Camp 71, Aldingen

Parade ground, barracks and prisoners

From 1830 the Ludwigsburg garrison developed its Große Exerzierplatz, the large parade ground, on Aldingen land. In 1935 a barracks camp called Alter See was built inside the parade ground, and from 1940 it held French prisoners of war. The 1991 survey of Ludwigsburg internment camps describes the site as a former Stalag barracks camp.

In May 1945 the American army turned the fenced camp into Internment Camp 71 for people subject to automatic arrest, chiefly local and district functionaries of the Nazi regime. About 2,500 internees were held there until mid 1946. The camp was in poor condition and the internees were first put to clearing and repair work. Internal administration was handed to a German camp leader with a team of 38 internees, including ten department heads and 25 barrack elders; twelve men shared each small room in bunk beds. A camp school, a daily camp newspaper and, from spring 1946, loudspeaker broadcasts of Stuttgart radio were part of camp life.

In 1946 the military government for Württemberg-Baden published a 74 page illustrated camp book about Camp 71, printed in Stuttgart, evidently produced by the internees under American supervision. Historians read it as a propaganda piece meant to give a relaxed impression of internment, although it also shows the daily roll call and the delousing plant.

The Polish DP camp, 1946 to 1947

By mid 1945 the Americans had gathered up to 15,000 displaced persons in the empty Ludwigsburg barracks for repatriation. Transport was lacking at first, and as communist rule in Poland became clear many Poles refused to go home. Supplying the Polish camps was difficult and complaints about crime were constant, so the Americans decided to move Polish DPs into fenced camps that had previously held prisoners of war or internees. The Aldingen camp was one of these: the Polish DPs moved in in April 1946, according to the local history society, while the Arolsen inventory dates its first records to 1 August 1946.

The camp was looked after by UNRRA Team 91, subordinate to the military command in Ludwigsburg, and carried the assembly centre number 717. It normally held about 950 Polish DPs. The first precise UNRRA statistic, dated 7 December 1946, lists four camps in Ludwigsburg and Aldingen with 3,094 residents in total, almost all Poles: the Jägerhof, Luitpold and Karls barracks, and Aldingen Camp No. 717 with 905 residents. The society’s reading that 3,094 people passed through Camp 71 appears to rest on this four-camp total and should be treated with caution.

The 164 pages of occupancy lists in the Arolsen Archives show a camp with equal numbers of men and women. Change reports record Polish DPs being transferred to Aldingen from other camps, above all from Schwäbisch Hall, Ulm and Waiblingen, and Polish Ukrainians being transferred out to Ukrainian DP camps of their own. Repatriation remained slow: the first list, in August 1946, named 44 residents willing to return, and later months brought 68 in November 1946, 57 in December, 8 in January 1947 and 40 in February. October 1946, with 342 returnees, was the one exception.

On 29 May 1947 the remaining 621 residents were moved to the Luitpold barracks in Ludwigsburg and Camp 71 was dissolved. The Arolsen inventory places the closure between 20 May and 20 June 1947, and the 1947 town chronicle records that the barracks of the Aldinger Lager were handed back by the occupation authorities in the summer of that year.

From camp to Grünbühl

The barracks did not stay empty. From 1947 they housed German expellees and refugees, and the settlement that grew there acquired its own shops, schools and small industrial sites. Its administration was awkward because the ground belonged partly to Ludwigsburg, partly to Aldingen and partly to Kornwestheim, although Ludwigsburg looked after the residents. In the same year about 450 former DPs, mostly Poles and Ukrainians whose DP status had been withdrawn by UNRRA or the IRO, were assigned to Ludwigsburg as refugees; that figure covers the town as a whole, not the Aldingen camp.

For Polish DPs who stayed in Germany, the state hostel Aldingen-Neuheim was built on the Aldingen part of the site in 1950 as part of the Grünbühl settlement, and in 1951 to 1952 an IRO emigration camp was set up to the west on Kornwestheim land. In 1956 Aldingen and Kornwestheim ceded the ground to Ludwigsburg and Grünbühl became a district of the town; Pattonville, the housing estate for the US Army, rose on the eastern part of the old parade ground from 1954. The 1989 study concluded that Ludwigsburg had to house displaced persons longer than most towns, until 1951, and that the DPs themselves left almost no written trace of their own.