Kreuzstadl Rechnitz

The Kreuzstadl stands at the southern edge of Rechnitz, a small town in Burgenland near the Hungarian border. Once a working farm building, it now serves as a memorial to the Rechnitz massacre of March 1945. The structure is protected by national heritage law. During the final months of the Second World War, about two hundred Hungarian Jews were held in the building after being judged unfit for labour. Late that night, members of the local Nazi party left a nearby party at Rechnitz Castle and walked to the Kreuzstadl, where they shot around one hundred and eighty people. Eighteen were spared to bury the dead, then killed the next day. Their grave was found in 1969, exhumed in 1970 and reburied in Graz. The bodies of the first group have never been located. The building’s name comes from its cross-shaped floor plan, with wide arched entrances at the east and west ends. These entrances once let harvest wagons drive straight through, but the eastern arch is the only one still open. The north and south doors are bricked up, and small barred windows remain in the stone walls. Inside, a sculpture by Kosso Eloul, an Israeli artist who also created the Eternal Flame at Yad Vashem, marks the memorial site. In 1993 the whole site was handed to the Vienna Jewish community as a place of remembrance.