Right here is where a luxury hotel once stood, with Corinthian columns and a glass-covered dining hall. This was the Hotel Metropole, built in 1873 for the Vienna World Exhibition. After the Anschluss in March 1938, the Gestapo confiscated it from its Jewish owners.
On April 1, 1938, operations began at Morzinplatz 5. That same day, the first transport of Austrian prisoners left for Dachau. With a staff of 900, this became the largest Gestapo office outside Berlin.
Prisoners entered through the rear entrance on Salztorgasse and descended to the basement prison. Bruno Kreisky, later Chancellor of Austria, remembered his interrogation: "Half unconscious and covered in blood, I came back into the cell." 50,000 Viennese ended up in Gestapo files here.
What most people don't know: 80 percent of Gestapo agents were former Austrian policemen. They knew the city. They knew the people.
Allied bombs destroyed the building near war's end. The ruins were torn down. In 1985, survivors built the memorial you see using granite blocks from Mauthausen concentration camp. The inscription reads: "Here stood the House of the Gestapo. It was hell for those who believed in Austria." The Leopold Figl Hof building stands here now, at the corner of Morzinplatz and Salztorgasse.
Sources. Story: https://www.geschichtewiki.wien.gv.at/Gedenkst%C3%A4tte_Hotel_Metropole, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotel_Metropole,_Vienna Photos: Blackpool war memorial and the Metropole Hotel by Phil and Juliette Platt, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
