St. Martin Camp

A town short of roofs

Villach is a railway junction, and from 1944 that made it a target. Fifty-two air attacks fell on the town, the worst of them on the railway installations on 25 July 1944; from November 1944 until the end of the war the air-raid alarm was near continuous. Some 1,300 houses were destroyed or badly damaged and about 300 inhabitants were killed. Few Austrian towns were harder hit from the air.

About 5,000 people were made homeless, and many of them were put into emergency dwellings and barrack camps which, in the city historian’s words, were characteristic of Villach for years afterwards. British tanks entered the town on 8 May 1945. The barracks that housed displaced people therefore stood in a town where a large part of the Austrian population was itself living in huts, and the competition for building materials and permanent housing shaped everything that followed.

The earlier Villach camps

UNRRA Team 336 administered five Villach camps: Bauleitung, Judendorf, Völkendorf, Magdalene and Piccolo. The neighbouring team, 330, worked at Spittal an der Drau.

A contemporary United Nations document independently describes Bauleitung and four other camps as a combined administrative group in February 1946. This matters when reading a record labelled simply “Villach”: the name can refer to a network of accommodation rather than one building.

The same document records a dispute over repatriation. The Byelorussian delegate accused the camp administration of obstructing people who wished to return to the Soviet Union. It is evidence of the political arguments surrounding the camps, rather than an impartial account of what every resident wanted. Its reported total of Soviet citizens is not a Ukrainian population figure.

Ukrainian life and education

Villach was one of the Ukrainian centres of the British zone. Its educational activities included an elementary school, vocational schools and a folk university: organised adult education alongside schooling for children. These institutions are documented for the Villach community; the available account does not assign each school to a particular barracks or to St. Martin itself.

The surviving population table records 871 Ukrainians under “Villach” in September 1948 and 426 under “St. Martin” in June 1950. Both figures describe Ukrainians within the relief system. They are separate snapshots under different place labels, so subtracting them would not establish how many residents emigrated from St. Martin.

The same table shows how large a share of the zone St. Martin had become. The British zone of Austria held 1,527 Ukrainians in IRO accommodation on 30 September 1948 and 881 on 30 June 1950. By the later date the only Carinthian and Styrian places still returning Ukrainians were St. Martin with 426, Treffling with 196, Trofaiach with 145 and Spittal with 114 — so almost half the Ukrainians left in the whole British zone of Austria were at St. Martin. Villach itself had by then disappeared from the table as a separate label.

The work of leaving

A place in a camp did not automatically settle a family’s prospects. Recent research using IRO case files shows how officials assessed nationality, wartime history and eligibility for assistance. Families also had to negotiate separation, childcare and the admission rules of potential destinations.

One anonymised case follows a mother with three children from Feffernitz to registration at St. Martin in 1950. She had considered several destinations and faced uncertainty over the family’s classification. Later tracing correspondence records that she and the children reached Australia in 1951. This documents one route through the camp and its field office; the study does not identify the family as Ukrainian.

From barracks towards permanent homes

A 1953 aerial photograph locates St. Martin in Untere Fellach. Another records new residential blocks opening in July 1959.

Administrative records add another part of that picture. The Austrian State Archives holds the Interior Ministry’s refugee files, in which the Carinthian camps form their own group. St. Martin’s file, IV-2.10, covers repair work in 1949, accounts for IRO stocks in 1951–52 and descriptions of the camp, running to 1968. Its neighbours in the series are the files for Feffernitz, Fürnitz, the Jesuitenkaserne and Tessendorf barracks at Klagenfurt, Kellerberg, Seebach, Spittal an der Drau, Treffling, Viktring and Waidmannsdorf: the administrative map of refugee Carinthia in a single shelf-list.

Those files record the pattern that ended camp life across the province. Barracks were handed over, camps dissolved and replaced by houses and flats built with state credit — Treffling was wound up in 1951–52, Kellerberg in the same years, and building projects for refugee houses appear at Spittal from 1956. At St. Martin the new residential blocks of July 1959 belong to that programme. Villach cleared the last of its wartime barrack camps during the 1960s, and in 1973 Fellach was incorporated into the city.

The surviving record

The evidence is dispersed across several kinds of source: dated nationality returns, a contemporary diplomatic document, city-archive photographs, government accommodation files, local town history and later research into emigration cases. Together they distinguish the physical St. Martin camp from the broader Villach camp group and show both Ukrainian community life and the practical machinery of resettlement.