Treffling Camp

Who ran the camp

The British military administration ran Treffling and recruited its camp police from the residents themselves. George Bolton represented the British Red Cross at the camp and is remembered in the municipal history as the driving force behind its schooling and its theatre; he left Treffling in June 1947. UNRRA supplied the camp until 1947, after which the International Refugee Organisation took over supply and transport.

Rations were set above the level available to the surrounding Austrian population: about 2,000 kilocalories a day for displaced persons against about 1,500 for local civilians, with additional milk and chocolate rations for children. The British organised what the municipal account describes as a small municipality containing practically everything needed for daily life — piped water and electricity, a shop, washing barracks on concrete foundations, a large communal dining hall and a joinery workshop for repairs.

The Ukrainian community in the returns

Residents were housed by nationality, with separate barracks for each group. Among them were Reich Germans from Silesia and East Prussia, ethnic Germans from the Batschka and the Banat, and Russians, Croats, Serbs and Hungarians. The population fell from about 4,800 in 1946 to roughly 4,000 in 1947 and about 1,000 by 1950.

Ukrainian residents are documented in the IRO camp statistics reproduced by Ihor Stebelsky: 278 on 30 September 1948 and 196 on 30 June 1950. These figures refer specifically to Ukrainians. The total camp population was much larger and included several eastern European and German-speaking groups.

The later figure is especially useful because it falls just after the transfer to Austrian administration. It establishes continuing Ukrainian residence during the camp’s contraction, rather than merely a brief passage through Treffling immediately after the war.

A school among the huts

Education became a major undertaking. The municipal history counts about 900 children in the camp, of whom 800 attended school in twenty classes spread across twelve barracks. Twenty-five teachers were needed, and they were recruited both from the surrounding district and from among the displaced people themselves. Furniture and supplies had to be assembled from what could be found.

The camp’s best-remembered production was A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Martha Molka directed and Herr Liere designed the staging; costumes were made from old clothing and the sets from scrap material. It was played nine times, in other camps as well as at Treffling, and at the Klagenfurt city theatre with the radio orchestra accompanying.

A separate recollection in the municipal archive of Gmünd in Kärnten records the daily journey of one of those teachers. Herbert Wagner, born in 1916, lost his teaching post after the war and worked as a carpenter’s assistant; for two years he taught in Treffling’s camp school, covering the distance from Gmünd on foot. He was taken back into the public school service in January 1948 and went on to direct the main school at Gmünd. Counting back two years from that date places his time at Treffling in 1946 and 1947, the camp’s fullest years. His experience places the camp school within the surrounding district’s disrupted professional life: its staff included people rebuilding their own livelihoods as well as children recovering an education.

A photograph preserved by the Carinthian provincial archive shows children assembling for school sports beside the long wooden huts. The banner names Treffling. Published again in 2025, it gives a direct view of the camp’s educational life; it does not identify the children’s nationalities.

Life in a temporary village

Families divided shared rooms with blankets and later with fibreboard. Three churches served the camp — Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox — and a hospital with four or five doctors and nursing staff treated everything except infectious disease. Tuberculosis patients went instead to the separate sanatorium at Seebach, which operated from 1945 to 1951 and held up to 156 patients.

There was little paid work beyond maintaining the camp itself. Saturday evenings were spent in the dance barrack to accordion music; the Klagenfurt touring theatre came out to perform, films were shown, and on Wednesdays buses took residents to bathe in the lake, wearing paths that survived as local routes. A cultural festival in 1948 brought out the handicrafts, costumes and cooking of the different groups living in the camp.

Relations with the surrounding villages were on the whole workable. Some refugees found work with local farmers or offered trades and services; field guards from the camp and from the village patrolled the crops together. Marriages between refugees and local people took place, and a butcher and a dentist from the camp settled permanently in Spittal.

A route through the British camps in Carinthia

A first-person account published in 2017 follows a German-speaking family expelled from the Abstaller Feld, now in Slovenia, in January 1946. After a journey through Murakeresztúr on the Hungarian-Croatian border, Maribor and Jesenice, they were put over the frontier by rail to Rosenbach in Carinthia, where British soldiers took them by lorry to the British camp at Fürnitz near Villach. “Später kamen wir nach Treffing”, the account continues — later they came to Treffing, and were released from there to find private lodgings in Austria. The mother and daughter found accommodation with a farmer near Graz, while the son reached relatives farming near Mureck and went back to school there in May or June 1946 after an interruption of more than a year. The account spells the camp Treffing and says nothing further about it. The spelling is one letter from Treffling, the route runs between British-run Carinthian camps, and the dating falls inside Treffling’s fullest year; but the account itself supplies nothing that fixes it to this camp, and it records a German-speaking family’s passage rather than a Ukrainian one.

Departure and dismantling

By 1948 repatriation had ceased to be a realistic prospect for most residents, and the British organised emigration instead — to Britain, Australia and North and South America. About 500 people left Treffling that way. Those with tuberculosis were refused visas and remained in Austria as welfare cases.

Austrian authorities completed the takeover on 23 June 1950. Residents who did not emigrate were moved to the camp at Spittal, where permanent housing was built on Fritjof-Nansen-Straße. Empty huts were handed to local families or moved elsewhere; three built on concrete foundations stood longer and made the ground harder to return to farming. The camp was formally liquidated in October 1952.

This history connects departure overseas with a second outcome: remaining in Austria and finding more permanent housing. The camp’s closure therefore marks the end of a particular settlement, not the end of displacement for everyone who had lived there.

The camp cemetery

Thirty-one people of several denominations were buried at the camp between 1945 and 1947. In 1983 the graves were opened and twenty-six sets of remains were recovered and reburied at the refugee cemetery at Feffernitz.

That cemetery was laid out in 1945 for the Feffernitz and Kellerberg camps and closed in 1952. Its recorded burials are of 126 Danube Swabians, 26 Gottscheers, 25 Russians, 66 Ukrainians and 19 Hungarians; Orthodox graves are marked with stone crosses and the others with metal ones, and graves that could not be named carry the words “Unbekannter Flüchtling” — unknown refugee. It is the only refugee cemetery of its kind still standing in Austria, is cared for by the Austrian Black Cross, and was restored between 2013 and 2016 and blessed again on 4 November 2016.