Memorial Forest for 65,000 murdered Jewish citizens of Vienna

In 1987, 400 students planted 65,000 trees in memory of the Viennese Jewish women and men murdered by the NS regime in Essling, at the request of the city of Vienna. The idea to establish a memorial forest in Vienna came from the Bund sozialdemokratischer Juden – Avoda, especially from Anne Kohn-Feuermann, the president of the federation, who also served as the Kultusvorstand of the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde. The site selected by the city administration formed a gap in the planned green belt around Vienna. The memorial forest not only represents a symbolic gesture of remembrance, but also fulfills an ecological function. It covers an area of about seven hectares. The planting began on April 9, 1987. The then mayor, Helmut Zilk, planted the first tree. The ceremony was also attended by Paul Grosz, president of the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde, Oberrabiner Paul Chaim Eisenberg, and the Israeli diplomatic representative Gideon Yarden. Historically, the selected area had no significance for the deportation and annihilation of the Jewish population, in contrast to the Aspangbahnhof in the 3rd district (often confused with Aspern), from which the SS organized the deportations of the Jewish population, particularly to the extermination camps Auschwitz, Maly Trostinec, and Sobibor. Although the memorial forest was built on part of the former Aspern airfield, where German SS leaders arrived on March 12, 1938, during the "Anschluss," this aspect played no discernible role in the selection of the site. About a year after the planting began, on May 30, 1988, Mayor Helmut Zilk opened the memorial forest with the unveiling of a memorial stone on a clearing in the woods. With this memorial stone, the scale of antisemitic violence during the NS period was for the first time more precisely named in the Viennese cityscape. In 2017, as part of the development of the Seestadt Aspern, a project to enhance and maintain the memorial forest was carried out. A new bridge into the Aspern memorial forest was also built, on which the historical dimensions of the site are thematized. In addition to the German inscription, there is also an inscription in Hebrew.