Vienna Aspangbahnhof

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The Aspang train station around 1905
Memorial stone and banner on the occasion of the 70th memorial day on November 9, 2008

The Aspangbahnhof in Vienna , opened in 1881 and closed to passenger traffic in 1971, was the departure station of the Aspangbahn to the south and was located in the 3rd district of Vienna , Landstraße , on what later became known as the Aspanggrund on Aspangstraße , between Rennweg and Landstraßer Gürtel . The railway and train station were named after the market town of Aspang in southern Lower Austria .

history

The Wiener Neustädter Canal , which opened in 1803, was increasingly viewed as uneconomical in the second half of the 19th century. The first Austrian Schiffahrts-Canal-Actiengesellschaft , which operated the canal, therefore successfully applied for a concession to build and operate a railway line, the Aspangbahn , in 1872 . In July 1879, shipping in the Vienna city area was stopped and the water in the canal in the Vienna area was drained; the canal still exists in Lower Austria.

In the same year the harbor basin was filled in and the station of the Vienna-Aspang Railway (EWA) was built in its place in 1880/1881 . The reception building was located north of the track system; it was built by Franz von Gruber , professor at the Austro-Hungarian Technical Military Academy , in the historicizing Renaissance style. The station building was 97 meters long and had a very modern post office with a telegraph office and pneumatic post ; the platform was 160 meters long. There was also an inn with a large dining room and a smaller dining room.

The station had an area of ​​about eight hectares; 7.7 kilometers of track and 45 points were laid on it. In 1881, starting from the north-western end of the station, a connecting track to the Vienna connecting line to the north station was opened. The street leading north of the station was named Aspangstraße in 1894 ; previously it was called, as it is today in the 11th district along the railway line, Am Kanal .

In 1937 the Austrian Federal Railways took over rail operations, and in 1942 the railroad was nationalized by the Nazi regime.

After Austria was " annexed " to the German Reich in 1938, the train station was the starting point for the deportation of the Jewish citizens of Vienna until 1942 : from October 1939 to October 1942 a total of around 50,000 Jewish Viennese were rounded up and initially in ghettos from the Aspangbahnhof in 47 transports so-called assembly camps, later transported directly to concentration and extermination camps of the Nazi regime. From 1943, the deportation trains were dispatched from the North Station . On May 8, 1995, on the 50th anniversary of the liberation from National Socialism, the place of the victims of the deportation was named at the former Aspang train station . A memorial stone placed on this site in 1983 on the initiative of a private person commemorates the transports. Since November 9, 1994, the anniversary of the National Socialist November pogroms in 1938, an annual vigil and rally in memory of the victims of National Socialism have been held here.

The operation of the station had to be stopped at the beginning of 1945 due to the war; on July 26, 1945 the first train ran again. Until 1947, rail operations had to be limited to one train per day due to an acute lack of coal. During the occupation after the Second World War, the station served the British occupation troops, whose Vienna sector included the 3rd district, until their departure in 1955 as the starting point for their trains through Soviet-occupied Lower Austria to British-occupied Styria and to Villach , also in the British occupied Carinthia . Furthermore, the trains of the Pressburger Bahn (today S7) were (and are) led since 1945 from the Nordbahnhof or Praterstern via the Aspangbahn towards Vienna Central Cemetery.

After no noteworthy renewals and renovations had been made to the railway systems after 1955, they increasingly fell into disrepair. The last steam train to Puchberg left the station on September 26, 1970. When the rapid transit station Wien Rennweg was opened in May 1971 on the main S-Bahn line at the junction to Aspangbahnhof , the nearby Aspangbahnhof lost all passenger traffic. On May 31, 1971, the station was closed to passenger traffic; the trains of the Aspangbahn (and the Pressburger Bahn) now departed from Vienna Praterstern and reached the Aspangbahn route via Rennweg. The reception building of the Aspang station was demolished in the summer of 1977; Roman walls and numerous ancient artifacts were found during the demolition.

Since the construction of the central shunting yard separated the Viennese from the Lower Austrian railway line , the passenger trains of the Aspangbahn ran from May 1979 onwards from Vienna Südbahnhof until December 2009 and no longer touched the former Aspangbahnhof, which remained as a traffic point for goods traffic until 2001. Until the completion of the new Vienna Central Station at the end of 2014, the trains of the so-called Inner Aspang Railway (= the route from Vienna to Wiener Neustadt ) ran from Maria Lanzendorf ; Buses ran there from the main train station.

Reuse

The area of ​​the demolished station remained undeveloped for a long time. It was not until after 2000, when the previous land owner ÖBB worked together with the Vienna city administration , that concrete plans for the urban development area Aspanggrund / Eurogate came about . The area from the former train station (the railway line was lowered) to the Landstraßer Gürtel is to be built on with apartments, offices and social and technical infrastructure. Among other things, it is planned to build the largest passive house in Europe with 740 apartments there. For this purpose, a road network was planned, which already appeared on the 2012 city map with numerous newly named traffic areas.

Aspangbahnhof street sign

The memorial stone was repositioned within the “Place of the Victims of the Deportation” (status: October 2015). Its inscription reads: IN THE YEARS 1939-1942 TEN THOUSANDS OF AUSTRIAN JEWS WERE DEPORTED FROM THE FORMER ASPANGBAHHOF TO EXAMINATION CAMPS AND WERE NO LONGER RETURN. NEVER FORGET

Aspang railway station memorial

In September 2017, a 30 m long memorial to the deportations was opened here on the site of the former train station , with tapered rails made of concrete that run into a black concrete block. The project, originally from 2006, planned a 35 m long trench.

literature

  • Wolfgang Kos, Günter Dinhobl (Ed.): Large station. Vienna and the wide world. Czernin, Vienna 2006, ISBN 3-7076-0212-5 ( special exhibition of the Vienna Museum 332), (exhibition catalog, Vienna, Vienna Museum, September 28, 2006 - February 25, 2007).
  • Gerhard Kletter: The Aspangbahnhof and the Vienna-Saloniki Railway . Sutton Verlag, Erfurt 2006, ISBN 978-3-89702-928-6
  • Josef Steindl (Red.): 125 years of the Vienna - Aspang railway. 1881-2006 . Self-published by the Museum and Education Association Pitten , Pitten 2006

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Development zones Erdberger Mais, Aspanggrund and Arsenal on the Vienna city administration website
  2. ↑ orf.at: NS memorial opened at Aspangbahnhof . Article dated September 7, 2017, accessed September 8, 2017.
  3. ↑ Aspangbahnhof: Memorial planned for Nazi victims orf.at, November 8, 2016, accessed November 8, 2016.
  4. ↑ Permalink Austrian Library Association

Coordinates: 48 ° 11 '25 "  N , 16 ° 23' 41"  E