DP Camp Arolsen No. 511

The barracks before 1946

Arolsen became a garrison town again in spring 1935, when the 2nd Regiment of the SS-Verfügungstruppe Germania moved into the barracks on the Grosse Allee. In December 1935 the office of the SS-Oberabschnitt Fulda-Werra took over the Neues Schloss. The regiment stayed in the barracks until 1939; from 1943 to 1945 the complex held an SS leadership school and an SS clothing store.

A sub-camp of Buchenwald known by the cover name Arthur was located on the barracks grounds from 1943 to 1945. Its roughly 100 male prisoners first worked on extending the leadership school and later in its large kitchen, in the clothing store and as cleaners and hairdressers. The SS cleared the sub-camp on 29 March 1945, immediately before the US Army entered the Waldeck area.

The tracing service as employer

At the end of 1945 UNRRA moved its Central Headquarters for Germany to Arolsen, and in January 1946 the Central Tracing Bureau followed from Frankfurt-Höchst. Its offices were at first scattered around the town. When UNRRA was wound up in the summer of 1947 the International Refugee Organisation took over the bureau, which worked under the name International Tracing Service from January 1948.

From 1945 both organisations employed mostly DPs, alongside Allied military and civilian staff and some Germans. DPs did clerical work and translation, kitchen and transport duties, and worked in nearly every department of the tracing service, where their command of Slavic languages was particularly valued. The bureau had 80 employees in 1945 and 1,758 by 1949. The number of DPs on its staff rose from 63 in June 1947 to 109 in January 1948, 150 a year later and 204 in the summer of 1949, before falling to 85 by January 1952 as people emigrated.

Six housing sites

In early 1946 the Allies requisitioned 96 residential buildings, three flats, six public buildings and the former barracks in Arolsen. Communal DP housing was set up in the former Hitler Youth centre Am Tannenkopf, in the Hotel Bergischer Hof at Fürstenallee 9, in the former military hospital at Kasernenstrasse 19, in a master painter’s house at Kasernenstrasse 15 and in the barracks; the Neues Schloss was added in 1949, after UNRRA and then the tracing service had used it as offices. A few DP employees lived in requisitioned private homes.

The barracks were the largest and longest-standing site, in use from January 1946 probably until the summer of 1952. In spring 1946 three of its buildings housed DPs. From March 1947 the complex also held a Vocational Training Center for DPs, with classrooms and lodgings for course participants; the centre had around 400 participants in spring 1947 and 675 in January 1948, and moved to Neuburg an der Donau in 1949. In May 1949 the tracing service took over the whole barracks, and Block F was fitted out with around 305 residential units and its own canteen for DP employees.

Conditions varied between the sites. The Bergischer Hof had around 27 residential units in May 1949, with a canteen on the ground floor. In the former youth centre and in the barracks residents had hardly any private space, and a 1950 renovation report shows that they had divided the large rooms with lightweight partitions and installed extra stoves, water pipes and drains themselves.

Who lived in the camp

The DPs were not registered by name in the UNRRA statistics, but the reports record their countries of origin. In April 1946, 350 DPs were registered in Arolsen: 140 Poles, 75 Lithuanians, 33 Latvians, 19 Estonians, 16 Jews, 23 stateless people and 44 whose nationality was not recorded. There were 408 registered in October 1946 but only 114 in June 1947, after which the number grew again with the expansion of the tracing service. The figures include family members who moved with the employees, and turnover was high.

The published chart of the camp population for 1946 to 1949 uses the categories Poland, Ukraine (Polish minority), Belarus (Polish minority), Soviet Union, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Jews, Yugoslavia, stateless or Nansen, and not specified. Polish and Baltic DPs were consistently the largest groups. The chapter gives no separate count for the Ukrainian category, so the presence of Ukrainians is documented but their number is not. The biographies it reconstructs include a Ukrainian-born chemist who followed the bureau from Frankfurt-Höchst because of his languages, and a doctor deported from western Ukraine in 1944 who provided medical care in the camp.

With the training centre, more than 800 DPs lived in Arolsen at times, and in March 1949 more than 1,000. Many of the residents were former forced labourers from Poland and the Soviet Union, former prisoners of war, concentration camp survivors and some Jews; a large group had come from the Baltic states in the last months of the war.

Running the camp and daily life

UNRRA Area Team 51, which also looked after the camps in Korbach, Landau and Rhoden, handled provisioning and registration; it was renumbered Area Team 1024 at the end of 1946 and 1025 from April 1947. DPs served as camp leader, assistant leader and secretarial staff, chosen by the team and voted on by the residents, and took on maintenance, kitchen and sanitary duties, fire and police services and translation for new arrivals. The camp police were mostly Polish DPs, and DP doctors provided everyday medical care. In April 1946 the UNRRA field supervisor noted the awkward position of a camp whose residents included over 300 people living and employed at the headquarters next door.

Residents formed their own sports and entertainment committees and a band. Bingo evenings, balls, cabaret and film screenings took place regularly; swimming classes used the old open-air pool Am Tannenkopf, and teams played against DPs from surrounding camps. Until the summer of 1949 events were held in the Kurhaus at Grosse Allee 23 and in the Altes Schloss, where a carnival ball took place in February 1949; afterwards most gatherings moved to the large canteen in Block E of the barracks. The DPs organised themselves in national groups, and Baltic residents mounted an arts and crafts exhibition for an international tracing conference in autumn 1949.

Many residents were families. More than 50 children were registered at the start of 1950, around 20 of them born in Arolsen or Korbach after the war, and families celebrated Christmas and Thanksgiving together. The local population was rarely invited to these events.

Closure and the site afterwards

Between 1947 and 1950 most DP camps in the western zones were dissolved. In December 1949 only 2,859 DPs were living in the whole of Hesse; besides the ITS Employees Camp in Arolsen there was one other camp in Hanau and three centres for repatriation and emigration. Arolsen’s DP population fell from 357 at the start of 1950 to 237 in early summer, as most residents emigrated to the USA, Canada or Australia.

The sites Am Tannenkopf, at Kasernenstrasse 19 and 15 and in the Neues Schloss closed in spring 1950, and the camp in the barracks was handed over to the ITS administration in February 1950, although communal housing there probably continued until the summer of 1952. The town’s history records the DP camp as existing from 1946 to 1951. The tracing service remained on the former barracks grounds; the old SS clothing store later became a hardware store and Block F a supermarket and electrical shop. The International Tracing Service was renamed Arolsen Archives in May 2019.