Germany holds more of these pages than any other country, nearly all of them displaced persons camps of the years from 1945 to the early 1950s, with a smaller group of displaced persons hospitals, transit and resettlement centres and one entire housing estate. Almost nothing was built for the purpose. The camps were army barracks, hut settlements put up for forced labourers, factory estates, schools and hotels, catalogued by UNRRA and then the International Refugee Organisation as numbered assembly centres with a team, a capacity and an opening date.12
Ukrainians reached them by several routes. Most had been deported for forced labour in the German war economy; others were prisoners of war, and many families had left western Ukraine ahead of the retreating front in 1944 and would not go back. After liberation the western occupation zones gathered them into assembly centres, where camp administrations, Greek Catholic and Orthodox parishes, schools, printing presses, scout troops and sports clubs took shape inside the wire.345
The largest are here. Ganghofersiedlung in Regensburg, a Messerschmitt workers' estate whose residents called it Oselia, held almost 5,000 Ukrainians at its peak in 1947. Somme-Kaserne in Augsburg took 3,360 Ukrainians between 12 and 23 August 1945; Heidenau Camp was among the biggest in the British zone; Karlsfeld Camp near Munich sent its schools and youth organisations on to other camps when it was dispersed in 1946. Wentorf Resettlement Centre and Funk-Kaserne Transit Centre were where people sat out the medical and consular formalities before a ship.6789
The figures on these pages are camp returns rather than censuses. Stebelsky's tables count Ukrainians in the UNRRA and IRO camps of a zone on particular dates, and some rows are city totals covering several assembly centres instead of a single site.101112
Altöttinger Hof is a Baroque inn beside Altötting’s pilgrimage quarter which held 50 Yugoslav and Ukrainian residents on 12 August 1947. It was one of four town buildings named in that return, and it was never registered as an assembly centre in its own right.
Artillerie-Kaserne was the largest and longest-lived of Aschaffenburg’s Ukrainian displaced-persons camps, with its own Orthodox parish, co-operatives, veterans’ clubroom and elected camp leadership. Contemporary Ukrainian reporting and the camp inventory follow it from the barracks of 1938 to closure in July 1949.
A boarding school on the edge of Pfarrkirchen was requisitioned in September 1945 and held Ukrainian and Russian displaced people for three and a half years. Published population returns record several hundred Ukrainians at the town, and one former resident’s recollection places her family there for three years before they left for Canada.
A former teacher-training school in Amberg was registered as a displaced-persons camp for seven hundred people between January 1946 and July 1949. Contemporary Latvian newspapers record a theatre company and family tracing at the address, and the register lists Polish-Ukrainians among its residents.
The lower spa house at Kohlgrub was taken over by UNRRA in May 1945 and run as a sanatorium where displaced people too weak or ill for camp life were treated before being sent on. Its patients were counted separately in Ukrainian and in Jewish returns, and the building was demolished less than twenty years after it closed.
A Ukrainian community grew inside a 1937 infantry barracks on Aschaffenburg’s Würzburger Straße, one of five camps in the town’s barracks quarter. Population returns, an art lottery for two Ukrainian painters and the surviving military buildings document different parts of its history.
A Ukrainian camp opened in the former Buckenberg infantry barracks at Pforzheim on 20 August 1947, after Polish residents and American troops had used the site. A visiting Ukrainian correspondent found six blocks around a square, two parishes, a school, a theatre in a garage and a Plast troop of sixty.
A fenced barracks camp on the old Ludwigsburg parade ground held prisoners of war, then interned Nazi functionaries, before becoming a Polish displaced-persons camp in 1946. Its transfer lists record Polish Ukrainians being moved on to separate Ukrainian camps.
Baltic and Polish-Ukrainian families made homes in the bombed buildings of Bayreuth’s former psychiatric institution at Wendelhoefen, where the American military government ran a camp for up to 1,400 displaced persons. Its school, shared rooms and craftwork survive in photographs and in an original exhibition catalogue.
A fire-police compound on both sides of Sorgenser Straße in Burgdorf became Camp Ohio in April 1945, run under British military government in the Hannover region. Children learned in wooden classrooms, adults trained for new work, a football team carried the name Zaporozhets, and by April 1950 the residents had dispersed across the world.
At the Continental tyre works in Korbach, displaced Ukrainians rebuilt a community with schools and youth organisations. The camp took in people from at least two smaller Waldeck camps before it closed in March 1949 and its residents were scattered again.
A mining settlement became a home for displaced Ukrainians. Schools, a driving course, congregations and family life grew among Cornberg’s sandstone houses before residents moved on to new lives overseas.