Kriegsschule Camp

The war school by the abbey

The building stood near the abbey ruins. A barracks was put up opposite the main portal of the Stiftsruine after Prussia annexed Hesse, and in 1871 the fusilier battalion of the 2nd Thuringian Infantry Regiment No. 32 was quartered in it; from 1890 the building housed a Prussian Kriegsschule. The Hessian state historical atlas records the same site’s successive uses as infantry barracks, military school and tax office. That physical history locates the camp within the town rather than at the separate Cornberg settlement.

The Kriegsschule should not be confused with the town’s other barracks. The Langemarck-Kaserne, built during the rearmament of the 1930s on the Hohe Luft above the town, was taken over by the United States Army in 1945 and renamed McPheeters Barracks, and American troops remained there for nearly half a century. The displaced persons went into the old school beside the abbey, not the newer barracks on the hill.

The camp in the records

The Arolsen inventory gives the camp its administrative shape. It carried the assembly centre number AC 548, replaced in September 1948 by the IRO designation K 120, and a capacity of 700 entered against 31 October 1947. It was served by UNRRA Team 715 Hersfeld, with a team director recorded as Shorthose and a field supervisor recorded as Jonckheere, and it lay in Area 1, Frankfurt am Main. The lists and change reports for Hersfeld are held at Bad Arolsen under document identifiers 81964322 to 81964379.

Two smaller installations shared the town and the same assembly centre number. A DP hospital opened at Hersfeld on 20 August 1946 and closed again within weeks. A transient camp, entered in the inventory as the Soviet Transient Camp, opened on 26 September 1947 with fifty places; at the end of October 1947 it held four people, and it had gone by the end of January 1948. For anyone being moved eastwards, that small annexe rather than the Kriegsschule was the last address in the town.

Hersfeld was also an administrative centre in its own right. Area Team 1023 Hersfeld covered more than twenty camps across northern and eastern Hesse: the large Polish and Ukrainian camp at Cornberg, the Constantin barracks at Fulda, the Braunsfels barracks at Wetzlar, the Jewish centres at Ziegenhain, Bad Nauheim and Bad Salzschlirf, the Polish camps at Allendorf, the Russian camp at Neukirchen and the hospitals at Fulda, Wetzlar, Haina and Marburg. A resident of the Kriegsschule was living at the seat of the office that ran them all.

The struggle against forced return

A declaration reproduced in the 1985 Ukrainska zemlia described about 350 Ukrainian political emigrants at the UNRRA centre in Hersfeld. Its authors feared that their threatened removal meant extradition to the Soviet Union and appealed to the American commander for freedom to leave the camp. The appeal records the residents’ understanding of the danger they faced.

Marta Dyczok’s history describes an American officer refusing to hand over a group assembled at Hersfeld and seeking to move them farther from Soviet control. Together, the appeal and historical account show how protection from repatriation could depend on decisions taken by local military authorities.

Repeated screening added to the insecurity. Marta Dyczok’s study describes nine examinations within one year, followed by the announcement of a tenth. Residents protested to their UNRRA repatriation officer and then appealed to American military authorities. An investigation led to the officer’s removal. This episode shows refugees organising to challenge administrative treatment as well as seeking protection from forced return.

An account published by the Foreign Intelligence Service of Ukraine, drawing on declassified archival documents, lists Hersfeld among the German cities whose camps held the greatest numbers of Ukrainians, alongside Regensburg, Mittenwald, Berchtesgaden, Neu-Ulm, Augsburg, Aschaffenburg, Ellwangen, Munich, Hanover, Heidenau, Weiden and Traunstein. The account gives no further detail about Hersfeld, and does not say which camp in the town the documents referred to.

Ukrainians at the military-school camp

The successive administrative returns for Hersfeld’s Kriegsschule record 430 Ukrainians in the questionnaire returns collected during 1946 and 1947, then 217 in August 1946, 246 in May 1947 and 41 in December 1947. The sharp fall establishes a change in the recorded community; these figures alone do not identify where each family went or establish the camp’s closure.

