The author was commissioned to build the education department at the Mauthausen Memorial in 2007. Through research and workshops, the author developed a work plan with three areas: developing educational content and concepts; recruiting and training educational staff; and cooperating with schools. Over six years, the author helped grow the education department to around 100 employees, established guides training programs, created educational software, and secured additional EU funding to further develop memorial education programs.

1. How I built the Mauthausen Memorial Education Department
In June 2007 I was commissioned by the Austrian Minister of Interior - who is responsible for the
Mauthausen Memorial - to build up the education department at the Mauthausen Memorial. I
started out on my own, with no defined budget nor employees. When I left the Memorial in June
2013 the education department employed close to 100 people.
The first step was to gather information, on the basis of which I developed a work plan. I
commissioned a research on the situation of educational departments in six major memorial sites,
in order to assess the challenges and the ways in which these challenges are addressed.
The research served as the basis of a workshop I convened in Vienna, to which the directors of
several educational departments were invited. The workshop was instrumental in creating my work
plan in two ways: 1. in defining what needs to be done; 2. in receiving the necessary institutional
recognition for the, which I needed in order to get funding and support.
The work plan defined three areas: the need to development educational contents, for which an
educational concept was necessary; the recruitment and training of educational staff; and the
cooperation with the school system. In the autumn of 2008 a group of relevant experts (working in
museums, in schools, in teacher education and in memorial sites) was gathered and given the task
of developing the educational concept.
By this time I managed to recruit two employees - Dr. Maria Ecker and Dr. Christian Angerer, both
of whom brought rare expertise in the theory and practice of the subject matted - to work with me in
building up the system. Together with the aforementioned experts we worked until the summer of
2009 and developed the Mauthausen Memorial educational concept. The concept has since been
published in several professional publications, and served as the basis for the guides training.
In the meantime the recruiting of guides began. The concept for the guides’ training was developed
together with my two co-workers, Maria and Christian, and implemented by the three of us. By
2013 three trainings took place, each starting out with ca. 36 potential guides. A public tender for
interested people would be published in spring, with the training beginning in June and ending in
April of the following year. The training consists of 7 sessions of 11 hours each, taking place on the
weekends up until February. From February until April the participants practice working with actual
visitors’ groups.
The third component of the work plan was the cooperation with the school system. Additional
employees were recruited in order to coordinate the visits of schools and to help the teachers plan
their visit appropriately. A special soft ware was developed in order to simplify the coordination of
some 3,300 groups and some 100 guides. In order to enhance the educational process and
integrate the visit into the school curricula a program for the preparation of the students before the
visit was developed. Maria, Christian and myself cooperated with teachers’ training institutions
throughout Austria and offered seminars for both teachers and students of education.
In order to enable this system, additional employees were recruited for the administration, training
and support of the guides. In 2012 I applied for funding to the EU “Europe for Citizens” program,
with a project aimed to deepen our investments in the research and implementation of education at
memorial sites. I was granted the maximum 100,000 Euro, which together with the local funding
amounted to 144,000 Euro for a project that lasted 21 months. I continued to lead this project also
after leaving my post of director of the education department in June 2013, and brought it to
completion in October 2014. This project is described in a separate part of my profile here.