Deep in the heart of Graz, people once feared for their lives. The tunnel system in the Schlossberg served as the city’s largest air-raid shelter during World War II. An insight into largely hidden relics of the Nazi era.
“The worst incident happened when a pram fell over during a night raid in March 1945,” says contemporary historian Barbara Stelzl-Marx from the University of Graz. Several people fell. Seven adults and one child were kicked to death on the way down the Schlossberg tunnel, which was supposed to protect them.
Knowing about such events, he goes into the darkness with a strange feeling. The flashlights feel the contours of the raw, slightly damp rock faces of the Jahnstollen, here and there a bat is hanging. Inside the Graz Schlossberg it is around eight degrees Celsius all year round. This is hardly noticeable in winter with padded coats and sturdy shoes. Anyone who fled here in the summer months of the last two years of the Second World War may have been frozen. “People hurriedly took their most important items with them in suitcases and backpacks and, if possible, food and drinks. Then we waited anxiously for many hours,” says Stelzl-Marx, who also heads the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Research on the Consequences of War.
–
