Klagenfurt mining museum reopens with nature and wartime history

Klagenfurt’s mining museum has reopened with an exhibition exploring the lives of people, animals and plants, as well as the site’s difficult wartime history, ORF reports. The tunnel at Kreuzbergl had been closed since 2015.

The museum has reduced technical installations in the tunnel to allow natural features, including growing stalactites, to take centre stage. Curator Martina Zerovnik said she hopes visitors will find the exhibition striking and atmospheric, and leave reflecting on their responsibilities to one another and to nature.

The tunnel was built in 1943 as an air-raid shelter for Klagenfurt residents. Italian miners and British prisoners of war were made to work on its construction. A bomb on display recalls the air raids that killed more than 500 people in the city. ORF’s report gives differing figures for the raids: it says the city was bombed 48 times, and later states that US bombers made 47 attacks.

The exhibition also examines the pasts of two figures connected to the tunnel. Geologist Franz Kahler, a co-founder of the botanical garden and the former mining museum, prepared geological reports for the Loibl Tunnel, which was built by prisoners from Mauthausen under inhumane conditions. His role during the Nazi period was largely overlooked, and he continued his career after the war.

Friedrich Rainer, who became Gauleiter of Reichsgau Kärnten in 1941, announced the Nazi surrender by radio from the tunnel on May 7, 1945. He was sentenced to death for war crimes in Laibach in 1947.

The exhibition costs 30,000 euros a year. The museum tunnel can be reached through Klagenfurt’s botanical garden and is open throughout winter, except when there is snow, from Monday to Thursday between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m.