For 30 years, the Austrian government has been offering young people the chance to volunteer with organisations related to the Holocaust and Jewish life and culture, as an alternative to compulsory military or civil service.

Since the first volunteer went to work in the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in September 1992, 1,300 young people have taken part in the Gedenkdienst, or Austrian Holocaust Memorial Service programme.

That achievement was celebrated last month at a reception hosted by the Austrian parliament in the presence of Dani Dayan, chairman of the Jerusalem Holocaust museum Yad Vashem, and Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles.

The Holocaust Memorial Service was the brainchild of the Austrian political scientist Andreas Maislinger, and founded a year after then-Chancellor Franz Vranitzky formally acknowledged Austria’s role as a perpetrator of the Holocaust, abandoning the myth that the country was the “first victim of National Socialism”.

Foreign minister Alexander Schallenberg described Gedenkdienst as an “expression of Austria’s historical responsibility” for the Holocaust, with the volunteers serving as “bearers of and ambassadors for a new Austria” that has acknowledged its role in Nazi crimes.

Since 1992, volunteers have been sent to serve not only in Holocaust museums and institutions of Jewish culture but also with social services organisations such as Jewish Care’s Holocaust Survivors’ Centre in Golders Green.

Jacob Anthony Bauer volunteered with two different institutions: the Tom Lantos Institute, a human and minority rights organisation in Budapest, and the Cape Town Holocaust and Genocide Centre in South Africa.

Mr Bauer’s great-great-aunt was a victim of Nazi persecution, sent to a psychiatric facility near Vienna and murdered as part of the “Aktion T4” euthanasia programme.

As a young Austrian, though he said he did not feel guilt per se, Mr Bauer said he felt “a certain responsibility” for the past, and that Gedenkdienst gave him the opportunity to acknowledge that.

He recalled that in Budapest he witnessed far-right skinheads assembling for a rally, a sight Mr Bauer said strengthened his resolve to live out the mantra “never again” through his volunteer work.

Felix Loidl, another alumnus of the service, volunteered at the Galicia Jewish Museum in Krakow, Poland. He said that Gedenkdienst afforded him the opportunity “to show that I, as a young Austrian, care about the atrocities that were committed” by the Nazis and the coming to terms with that awful past.

Beyond the practical side of overseas service in Holocaust museums and Jewish institutions — from guiding German-speaking tour groups to translating German language archival documents — Mr Loidl said one should not underestimate the Gedenkdienst’s “symbolic power”.

Mr Dayan, on his first visit to Austria, signed a cooperation agreement with the Austrian parliament that will enable the two institutions to work together on joint educational initiatives concerning antisemitism, discrimination and democracy.