The Labor Education- and Gypsy Detention Camp St. Pantaleon-Weyer is a former National Socialist detention camp in the municipal area of St. Pantaleon, today again called Haigermoos, in Upper Austria. The camp existed as a Labor Education Camp from July 1940 until the beginning of 1941, when it was converted into a Gypsy Detention Camp and used as such up to November of the same year. Today, a memorial place reminds of this prison.
History
The camp was situated in Weyer, a part of the municipality Haigermoos, which belonged to the municipality Sankt Pantaleon until 1945.
The Labor Education Camp
The Labor Education Camp existed from July 5, 1940, until about January 7, 1941. From July 7, 1940, until the end of August 1940, the inn Göschl in Moosach in the parish of Sankt Georgen bei Salzburg served as an edifice for the camp. Then, the Ortsgruppenleiter, the landlord and agriculturalist Michael Kaltenegger, as well as the Gaufürsorgeverband, the organization that officially ran the camp, provided the property of the landlord Geratsdorfer in Weyer as a sublease. Kaltenegger himself had leased it from the economically struggling landlord. The prisoners were deployed in the regulation of the river Moosach.
In letters of the Gauleiter August Eigruber from May 31, 1940 and of the Nazi appointee Kubinger from September 10, 1941 directed to all mayors of the district Oberdonau, the purpose of the camp is described as follows:
“Admitted can be such fellow citizens, that on principle refuse work, that skip work, that constantly cause disturbances at the work site, or that refuse any taking up of work at all, despite being physically fit. They all, however, have to have reached the age of 18. Also “anti-social” managing directors are included. Only cases of criminal nature cannot be covered in this setting. And serious cases of invalids, as hard physical labors have to be performed.”
Corresponding to these guidelines, persons classified as “disagreeable” were consequently brought into the camp; So for example Karl Grumpelmaier from Mauthausen, the manager of a big woodworking business, because he refused to purchase a banner of the German Labor Front. The two teenage prisoners Oskar Heinrich and Heinrich Müller had refused to take part in the company-facilitated sports activities of the paper mill Steyrermühl and were – because they had not reached the age of 18 yet – unlawfully detained in Weyer as “anti-socials”. It is proven in many cases that not only “anti-socials” were admitted to the camp.
Only upon their arrival at the camp the inmates were informed about the reasons of their arrest. There were no legal means; on their arrival, resorts of violence through the camp leader August Steininger were regularly the case. The so-called “education” became the responsibility of the camp personnel, which was composed of the SA-Standarte 159 from Braunau am Inn – whom also the camp commandant belonged to. With the continued existence of the camp, the violence of the SA became more and more prominent. The first person to die in the camp was Johann Gabauer from Julbach, who was left lying next to his fellow workers with fatal injuries. Numerous severely injured were admitted to the circumjacent hospitals. An extract from a medical history:
“Welts were discovered all over the body. E. temporarily regained conscience at the hospital and related that he had been thrown into the water repeatedly. He died on September 4th 1940. The chief doctor initiated a postmortem examination, in which superficial and bleeding damages of the epithelial layer were detected spread all over the back, especially on the protruding parts of the back, the back of the head and the upper arm. They apparently are the results of physical abuse.”
After the death of Joseph Mayer, who came from Neukirchen, the camp physician Alois Staufer saw the opportunity to personally emerge from being involved – which he had become through issuing innocuous death certificates for camp victims. He presented the circumstances of the case to the local court Wildshut. A year-and-a-half-long struggle ensued concerning the arraignment against the superintendent and the camp management, but also against important Nazi figures such as Franz Kubinger and the district superintendent Stefan Schachermayer. The charges that were approved by the ministry of Justice in Berlin consisted of the following:
Manslaughter
Gross physical abuse
Confinement of individuals under the age of 18
Confinement of individuals that couldn’t be declared as “reluctant to work”