In March 1941, the Wehrmacht began constructing the POW camp Stalag XVIII C »Markt Pongau«. The camp was located in Markt Pongau (today: Sankt Johann im Pongau) in the northwest of Austria, close to Salzburg. The prisoners of war - mostly from France and the Soviet Union - had to perform forced labour in nearby factories and in agriculture.
Today, various memorials, gravestones and memorial plaques commemorate the almost 4,000 victims of the camp, the majority of them Soviet prisoners of war.
History
In March 1941, the Wehrmacht began constructing a POW camp for around 10,000 prisoners of war in the town of Markt Pongau. The Stalag (short for »Stammlager«) was still under construction when the first prisoners were brought there from France in the summer of 1941.
Until the end of 1941, the number of prisoners of war rose to 30,000. Most of those held in the so-called »South Camp« were French, Serbian and Polish prisoners; Soviet prisoners of war were housed in the »North Camp« which was established later. Due to overcrowding in the barracks, many of the prisoners were forced to stay in tents. The prisoners of war had to work in factories and agriculture.
The Soviet prisoners, whom the National Socialist racist ideology deemed »inferior«, were exposed to particularly harsh conditions. Thousands of them died of malnourishment and illnesses. Although they made up only about a third of the camp's prisoners, the number of deaths among the Soviet prisoners was by far the highest. The camp administration set up a special cemetery in the vicinity of the camp, the so-called »Russian Cemetery«.
Victims
In all, about 4,000 prisoners of war perished in the camp. The majority - around 3,700 - came from the Soviet Union.
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
Today, various memorials, memorial plaques and gravestones at the municipal cemetery and the »Russian Cemetery« commemorate the victims of the POW camp. Most of the victims are buried in the »Russian Cemetery«. There, monuments honour the 3,600 prisoners, of those 3,542 were from the Soviet Union.
The community of Sankt Johann im Pongau, the Austrian Ministry of Interior and the War Graves Commission »Black Cross« are responsible for the maintenance of this memorial site. What's more, for decades individuals and pupils from the town have been getting involved in keeping the memory of the camp and its victims alive.
Open
The memorials and the municipal cemetery are accessible at all times.
