The Viehofen Monument

In 2009, the municipality of St. Pölten and the state of Lower Austria, department of public art, wrote a competition to erect a memorial. The commemorative project was intended to recruit and keep the memory of the Jewish forced labor camp, the nearby labor camp, and the mass grave at the municipal cemetery.

The jury, which also included Martha Keil from the Institute for Jewish History of Austria, selected two projects. Catrin Bolt designed information panels on the grounds of the Viehofner Seen, which seem like ordinary orientation signs, but represent the situation of 1945: Mahnmal Viehofen Bolt.

In the second project Tatiana Lecomte sent to 20,000 St. Pöltner addressees postcards with views of today's traces of the camp and the mass grave. The handwritten standard text read: "I am healthy, I am fine." This sentence had to be included in the post-Nazi period in all mailings of prisoners to their relatives. The direct, unexpected confrontation aroused opposition and was controversially discussed. provides extensive information, documents, personal testimonies and photos of the camp and its inmates.

Still to be realized is a gravestone for those in the mass grave at the main cemetery burial. Their names are mostly known: Manfred Wieninger made a list of 179 notable and 15 anonymous people from the death certificates: Hungarian-Jewish, Catholic and Orthodox forced-laborers from Poland and Ukraine, prisoners of war from Italy and Russia, deceased from the hospital Environment, bombs, and plunder.