Wegscheid Camp

Linz as a barrack city

Wegscheid was one camp among many. Linz had more than doubled in population between 1938 and 1945 with the building of its heavy industry, and hutted camps had gone up all over the city for foreign and forced labourers and prisoners of war. In May 1945 more than 30,000 people were living in huts in Linz alone, and about 100,000 across Upper Austria; the figure was roughly halved over the following five years.

About 40,000 foreigners from twenty-five nations were in the city in the summer of 1945, some twenty per cent of its population, and most of them were housed in more than sixty hut camps in and around Linz. People were allocated to different camps according to origin: camps for foreign-language displaced persons, separate camps for Jews and camps for ethnic German refugees. Linz served for years as a central gathering point for Jewish displaced persons awaiting a way out, above all in the camps at Bindermichl, Ebelsberg and Wegscheid.

The larger camps were laid out like small towns. Alongside the living huts, Wegscheid had a sick bay, bath and lavatory huts, churches and a works yard. The mayor of Linz coined a phrase for what the city had become: it had turned from a baroque city into a barrack city.

A crowded stop on the way abroad

The camp set up in June 1946 consisted of about a hundred huts that had housed soldiers during the Nazi years. World ORT describes Wegscheid as Austria’s largest Jewish transit camp, with roughly 3,000–4,000 residents. Most came from Poland and Romania and were expected to remain only briefly before moving onward. Continuing arrivals overwhelmed the available space. Food supplies and their quality were also inadequate, and the same account records constant severe conflicts between the Jewish and non-Jewish inhabitants.

Even in these conditions, residents established institutions. The small hospital offered nursing courses, and there were a kindergarten, a school and a synagogue. These facilities gave a degree of continuity to a population whose intended purpose at the camp was temporary residence.

For most of the Jewish survivors Wegscheid was one stage in leaving Europe altogether, and after 1948 many went to the new state of Israel; for a minority it became the beginning of a longer rebuilding of Jewish life in Austria.

One room for a family

A childhood account preserved by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum describes life at Tyler Camp in late 1947. One family shared a room about twelve by fourteen feet in a weathered wooden barrack. It contained a bed, a rough table and three chairs; water came from outdoor taps and the toilets stood in a separate row of wooden sheds.

The household carried water inside and warmed it on the stove for washing. To supplement food and fuel, the family sold concealed sugar on the black market. The recollection shows the practical work behind everyday survival: obtaining water, heating a room and caring for an older relative whose health had been damaged by persecution. It records one Jewish family’s circumstances rather than a standard ration or housing entitlement for every resident.

The wider Upper Austrian pattern was similar. The huts were barely insulated, so the winters were bitterly felt; poor sanitation kept the threat of epidemics alive, and damp rooms infested with bugs added to the strain. Only later were the large shared spaces broken up into small dwellings that allowed families four walls of their own, and football clubs, theatre groups and bands began to form.

Ukrainians at Wegscheid

The IRO return for 30 June 1950, reproduced by historian Ihor Stebelsky, records 191 Ukrainians at Wegscheid. It is a nationality count, not the total population of the camp. It places Ukrainian residents within the later phase of a settlement whose best-documented earlier history concerns Jewish transit and emigration.

Training and children’s education

At the end of 1947 ORT established an annex of its central Linz school at Wegscheid. It trained 45 students in May 1948 and closed in 1949. Training was one means of preparing displaced people for employment after emigration.

Children’s education continued through a different system. The Stadlerschule traces its beginnings to the 1951–1952 school year, when a mixed primary school—the Gemischte Volksschule 7, or GV 7—operated in huts at three camp sites: Lager 55 in the Niedernhartstraße, Lager 67 at Wegscheid and Lager 65 in the Hummelhofwald. Across the three sites it had seventeen classes and about 650 pupils, roughly 600 of them without Austrian citizenship. These are school-network totals, not Wegscheid-only enrolment.

Building of the present school began in August 1952. The camp classrooms at Wegscheid and Niedernhartstraße were given up in the last days of the 1953 school year, and the new building was opened on 15 September 1953 by the mayor of Linz, Ernst Koref. Separately, Linz’s statistical yearbooks record 142 children at the Wegscheid camp kindergarten in 1951 and 57 in 1959. The kindergarten figures demonstrate continued provision for young families beyond the closure of the earlier training school.

Photographs and the memorial

A 1947 photograph from the Crommelin family archive records a relief-staff farewell gathering at Camp Tyler. Seven small photographs taken in barrack 44 at Wegscheid in 1947, dated on the plate and ranging from six by eight and a half to eight and a half by thirteen and a half centimetres, were bought in 2011 for the Jewish Museum Vienna; they are described as rare images of the camp between the liberation and the founding of Israel.

The camps outlasted their intended purpose. In 1952 the barrack camps were officially renamed housing settlements, in recognition that people admitted for a short stay were going to remain in Austria, and the last of them were cleared only in the 1960s. The surviving memorial at Wegscheid, erected in 1996, recalls the many people, including Jewish displaced people, who prepared here to return home or leave for another country.

The memorial is a black stone obelisk. The Linz monuments database describes it standing on Landwiedstraße by the Kaplitzstraße bus stop in memory of camp 67, and lists it in its Bindermichl-Keferfeld district entries among the monuments and buildings associated with the architect Matthäus Schlager. The database does not state what his part in it was.

Records of the camp also went abroad. The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research holds a collection of records from the displaced-persons camps of Austria covering 1945 to 1951. Its administrative history counts twelve camps in all, at Salzburg, Linz, Ebelsberg, Saalfelden, Puch, Hallein, Wegscheid, Wels and Enns, and its description lists Wegscheid, under the designation Tyler 337, among the camps whose material the collection includes.