Lienz: A Cossack woman's traditional shoe

In April 1945 around 25,000 Cossack Wehrmacht soldiers and their families were gathered in the vicinity of Lienz, Eastern Tyrol. They were nationalist opponents of the Soviet Union and had fought in Italy and Yugoslavia, where they had committed war crimes. The British army had an agreement with the Soviet Union to hand over all Soviet citizens, which is why they arrested the Cossack officers under false pretenses. On 1 June 1945 the British administration forced most remaining men, women and children into transports. For these Cossacks, their extradition meant persecution and in many cases death in the Stalinist terror system.

Some families in Eastern Tyrol reused objects left behind by the extradited Cossacks or preserved them as keepsakes from the “Tragedy on the Drau”. One of the Cossacks remaining in Austria gave this shoe to a Lienz family, who donated it for an exhibition on the 50th anniversary of the liberation at the Ferdinandeum museum in 1995.