Steyr is a town in the Austrian federal state of Upper Austria, located at the confluence of the rivers Steyr and Enns.

It has a long history as a manufacturing center, and has given its name to several manufacturers headquartered there, such as Steyr Mannlicher (a firearms manufacturer best known for the Steyr AUG), Steyr Tractor, and Steyr Automobile.

History and sights

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Steyr marked its 1,000th anniversary in 1980, undergoing extensive restoration of its historic architecture made the city one of the best preserved old towns in Austria. Steyr is famous for its historic town center around the "Stadtplatz" (town square), which has been very well preserved for several hundred years, and which was largely restored following World War II. Its best-known piece of architecture is called The Bummerlhaus which is considered one of the finest pieces of Gothic architecture for its size in Central Europe.

The city is very attractively sited, with two rivers the Steyr and the Enns flowing through it and meeting in the town centre where the confluence is towered over by the Babenberg castle "Lamberg" and the church of St. Michael. This prominent location however led to the plague of severe floodings through the centuries until the present, one of the worst cases at last in August 2002.

To the south of city rise a series of hills that climb in altitude and stretch out to the Alps. To the north, the hills roll downward towards the confluence of the Enns and Danube rivers, where the city of Enns is situated.

Historically, the city has had a number of well-known residents or visitors, including Franz Schubert who wrote his "Trout Quintet" there while on holidays, composer Anton Bruckner, who was also the organist for the local parish church. Adolf Hitler spent a brief period there while in his teens. Hitler, who lived in a room at the Grünmarkt, went to the realschule of Steyr in 1904.

In 1934, the city became one of several battlegrounds between Social Democrat and Christian Social Parties (and their respective Schutzbund and Heimwehr militias) in the Austrian Civil War that brought about the fascist corporate state that ruled the country until the German Anschluss in 1938.

Because it was such a major producer of arms and 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 placement 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. The city continued to be occupied -- divided, like Berlin -- by Soviet and American troops until 1955 when Austria was declared...