Brucker Lager

Which Bruck?

The camp belonged to the Bruckneudorf military training area beside Bruck an der Leitha. It was separate from the Kaisersteinbruch camp within the same broader training complex, and separate again from Bruck an der Mur in Styria, which lay in the British zone. The archive’s abbreviated place-name therefore refers to this eastern Austrian site.

The distinction matters because Kaisersteinbruch had its own numbered functions in the same months. It appears as repatriation camp 285 for former prisoners of war and forced labourers, and as camp 306 for internees described as state criminals, who were taken away at the beginning of May 1946. Numbers, dates and populations from one camp cannot be carried across to the other.

The camp before 1945

Emperor Franz Joseph I approved a permanent troop camp on 20 April 1866, and the so-called Brucker Lager was occupied on 8 January 1867. The new municipality of Bruckneudorf, Királyhida in Hungarian, was founded south of the Leitha in the same year with financial help from the town of Bruck an der Leitha. A new cavalry camp of 1873 allowed up to 10,000 men and 2,300 horses to be accommodated at once.

During the First World War the camp was enlarged again to hold up to 26,000 men, and the camp at Kaisersteinbruch was built in the same period. In 1935 construction of a tank barracks began within the Brucker Lager for the first Austrian armoured car battalion. These are military strengths, not displaced-person populations.

From 1938 the German Wehrmacht took over the training area, extended the exercise ground to 130 square kilometres and raised the accommodation capacity to 30,000 men. That inheritance of large, serviceable quarters explains how a whole transit population could be gathered on the site within weeks of the fighting ending.

Collection and transit point No. 198

After the Red Army took over the installations in April 1945 it began assembling former forced labourers from the east in the Brucker Lager. The camp was designated a collection and transit point for the reception of Soviet citizens. Correspondence of the NKVD troops guarding the rear areas of the Central Army Group, dated 20 July 1945, addresses the chairman of the NKVD screening and filtration commission at “Collection and Transit Point No. 198 Bruck (East)”, so the camp was a filtration site as well as a staging post.

How many people passed through is not settled. The archival reconstruction gives 6,000 from the Lower Austrian State Archive, 16,000 from the Burgenland State Archive and about 18,800 from the State Archive of the Russian Federation, and flags the source position as uncertain. None of these is a Ukrainian count; the Ukrainian evidence for this camp is the fact of the departure recorded in the security report, not a number.

The last transports of several thousand people left on 18 and 20 August 1945, after which no former forced labourers remained in the camp. The transit function therefore lasted about four and a half months.

Other camps at Bruck in the preceding months

The name Brucker Lager should not absorb the separate camps of the winter before. From autumn 1944 the Gau Niederdonau put 8,000 to 10,000 people to work on the South-East Wall fortifications at Bruck, among them 3,000 prisoners of war from Kaisersteinbruch. In October 1944 about 1,500 to 2,000 Hungarian Jews were quartered in barns in the town, and one of the Bruck camps stood at the Heidehof in Bruckneudorf municipality. Those camps were evacuated on 29 March 1945 and their dead are buried in a mass grave at the town cemetery, whose stone records 155 victims.

That forced-labour complex ended a week before the Soviet transit point began. The two must be kept apart in any record search, because both are catalogued under the place-name Bruck.

After the repatriation phase

The Red Army continued to use the training area, including the Brucker Lager, until 28 August 1955. The properties were declared German assets in 1946 and passed into USIA administration, the Soviet-run enterprise administration in eastern Austria.

A training area command for Bruckneudorf and Kaisersteinbruch was set up in 1956 and exercises resumed at the beginning of 1957. The ground was reduced from its wartime extent to 41.3 square kilometres. Troops of the new Austrian federal army moved back into the tank barracks on 13 March 1956, and in June 1967 the barracks was renamed the Benedek-Kaserne at the camp’s centenary. The site’s military history is much longer than its brief role in the movement of displaced people during 1945.