Trofaiach Camp

The site before 1945

The land had been expropriated during the First World War for a powder factory, and the farmers affected expected to get their fields back. In 1940 the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle built a resettlement camp on the site, and in 1941 it was handed over to the Reichswerke Alpine Montanbetriebe “Hermann Göring”, which later used it for foreign workers. The Trofaiach diarist, writing on 1 January 1949, recalled the wartime barracks on the site as housing Ostarbeiter, workers forcibly relocated from eastern Europe and, in his words, mostly Ukrainians.

The compiled register of Austrian camps gives the 1940 camp a capacity of 2,000 and notes Soviet troops on the site immediately after the war. Drawing on the local study by Werner Anzenberger, Heimo Halbrainer and Gabriela Stieber, it also records a prisoner-of-war camp on the adjoining Gai ground at Untergimplach as early as 1915, and the Schlagfeld barracks in use as a forced-labour and prisoner-of-war camp between 1941 and 1945. These neighbouring compounds are not one continuous institution.

Food, relief and the first winter

The first winter brought an urgent struggle over living conditions. A 2021 archival study describes inspections by Jewish relief workers in November 1945. By mid-December the population had fallen from about 1,500 to 900, but some residents still lived in poor accommodation. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee established a local worker at Trofaiach to supervise food distribution. Relief involved the British camp authorities, the Red Cross, UNRRA and the residents’ camp committee.

In January 1946 an incoming UNRRA team refused to assume management under the existing conditions. Discussions led to a decision to move the Jewish refugees, both to improve hygiene and health and to give the community a fresh start. Some were transferred to Kobenz on 1 February; others went to Judenburg-Murdorf. These early transfers belong to the history of Trofaiach’s Jewish residents. The Ukrainian population recorded in 1948 and 1950 belongs to a later phase of the same camp’s changing life.

A regional encyclopaedia article on the town records that the Jewish refugees quartered at Trofaiach by the British military administration until the beginning of January 1946 came mostly from Hungary and emigrated to Palestine.

Names, numbers and administration

The camp carried several designations at once. The register of Austrian camps records that from December 1945 it served as Assembly Centre S, Control Camp P and Forwarding Group K, and that it was worked by UNRRA team 327. In the ministry’s renaming of 1951 it became simply Lager Trofaiach.

A British list of November 1947 gives the September occupancy of Camp Trofaiach-Gai as 2,280, the second largest figure in Styria. In February 1948 the British headquarters proposed handing the camps housing ethnic Germans, Trofaiach among them, to Austrian administration; the transfer in fact came on 23 June 1950, with 1,200 residents, and the camp continued as an IRO transit centre under a British camp director.

Ukrainians in a changing population

The IRO returns reproduced by historian Ihor Stebelsky record 378 Ukrainians on 30 September 1948 and 145 on 30 June 1950. These are national-group snapshots, not the total camp population. They establish a Ukrainian presence across the transition from international relief to Austrian administration.

A diary kept at Trofaiach through 1948 helps explain the first of those figures. On 12 July 1948 its author recorded that 300 new refugees arrived from Kapfenberg, mostly Ukrainians, and that everyone had to make room in their barracks. Three months earlier a convoy of Slovenian families had been trucked in from the Liechtenstein camp near Judenburg, part of what the camp register calls an exchange of populations between the two camps in April 1948.

In a 1954 camp report, the category “Ukrainian Poles” contained 23 people out of 259 still resident. This later administrative label should not be treated as identical to the earlier Ukrainian category.

School, chapel and workshops

Schooling ran inside the camp until the Austrian takeover: 79 children in four classes, in a school very well supplied with teaching materials provided by the IRO. Camp schools under Allied administration were treated by the Austrian state as quasi-extraterritorial and handled like private schools without public status, so their certificates carried no recognition. A kindergarten occupied two rooms and averaged about forty children. The Holocaust Memorial Museum encyclopedia records a kindergarten, a choir, a carousel, and classes in English and Spanish to help residents emigrate. A tailoring shop and a shoemaking shop worked only for residents, alongside a locksmith, an electrician, a joiner and a barber. In May 1950 the camp had 1,600 permanent places and 200 transit places but beds for only 1,250 people.

The compiled camp register lists the kindergarten and school as teaching in Slovenian, Croatian and Ukrainian, a Slovenian trade school, and camp churches for Roman and Greek Catholic and for Greek Orthodox worship. That is the clearest indication that Ukrainian residents had their own language teaching and their own liturgy on the site.

A year inside the camp

The diary of Anton Zakelj, translated and edited by his son John Zakelj, records the texture of camp life in 1948. New arrivals were assigned to a room shared with two other families. Breakfast and supper were coffee; lunch was pea soup and a little bread, with milk and white bread only on a doctor’s prescription. Mass was said at half past six in a chapel that had no windows and a cold concrete floor. When camp pay for labouring was cut to 120 Schillings a month, nine Ukrainians were called in and offered the work; four of them refused it.

Emigration shaped the year. A first group left for Canada on 26 April 1948 by IRO train from Leoben, each person allowed 200 pounds of luggage, and in June the Chilean consulate accepted 100 Slovenians and about 400 Croatians and Ukrainians. Photographs of the camp choir and of a Corpus Christi procession record the Slovenian community and should not be read as Ukrainian.

Medical examinations and the wait to leave

Trofaiach became an emigration transit centre. In 1949 it housed 1,200 people awaiting departure; medical teams sometimes examined up to 400 people daily. People excluded from emigration because of age, illness or disability stayed on and depended on camp support.

The diary continued through 1949 and shows the camp organised into national sections. Its author worked as camp mail carrier, distributing post in the Croatian and Ukrainian sections, and later collected donations for that work in the Ukrainian part of the camp.

Departures ran through the year. On 8 May 1949 a first group of fifty people left for New Zealand, among them three Slovenians and a number of Ukrainians; their train went off the tracks at Trofaiach station soon after everyone had boarded. Large groups left for America on 16 September and again on 28 October, each including Ukrainian residents. On 25 November the diarist himself left with a party of eighty-eight, taken by IRO lorry to the station at Trofaiach.

The camp in 1950

Photographs taken by relief worker Edward Crommelin in 1950 show the entrance marked “Trofaiach D.P. Camp”, the roadside barrier and rows of buildings beneath the mountains. The series records the actual camp during the same year as the second Ukrainian population return.

Running down the camp

Once the IRO wound up its work Trofaiach lost its transit function, and from 1 February 1952 it counted as a residential and welfare camp. The camp hospital closed that year for want of use, forty-seven residents moved to Feffernitz in Carinthia in August, and many huts were returned to the Alpine-Montan company, which demolished them. Neither Gai nor Trofaiach nor Leoben wanted to keep the site as a private housing camp, because the repair costs were too high.

By the 1954 report the camp had fifteen residential huts and buildings used as workshop, bathhouse, store, kindergarten and clinic. Most of the 259 residents had health problems, and most of those in work were labourers who were usually unemployed in winter. The camp register dates the closure to December 1960.