Foreign Correspondent: Uncovering a chapter of the Holocaust

Shot of Mark Corcoran in Vienna

MARK CORCORAN

Hello, I'm Mark Corcoran in the Austrian capital of Vienna. Our next story tonight is all about digging up the past, one woman's campaign to rediscover Vienna's 19th century Jewish heritage. But it's a quest that disturbs the ghosts of this city's Nazi past and also raises an unexpected Australian connection.Shot of tram going down city street in Vienna

MARK CORCORAN

Vienna is a city that celebrates its past. It's a splendid heritage, largely created during the 18th and 19th centuries.

Shot of horse-and-carriage driving down city street in Vienna

MARK CORCORAN

But there's a sense of collective amnesia over one era. A legacy that historian Tina Walzer is determined to reveal.

Shot of Tina Walzer walking into cemetery

TINA WALZER

We have about 30,000 people buried here, but what you can see actually is about 8,000 tombstones.Shot of neglected cemetery, overgrown with shrubs

MARK CORCORAN

This is Wahring Jewish Cemetery, a 20,000sqm wilderness in the heart of an obsessively tidy metropolis.

TINA WALZER

It's the most important Jewish cemetery in Vienna for the 19th century. and it's the place where all the important people, the key figures of the Industrial Revolution in Austria are buried.

MARK CORCORAN

Wahring closed in the 1880s. Within a lifetime there would be no-one left to mourn the dead.Archival photographs of Jewish Viennese in Nazi custody

MARK CORCORAN

200,000 Jews lived in Vienna when the Nazis came to power in the 1930. Those who didn't flee were sent off to the death camps. Only 700 survived in the city at the end of the war.

TINA WALZER

That's part of the reason why the cemetery's looking like this today, because you have to keep in mind that most of the families whose ancestors are buried here have been killed during the Holocaust, so they don't live anymore.

MARK CORCORAN

Ten years ago Tina Walzer arrived. A Jewish historian on a field trip.

Tina Walzer leads a tour group through the cemetery

MARK CORCORAN

She's never left, and now guides tour groups through her domain.

Tina Walzer speaks to the tour group in German

MARK CORCORAN

Her lobbying has finally paid off. After years of bureaucratic buck-passing, city and federal authorities have just agreed to fund a clean-up.

Shot of Mark Corcoran and Tina Walzer in cemetery

MARK CORCORAN

So this is a human remain?

TINA WALZER

Yes.

MARK CORCORAN

But the damage may already be done.

TINA WALZER

I'm not a doctor but I'd say that's part of a rib. That's how it looks to me.

MARK CORCORAN

Tina routinely finds human bones dug up but foxes that scavenge through the broken tombs.

TINA WALZER

I'll put it aside so nobody would step on it.

MARK CORCORAN

Constant vandalism prompted the construction of a wall topped with wire and broken glass.

TINA WALZER

If they are visitors for the guided tours at the cemetery, they say, 'Well, why does the Jewish community want the place to look like a concentration camp?' So this is what they associate with the barbed wire. Well, I turn the question around and say, 'Why is it necessary to fortify a Jewish cemetery in Vienna this way?'

MARK CORCORAN

Wahring may be forgotten but in Vienna's Judenplatz the memory of the Holocaust is very much alive.

Shot of Holocaust memorial in Vienna's Judenplatz

MARK CORCORAN

On this memorial only the death camps are listed. The dead remain anonymous. Austrian authorities claim that they've done much in recent years to help atone for the past. In addition to this memorial there are now two Jewish museums in the city. The Austrian government has established a fund to provide at least token compensation for the survivors and next of kin of Jewish families whose homes were seized in the war and never returned. But there are those who claim this is all too little too late, that the legacy of Vienna's Nazi past still lingers in these streets. Not only did the Nazis persecute the living, they pursued the dead. To prove their master race theories, Nazi anthropologists from the Vienna Museum of Natural History exhumed between 200 and 300 Jewish graves from Wahring.