On Sunday, 11 May 2025, ceremonies commemorating the 80th anniversary of the Nazi camps’ liberation were held at the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria.

Eighty years later, this site of so much horror was filled with people and life to remember and celebrate the victory against death, against those who systematized the mass murder of political opponents and other ethnic groups they considered inferior.

In 2025, the Mauthausen Association and other camps organized a trip with more than two hundred people (Figure 1), including descendants of deportees and several groups of secondary school students from Catalan and Spanish high schools, to visit and participate in the commemorative events. I had the privilege of being among them.

Mauthausen is known as the camp of the Spanish prisoners because 9,000 to 10,000 Spanish Republicans were deported there—those who were defeated in the Civil War (1936-1939), who then fled to France only to face harsh conditions before continuing their fight against fascism in World War II. The camp network included brutal subcamps such as Gusen I, where the vast majority perished, and Hartheim Castle, where the Nazis conducted medical experiments and murdered people with disabilities.

Visiting these places reminds us what Nazism meant and how it systematized the extermination of thousands of people, who were first exploited for the war economy. Walking through them shows us the human dimension of the tragedy, from the dehumanization they suffered upon entering the camp—shaved, showered, and given clothes with a number that would identify them from that moment on. The conditions they endured, such as working in the quarry carrying forty or fifty-kilogram stones each day on their backs, climbing the 186 steps of death; and where people of all ages, sexes, and nationalities were brutally murdered and incinerated, so that nothing would remain of them and their stories.

But we must not only remember the victims and their suffering. Mauthausen (Figure 2) makes us reflect on how German society, but also a large part of the world’s population, considered ultraconservative or fascist dictatorship as a solution to overcome the effects of the 1929 crash and become great powers again.

Part of German and European society collaborated with Nazism and fascism, but a large part also showed indifference to how the dictatorship was imposed and policies were carried out. Those people, after World War II and the denazification process, became known as the “grey ones”—people who knew what was happening but did not stand against it, rather they tolerated it indirectly. At Mauthausen and Gusen we see this very clearly: surrounding the camps are idyllic landscapes with houses and families who on Sundays walked through these areas and saw and smelled the burned flesh from the crematoriums.

As people who teach, it should also surprise us how some museographies, such as those at Hartheim Castle, still emphasize the idea that Nazism was the product of Hitler and a group of leaders, and what happened was their fault, ignoring the direct or indirect participation of the societies of origin. Forgetting this means that today we are not aware of the dangers of hate speech that calls for deportation, for the imposition of order by cutting rights… defended by far-right parties and even linked to neo-Nazism, such as Alternative for Germany. These parties are destroying the memory of this period to impose a new narrative that trivializes what happened. An example of this was the demolition of the historic Linz station, where deportees sent to Mauthausen got off the train, to build a dehumanized space that does not challenge us with the past. Another example is the construction of an elevator inside the Mauthausen camp, which under the justification of facilitating access, intends to hide how these camps were built to kill the people interned there.

Explaining the complexity of the past to young people should allow us to fight against the hate speech that is increasingly present on social networks and aimed at Generation Z to socialize ultraconservative discourses that defend LGBTIphobia, sexism, historical denialism, and climate change denial. Humanizing content about this period and giving specific examples of people who suffered in the camps fosters historical empathy. For example, José Alcobierre, a 14-year-old boy from Aragon, was deported to Mauthausen along with his father, Miguel, who was murdered on 24 January 1941, at Gusen I.

“Take care of yourself, my son” was the last thing that Miguel said to his son the last time he saw him. That child, who was left alone there, survived thanks to the solidarity of the deportees who organized themselves to resist the terror, because solidarity, struggle, and hope can overcome horror, as they proved in 1945.

While many were able to return home at the end of World War II, most of the Spanish Republicans, due to Franco’s dictatorship, could not, and had to rebuild their lives far from their homes. In France they were recognized as heroes of the Resistance. Many of those who returned to Spain had to assume the narrative of silence, keeping quiet so as not to be singled out and also not to transmit the traumatic memory of the camps to their descendants.

Today, little by little, we are recovering these stories. Civil associations like the Mauthausen Association and other memorial groups began to study and explain this story, and today there are many teachers who work on democratic memory in the classroom and do research with their students on the lives of local deportees. For example, the Teachers in Democratic Memory promote placing golden cobblestones, the Stolpersteine, throughout the Catalan area to remember these people.¹

In conclusion, as teachers we have a duty: to explain the world in which we live, but to understand it we must know where we come from. Therefore, remembering World War II and everything it meant helps us to make young people aware of the dangers of certain discourses, critical of the injustices of our environment, and to become involved in building a better society. Only eighty years have passed.