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During the Nazi era, the Liebenau camp was not only a camp for resettlers and forced laborers, but also a site of Nazi crimes. Between 1940\/41 and 1945, thousands of people from various countries were housed in the wooden barracks located here, the majority against their will.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
These people are commemorated by the countless artifacts discovered during archaeological excavations between 2017 and 2022 and handed over to the Graz City Archaeology Department at the Graz Museum. Other artifacts, however, tell the story of the time before the camp was located here, and still others of the years after 1945.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
350 of these objects were processed as part of the project \u201cRescued from Oblivion\u2014Digitization of Personal Objects from the Site of the Former Liebenau Forced-Labor Camp\u201d (short title: Liebenau 3D), funded by the Federal Ministry of Housing, Art, Culture, Media, and Sports under the \u201cDigital Cultural Heritage\u201d funding program. The selected objects were captured using 3D scanners, digitally photographed, and cataloged.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Every find tells a story. Some reveal it at first glance, while others only do so upon closer inspection. Combs, toothbrushes, and other hygiene items, as well as shoes, buttons, dishes, and silverware, along with children\u2019s toys, decorative items, and everyday objects, may seem unremarkable at first. Yet it is precisely these objects that tell us about the people who lived here, about their daily lives, their hopes, and the conditions under which they had to live. They preserve memories, even when the eyewitnesses themselves can no longer recount them. Archaeologists thus become mediators between the past and the present: they decipher the \u201clanguage\u201d of the objects and make their stories legible once again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The following artifacts tell the eventful history of the historic site \u201cLiebenau Camp.\u201d They span the period from before the camp was built, through its use as a camp for resettlers and forced laborers, to the postwar era. These objects reveal both the traces of the Nazi policies of violence and exclusion and the changes the site underwent after 1945. Not every object, however, readily reveals its story. Our \u201cMystery Objects\u201d exemplify the challenges of contemporary archaeology at a site with a turbulent history: They raise questions about their function, their context, and the people behind them, and show that the past cannot always be fully deciphered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Before the camp<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Before the barracks camp was built in the winter of 1940\/41, this site, east of the Mur River, was fallow land bordered to the northeast by the Sch\u00f6nau and Kirchner barracks and to the northwest by a fertilizer factory (now a soap factory). To the south and east, there were only a few scattered houses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
According to contemporary newspaper reports, there was a landfill south of the fertilizer factory on the Mur River around 1900, which could explain the presence of objects from the late 19th and early 20th centuries in this area. However, some of the older objects might also be connected to the camp, as they could have been brought here by the people housed there from their home countries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n \n \n Coffee House Clay Pipe <\/h2>\n\n \n
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