Commemoration ceremony at the site of the former Melk concentration camp

The international commemoration ceremony for the victims of the Melk subcamp will take place in Melk on Monday 12 May 2025 at 10:30 am. The ceremony is being organised by MERKwürdig - ZHZ Melk in cooperation with the Mauthausen Memorial. 80 years after the end of the war, the event will focus on the theme of ‘Together for a Never Again’. As part of the ceremony, relatives of former Melk concentration camp prisoners from all over Europe will come to Melk to commemorate the victims together. The content of the event is being devised by pupils from Melk Abbey Grammar School, with music provided by the Melk Music School. The ceremony will begin in the historical prisoner accommodation barracks ‘Objekt 10’, after which participants will walk together to the Subcamp Stela and on to the former crematorium, where the victims are commemorated on the ‘Wall of Names’.

The Melk subcamp was set up on 21 April 1944 and operated until 15 April 1945. With around 14,400 concentration camp prisoners, Melk was the third-largest subcamp of the Mauthausen concentration camp, and the largest in Lower Austria. The prisoners were exploited as forced labourers to build tunnels for ‘Project Quarz’ of the company Steyr-Daimler-Puch-AG. Almost 5,000 prisoners were killed.

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