Today, following many years of discussion on contents and design, the Austrian President Alexander Van der Bellen will open the Republic of Austria’s new memorial exhibition at the Auschwitz Memorial, together with the Polish Auschwitz survivor and President of the International Auschwitz Committee Marian Turski and a group of relatives and descendants of Austrian Auschwitz prisoners.

80 years after the first transports of Austrian prisoners to Auschwitz camp, the exhibition tells of the fates of Austrian Jews and the stories of the lives of people who were persecuted for many different reasons and deported to Auschwitz as prisoners. One of them was Hermann Langbein, later to become co-founder of the International Auschwitz Committee and pioneer in the Auschwitz Trials in Frankfurt. He was imprisoned as a member of the Austrian resistance against the Nazis and had to endure many years in Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp.
In Vienna Hannah Lessing, the Austrian Vice President of the International Auschwitz Committee, said:

"The exhibition is both a place of remembrance and a place of learning, and that is why it does not leave out the Austrian perpetrators who took part in the humiliation and murder of the prisoners in Auschwitz. Together with our Polish partners and the management of the Auschwitz Memorial, we are happy to be able to add a new chapter of remembrance, so that the memories of what happened in Auschwitz will never vanish with the last victims of National Socialism."