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Foreign Correspondent: Legacy of Nazism in modern Vienna

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Man and woman look at museum cabinet
Foreign Correspondent: Legacy of Nazism in modern Vienna

SUBJECTS:  History

YEARS:  9–10


Why did Nazis in Austria dig up hundreds of human remains from graves in Vienna's Währing Jewish cemetery?

Join reporter Mark Corcoran as he visits a Viennese museum to search for the remains of an 18th-century Jewish baroness. He makes some disturbing discoveries there.

This clip from 2007 is the second of two.


Things to think about

  1. 1.In an attempt to justify their 'master race' theory, the Nazis conducted gruesome experiments on both living and deceased Jewish people, seeking evidence of inferiority. The Jewish cemetery at Währing in Vienna was a reliable source of remains for this work. Baroness Fanny von Arnstein was a notable social and intellectual leader in 18th-century Vienna.
  2. 2.In the reporter's view, why has it taken a younger generation of Austrians to 'confront the burden of the past'? The Austrian Nazis exhumed Jewish remains from Währing cemetery to use as museum exhibits for their racist theories. Are Fanny von Arnstein's remains in the museum? Note the museum's response to calls for the 'restitution' of the human remains of Jewish and Polish WW II victims and Australian Aboriginal people.
  3. 3.The Vienna Museum of Natural History holds skeletal remains of some 40,000 people collected over many years and from many places. How did the museum respond to the 1990s campaign for the release of its collected remains of Jewish concentration camp inmates and Polish resistance fighters? What do you think museums' policies regarding human remains, including those of Indigenous Australian people, should be?
  4. 4.After World War II, the international community took significant steps to attempt to prevent events such as the Holocaust from happening again. Find appropriate sources for determining what these actions were, as well as the backgrounds of the main protagonists. Find out what has happened to the Australian Aboriginal remains in the Vienna Museum of Natural History.



Date of broadcast: 29 May 2007


Copyright

Metadata © Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Education Services Australia Ltd 2012 (except where otherwise indicated). Digital content © Australian Broadcasting Corporation (except where otherwise indicated). Video © Australian Broadcasting Corporation (except where otherwise indicated). All images copyright their respective owners. Text © Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Education Services Australia is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0).

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