The Austrian city also intends to rename 3 other arteries with “dirty” names after the commission’s report.
The Austrian city of Linz has announced plans to rename a street after the discoverer of luxury carmaker Porsche after a commission investigating questionable names found its Nazi to be more than “problematic. “
Renaming streets and other public places remains a hotly debated factor in Austria, that of Adolf Hitler, which Nazi Germany annexed in 1938 and has long been portrayed as a victim.
Only in the last 3 decades did the country begin to read seriously about its role in the Holocaust, in which approximately one-third of Austria’s Jewish population of 200,000 was murdered.
The Porscheweg and 3 other streets in Linz were to be renamed, a city spokesman said on Thursday.
The city’s Senate had hoped to approve the replacement of the convocation this month, he added. New calls for the streets have not yet been decided.
In 2019, Linz, 185 km west of the Austrian capital, Vienna, asked a commission of six experts to investigate the city’s street names.
In its November report, the commission knew of 64 “problematic” names out of a total of 1,158.
They belonged to 61 men and 3 women who were at least members of the Nazi Party, if they were active supporters propagating Nazi ideology, according to the report.
Four men in particular have been anti-Semitic, joined by Austrian-born engineer Ferdinand Porsche, founder of the luxury car logo that bears his name.
“Porsche played a central role in the NS [National Socialism] war economy and actively promoted forced hard labor for prisoners of war and concentration camp inmates,” the city said in a statement, delivering the commission’s findings.
In doing so, Porsche “accepted his death and that of his young people due to the inhumane situations in the camps,” he added.
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Porsche did not immediately respond to a request for comment from AFP, but the company said in the Kurier newspaper that it did not change the call.
“In our view, erasing history in the public space does not lead to any social progress,” he said.
The other 3 names that the commission discovered, “contaminated”, and whose street names will be replaced, were those of the composer Hans Pfitzner, the artist Franz Resl and Bishop Johannes Maria Gföllner.
Many streets in Austria have been renamed or contextualized through plaques after being deemed racist, honoring anti-Semitic figures or polluted in a different way.
Streets referencing Porsche still exist in other parts of Austria.