LEOBERSDORF, Austria (AFP) — A few crumbling concrete blocks in an overgrown field are all that remains visible of what was once a sprawling Nazi forced labor complex around the Austrian town of Leobersdorf.

Now, plans to build a business park on the site of the former Mauthausen concentration camp, including a cold storage warehouse and branch of the discount supermarket chain Lidl, have sparked anger in the Alpine nation, which long neglected to address its Nazi past.

“For me, it’s a sad feeling, because a place burdened by history is being built over, sacrificed to the economy,” Erich Strobl, head of a local campaign to preserve part of the site, told AFP.

After Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938, the Weinberglager complex was used for thousands of prisoners of war and forced laborers.

It later included the Hirtenberg subcamp of the Mauthausen concentration camp — Austria’s second-largest women’s camp.

Around 400 women, mainly from the Soviet Union but also from Italy and Poland, were imprisoned at the Hirtenberg subcamp between September 1944 and April 1945 and forced to manufacture infantry munitions at a nearby factory complex.

Although some factory ruins survived, the camp barracks and most other structures were gradually demolished, repurposed or destroyed after the war.

But Bertrand Perz, a historian specializing in the Mauthausen camp, told AFP the Hirtenberg site remains “historically important,” partly because “women prisoners in Mauthausen have been marginalized in the culture of remembrance.”

Plans to build a business park on the plot about 40 kilometers (25 miles) south of Vienna, including on land that once formed part of the........

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