In 1850, the cadastral community of Gerasdorf was constituted as a free local community, together with Kapellerfeld. In 1938, after Austria was annexed to the German Reich, Gerasdorf was incorporated into the city of Vienna. The municipality regained its independence with the introduction of the Territorial Review Act of September 1, 1954, which brought about the reorganization of the Vienna outlying districts into the federal province of Lower Austria. On January 1, 1972, the municipality of Seyring was merged with Gerasdorf. Today's municipality of Gerasdorf is made up of the localities of Gerasdorf and Seyring, and three settlements: Kapellerfeld, Oberlisse and Föhrenhain. Gerasdorf belongs to the judicial district of Klosterneuburg and the administrative district of Korneuburg. Until 1848, the responsible regional court authorities for Gerasdorf was the Süßenbrunn Estate.
The two oldest villages in the municipality are Gerasdorf and Seyring. Gerasdorf is first mentioned in an entry in the Klosterneuburg tradition book dated around 1200, where a "Viricus des Gerhartesdorf" appears as a witness to a donation to the monastery. The place itself is likely to have developed 100 to 150 years earlier, i.e. in the second half of the 11th century. The oldest documented mentions of Seyring were made in 1240 as "Seuringe" and probably also in the 11th century: this is supported by the old form of the name with the "-ing" word ending.
Seyring was the seat of a manorial estate until 1848. A manor is mentioned for the first time in 1442: Johann von Ehrenfels sold the "Veste Sayringh" to Georg von Kuenring-Seefeld. The Kuenringers remained the owners of the Seyring estate until the early years of the 16th century. The next known landowners, the Trautson family, have been proven to have ruled from 1619. The Auersperg family held the manor for a short time in the 18th century, and later sold it to the Swiss Beroldingen family in 1797. They remained the landlords of Seyring until 1848; after the agrarian reform they owned Seyring Manor and Estate until 1917. At that time the property was sold, though the manor house as a whole did not find a buyer, and so the individual wings were sold separately and found various uses: a factory building was built in the manor garden; another part of the park was designed as a sports facility by the Gerasdorf community. The manor house in its current form was built in the classicist style in the late 18th century.
Both Gerasdorf and Seyring often suffered from enemy invasions due to their unprotected locations on the edge of the Marchfeld and their proximity to Vienna. Gerasdorf was destroyed in 1428 in the course of the Hussite Wars. In 1529, during the first Turkish siege of Vienna, Turkish troops known as the "Akindschi", referred to by the locals as "Renner und Brenner", set fire to the Marchfeld: Gerasdorf and Seyring went up in flames. In 1605 the "Heyducken" burned Gerasdorf; and in 1619/20, at the beginning of the Thirty Years War, it was devastated again. Gerasdorf suffered the same fate in 1683, during the second Turkish siege of Vienna. At that time, many farmers were abducted by the Turks and died near Stammersdorf.
Gerasdorf was also occupied by the French in 1805, during the Napoleonic Wars. In 1809 the village burned down again, when the victorious French advanced after the Battle of Deutsch-Wagram. The area was also affected by the Prussian War in 1866, as a section of the "Schanzengürtel" (ring of entrechments built around Vienna) ran through Gerasdorf. During the Second World War, there was a military airport of the German Wehrmacht in the Seyring area, which was the target of Allied air raids from 1944 onwards. At that time, bombs often fell in the Gerasdorf area too. Thankfully, the residential areas were largely spared. In 1944 there was a labour camp for Hungarian Jews in Gerasdorf in which around 280 men, women and children were interned. They had to do forced labour in agriculture and in commercial & industrial companies. In 2016, a memorial was erected near the train station in memory of the victims. You can download the commemorative volume here (German only)"Das Judenlager Gerasdorf".
