military vehicles during the Second World War, Steyr became a target of Allied bombing raids which tried to knock out its factories. Much of the town was badly damaged, but the factories continued to function until near the end of the war. A dark point in Steyr's history was the construction of a Nazi concentration camp, part of the Mauthausen network, in Steyr. The city was a meeting point in May 1945 when units of the 5th Guards Airborne of the Red Army and black troops of the US 761st Tank Battalion along with the 71st Infantry Division contacted each other on the bridge over the Enns River. Steyr was occupied by the U.S. Army—the Soviet Army moved east behind the demarcation line of the province of Lower Austria. The troops remained until 1955 when Austria officially declared neutrality
