Almost half the soldiers serving in World War I received their gunnery training on the parade ground of Bruckneudorf (in Hungarian: Királyhida) in the district of Neusiedl am See. The War Ministry had initiated the construction of a war memorial on this site in 1915, planned by the architect Emil Krause (1873–1937) according to the design of the Leipzig battle of the nations. With use of Russian POWs the tower-like construction – the largest memorial in the Vienna military commando area – was then built in 1915/16; inauguration took place in 1917. Bruckneudorf therefore gained the first memorial constructed in the area of today's Burgenland that generally commemorated "soldiers fallen in the World War" instead of soldiers specified by name.
The coloured shield of the Austro-Hungarian Donau monarchy with the associated coat of arms of Habsburg-Lothringen and the motto "indivisible and inseparable" was intended to instil in the soldiers undergoing training a sense of the unity of the monarchy.
The war memorial was redecorated  during the 1934-38 corporate state: the decorative painter Gottlieb Günther created a wall painting for the cupola of the consecrated room that no longer exists and unfortunately has not been reproduced in image form.