Location: Eisenbahnerstraße 7, 8435 Wagna
The camp in Wagna was used several times and in different ways during the Nazi era. In 1940/41 it was a resettlement camp of the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle, in 1941/42 it was briefly a teacher training college, from 1942 to 1944 a prisoner of war camp and in 1944/45 a camp used by the Wehrmacht. A listed barrack has been preserved. The camp barrack, which still exists today, was the kitchen of the hospital, which was run as the Gaukrankenhaus Wagna from 1939 to 1945. As a side story: Gauleiter Uiberreither was operated on in this hospital after a car accident.
In August 1940, the Reich Governor and Gauleiter of Styria, Siegfried Uiberreither, was informed by the “Reich Commissioner for the Consolidation of the German Nation” that 25,000 resettlers from South Bukovina would have to be accommodated in the Reich region of Styria. As this action was to be carried out in a short space of time, properties that had already been used as camps during the First World War were used – as was the case in Wagna near Leibnitz. In the planned Wagna resettlement camp of the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle, 60 residential barracks, 12 economic and 12 washing barracks, six guide and six administrative barracks and 18 abort barracks were to be erected.
When the first resettlers arrived in December 1940, the camp was only 70% complete. After the resettlers had contributed to the completion of the camp, they left again by September 1941 – there were around 2,000 of them – and moved to the east (O-Fälle) or to the “Altreich” (A-Fälle). At the end of September 1941, part of the camp was sold to the Department for Pupils’ Homes of the Reich Governor’s Office for Styria, which briefly housed a teacher training college in the camp. Around 400 candidates were housed in the camp’s barracks in order to train them for their future profession as teachers. The prisoner-of-war base camp (Stalag) Wagna was established in September 1942 by relocating Stalag XVIII B from Spittal an der Drau to Wagna. The first prisoners of war arrived in Wagna on November 10, 1942.
However, the camp was disbanded a short time later and the prisoners of war were transferred to Pupping (Upper Austria and Upper Danube). As the camp barracks were now empty, 1,046 French officers who had been taken prisoner of war and the assigned German guards arrived at the camp on August 1, 1943. These officers and three Italian officers left Wagna again at the end of 1944. Around this time, the Mountain Infantry Replacement Battalion 138, which had been stationed in Admont since July 1944, was relocated to Wagna. In the spring of 1945, underage “Volkssturm men” were also trained in the Wagna camp for their deployment on the south-east rampart.
In August 1945, there were around 1,700 people in the Wagna camp, including 600 Jews as so-called DPs (displaced persons). It was not until the mid-1950s that the situation for the refugees in the camp improved noticeably. The Wagna camp was not closed until the end of July 1963. A listed barrack has been preserved.
Literature: Heimo Halbrainer, Lager Wagna 1914-1963. The at times third largest town in Styria (= Schild von Steier. Kleine Schriften; 23). Graz 2014.
Text: Markus Rieger-Roschitz / Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Research on War Consequences
