Crimean Tatar’s Traces in Vorarlberg

Abstract

In the course of research on the history of Tatar forced laborers, the author came across a little-known chapter of Vorarlberg’s history: the tragic history of a Muslim minority, Turkic-speaking Crimean Tatars, who fell between the millstones of the Nazi policy of conquest and extermination in Eastern Europe and Stalinist tyranny and were suffering a lot in the process. One trace of this minority leads to Austria’s westernmost State of Vorarlberg: In 1945/46, a refugee group of surviving Crimean Tatars was stranded here and housed in the village of Alberschwende.