The article deals with major aspects of the National Socialist history at the Austrian mining town of Eisenerz in Styria. The Nazis carried out an immense push of modernization within the mining industry and the town and employed massively foreign and forced labourers, prisoners of war and concentration camp inmates. In this context, a massacre perpetrated on 3 000 Hungarian Jews on the morning of April 7, 1945 - the worst crime committed in Styria during the Nazi era – still has to be seen as an instance of utmost importance, though after the end of World War II and sentencing of the murderers this fact was not faced any more at Eisenerz: Most people knew about this atrocity, but kept quiet about the actual extent of the massacre, which will be discussed and interpreted here from the point of view of "modernism and barbarism", "remembering and forgetting" and finally "guilt and shame".