Kufstein Camp

From emergency relief to a settled camp

The French Diplomatic Archives identify Kufstein as one of four camps opened in Tyrol in May 1945. American forces handled the initial repatriations before French units arrived in July. UNRRA provided accommodation, food and medical care for those it assisted, working at Kufstein as Team 199.

A September 1945 report associated with UNRRA Team 199 recorded 3,262 displaced people at Kufstein. Later research describes a community including Russian emigrants, Jews, Poles, Ukrainians and Romanians, with ethnic German refugees also living alongside displaced people. A single national label would miss much of the camp’s history.

Counted, screened and sent on

UNRRA’s own Austrian files show what that administration looked like on paper. A registration list of Yugoslavs at camp Kufstein runs to 180 people, described as Yugoslav and Russian, and records for each of them a name, a date of birth, a place of residence, a religion and a trade. It is the kind of document from which a camp population was managed, rationed and sorted.

A second list, dated 10 May 1946, names ninety-seven Poles leaving camp Kufstein the following day for repatriation to Poland, with dates and places of birth and the destination each was going to. Repatriation eastwards was the first business of the camps, and for Poles from what had become Soviet territory, and for Ukrainians from the Soviet Union, it was also the thing most to be avoided.

Living, learning and worshipping in the barracks

Surviving photographs place everyday life within a recognisable settlement of low buildings, paths and open spaces. Views of a kindergarten record children gathered for activities, while photographs of a Russian Orthodox church show a dedicated space for worship. The church images document that congregation; they do not establish a Ukrainian parish.

Accounts collected for Kufstein’s municipal history project recall sparse living conditions and health supervision. Children were regularly examined before being allowed to attend school. Those memories show how the routines of family life were shaped by the camp’s medical administration.

The camp has since been written into the town’s own history. The fifth volume of the Edition Kufstein, published in 2022 by three historians of the University of Innsbruck working with the city archive, treats Kufstein’s migration between 1930 and 2000 as a single subject: the South Tyrolean optants who arrived from 1939, the displaced people who ended up in the Weißach camp after the war, and the labour migrants recruited from Yugoslavia and Turkey from the 1970s. It draws on thirty-five interviews.

The Ukrainian community in numbers

Ukrainians were a substantial minority within this mixed settlement. The return for 30 September 1948 counted 464, compared with 123 on 30 June 1950. The two figures describe Ukrainian residents at those dates. They are separate from the 1945 total, which covered the camp’s displaced population across nationalities.

Set beside the other camps of the French zone of Austria, Kufstein was the second largest Ukrainian community in the zone on both dates. The zone held 2,006 Ukrainians on 30 September 1948 — Landeck 1,161, Kufstein 464, Vorkloster 255, Wörgl “A” 85 and Hötting 41 — and 520 on 30 June 1950, of whom Landeck had 339, Kufstein 123, Hötting 31 and Vorkloster 27. Almost a quarter of the Ukrainians still in the zone in 1950 were at Kufstein.

The changing numbers place Kufstein within the wider Austrian network of Ukrainian communities, alongside Landeck, Innsbruck and camps in the other western occupation zones. Moving through this network could precede departure from Europe; arrival in Kufstein was not itself overseas resettlement.

Waiting for a country of settlement

An emigration office in the camp helped arrange onward journeys. Interviews collected by the city’s history project remember routes to Canada and New Zealand. These recollections explain why administrative offices were as important to camp residents as the barracks in which they lived.

A publicly shared family archive records a different route: arrival in October 1945, years of waiting, and departure for the United States in July 1949. It also recalls a Venezuelan recruitment visit in 1947. These examples illustrate several possibilities considered by residents rather than a single destination shared by the camp.

What remained after the emigration years was a residual population that no scheme would take, and the camp changed its character accordingly. Its buildings came to be known simply as the Flüchtlingshäuser, the refugee houses — no longer an assembly centre but housing on the edge of an Austrian town.

What survives of Kufstein Camp

The former camp buildings were demolished in 2005, according to research drawing on the city archivist’s assistance. Its history now survives across official records, family photographs and memories collected locally.

The Tyrol State Archive lists an identity-card index for the Kufstein UNRRA refugee camp beginning in 1945. The French Diplomatic Archives preserve the occupation administration’s displaced-persons files, and UNRRA’s Austria Mission records, now indexed by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, hold the camp’s registration and repatriation lists. Together with photographs and population returns, these collections document different aspects of a settlement whose buildings have disappeared.