Memorial Site Weyer/Innviertel Camps

Erinnerungsstätte Lager Weyer/Innviertel

In May 1940, the Gau-leadership of the district Oberdonau (Upper Danube) established a »labour education camp« (»Arbeitserziehungslager«) in the Upper Austrian township of St. Pantaleon. After its dissolution in 1941, a »Gypsy internment camp« (»Zigeuneranhaltelager«) was set up in its place. Only in the 1990s did a local grass-roots initiative result in the construction of a memorial to both camps in St. Pantaleon, which was opened in 2000.

History

From 1940, together with the German Labour Front (Deutsche Arbeitsfront, DAF), the Gau leadership of Oberdonau maintained a »labour education camp« (»Arbeitserziehungslager«) in the Upper Austrian township of St. Pantaleon in the Innviertel - a region south-east of the Inn river. Many of the camp's prisoners had come there after being denunciated by fellow citizens. Guarded by members of the SA, the men who had been deemed ›asocial‹ and ›work-shy‹ were deployed in forced labour in the camp's vicinity. In the camp, the prisoners were subjected to abuse by the guards. Around Christmas 1940, the violence led to five consecutive murders. In reaction, the camp and community doctor of St. Pantaleon filed a charge with the district court. When the district attorney began investigations, the DAF closed down the camp in early 1941. Some of the prisoners were released, others were transferred to Mauthausen concentration camp. The proceedings were finally stopped by the Ministry of Justice following an intervention by the local Gauleiter.
Immediately after the closure of the DAF camp, a »Gypsy internment camp« (»Zigeuneranhaltelager«) for Austrian Sinti and Roma was set up. Police reservists guarded the camp while a staff member of the Linz criminal police (Kriminalpolizei, Kripo) became camp commander. The majority of the 340 prisoners interned came from the area; for the most part, the Kripo imprisoned entire families, men, women and children. The prisoners had to conduct forced labour, mostly in agriculture. The »Gypsy internment camp« existed until November 1941. When the camp was liquidated, the SS had the approximately 300 surviving prisoners taken to Lackenbach and from there to the Łódź Ghetto. Most of the deportees perished.

St. Pantaleon, 2000, Monument at the Memorial Site Weyer/Innviertel Camps, Verein Erinnerungsstätte Lager Weyer, Inge Widaue

St. Pantaleon, 1941, Interned Roma at Weyer Camp, Verein Erinnerungsstätte Lager Weyer

Victims

At least five murders of prisoners committed by guards during the time when the camp was used as a »labour education camp« by the DAF are documented.
Almost all of the 340 Roma who were imprisoned in the »Gypsy internment camp« perished. At least three people died in the camp, however the exact number of victims is not known. The surviving 300 prisoners were deported to Łódź Ghetto in 1941. Almost all died in the ghetto or later in the Chełmno extermination camp.

On March 12, 1938 the German Wehrmacht entered the Austrian Republic to a jubilant reaction from much of the population. The next day saw Austria’s »Anschluss« (»annexation«) to the Third Reich; the country was now known as »Ostmark«. Austrian Nazis immediately began to persecute the Jewish minority and opponents of the regime. From May 1938, German anti-Jewish legislation also applied to annexed Austria. Over 126,000 Jews, mainly from Vienna, had managed to escape the country by the end of 1939. The first deportations of Austrian Jews to occupied Poland began in the autumn of that year. By 1945, the SS had deported almost 48,600 Jews from Austria along with 16,600 others who had sought refuge abroad. They were deported to the occupied Eastern territories, where all but a few were murdered. Over 40,000 non-Jewish civilians died in the war, including more than 8,000 Sinti and Roma deported from the province of Burgenland. In 1945, the Allies divided Austria into four occupation zones. The Soviet occupying powers erected a »Liberation Monument« in Vienna. Representatives of the provisional all-party government made up of the socialists, communists and the conservative People’s Party used the inauguration of this monument on August 19, 1945 to declare Austria as »the first free country to fall victim to Hitlerite aggression«. For decades, this perspective was broadly upheld by politicians and the general public. However, the 1960s saw the start of bitter disputes on Austria’s involvement in National Socialism. The low point came during a demonstration in March 1965 when a far-right student fatally wounded the former concentration camp prisoner Ernst Kirchweger (*1898). Kirchweger became the first victim of politically-motivated murder in post-1945 Austria. Subsequently, the Austrian public became increasingly vocal in warning against a relativisation of the period 1938 to 1945. The country was rocked by a series of scandals related to the past of its political representatives, for example the »Waldheim Debate« between 1986 and 1992. The country was divided over claims that Kurt Waldheim (1918–2007), the Austrian President and former General Secretary of the United Nations, had been involved in war crimes in the Balkans. Waldheim responded that he had simply done his duty »like hundreds of thousands of other Austrians«. It was not until the early 1990s that the then Chancellor Franz Vranitzky (*1937) acknowledged Austria’s complicity in the Holocaust. The Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance was founded in 1963. This institution researches the history of the Holocaust and far-right extremism in Austria and has a small exhibition. For a long time, the permanent exhibition opened in 1970 at the former Mauthausen concentration camp was almost the only museum on the history of National Socialism in Austria. In 1983, the city council of Vienna voted to establish a »Memorial against War and Fascism«. Designed by the sculptor Alfred Hrdlicka (*1928), the memorial was inaugurated in 1991, the »Memorial to the Austrian Jewish Victims of the Shoah« followed suit in 2000 Laws governing compensation for confiscated property, compensation to former forced labourers and the work of a Historians’ Commission between 1998 and 2003 to investigate the expropriation of assets under National Socialism all point to a shift in Austrian national memory. In 2009, former deserters of the Wehrmacht were officially rehabilitated, and a memorial dedicated to them was unveiled in 2014.

Remembrance

Research undertaken by Austrian author Ludwig Laher and a local grass-roots initiative opened a discussion about the history of both camps, which had been buried in oblivion for decades. The memorial site was opened in the year 2000. The St. Pantaleon-Weyer community set up the memorial jointly with the local initiative, the Memorial Site Weyer/Innviertel Camps Association, which continues to supervise the memorial and conducts research on the history of the camps. The Association also supports initiatives connected to the Roma minority in Upper Austria.
At the centre of the memorial stands a bronze sculpture portraying four mourning figures. The sculpture stands raised on a round granite pedestal. A memorial plaque on the pedestal commemorates the victims of both camps.
The memorial is not located on the former camp premises that now belongs to another municipality, but five kilometres further south, on the territory of St. Panteleon.

St. Pantaleon, 2008, Monument at the Memorial Site Weyer/Innviertel Camps, public domain

St. Pantaleon, 2008, Memorial plaque on the monument, public domain

Possibilities

Archive, publications, guided tours, readings and an educational programme for schools

Open

The memorial is accessible at all times.

Contact

http://www.lager-weyer.at

office@lager-weyer.at

+43 (0)6277 7212

St. Pantaleon, 2008, View of the memorial site, public domain

St. Pantaleon, 2004, The survivor Rosa Winter at the memorial site, Verein Erinnerungsstätte Lager Weyer, Inge Widauer

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