling stones are still important to maintain a vivid memory of the Nazis’ genocide against Jews, Roma, and Sinti, and to remind us that the victims weren’t just a number among many others.

Photo N.2

Salzburg, August 2025.
Some people are stepping on a stumbling stone. Here, Maria Rausch was arrested by the nazis and deported to Hartheim castle, where she was murdered in 1941. These kind of monuments reminds us of more than six million people murdered by the Nazis regime in WWII. Thousands of tourists come to Salzburg every August, and most of them do not even look at the street they are walking through. It seems that the victims are once again forgotten. Maria Rausch was murdered in Hartheim, near Linz. This was one of the six killing facilities of the Nazis program Aktion T4, which performed mass sterilizations and mass murder of “undesirable” members of German society. In Hartheim, about 18,000 people with physical and mental disabilities were murdered.

Stefano Toniolo