ABSTRACT
The Kaprun Power Plant played a key role in two respects. First, the power plant construction project in the Hohe Tauern was quantitatively speaking—both with respect to the size and duration of the project as well as the number of workers it employed—by far the largest undertaking by the energy sector of the so-called Ostmark. Furthermore, the project's enormous importance and highly symbolic impact and resonance during the postwar years additionally underscore the significance of Kaprun. The registration data filed with the Community of Kaprun—the project's most basic source material—prove that the number of foreign workers in Kaprun was several times larger than the number employed in other power plant projects. The tremendous publicity campaign surrounding it made Kaprun the optimistic symbol of the economic and political rebirth of Austria from the wreckage of war. In August 1955—the year of the Austrian State Treaty—the work at Kaprun was officially declared to be complete.
