Wörgl Camp A

The transit camp for eastern workers

Building began in December 1941 at Wörgl-Söcking, for the regional labour office Alpenland and on the instruction of the Gauleiter of Tyrol, on a Durchgangslager intended above all for Russian and Ukrainian civilian labour. Local firms took part in the construction, using foreign workers and prisoners of war. The camp was ready in spring 1942 and the first transports from the occupied eastern territories arrived.

The camp had eighteen accommodation huts and was divided into an unclean and a clean section, separated by one long hut with a delousing plant in the middle. New arrivals were taken into the unclean part; after medical examination and police registration they were moved to the clean part. Four further huts served the administration.

By 30 November 1942, 10,979 people had been deloused, examined, registered by the labour office and allocated to branches of the economy. Between May 1942 and September 1944 thirty-four transports carrying 31,759 people in total passed through. Alongside the Ostarbeiter transports, Polish, French and Warthegau transports arrived, and people were sent on not only into the Alpenland labour office district but into Bavaria as well. Until May 1943 eastern workers judged unfit for work were also sent home through the Wörgl camp.

Wörgl at the end of the war

Wörgl’s railway junction had suffered devastating bombing. In the surrounding town, housing, food and fuel were scarce; school attendance was disrupted by coal shortages, so that pupils came in only every second week in winter to hand in and collect work. French troops replaced the Americans on 9 July 1945. Reconstruction of the station area continued until December 1950, the year before Wörgl was granted town rights.

About 1.6 million displaced people were in Austria at the end of the war, and roughly 110,000 to 120,000 in Tyrol. Almost 10,000 Ukrainians were in the province in these years, more than 7,000 of them Greek Catholic, with eighteen priests serving them in 1947. Those are provincial figures and not a measure of the camp at Söcking.

Two camps, different residents

The authorities distinguished Camp A from Camp B. A French administrative return counted 226 people in A and 477 in B on 15 May 1947. These are separate camp totals, not Ukrainian population figures.

Camp B accommodated ethnic Germans, who were classed as enemy or ex-enemy displaced persons and excluded from UNRRA and its successor the IRO; those camps were administered by the French military government. Camp A belonged to the international relief system: the exhibition names Landeck, Haiming, Kematen, Kufstein and Wörgl A among the DP camps UNRRA organised in Tyrol. The distinction decided which residents received relief and resettlement help and which did not.

Stebelsky’s Table 5 of Ukrainians in the PCIRO or IRO camps of Austria records 85 Ukrainians at Wörgl A on 30 September 1948, drawn from the IRO Field Service Office in Salzburg. No figure is given for Wörgl in the column for 30 June 1950, when the French zone as a whole held 520 Ukrainians against 2,006 two years earlier. This establishes a Ukrainian presence within the camp rather than an exclusively Ukrainian institution.

Floodwater and a kindergarten

Photographs from the local museum show how vulnerable the barrack settlement remained. In 1948 floodwater spread between the huts. Another image records the kindergarten in 1951, when it cared for 38 children. The photographs belong to the Söcking settlement; the kindergarten total describes its children, without identifying their nationalities.

The changing site

The camp kept its structure into the early 1950s. By 1948 only huts in the western part were still standing. Aerial photographs in the exhibition follow the site in 1953, 1963 and 1966; by 1963 a single hut of the former Durchgangslager remained.

A works site and a housing development now occupy the ground, and the 2016 exhibition recorded that nothing on the site marks the transit camp. The exhibition and its memory walk were the first sustained public account of it.