Vorkloster Camp

A province used as a corridor

At the end of the war 65,000 people classed as strangers to the province were in Vorarlberg, one inhabitant in four. Between May and December 1945 about 130,000 people travelled through, and as many as 3,000 a day are said to have passed through Bregenz that summer. By December 1945 some 7,270 displaced people remained, the largest groups being 1,400 Polish and 1,000 Soviet citizens. The French military government with its Service social was responsible for them, and later the provincial government.

The historian Wolfgang Weber records that Ukrainians reached Vorarlberg in two earlier waves as well: about 2,000 internal refugees in the summer of 1915, and just under 3,000 forced labourers counted in 1942, with roughly 3,000 more arriving as refugees after 1944. The provincial policy after 1945 was emigration and repatriation rather than settlement.

The buildings and the routine

Vorkloster was a named place before any camp stood there. The Österreich-Lexikon records that Rieden-Vorkloster was incorporated into Bregenz in 1919, and names in the district the Maria Hilf parish church, built between 1925 and 1931 to designs by Clemens Holzmeister, and the Cistercian monastery of Mehrerau.

Weber describes Camp Vorkloster as one of about ten former Reich Labour Service camps between Bludenz and Bregenz that were pressed into use as quarters. The largest of them held up to 500 people. Each consisted of at least six huts, with a central corridor serving between eight and twelve rooms for four people each, a communal kitchen and a communal shower. Basic needs, in his account, were met.

Military authorities, the provincial government and the Service social ran the camps through resident self-administration: the refugees filled every function the camp required, and the day was structured by that self-government. Contact with the outside was slight and there was no work to be had. The declared aim was onward migration rather than integration.

A gazetteer maintained by avArc records a “Prisoners of War Camp Vorkloster” in the municipality of Bregenz, citing the Austrian Federal Monuments Office. The entry gives no dates, no published field observations and no reference to displaced persons, and nothing in it connects the camp it records to the camp described here.

A mixed community in the French zone

A September 1946 record discussed by Julia Maspero lists Polish, Yugoslav, Dutch and Czechoslovak displaced people at Vorkloster, together with stateless Russian-speaking and Ukrainian-speaking residents. Camps in Vorarlberg were administered by the French authorities during this period, outside UNRRA’s direct camp-management network in Tyrol.

The distinction between language, citizenship and nationality matters in tracing this community. A person recorded as stateless and Ukrainian-speaking in one return need not appear under an identical label in another. The later IRO figures nevertheless establish a continuing Ukrainian presence at the named camp.

Vorarlberg’s camps were also organised by nationality where possible. A 2015 survey of the same research names Rappenwald, Schindler at Kennelbach and Weidach in Bregenz as the camps intended for Ukrainians and Russians. Weidach lies within the Vorkloster quarter, but that survey counts Vorkloster and Weidach as two of the five camps still working in 1947, so the two names should not be merged.

A community preparing to leave

Stebelsky’s Table 5 of Ukrainians in the PCIRO or IRO camps of Austria records 255 Ukrainians at Vorkloster on 30 September 1948 and 27 on 30 June 1950, the third largest of the five French-zone camp entries, after Landeck and Kufstein. The decrease was 228 people, about 89 per cent of the earlier number. It measures a change between two snapshots; the returns do not identify individual destinations or show every arrival and departure between those dates.

Across Vorarlberg, only about 200 Ukrainian refugees were left in 1949, a year before the camps closed. The five camps still open in 1947, Alberschwende, Mehrerau, Vorkloster, Weidach and Levis at Feldkirch, between them fed and housed a tenth of all refugees in the province; the rest were in private quarters.

Everyday life and onward journeys

A child who spent her first four years in the camp remembered colouring books, concerts, church festivals and German nursery rhymes she can still recite, together with a vivid warning to be careful of strangers, prompted by the fear that Soviet agents were infiltrating the camps. North America, Australia and Argentina were the destinations that mattered to Ukrainian refugees in Vorarlberg.

A family photograph from Vorkloster shows a child beside a decorated Christmas tree, wearing embroidered clothing. Another image records Ukrainian refugees leaving Bregenz towards Argentina. One former camp family left in 1949 via Bremerhaven and Halifax for Canada. These photographs and recollections connect the administrative returns with domestic celebrations and the practical journey beyond Austria.

Ukrainian relief work in the town is documented in an archive rather than on the ground. The Ukrainian Central Relief Union in Austria deposited its papers with Osredok in Winnipeg, and they include files of the Ukrainian Social Service in Bregenz alongside papers from the camp at Landeck. Those files are attributed to Bregenz as a town, not to Vorkloster camp itself.

One of four camps remaining in 1949

The provincial government’s report for 1949 names Vorkloster alongside Mehrerau, Waidach, spelled Weidach in the 2015 survey, and Alberschwende as the four remaining foreign-resident camps after Feldkirch-Levis and the Riedenburg hospital closed. Together they housed 986 people at year-end, compared with 1,298 at the start of the year. Of the year-end total, 175 were recorded as employed.

Those figures describe the four-camp network, not Vorkloster alone. They show that overseas departures coexisted with continuing needs for accommodation and support. The report recorded expenditure of 3,472,182.07 Austrian schillings on the camp network during the year.