1945–1950: Displaced Persons in Austria

Displaced Persons (DPs) described people who were forcibly taken away from their homes, such as former forcer laborers, prisoners of war and concentration camp inmates, who ended up outside of their home countries after the war. Among the hundreds of thousands of DPs in Austria, Holocaust survivors played a central role: allied troops liberated approx. 25,000 Jews from the Mauthausen Concentration Camp and its subcamps. In addition to about 5,000 former Hungarian-Jewish forced laborers, thousands of concentration camp survivors returned to Austria. Starting in the summer of 1945, Austria became a hub for the exodus of Holocaust survivors from East-Central Europe. Following the Pogrom of Kielce in July 1946, approx. 100,000 Jews fled from Poland to Austria. These people tried, above all, to enter the US occupation zone via Vienna, where a DP camp had been set up in the former Rothschild Hospital. In the US occupation zone DP camps were built, for instance, in Linz-Bindermichl, Wels, Ebensee, Bad Ischl, Bad Goisern, Bad Gastein and Salzburg, and in the British occupation zone, in Graz, Judenburg and Trofaiach. The DP camps, supported by the UNRAA and the Joint Distribution Committee, were under the control of the underground aid organization Bricha, which helped Jews on their onward journey to Palestine. In the camps, DPs also collected materials about the Holocaust – in Austria, especially for the prosecution of Nazi criminals.

In 1947, 30,000 Romanian Jews fled to Austria due to anti-Semitism and a deteriorating supply situation. Following the establishment of the State of Israel and until the fall of the “Iron Curtain”, thousands of Hungarian Jews travelled to Israel via Austria. In total, 250,000–300,000 Jewish DPs were in Austria between 1945 and 1950.