Oflag XVII-A

Oflag XVII-A stands in the Waldviertel region of Lower Austria, between the villages of Edelbach and Döllersheim. It began as a military barracks built in 1938 for the large Döllersheim training area, which covered 200 square kilometres. After the war started, the site was enclosed with barbed wire and watchtowers to hold officers taken prisoner in the Battle of France. Most of the prisoners were French, with several hundred Poles among them, and the guards were mainly Austrian veterans. The camp measured roughly 440 by 530 metres and held about 6,000 officers and orderlies. The prisoners organised a university, a choir, a theatre and a sports ground called the Stade Pétain. The Université en Captivité, led by mathematics professor Jean Leray, awarded nearly 500 degrees that were later officially recognised. Other lecturers included embryologist Étienne Wolff and geologist François Ellenberger, while the weekly newspaper Le Canard en KG poked fun at camp life. A clandestine film, Sous le Manteau, was shot on 8 mm stock hidden inside a dictionary and showed scenes of daily routine and tunnel digging. Visitors today find the flat training area still used by the Austrian Army, with the old camp site now partly returned to farmland. The surrounding villages were cleared when the training area was created, leaving only scattered farmsteads and woodland. The remains of slit trenches and the open-air theatre can still be traced among the trees and fields. The scale of the former training area is evident in the wide, empty spaces that stretch for kilometres. A sense of the prisoners’ efforts survives in the scattered depressions where tunnels once ran beneath the wire.