Memorial
The Ebensee Memorial today
The barracks of the camp were destroyed soon after the liberation. Visiting the former area of the camp you can only see the former entrance gate of the camp. The victims’ cemetery is also located in this area, at the place where one of the mass graves secretly, created by the SS shortly before the liberation of the camp was found. The gallery systems still exist and in one of the huge tunnels a bilingual exhibition (German/English) gives a detailed description of the camp’s history. The remains of a staircase (called “Löwengang”) can also be visited.
Opening times of the exhibition in the gallery:
1st May – 15th June
Saturday & Sunday: 10 am - 5 pm
16th June – 15th September
Tuesday – Sunday: 10 am - 5 pm
(Closed on Mondays)
16th – 30th September
Saturday & Sunday: 10 am – 5 pm
Entrance fees
Adults: 3 Euro
Students/Groups: 2 Euro
Children: free
Guided Tours
Guided tours through the area of the former concentration camp are offered upon prior arrangement. You will be accompanied by experts or a former Polish prisoner upon request. We ask for your understanding that guided tours for individuals are only possible in exceptional cases. During the opening hours of the exhibition an expert is at your disposal for information and guided tours through the exhibition in the tunnel.
How to reach Ebensee Concentration Camp Memorial
Coming from Bad Ischl or Gmunden on the National Route B145 you take the exit RINDBACH and then you follow the brown coloured signs saying “KZ-Gedenkstätte”. There is a parking space in front of the cemetery. From there you can reach the exhibition in 3 minutes.
(Don’t forget warm clothes, it is only 8°C in the gallery!)
Literature: Brochures (70 pages) of the concentration camp Ebensee are available in German and English. We also can offer you a catalogue of the exhibition in German, English, French and Italian.
History of the Ebensee concentration camp cemetery
During the weeks following the liberation of the Ebensee concentration camp on 6 May 1945, the first cemetery was erected at a distance of two kilometres from the camp upon order by US Army authorities. About 900 victims who had been discovered at different places on the whole camp site at the time of the liberation were buried in individual graves at the cemetery.
Inauguration of the Lepetit memorial, 4 May 1948 (Collection Hilda Lepetit)
Three years later, the so-called Lepetit memorial was unveiled in the centre of today's cemetery. Hilda Lepetit, a native of Milan, had initiated the erection of the memorial at the site of a mass grave which had been built by the SS in the night from 4 May to 5 May 1945. Her husband is assumed to be one of the 1000 victims buried in the mass grave never opened.
In 1952, a French ministerial commission carried out exhumation and relocation works at various places, with the target being the creation of a collective cemetery for concentration camp victims in Ebensee.
At the abandoned original cemetery 842 corpses were exhumed and subsequently buried again individually left and right of the Lepetit memorial. Only about one third of the deceased persons could be identified. (Burial site plans in front of the burial places).
The relocations works also included the relocation of another mass grave with 1179 victims, which the SS also had erected not far from here immediately before the concentration camp was liberated. Upon opening the mass grave the commission in charge detected 197 legible badges with the prisoners’ numbers, thus it was possible to associate these with the respective names of the camp inmates in most of the cases. Individual identification of the human remains was impossible in any of the cases. The mass grave was re-built at the back of the Lepetit memorial. In addition, 11 deceased persons from the original cemetery and 151 corpses which had been transferred to Ebensee from Hörsching were buried at this place, i.e., a total of 1341 victims were buried here.
Camp cemetery, 1954 (Collection Hilda Lepetit)
Relocation of concentration camp victims from other places
Originally, prisoners who had died immediately after the liberation in one of the neighbouring hospitals as a consequence of the incarceration were buried at the respective communal cemeteries. In the course of the commission’s work these victims were exhumed, in few cases repatriated, in most of the cases they were buried at the cemetery of the Ebensee concentration camp.
Exhumations were carried out at the following places:
- Bad Goisern: 86 victims, 1 victim transferred to Belgium, 85 victims transferred to Ebensee (May 1951)
- St. Wolfgang: 33 victims transferred to Ebensee (September 1951).
- Bad Ischl: 54 of the 66 exhumed concentation camp victims transferred to Ebensee (May 1952)
- Sankt Konrad: 4 victims transferred to Ebensee. One victim from Aurachkirchen was transferred to Ebensee and buried here.
Victims from other concentration camps
235 victims (above all from the camp at Gunskirchen) who had died in Hörsching after the liberation were buried in the mass grave and at the burial sites left and right of it. 3 victims from the subsidiary camp in St. Valentin were transferred to Ebensee. 190 urns were relocated from Steyr. These include victims from the concentration camps Gusen and Mauthausen, who were cremated largely in 1941 and 1942 in the municipal crematorium in Steyr. 52 victims from the Mauthausen concentration camp, who lost their lives after the camp’s liberation in a hospital in Schönau, were exhumed in December 1953 and buried in Ebensee. All victims, 51 Hungarian Jews and a Russian, could be identified. Furthermore, 19 victims (4 urns), thereof 5 could be identified, were transferred from the cemetery in Linz-St. Martin to the cemetery of the Ebensee concentration camp. Finally, in October 1960, 10 victims were relocated from the cemetery in Altaussee and 6 from Gallspach to Ebensee.
2 victims were exhumed again at the end of the 1950s and transferred to Salzburg, 1 victim was repatriated to Israel.
All in all, 1343 victims were buried in individual graves as well as about 2341 victims in the two mass graves at this cemetery. The location of any ash pits has not been clarified up to the current date. These are said to have been created - according to the memories of surviving camp inmates - as a result of the cremation of thousands of victims in the camp crematorium.