Gedenkstätte für das "Lager Puch"

On the site of the playground near the present senior housing complex in Puch bei Hallein stood the barracks camp of the Eugen-Grill-Werke, which was used as a forced labor and prisoner-of-war camp from 1943 onwards. In this Nazi labor camp, around a thousand inmates were accommodated in close quarters and under harsh conditions, primarily performing forced labor for the arms industry of large enterprises in nearby Hallein. Freed by the Americans in 1945, the barracks continued to serve as a transit camp for mainly East European refugees until 1956. One of the original walls has remained preserved to this day, around which a memorial site was established in 1999. The artist Günter Stanzer conceived and designed the memorial as “clumsy memory” – alongside the commemorative stones made from the remnants of the wall in the ground, commemorative plaques with information are mounted on a concrete base, intended to call for conscious stopping and reading. The memorial site was comprehensively renovated in 2021.