Hötting Camp

The Ukrainian residents

Ihor Stebelsky’s Table 5 of Ukrainians in the PCIRO or IRO camps of Austria lists Hötting in both of its columns: 41 Ukrainians on 30 September 1948 and 31 on 30 June 1950. The figures come from returns of the IRO Field Service Office in Salzburg held in the Archives nationales de France. They count a nationality, not families and not everyone accommodated on the site.

The same table gives 2,006 Ukrainians in the French zone of Austria on 30 September 1948 and 520 on 30 June 1950, with much larger groups at Landeck and Kufstein. Hötting was one of the small entries in that list. Its inclusion matters because the settlement pattern extended beyond the best-known assembly centres to modest communities attached to established towns.

Within the French occupation zone

Archival research by Julia Maspero places Hötting among the camps administered by the French authorities rather than UNRRA during the early occupation. In spring 1946 UNRRA’s direct camp responsibility in the zone was concentrated on Kufstein and Landeck. Management arrangements therefore differed even between camps sheltering people with similar displaced-person status.

The Wörgl museum exhibition, listing the Tyrolean camps that UNRRA organised, names Landeck, Haiming, Kematen, Kufstein and Wörgl A, and does not include Hötting. The two accounts agree in leaving Hötting outside the UNRRA camp network, even though its residents later appear in IRO nationality returns.

Ukrainian life in Tyrol

The Ukrainian population of the province was far larger than any one camp. Tyrol counted almost 10,000 Ukrainians in the postwar years, more than 7,000 of them Greek Catholic, and in 1947 eighteen priests served them. Most were pushed onward to North America and Australia by conditions in Austria, so the Ukrainian population of the province fell sharply during the 1950s.

The organised centre of that community lay elsewhere in Tyrol. Landeck had a Greek Catholic deanery that published the weekly Nedilni Visti from October 1945 to August 1947, and the daily Taborovi Visti ran there from June 1945 to June 1947. Innsbruck itself was a student centre: the journals Na Varti from September 1945, Stezhi from June 1946, Studentskyi Shliakh and Zveno were published in the city, and the IRO archive holds a file on a student centre at Innsbruck covering June 1949 to June 1950.

None of those titles or institutions is recorded as belonging to Hötting camp. They describe the town and the province around it, and they show what the small group counted at Hötting could reach on foot or by post.

Huts that became long-term homes

Bomb damage, a rising population and requisitioned apartments intensified Innsbruck’s housing shortage: the city held about 91,000 people in 1945 and about 99,000 in 1947. At Hötting temporary accommodation endured. Twelve huts housed 135 households in 1957, and 65 households remained in 1960. Sanitary conditions were poor.

The Hungarian rising of autumn 1956 brought a further wave of refugees, and the Innsbruck camps were used to house them before most emigrated to North America or Australia. The final 68 ethnic-German refugee families were rehoused around 1964, when the remaining huts were demolished.

The camp entrance

The city archive’s photograph shows a sign identifying the refugee camp above the entrance. Long timber buildings line the passage, with stove pipes rising above the roofs and fencing along the frontage. It preserves the scale and materials of accommodation that could easily disappear behind a population total. The archive does not supply an exact date for the photograph.