The four columns are not four snapshots of one kind. The first comes from the Central Representation of the Ukrainian Emigration’s own questionnaire, gathered across two years; the second and third are UNRRA assembly-centre summaries; the fourth is the PCIRO summary compiled at Heidelberg on 2 January 1948. Land Hessen as a whole runs 6,528, 3,972, 5,340 and 4,941 across the same four columns, so the collapse at Hersfeld to 41 is a local movement rather than a zone-wide one.

Against a recorded capacity of 700, a Ukrainian population in the low hundreds means that the Kriegsschule was a mixed camp throughout its life, holding Poles, Latvians and Lithuanians alongside Ukrainians.

St Volodymyr’s parish in Hersfeld

The Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox parish kept a register of baptisms, marriages and funerals during 1946–1947. It survives as a small, distinct collection at the Ukrainian History and Education Center. These are traces of a family community maintaining religious life during displacement.

The surviving description identifies the parish with the Hersfeld DP camp, without specifying its address. Its records preserve a further dimension of the Ukrainian refugee community in the town, alongside the population returns that explicitly name the Kriegsschule.

The congregation was formally constituted: a statute for a parish of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church was printed at Hersfeld and is catalogued in the standard bibliography of Ukrainian displaced persons’ publications. A parish that prints its own statute is organising itself, not merely gathering.

Hersfeld also had a part in the wider quarrel over the government of that church. From 3 to 5 June 1947 the town hosted the seventh meeting of the Initiative Group for the Unification of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church of the 1921–1942 formation — the conciliar opposition to the emigre episcopate. The meeting discussed Archbishop Ioann Teodorovych’s letter of 28 April 1947 to Ivan Harashchenko and his correspondence with Bishop Mstyslav Skrypnyk on the terms of any union between the two churches. The group’s following meetings were held at Aschaffenburg in July and August.

News and a sense of home

Korotki visti was, on the best available account, the first Ukrainian periodical of the postwar emigration. It was published by the Ukrainian Organized Community, headed by Volodymyr Dolenko, Mykhailo Vietukhov and Vasyl Dubrovsky, and its first issue appeared in Weimar on 22 April 1945, before the war had formally ended. The first four issues were typed, and readers were asked to retype copies and pass them on; from the fifth the bulletin went over to letterpress. By its ninth issue it had moved to Hersfeld, in the American zone, where publication ended.

The bibliographies show what the move left behind. Korotki visti is catalogued at Hersfeld under the imprint of the Information Service of the Organized Ukrainian Community, with issues 3 (11) and 5 (13) of 1945 surviving — the double numbering of a bulletin that started again at Hersfeld while keeping its running total. A second Hersfeld title, the Bulletin of the Ukrainian Relief Committee in Hersfeld, survives in numbers 8 to 10 (25 to 27) and 12 to 13 (29 to 30), all of 1945, so that committee had put out about thirty numbers before the year was out.

Books were made there too. Vasyl Dubrovsky, one of the three men behind Korotki visti, reissued his Batko Nestor Makhno at Hersfeld in 1945, and a political pamphlet under the imprint U.N.D.I. was published in the town the same year. For a few months in 1945 this small Hessian town was one of the places where Ukrainian print was being produced.

A surviving photograph records a Hersfeld camp barber’s mirror surrounded by smaller photographs. Images of people and places filled the space around an everyday service. This arrangement brought personal memory into camp life, making room for familiar faces and earlier homes within temporary accommodation.

Closure and the spa town

The inventory gives the camp a closing date of 27 May 1949. By then the town had changed its own name: from 4 March 1949 Hersfeld was recognised as a spa and entitled to call itself Bad Hersfeld, and the inventory carries a separate entry for Bad Hersfeld which notes that the prefix has been used since 1949 and refers the reader back to Hersfeld.

The building outlived both the war school and the camp. The site opposite the abbey ruins that had been an infantry barracks and then a Prussian military school became the town’s tax office, which is what stands there today.

The record of the community

Camp statistics, parish records, a collective appeal and a refugee bulletin preserve complementary parts of Hersfeld’s story. They connect practical needs with efforts to maintain a community: finding protection, recording family events, circulating news and keeping memories visible during a period of uncertainty.