6 of 101Vienna, Vienna, Austria
Memorial to the Austrian vicims of the Nazis at Schwedenplatz. A transcript, where I have inserted capitalization and punctuation as I see fit:
Niemals Vergessen
Hier stand das Haus der Gestapo. Es war für die Bekenner Österreichs die Hölle. Es war für viele von ihnen der Vorhof des Todes. Es ist in Trümmer gesunken wie das tausendjährige Reich. Österreich aber ist wiederauferstanden und mit ihm unsere Toten, die unsterblichen Opfer.
Approximate translation (trying to preserve idioms) into English is:
Never Forget
Here stood the house of the Gestapo. It was Hell for the confessors of Austria. It was the antechamber of death for many of them. It is buried in ruins, as is the Thousand-Year Reich. But Austria is reborn and with her our dead, the immortal victims.
The Gestapo, however, was not some kind of all-knowing Big Brother - in order to inflict its suffering on its victims it was almost entirely dependent on a complicit population:
As historian Robert Gellately's analysis of the local offices established, the Gestapo was for the most part made up of bureaucrats and clerical workers who depended upon denunciations by ordinary Germans for their information. Indeed, the Gestapo was overwhelmed with denunciations and spent most of its time sorting out the credible from the less credible denunciations. (...) 80% of all Gestapo investigations were started in response to information provided by denunciations by "ordinary" Germans; while 10% were started in response in to information provided by other branches of the German government and another 10% started in response to information that the Gestapo itself unearthed.
Unlike Germany, which has done more than any other nation to uncover its crimes during WW2, Austria has hidden behind the excuse that they, too, were invaded by Hitler. But the fact that large parts of Austrian society was totally behind Hitler can't be denied, and it is only recently that Austria has started to examine its own actions during the Nazi era.
From: Vienna Light Table 5