Aufbauschule Camp

A school building put to new use

The Aufbauschule belonged to the institutional history of today’s Max-Reger-Gymnasium. A royal teacher-training institution had opened on the site in 1880 and ran until 1935, when the Deutsche Aufbauschule took its place with a six-year course leading to the Abitur. After the war, UNRRA took over the school building for displaced people. The German school’s teaching moved elsewhere in Amberg, illustrating how the same institution and its building could follow different paths during the emergency.

The school-history account records lessons restarting in the Landgericht building on 15 November 1945. Another move followed in 1947. Those were changes in the German school’s location, not dates for the arrival or departure of all displaced people at the original building. The school’s own chronology states that the war-damaged building was reoccupied in December 1951, more than two years after the register’s closing date for the camp; no source read here explains what happened in the interval.

Dates, capacity and administration

The inventory gives an opening date of 24 January 1946 and a closing date of 31 July 1949, a capacity of 700 recorded on 31 October 1947, and assembly-centre identifiers AC 93-549 and AC 93-375, later NBO 455. Supervision came from UNRRA Team 133 at Amberg and Team 570 at Vilseck. Capacity describes accommodation provision on one date, not occupancy and not a count of Ukrainian residents. No verified Ukrainian-only total has been established for this particular building.

The record cites documentation in two places: monthly returns for Amberg among the papers of the International Tracing Service, and files at the Staatsarchiv Amberg, including the collection of monthly reports by the parishes of the Amberg district to the military government on their inhabitants, refugees and displaced persons for 1945 to 1950.

A third documentation lead lies in the archives of the International Refugee Organisation. A catalogue description in the EHRI Portal, drawn from the Archives Nationales de France, lists a dossier of IRO administrative documents from the American zone of Germany that includes documents concerning “Aufbauschule, Amberg” dated October to November 1947. Only the catalogue entry has been read here; the contents of the dossier are not known.

A theatre in the camp hall

On 18 August 1945, a Latvian theatre company gave its opening performance in the Aufbauschule camp. The company had moved from Marienbad through Weiden to Amberg. It staged Rūdolfs Blaumanis’s comedy No saldenās pudeles before Latvian refugees, UNRRA officials and invited Estonian, Lithuanian and Polish representatives. The performance is five months earlier than the inventory’s opening date, which shows that people were housed in the building before the assembly centre was formally registered.

The contemporary report describes flowers presented to the performers and a later performance in the school hall filled to capacity. The troupe hoped to visit other Latvian camps, although transport difficulties stood in its way. This is evidence of Latvian cultural life at the shared site; it is not an account of a Ukrainian theatre company.

Residents, tracing and the Ukrainian question

A family-tracing notice published on 27 April 1946 used “DP Camp, Aufbauschule, Amberg” as a return address. Alongside the theatre report, it confirms that the school name functioned as a residential address for displaced families.

The published Ukrainian population table has a single row for Amberg covering the whole town rather than any one building. It records no figure in the questionnaire returns collected in 1946 and 1947, then 10 Ukrainians in the UNRRA return of 24 August 1946, 135 in the UNRRA return of 31 May 1947 and 86 in the return compiled for December 1947. These are small numbers for a town with several camps, and none of them can be assigned to the Aufbauschule rather than to the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Kaserne or the other sites.

The town’s own reconstruction record shows how crowded Amberg was around the camp. In January 1946 there were 11,856 refugees and expellees spread across 39 camps, quartered in schools, inns and the town towers and fed from four kitchens. By January 1949 there were 10,132 refugees alongside 5,152 displaced persons in four named facilities. The Aufbauschule is not among those four, although the inventory records it as open until July 1949; the two records have not been reconciled. Refugees and expellees are a separate category from displaced persons and the figures cannot be added together.