During in the interwar period, the two settlements "Oberlisse" and "Kapellerfeld" emerged in the Gerasdorf municipal area. Both names are old field/meadow names. The field strips allocated to each farmer used to be called "Lisse". "Oberlisse" is the field name for the higher-lying fields in the municipality. "Kapellerfeld", on the other hand, is reminiscent of the lost place known as "Kapellen". It is documented for the first time in the Passau tithe register from 1258 ("Capellen"; Passauer Zehntverzeichnis). The place was located about 400m south of today's settlement. It became deserted around the middle of the 16th century and was not repopulated afterwards. The fields of the deserted houses were used by the neighbors, especially the Gerasdorfers, as additional grazing land for their cattle. They leased the land from the "Schottenkloster", the landowners of Kapellen. The name "Kapellerfeld" originally describes the fields of the abandoned villages. Kapellen appears in the Franziszeischen Cadastre as a separate cadastral parish without houses, which has belonged to the municpal territory of Gerasdorf since 1828.
When the economic situation continued to deteriorate after the First World War, many Gerasdorf farmers parceled out their fields and sold them as garden plots. However, settlements soon began to emerge, which grew rapidly as a result of rising rents in Vienna. Gerasdorf has experienced a steady growth in population since the beginning of the 1930s.
The name of the Föhrenhain settlement is a modern artificial name. It alludes to the custom, practiced since the time of Maria Theresa, of planting pine forests in Marchfeld to combat the drifting sand.
The municipal administration employs 28 people and is housed in town hall in Gerasdorf, which was renovated and rebuilt in 1985. The municipality is the seat of a citizenship registration office and its own registry office district: the registry office and wedding hall is also located in the official building.
According to the Lower Austrian regional planning, Gerasdorf is classified as a "general location for central facilities", but in the planning program for trade, commerce and industry as a "first-order suitable location, which is in a fourth-order development area".
Its favorable location highlights Gerasdorf as a business location, due to the close proximity to the city of Vienna (planning region with a metropolitan core) and the favorable transport conditions. According to the assessment of the Lower Austrian regional planning, Gerasdorf is also of outstanding importance in the areas of health care, leisure and sport, as well as education (four kindergartens, three elementary schools, NÖ middle school and the music school). This results in the main function of the municipality as a preferred place to live and work, which is also reflected in the high number of inhabitants.
On December 19, 1991, the provincial parliament resolved to raise the status of the market municipality at the request of the provincial adminstration. This decision is based on the fact that the municipality of Gerasdorf has facilities in the areas of economy, health care, sport and leisure, as well as schools, that are of central and cross regional importance. In May 1992 Gerasdorf was promoted to a market municipality.
On December 17, 1998, the Lower Austrian state parliament decided to designate Gerasdorf as a town, and in 1999 Gerasdorf celebrated its 800th anniversary.
Gerasdorf is also very well connected in terms of transport. The railway age began in Austria in 1837 with the opening of the first section of the Austrian Royal Imperial Chartered Railways "Kaiser Ferdinands-Nordbahn" (today's "Nordbahn") between Floridsdorf and Deutsch-Wagram. Approx. 1.5 km of this route is on Gerasdorf soil. In 1870, the Austrian Royal Imperial Chartered Railways (Vienna - Brno - Prague), later the "Ostbahn" or today's "Laaer Ostbahn", was opened. The place was therefore called "Gerasdorf an der Staatsbahn" and later "Gerasdorf an der Ostbahn".
Until the construction of the Reichsstraße to Moravia (Mährische Straße, today's Brünner Straße) in 1736, the connection from Vienna to Moravia was through Gerasdorf and Seyring. The routes of the provincial roads B7 (Brünner Straße), B8 (Angerner Bundesstraße), and the Vienna outer ring expressway S1-East, which opened in 2009 with the Seyring-Kapellerfeld exit, are all partly within the Gerasdorf urban area. The Stammersdorfer local railway "Weinviertel Landesbahn", which was operated from 1903 to 1988, also ran through our municipality. The international Euro Velo 9 cycle track (Vienna - Breclav) was built on this route.
The Marchfeld Canal (depicted in the city arms) cuts through the urban area of Gerasdorf over a length of approx. 5 km. Its flooding took place on a trial basis in 1991 and it was opened in 1992. Accompanying paths were built along this cana, which are often used for agricultural development, hiking and cycling.
The G3 Shopping Resort Gerasdorf was built in 2012, as the fifth largest shopping center in Austria.
