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Summer Alps: Mountain Pass Ljubelj (Slovenia to Austria) part 1.
The Loibl Pass or Ljubelj Pass is a high mountain pass in the Karawanks chain of the Southern Limestone Alps, linking Austria with Slovenia. The Loibl Pass road is the shortest connection between the Carinthian town of Ferlach and Tržič in Upper Carniola and part of the European route E652 from Klagenfurt to Naklo.
The mountain pass is located just on the Austrian-Slovenian border at 1,367 metres above the Adriatic (4,485 ft), east of the Stol massif. The mountain road (Loiblpass Straße, B 91), one of the steepest in the Eastern Alps, winds up from the broad Drava valley in numerous hairpin curves to the top of the pass, parallel to the Loiblbach brook and the picturesque Tscheppa (Čepa) gorge with several waterfalls. From the Kleiner Loibl (Sapotnica) pass, a small road branches off to the remote Bodental valley. Since 1963-64 the traffic passes through a two-lane tunnel at 1,069 m (3,507 ft) underneath the mountain crest. South of the pass, the road (No. 101) runs down via Podljubelj to Tržič in the Sava valley and further to the A2 motorway. Nearby mountain passes are Wurzen Pass in the west and Seeberg Saddle in the east.
During World War II, a 1,570 m (5,150 ft) meter long tunnel was built at 1,068 m (3,504 ft) above sea level by command of the Nazi Gauleiter of Carinthia, Friedrich Rainer, to bypass the steep upper parts of the mountain road. Work was performed by the Viennese Universale Hoch- und Tiefbau construction company, employing 660 civilian workers, several posted by the Service du travail obligatoire of Vichy France, and 1,652 forced labourers supplied by contract with the SS. These prisoners were interned in two minor subcamps of the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp, one on each side of the pass. They were put under the command of Obersturmführer Julius Ludolf, who served in Mauthausen since 1940 and was notorious for his excessive beatings.
Tunnel construction started on the south side in March 1943. The first forced labourers arrived at Tržič in June and were immediately transported to Loibl Pass by SS personnel. Most of the inmates were POWs and political prisoners. They were interned with German and Austrian criminals who assumed Kapo functions. Under inhumane conditions, about 40 forced labourers died either from starvation and exhaustion, or were killed by mistreatment, work-related accidents and rockfalls. By August, Ludolf was removed from his post after the construction company complained about the number of inmates that became incapable of working due to beatings and torture. To keep the work force efficient, hundreds of injured or sick prisoners were sent back to the main camp, or if unable to be transported were executed on-site by camp physician Sigbert Ramsauer by petrol injection.
The breakthrough of the tunnel happened in December 1943. Rainer and several high-ranking SS members came to inspect the project. The first Wehrmacht army vehicles passed through the very tight tunnel on 4 December 1944. Military traffic, German soldiers retreating from the Yugoslav Front and refugees used the tunnel until it was closed in 1947. At the end of the war, on 7 May 1945, the surviving 950 prisoners from the two camps were largely abandoned by the guards and began marching down to Feistritz im Rosental, where they met Yugoslav Partisans on the following day. As the survivors had in effect 'freed themselves', theirs were the only subcamps of Mauthausen-Gusen not to be either evacuated or liberated.
An American military court sentenced commandant Julius Ludolf to death on 13 May 1946. British military courts sentenced two other SS commanders of the camps, Jakob Winkler and Walter Briezke, to death on 10 November 1947, and sentenced camp physician Sigbert Ramsauer to life imprisonment on 10 October 1947. Ramsauer was released in 1954, however, and soon obtained an employment at the Klagenfurt state hospital. Today plaques at the Austrian tunnel portal and a memorial on the Slovenian side, erected at the site of the southern Loibl camp, commemorate the injustices. A joint memorial service was held on 13 June 2015.
The tunnel reopened as a border crossing between Austria and the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia in 1950 and expanded in the early 1960s to two lanes in November 1963. The old road over the summit of the mountain pass has been closed for motorised traffic since 1967.