Location: Seggauberg 1, 8430 Leibnitz
Although the Seggauberg episcopal refectory escaped confiscation by the Nazi regime, it was commissioned to serve as a seed propagation center. As the war progressed, the majority of the local employees were drafted into military service and Seggau sought the allocation of “foreign workers”. From 1942, 34 “Eastern workers” were employed here, who were treated well according to contemporary witnesses.
Unlike other Styrian monasteries and convents, Prince-Bishop Ferdinand Pawlikowski’s Seggauberg episcopal refectory estate escaped the confiscations and abolitions ordered by the Nazi regime. However, the regime considered the estate to have the function of a seed propagation center in order to be integrated into the general “National Socialist economic struggle”.
In 1940, 70 permanent workers, 25 day laborers and, in the summer months, winegrowing families were employed on the 860-hectare estate, making a total of over 100 workers. Due to the continued enlistment of “followers” of the German Wehrmacht, Eastern workers, prisoners of war and foreign workers were hired to work on the estate. In the summer of 1940, eight French prisoners of war worked at Seggauberg. In 1942, the number of conscripts was 36, rising to 40 in 1943 and 50 by mid-1944. After the estate manager requested Polish workers from the Leibnitz employment office in April 1942, a total of 34 Eastern workers were subsequently employed at the Bischöfliches Mensalgut. 24 workers are known by name, of whom 20 were male and four female. There is evidence that two workers volunteered to be recruited in Krakow. While one worker fled shortly after starting work and could not be found by the gendarmerie, the other worker remained on the estate until April 1945. The duration of the workers’ employment varied from just one month to three years. They lived on the second floor of the manor building and were paid according to their use as “servants” working in agriculture. The estate manager of the estate saw the assigned foreign workers as an inadequate replacement for the enlisted followers, so he wrote several letters to the Leibnitz military registration office requesting their return. Prisoners of war from the Kaindorf an der Sulm prisoner-of-war camp were also assigned to work in the camp.
In the course of the compensation negotiations by the Austrian government in 2000 regarding the Nazi forced laborers, Diocesan Bishop Johann Weber voluntarily paid 700,000 schillings into the fund set up, which was to benefit the 34 people who had been employed at the Mensalgut as well as a further five people.
Literature: Norbert Müller, Der Einsatz von NS-Zwangsarbeitern am Bischöflichen Mensalgut auf Schloß Seggau bei Leibnitz, in: Mitteilungen des Steiermärkischen Landesarchivs 50/51 (2001), 367–376.
Text: Markus Rieger-Roschitz / Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Research on War Consequences
