Altöttinger Hof

A seventeenth-century building

The Bavarian monuments register describes a substantial three-storey Baroque building with a hipped roof and two rear wings. Its three-wing arrangement distinguishes the inn from a purpose-built barrack camp. The protected building stands at Mühldorfer Straße 1, adjoining the central pilgrimage quarter.

From religious house to family inn

The inn’s own history says monks first occupied the house, which passed to the state during secularisation in 1803–1805. Brewery owner Georg Wasner bought it in 1870. Alois and Maria Stechl acquired the inn in 1928, beginning the family ownership described in its later history. These changes place the displaced-person accommodation within the longer life of a working town inn.

The return of 12 August 1947

Christian Haringer’s enumeration for 12 August 1947, quoted by Haus der Bayerischen Geschichte, names four buildings. It records 200 Polish Jews at the Gasthaus Bayerischer Hof, 200 Ukrainians at the Gasthof Zwölf Apostel, 50 Yugoslavs and Ukrainians together at the Gasthof Altöttinger Hof, and 200 Yugoslavs in the former domestic science school Josefsburg of the Englische Fräulein. Individual people were lodged elsewhere, among them the inns Schex, Alte Post and Huber, and private houses.

The 50 recorded here is the smallest of the four figures and the only one that combines two nationalities without dividing them. It is a count on one day and not a total of everyone who passed through the inn. Ukrainians at Altötting therefore lived across at least two separate inns rather than in a single compound.

Registered centres and unregistered houses

Displaced-person work at Altötting was run by UNRRA Team 305, with Watson recorded as team director from January 1946 and Brooke as field supervisor. From November 1946 the town was served by the area teams at Traunstein and Bad Reichenhall in the Munich area A 7. The American military government kept its district base at the Hotel Zur Post on the Kapellplatz, and displaced people drew ration cards centrally and spent them in the town’s shops.

The Arolsen inventory registers four numbered Altötting centres: the Polish House, opened on 23 December 1945; the Bayerischer Hof, recorded as Jewish with a capacity of 312 and closed on 12 April 1948; Altötting III, recorded as Yugoslav with a capacity of 126; and Altötting IV, for which no nationality is recorded. Altöttinger Hof is not among them, and neither is Zwölf Apostel.

The inn accordingly has no registered opening date, capacity or assembly-centre number. Its displaced residents were quartered in a working town inn under requisition, and they survive in a local historian’s enumeration rather than in an assembly-centre register.

Ukrainians counted at Altötting

Stebelsky’s table of Ukrainians in the camps of the American zone enters Altötting by town, not by building. It gives 136 from questionnaire returns collected during 1946 and 1947, 92 in the UNRRA summary of 24 August 1946 and 169 in the UNRRA summary of 31 May 1947, and prints no figure in the summary compiled for the Preparatory Commission of the International Refugee Organisation on 2 January 1948.

None of these totals can be assigned to Altöttinger Hof, and the town figure for May 1947 is smaller than the August 1947 figure for Zwölf Apostel alone. The two sets of numbers were compiled on different principles and should be read side by side rather than added together.

Ukrainian community life in the town

The Munich almanac of the Ukrainian Council for Physical Culture records one Ukrainian society at Altötting. Prolom was founded on 5 May 1947 under the chairmanship of Osyp Liskevych, in a town the almanac describes as famous for its pilgrimages and as holding 130 Ukrainians. Only the men’s volleyball section was active, and the society dissolved itself in the autumn of 1947 without having developed a programme.

A community spread across inns and private houses had no camp hall or sports ground of its own, which is the likeliest reason the society failed so quickly. The almanac’s 130 is its own figure for the town and belongs to no single building.

Keeping the Altötting houses apart

The four buildings in the 1947 return served different populations and must not be merged. The Bayerischer Hof at Neuöttinger Straße 5 was the administrative seat and social centre of the Jewish displaced-persons community and contained its prayer room; it had been a Wehrmacht auxiliary hospital and was demolished in the 1960s. The Josefsburg was a former domestic science school. Zwölf Apostel stands at Kapuzinerstraße 3. Altöttinger Hof, at Mühldorfer Straße 1, is a separate protected building and the only one of the four recorded with a mixed Yugoslav and Ukrainian household.

A place for gatherings

A July 1950 pilgrimage notice named Altöttinger Hof as the midday gathering place for Egerland participants. This records another use of the inn after the 1947 population return. Pilgrimage hospitality and displaced-person accommodation belong to the same building’s history, although the notice gives no end date for the latter.

The inn and its changing surroundings

A 1957 aerial photograph preserved by Altötting’s city archive shows the inn’s surroundings in the Bezirksamtshof. The published caption identifies the neighbouring Feuerhaus and explains that much of the courtyard’s building stock disappeared when a modern Stations of the Cross route was created in 1964. The municipal tourism photograph provides a later street-level view of the inn’s red-and-white façade.