Military camp Lebring and military cemetery Lang

After the outbreak of the First World War in the summer of 1914, the military administration of the Habsburg Monarchy looked for locations for prisoner-of-war camps. In Central Styria, construction of the huge Feldbach/Mühldorf camp began in December 1914, and in March 1915 the decision was made to build camps in the Leibnitzer Feld near Lebring and Lang. Protests against this construction were unsuccessful. From March to May 1915, about 1,500 prisoners of war and civilian workers built the Lebring camp. It comprised over a hundred buildings including infrastructure, including a water tank at the foot of the Buchkogel in St. Margarethen, sewers, a drag track between the Lebring train station and the camp slaughterhouse, and a camp post office. Electricity was supplied by a river power plant on the Mur river. Initially, up to 3,000 prisoners of war from Serbia, Russia and Romania were housed here and performed forced labor in work detachments on construction projects in the surrounding area. After Italy entered the war on the side of the Entente powers in May 1915, the camp also held Italian prisoners of war.

In addition, up to 15,000 Habsburg soldiers of various nationalities were quartered in the approximately 75-hectares fenced-in camp area as well as a cadre of miners and about 1,000 local skilled workers. The camp hospitals included 2,000 beds for wounded and infected soldiers and prisoners.
The camp also served as a dislocated training center for the Bosnian-Herzegovinian units of the Imperial Army, among them the soldiers of Infantry Regiment 2 (“Zweier-Bosniaken”) stationed in Graz, who had a reputation for bravery and loyalty to the Emperor. However, these men often requisitioned food in the villages surrounding the camp on their own authority, which resulted in curfews. In 1916, reports about the poor supply situation in the camp, about violent attacks by the guards and about diseases reached the Vienna parliament. An official review of the conditions, however, remained inconsequential.
In the turbulent last weeks of the war in November 1918, the Habsburg Army gradually disbanded. The Lebring camp was first looted by the Bosnian-Herzegovinian soldiers, later by the local population. Both the former Bosnian soldiers and the Russian prisoners of war started their journeys back to their homelands via the Lebring railway station of the Südbahn. A guard force of 35 military policemen and ten horsemen of the Volkswehr then remained in the camp; in February 1919 it was handed over to the province of Styria. After the sale of all army materials and the demolition of the barracks, “nothing is visible anymore of the magnificently laid out camp,” wrote the commander of the Wildon police. Today, there are settlements, industrial plants, roads and agricultural land on the former camp site.

After only a few months, the prisoners of war and soldiers from the military camp Lebring-Lang who had fallen victim to the poor hygienic conditions, hunger, cold and various diseases could no longer be buried at the parish cemetery near the church of St. Margarethen. Therefore, in September 1915, the military station command turned to the district administration of Leibnitz with the urgent request to approve a camp cemetery and to find a suitable place for it. The War Ministry then acquired a 7,000-square-meter parcel of woodland on the Eybesfeld estate to the south of the camp and established a fenced military cemetery which had to be expanded in 1917 due to the high mortality rate.

The official memorial plaque at the entrance to the cemetery lists a total of 1,670 graves today, distributed among 1,233 soldiers of the Austrian-Hungarian Army (including 805 Bosniaks) and 437 Italian, Romanian, Russian and Serbian prisoners of war. Several monuments of different nationalities commemorate the soldiers and prisoners of war buried here. Impressive are the crosses for the Christians, placed in dense rows, and the grave markers of the Muslim Bosniaks, surmounted with carved fez, the characteristic headgear. According to the “Islam Law” of 1912, the Muslims in the Habsburg Monarchy were recognized as a religious community, were granted religious self-determination and provided with pastoral care within the army by imams.
The military cemetery is also the final resting place of Johann Matella (1874-1962), who devotedly cared for the grounds and graves for decades.
Every year, on the last Sunday of October, a memorial service is held at the cemetery, attended by representatives of the authorities, the Armed Forces, the Rotarians, the Executive, the Black Cross and other organizations.
In the commemoration year of 2014, the Kulturpark Hengist designed a permanent exhibition on the grounds of the military cemetery consisting of ten display panels (designed by Andreas Karl) about the history of the military camp and the military cemetery during the First World War as well as the European peace projects of the 20th century.