Wieselburg prisoner of war camp

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Former command and main building of the prisoner of war camp

The Wieselburg POW camp in Wieselburg was a POW camp of the Danube Monarchy during the First World War .

It existed between 1915 and 1918 at Weitfeld in the Zeil district. Up to 60,000 prisoners, mostly Russians and Italians, were housed there.

In addition to other locations, the military construction management also selected Wieselburg and Purgstall in order to set up two large and one small prisoner-of-war camp there. The locations were chosen because there was a rail link and a river (the Great Erlauf) with sufficient water. In addition, the land transfer was relatively easy to carry out there, as large plots of land were owned by the imperial or mansion in both places.

In 1915, a camp with 684 individual objects for 57,000 men was built in Wieselburg on an area of ​​102 hectares on both sides of the Große Erlauf. This should have been expanded for up to 64,000 prisoners in a further expansion stage, which, however, no longer came about. In the Schauboden district of Purgstall, a warehouse for 24,500 men with 361 individual objects was set up on April 7, 1915 on an area of ​​50 hectares. In addition, a station for prisoners-of-war officers was built in Mühling. The prisoners of war were initially housed in temporary accommodation and helped to set up the camp. After the wooden barracks with a capacity of 200 men each had been built, they were housed in them.

Between 1915 and 1918 there were almost 80,000 prisoners of war and hundreds of Austro-Hungarian soldiers who were responsible for guarding and managing the camps in the Erlauftal. According to civil and military experts, the three camps were among the best equipped in the monarchy. Even the care of the prisoners was appropriate, given the circumstances of the time with its economic bottlenecks and the shortage of food. However, this should not hide the fact that the foreign soldiers were prisoners who had to get by in a confined space, with simple and little food, and were interned far away from their homeland.

literature

  • Franz Wiesenhofer: Trapped under the Habsburg crown. KuK prisoner of war camp in the Erlauftal , self-published, Purgstall 1997

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Erlauftaler Fire Brigade Museum , accessed on April 29, 2015.
  2. ^ Eisenstrasse Lower Austria , accessed on April 29, 2015

Coordinates: 48 ° 7 ′ 48.5 ″  N , 15 ° 8 ′ 55.3 ″  E