Asten Camp

From wartime camp to postwar home

The original compound was established in summer 1941 for people displaced from eastern and southeastern Europe. The parish history recalls as many as 26 nationalities and more than 3,000 residents at certain times across the camp’s history. These broad figures describe successive populations, not the number of Ukrainians in the postwar camp.

The parish history describes it as a large resettlement camp for people forcibly moved and for refugees from eastern and south-eastern Europe, its nationalities reaching from Lithuania to Yugoslavia. Before the war the parish had held steadily just under 600 souls; the camp changed the character of the place.

By the UNRRA period, Asten was a place where relief work and ordinary family routines happened side by side. Its surviving photographic record includes a community garden, greenhouses, children’s practical education and shared meals. The records show a residential community as well as an administrative stop in the displacement system.

Numbers, teams and administration

The International Tracing Service’s alphabetical list of displaced persons camps in Austria carries three Asten entries: a camp numbered 100, still named on 7 February 1951; a camp numbered 117; and an entry against Team 339, recorded in May 1947. All three sit under Area Team II at Linz on the Danube.

Austrian administration used the second of those numbers. Through the 1950s the provincial government carried the place as DP-Wohnsiedlung 117, Asten, and later as Durchgangslager 117, a transit camp; the numbering survives in the province’s resettlement files from 1952 to the settlement’s dissolution.

The Ukrainian community

A church report dated 12 February 1947 recorded 300 Byzantine-rite faithful in the Asten DP camp. It placed them within a regional congregation of 3,100 served through the Diocese of Linz. The report describes clergy supported by diocesan charity and church registers kept centrally in Linz, connecting the camp with a wider Ukrainian religious network.

Later IRO returns counted 361 Ukrainians in Asten on 30 September 1948 and 149 on 30 June 1950. These are dated nationality counts. They differ from the church figure in both date and definition, and they do not identify where each departing person went.

The report was written by Myron Hornykewytsch, the first vicar general of the Byzantine ordinariate, to Cardinal Tisserant at the Congregation for the Oriental Churches. It counted 26 clergy for Upper Austria under the dean, Emilian Stasiuk, of whom nineteen were married, six single and one a widower, with one deacon; their keep came from the diocesan Caritas at between 150 and 250 schillings a month. Liturgy was celebrated in Linz in the old cathedral with a mixed choir, and elsewhere in the parish churches where the priests lived. About a hundred Orthodox Ukrainians in Linz had no priest of their own and attended the Catholic service.

Growing food and learning

UNRRA’s photographic captions give an unusually concrete picture of daily work. Teenagers spent part of their school time tending the community garden. The activity combined practical lessons with a relief campaign to conserve food and increase production inside DP camps.

Other captions record greenhouses and a discussion between a welfare officer and the chief gardener. Yugoslav women and children also appear in the series, reflecting the camp’s mixed population. Gardening was shared work undertaken amid the food shortages of postwar Austria.

One caption names the UNRRA welfare officer at Asten as Lindsay, an Australian, discussing the prospects of the hot houses with his chief gardener.

A photograph captioned Christmas 1949 shows residents gathered around tables in a decorated dining room. An undated photograph records a wooden camp church. Together they preserve spaces for celebration and worship alongside the everyday work described in the relief archive.

Life in settlement 117

The provincial files show an institution with its own civil life. The settlement had kindergartens, a Jewish camp committee whose members were elected, a hut built for ritual slaughter, film shows put on by a travelling company, language courses for people preparing to emigrate, a mother-and-baby advice centre and a gendarmerie post. Residents held leases for a canteen, a dental surgery, a cinema, a fruit shop and a garage, and the local sports club ATSV Asten rented ground inside the settlement.

Health was a persistent problem. A 1953 return of illness in the Upper Austrian settlements records 119 residents of Asten as tubercular. A barrack fire in 1954 has its own file. Tension between groups of residents appears in the papers more than once, including between Yugoslav and other residents and among the Ukrainians of the camp.

Departures and new arrivals

Recollections collected by DP camps.org describe families leaving Asten for Canada, the United States and Australia. One former resident remembers Ukrainian and Polish families settling in Winnipeg. These accounts establish individual routes out of the camp; they do not provide a complete destination breakdown.

The population continued to change after the early overseas departures. The Upper Austrian archive catalogues 1952 records concerning the transfer of Jewish residents from Wels to Asten and the reception of Jewish refugees from Vienna’s Rothschild hospital. Asten therefore remained part of a network of accommodation and transfers within Austria.

Asten also became a place of departure for other camps. An emigration office of the resettlement department was set up there, with its own X-ray equipment and international vaccination books, and it was later moved away again. From the middle 1950s the transit camp kept monthly summaries of arrivals and departures alongside statistics of emigration.

The camp’s longer life

The 1952 administrative files include a description of settlement 117 alongside the larger settlement at Haid. Such records show that Asten’s history continued beyond the main 1940s displacement years. The parish account records the final departures in 1963, after which the surrounding community increasingly grew as a residential area for workers employed around Linz.

The settlement was handed to the justice administration in 1963 and formally dissolved the following year; a short history of it was written into the closing file. Meanwhile the industry of Linz, and the steelworks and nitrogen works in particular, drew workers who tired of commuting and settled in Asten. The population grew tenfold, and the old parish church of 1724 to 1735, with its 200 seats, was too small; a new church was consecrated on 28 November 1982.

The most useful surviving evidence describes different parts of that history: IRO returns count Ukrainians, church reporting records a religious community, relief photographs document daily activities, and provincial files follow later housing administration. Read together, they show how a temporary camp became a home for years.

What survives for a researcher

The Upper Austrian provincial archive holds the resettlement files, and its catalogue names several kinds of record that identify people: lists of residents’ names, the electoral registers drawn up for the settlement councils in 1953, which give name, date of birth and sometimes the barrack lived in, monthly returns of arrivals and departures, and lists of blood donors. The files themselves are not digitised.

For the Greek Catholic community the 1947 report gives a plain direction: the registers for the whole province were kept only in Linz.