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Holocaust Memorial, Judenplatz, Vienna
Concrete reminder of nazi atrocities against Jews during WWII
[Thomas Ledl/Creative Commons]

RIGHT in the heart of Vienna sits Judenplatz (Jewish Square), an area where Jews began to settle in about 1150.

Eight hundred lived there by 1400, including merchants, bankers and scholars. But the pogroms instigated by Duke Albrecht V in 1421, culminating in the last 200 being burned alive on a pyre, obliterated the Jewish presence for the next two centuries.

That obliteration resumed just over 500 years after Judenplatz got its name and eight months after Austria’s Anschluss (“reunification”) with Nazi Germany.

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