Lehen Camp

The buildings before 1945

Salzburgwiki records that the Lager Lehen was built by the German Wehrmacht, probably as a barracks for Pioneer Battalion 85, the unit for which the Glasenbach camp, later Camp Marcus W. Orr, was also put up. The site by the Glanbach was then used as Heimatkraftfahrpark XVIII, a home motor transport depot. The refugee camp was therefore an existing military installation rather than a purpose-built settlement.

Salzburg’s housing emergency

Salzburg’s population rose from 68,000 in 1938 to 112,000 by 1945, and in September 1945 about 30,000 people were living in hotels and huts. Lehen was one of a series of camps in the city, alongside the Rositen barracks, Riedenburg, Glasenbach, Hagenau, Hellbrunn and Lexenfeld. Barrack housing outlasted the camps: 6,794 people were still in 666 huts across the province in 1959.

A mixed refugee community

Many of the Danube Swabians had come from what is now Serbia. They were German-speaking people displaced from communities outside Germany and Austria. Their presence gave Lehen a strong community identity, but the camp was not exclusively theirs.

In September 1945 the Salzburger Nachrichten reported that the office of the Muslim religious community was at Lager Lehen 12 and called on Muslims in Salzburg and the surrounding area to register with it. The camp was thus in use as an address for organised religious life within weeks of the war ending.

Stebelsky’s Table 5 of Ukrainians in the PCIRO or IRO camps of Austria records 189 people at Lehen on 30 September 1948 and 16 on 30 June 1950, within an American zone total that fell from 2,869 to 1,171. These figures count Ukrainians, not everyone living in the camp. Their decline shows the changing size of this community without identifying each person’s destination.

The Soviet repatriation mission

On 16 December 1949 the Soviet repatriation mission in the American zone of Austria advertised in the Salzburger Tagblatt that a new Russian film, announced as “They are returning to their homeland”, would be shown in a circuit of camps. Lehen was on the list, with a screening on 26 December, alongside Asten, Wels, the DP hospital at Linz, Glasenbach, the mission’s own house at the Kasererhof in Salzburg and the Rositen barracks.

The advertisement was addressed to Soviet citizens. It shows that Lehen was still counted among the camps holding people the Soviet authorities claimed at the end of 1949, six months before the Ukrainian count there fell to sixteen. That claim was not the same as a resident’s own account of nationality, and the source does not say who attended.

A football ground between the barracks

Camp residents established Danubia, a football club named after the Danube. Its formal approval came in July 1948, but refugee status complicated participation: Austrian citizens had to support the founding application, and the team’s 1949–50 results initially did not count in the official championship table. Full membership followed in 1950. In November 1949 the club played the ATSV Liefering at the camp itself.

Players remembered a rough gravel pitch crossed by a footpath. They marked its lines with sawdust and shared training days with ASV Blau-Weiß; American soldiers sometimes used it for baseball. Equipment was scarce. Each player took his kit home to wash, and the ground had a cold-water trough rather than showers. Simple benches were set out for spectators on match days.

Worship and relief across the camp network

Lehen also formed part of the Croatian Catholic relief and pastoral network. The parish’s institutional history names it alongside Siezenheim, Puch and Hellbrunn among the camps served. Organised Croatian pastoral care in Salzburg took shape in 1948, and Caritas Croata began publishing a monthly religious periodical in 1949. These were shared institutions reaching several refugee communities rather than services confined to Lehen.

Salzburg was also the publishing centre of the Ukrainian emigration in Austria. The weekly Novi Dni and the daily Ostanni Novyny both began there in September 1945, the Ukrainian Central Relief Union in Austria issued its Visnyk from June 1946, and the Plast scouting journals Nash Shliakh and Skob appeared in the city. These are places of publication, and no title is recorded as produced inside Lehen camp.

One direct archival trace of the camp survives in the IRO records now in the Archives nationales de France, where a file of documents concerning the camp at Lehen covers May 1948 and February 1950, alongside files on Parsch, Glasenbach and Hellbrunn.

Leaving the barrack community

Emigration to Germany and overseas depleted Danubia’s playing numbers. By 1957 it could sometimes field only seven or eight players, and its old ground was no longer available. The club dissolved that July and joined FC Salzburg; the resulting Salzburg-Danubia name carried part of the camp community’s history into the city’s sporting life.

A motor vehicle firm later occupied the camp’s ground. A reunion in Salzburg in 1989 brought former players and supporters together again, and the association’s later publication preserved their recollections and a map distinguishing the camp from the nearby military barracks.