Lexenfeld Camp

A camp built for Ukrainians

The National Socialist regime closed the missionaries’ private gymnasium in 1938, intending to turn the buildings into a school of its own. A barracks camp was then laid out on part of the grounds and on neighbouring land for refugees from Ukraine, and Ukrainians were also housed in the school building itself. Seventeen huts had been built by 1943.

The camp that the Americans inherited in May 1945 was therefore not improvised for the postwar emergency. It had been put up for people fleeing westwards ahead of the Red Army, and part of its population simply stayed on when the war ended.

Making a home in the barracks

The eyewitness account describes families sharing barrack rooms, with blankets or sheets hung up to create a little privacy. Communal kitchens issued rations at fixed hours, while residents took turns cleaning and attended evening announcements. Elementary teaching continued despite a shortage of books.

A Ukrainian committee registered new arrivals, arranged ration claims and applied for travel permits. It also brought together singers, dancers and musicians. These functions linked basic household survival with collective cultural life; they were part of the Salzburg community described across both principal camps.

Camp life was also shaped from outside. From 21 September 1945 anyone not in military service who wore Allied uniform had to wear an armband lettered D. P. In February 1946 the American military government ordered the registration of every displaced person and refugee in Salzburg who was not living in a camp, and from August 1946 displaced people in the American zone of Austria came under the same labour-service rules as Austrian citizens, with exemptions only for those persecuted on racial, political or religious grounds. In March 1947 the provincial governor appealed to the Salzburg press to report on displaced people fairly and to stop repeating that they were all work-shy.

School and scouting

Lexenfeld had a Ukrainian high school. Its teachers helped establish Plast, the Ukrainian scouting movement, as an activity for young people outside the classroom. Because American authorities initially prohibited new youth organisations, Salzburg’s recognised Austrian scouts sponsored the Ukrainian units as part of their own organisation while allowing them to conduct their own activities.

A record from the Austrian side supplies a precise early encounter: the Maxglan scout group’s chronology records a Christmas celebration with Ukrainian exile scouts at Lexenfeld on 26 December 1945. This was a practical local relationship as well as an administrative arrangement.

The Ukrainian gymnasium continued into the later 1940s. The Encyclopedia of Ukraine documents attendance there in 1947–1949 in its account of a former pupil. Schooling formed part of the community’s preparation for a future that increasingly lay outside Austria.

How many Ukrainians

The clearest figure for the camp itself comes from the IRO’s own returns. On 30 September 1948 Lexenfeld held 976 Ukrainians — more than any other camp in Austria, and more than half of the 1,863 counted in Salzburg’s camps that day, the rest of them at Hellbrunn. Austria as a whole held 6,402.

By 30 June 1950 Lexenfeld had gone from the table altogether. Hellbrunn was down from 887 to 58, Wegscheid had appeared with 191, and the Austrian total had fallen to 2,572. The Ukrainian community at Lexenfeld had left within those twenty-one months.

The United Ukrainian American Relief Committee’s 1948 statistical report places Salzburg under the US zone and records 4,636 Ukrainians: 3,093 in camps and 1,543 outside camps. Its categories make visible a community divided between communal accommodation and private housing. These are Salzburg totals, not a count for Lexenfeld alone.

Getting out

Departure depended on quotas set far away, and the camps followed the news closely. When thirty displaced people were arrested by Italian police before boarding an IRO ship for Argentina and handed to the Soviet authorities, the residents of Salzburg’s camps went on a one-day hunger strike on 21 February 1948 and hung the camps with black flags.

The memorial panel at the site records that many Ukrainians left for Canada and the United States in 1949 and 1950, which is where the Ukrainian entry in the IRO returns disappears. For those who had still not gone, the American Displaced Persons Act of 1948 expired at midnight on 31 December 1951; people gathered outside the visa office in the Lehen barracks that evening, and about seventy were still waiting when the doors shut.

From Ukrainian camp to municipal housing

After 1945 the accommodation served several refugee populations in turn, including Ukrainians, Poles and ethnic Germans displaced from eastern and southeastern Europe. The gymnasium reopened in 1946, and in 1950 the missionaries took their school building back into use.

On 25 April 1953 the province of Salzburg took the camp over in order to convert it for housing, and the city undertook to put a hostel for the homeless and a kindergarten into it, as it had at the Guggenmoosstraße camp. An outpatient clinic for refugees and expellees opened at Lexenfeld on 30 June 1953, paid for by the National Catholic Welfare Conference with support from the provincial government, and the new municipal kindergarten opened on 10 September 1953.

The grounds returned to the missionaries in 1964 and the barracks were pulled down. The later municipal camp should not be mistaken for an unchanged Ukrainian community lasting twenty years: the Ukrainians had gone by 1950, and what followed was Austrian welfare housing on the same ground.

Remembering Lexenfeld

A memorial panel installed in 2005 and renewed in 2019 identifies the former camp beside today’s Herz-Jesu-Gymnasium. Its historical photograph shows dense rows of wooden huts; the accompanying account connects the school grounds, refugee accommodation and later redevelopment. The surviving marker preserves the camp’s position in the landscape after the barracks disappeared.