Reichenau camp

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The memorial stone in memory of the Reichenau camp

The Reichenau camp in Innsbruck- Reichenau was set up in August 1941 on behalf of the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA) in Berlin in cooperation with the Innsbruck State Labor Office .

Until the summer of 1942 it served its original purpose as a reception camp for Italian civil workers who returned to Italy due to the increasing bombing raids in 1942 on the German industrial centers. These were to be collected in the Reichenau camp and sent to the employment office as forced laborers . However, as fewer and fewer Italian civil workers were picked up, the camp was converted into a labor education camp. In this form, it was directly subordinate to the respective head of the Secret State Police , State Police Office Innsbruck and was intended “to take in the male people in the Gau Tirol / Vorarlberg because of breach of employment contract , blueprint or refusal to serve , and to educate them through strict discipline and hard work to become useful nationals . “Towards the end of the war, political prisoners of the Innsbruck Gestapo were increasingly being held in Reichenau. From 1943 the camp also served as a transit camp for Jews from northern Italy on the way to their deportation , many of whom had come from the Bolzano transit camp since 1944 . A total of around 8,500 people were imprisoned in the Reichenau camp, of whom 130 people can be shown to have been murdered or died as a result of inhuman treatment.

In April 1945, the 141 special prisoners and clan prisoners who were liberated shortly afterwards in South Tyrol were housed here for a few days (→ Liberation of the SS hostages in South Tyrol ).

After the war , the camp served as accommodation for so-called displaced persons and later for people with no or low income before it was demolished in the 1970s.

Since 1972, a memorial stone on the former property has been commemorating the victims of the Reichenau camp. It bears the inscription:

Here stood in the years 1941-1945
, the Gestapo detention Reichenau,
where patriots from all of National
inhaf- socialism occupied countries
were advantage and tortured.
Many of them died here.

Documentaries

  • Johannes Breit: It is better not to look around too much. The Innsbruck-Reichenau labor education camp 1941-1945. Absam 2008, DVD.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Sabine Mayr, Hannes Obermair : Speaking about the Holocaust. The Jewish victims in Bolzano - a preliminary assessment . In: The Sciliar . Monthly magazine for South Tyrolean regional studies. No. 88 , 2014, ISSN  0036-6145 , issue 3, p. 4-36. here: pp. 15, 20 and 23 .

literature

  • Thomas Albrich: A Gestapo concentration camp. The Reichenau labor education camp near Innsbruck. In: Klaus Eisterer (Ed.): Tyrol between dictatorship and democracy (1930–1950). Contributions for Rolf Steininger on his 60th birthday. Innsbruck u. a. 2002, pp. 77-113.
  • Johannes Breit: The Gestapo camp Innsbruck-Reichenau: history, reappraisal, memory . Tyrolia, Innsbruck / Vienna 2017, ISBN 978-3-7022-3570-3 .
  • Hermann Rafetseder : The fate of the Nazi forced labor. Findings on manifestations of the oppression and on the Nazi camp system from the work of the Austrian Reconciliation Fund. A documentation on behalf of the Future Fund of the Republic of Austria. Bremen 2014, 706 pp., ISBN 978-3-94469-028-5 ; Corrected print version of a text that remained unpublished in 2007 for data protection reasons, online (PDF) in the forum OoeGeschichte.at, in it chapter "AEL Reichenau and Frauen-AEL Jenbach", pp. 473–482.
  • Horst Schreiber : The Reichenau labor education camp. In: Gabriele Rath, Andrea Sommerauer, Martha Verdorfer (Ed.): Bozen - Innsbruck. Contemporary history tours. Bolzano: Raetia 2000, pp. 143-147.

Web links

See also

Coordinates: 47 ° 16 ′ 21.7 "  N , 11 ° 25 ′ 50.5"  E