Re-enactment of the first arrival of American soldiers in Mauthausen, probably 7 May 1945
© Photograph: commons wikimedia, photo: Cpl. Donald R. Ornitz, US Army
The former Mauthausen concentration camp had 49 ancillary camps, making it one of the largest in the whole Nazi system of destruction. Following the camp's liberation on 5 May 1945, and its initial use by the US army, the Soviet occupational forces handed over the former concentration camp to the Republic of Austria on 20 June 1947, on provision that a memorial was erected there.
Architect Wilhelm Schütte was responsible for supervising the construction of the first national memorial in Mauthausen: the memorial to the French victims, which was a collaboration between French architect André Bruyère and the sculptor Fritz Cremer, completed in 1949/50. The correspondence shows that other countries also commissioned him with supervising their memorials.
A drawing preserved in the Az W collection shows the memorials for France, Italy, Poland, Austria and the Soviet Union in the positions proposed by Schütte in front of the main gate to Mauthausen concentration camp. The partial estate also contains drawings of designs for the Soviet and Polish memorials, although these were realised in a different form. Schütte’s contribution to the design was probably greatest for the French memorial, where he also played a key role, above all, in the concrete realisation and the consideration of the relationship between the individual memorials.
The work for the memorial park plays a major role in Schütte’s oeuvre — partly because he was virtually excluded from public commissions in Austria after 1945 due to his communist views. He was considered an expert in school construction, which he took to a new level while working on the New Frankfurt urban planning programme as head of the school construction department before the Second World War. This is where he also met his future wife, the architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky.¹
In 1930, the Schütte couple followed the German architect Ernst May to Moscow, where they focussed on planning socialist cities. As a result of the worsening political situation in the Soviet Union, the couple emigrated to Turkey in 1938. Margarete was arrested in Vienna in 1941 as part of secret courier services for the resistance group of the Austrian Communist Party.² Initially sentenced to death, she served several years in prison in Bavaria, where she was liberated by American troops in April 1945. Wilhelm Schütte, who was overshadowed by his wife for decades in terms of his work in the resistance, was — as recent investigations show³ — active as an agent of the British military intelligence service SOE. He only returned to Vienna with his wife in 1947.
1) Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky (1897-2000); married Wilhelm Schütte in 1927, separated in 1951
2) The foreign group was set up in Istanbul by the Austrian architect Herbert Eichholzer, who was executed on 7 January 1943 for plotting to commit high treason.
3)Thomas Fierl (ed.), Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, Wilhelm Schütte. ‘Mach den Weg um Prinkipo, meine Gedanken werden Dich dabei begleiten!’. Der Gefängnis-Briefwechsel 1941–1945 (the prison correspondence 1941-1945), Berlin 2021, p.526 ff.