Prinz-Leopold-Kaserne

The barracks before the camp

The Prinz-Leopold-Kaserne was built in 1877 and 1878 on what was then Kasernstraße, now Rathenaustraße, and housed the first battalion of the 7th Infantry Regiment. Bayreuth knew it simply as the Siebenerkaserne, the seven-ers’ barracks, and it was the largest building on the site.

The garrison suffered heavily in the air raid of 8 April 1945; in the neighbouring Hans-Schemm-Kaserne alone as many as 170 soldiers were killed while collecting their food. Within weeks of the American occupation the surviving barrack blocks were holding displaced persons instead of soldiers.

A community in former barracks

The administrative inventory identifies this camp as Assembly Centre 92-255 and later OMF 319. It records an opening on 29 August 1945 and an end date of 1 October 1949. These are the inventory’s administrative dates, rather than dates of arrival and departure for every resident. Its nationality field describes the camp as Ukrainian.

The camp was not Ukrainian from the beginning. A registration of 25 June 1945 counted 3,158 Poles, 271 Lithuanians, 58 Russians and two stateless people in the Prinz-Leopold-Kaserne. The Ukrainian character the camp is remembered for was the result of the sorting and consolidation of the following years, and by August 1949 the roughly 1,500 people still living there were predominantly Ukrainians, with Hungarians, Poles and Yugoslavs among them.

A separate Bayreuth entry, Camp Mack, had different identifiers and a mixed Baltic and Polish-Ukrainian population. Another entry concerns Mack at Wendelhöfen. A reference simply to Bayreuth therefore needs its barracks name or camp number to establish which site it describes.

A Ukrainian almanac published at Munich in 1948 carried an advertisement for the PLAST co-operative, which the advertisement placed at Munich and Bayreuth with branches at Regensburg, Passau and Neumarkt. It sold products including magazines connected with Plast, the Ukrainian scouting organisation. The co-operative’s own advertisements in the Plast youth journal Na slidi give its Bayreuth address as Block IX of the Leopold Kaserne, and one of them adds the words DP Camp to that address.

The co-operative’s own notices set out what it did from that address. It supplied, in its own words, all the equipment needed for scouting, Plast literature, and school and stationery supplies, and it advertised publications that could be obtained there. It also advertised to buy up offcuts of khaki cloth so that it could make Plast badges for participants, rovers and helpers.

The journal was run from the same address. Readers were told that Na slidi could be ordered and subscribed to at the Plast co-operative, Bayreuth, Leopold-Kaserne, at two Reichsmarks an issue, and that all material for the journal should be sent to the co-operative at Leopold Kaserne, Block IX. Its philately column records that a set of stamps was produced by the Neumeister printing works in Bayreuth, in sheets of thirty, with a print run of 3,000 of each stamp.

The journal also shows Bayreuth’s scouts away from the barracks and records the youngest end of the organisation. A photograph caption describes Plast members from Bayreuth on a hike in the Alps. A death notice announces that the novice nest Diti Sontsia, or Children of the Sun, at Bayreuth had lost one of its members on 19 February 1948, in her ninth year.

The changing population

Published returns record 1,301 Ukrainians at Leopold-Kaserne in August 1946, 1,432 in May 1947 and 2,610 in December 1947. These dated counts reveal substantial change within an established camp. They should not be confused with the inventory’s capacity of 3,270 in October 1947.

Ukrainian reference works give the swing rather than a single figure, putting the camp between 500 and 4,000 people across the years 1945 to 1949 and placing it among the large Ukrainian camps of the American zone. One account of the camp settles on about 1,900 Ukrainians and names Dr Mykola Tsenko as its commandant.

Education and literary life

Schooling at Bayreuth ran from a gymnasium and a secondary modern school through a commercial school to teacher-training courses, and youth and sports organisations worked alongside them. Among the teachers were the pedagogues Vasyl Lev and Kost Kysilevskyi and the composer Ivan Nedilskyi.

A choir was founded in the camp gymnasium in 1945. Nedilskyi taught its music theory and Anastasiia Ohrodnyk-Zhylava conducted it, and some of its singers, the basses in particular, were called on to strengthen the town choir at the Festival Theatre. A camp sports society, UST Dnipro, carried the same name into competition.

Bayreuth had a Ukrainian lower commercial school. It also hosted the Ukrainian Artistic Movement’s conference on literary criticism on 4–5 October 1946. These institutions connected practical training with intellectual debate: a camp could be both a temporary home and a meeting place for a dispersed literary community.

The literary meeting belonged to a wider circuit. The Artistic Ukrainian Movement, founded at Fürth near Nuremberg on 25 September 1945, held its congresses and conferences in one displaced-persons town after another — Aschaffenburg, Augsburg, Bayreuth, Ulm, Berchtesgaden, Mainz-Kastel, Stuttgart. The Bayreuth meeting was its critical conference, at which Borys Podoliak spoke on the problems of contemporary Ukrainian literary criticism in emigration, Leonid Bilets’kyi on the writer and the critic, and Ostap Hrytsai, Yurii Kosach, Ihor Kostets’kyi, Vasyl Chaplenko and Volodymyr Derzhavyn on criticism, genre and the reader.

Schoolwork itself has survived. The Shevchenko Scientific Society Archives in New York lists fifteen school notebooks from Bayreuth DP-camp educational facilities in a collection dated 1945–1949. These exercise books provide a further archival route into classroom life, alongside the published accounts of the town’s schools.

Craft and art on show

In 1948 the Bayreuth sub-headquarters of Area 3, working for the Preparatory Commission of the International Refugee Organisation, mounted an exhibition of work made by the displaced persons of its camps and published two illustrated catalogues of it, one of handicrafts and one of paintings, sculpture and graphics. Joseph M. Lisiak, the field supervisor, presented both; E. Paramanoff took the photographs with his own equipment and supplies; and an exhibition committee of displaced persons ran the sections, with Professor E. Lipeckyj responsible for art.

The handicrafts catalogue lists its exhibits by nationality and by the camp they came from, and twenty-three of the eighty plates are Ukrainian work from Leopold Kaserne: a bead-inlaid plate, three wood carvings and a carved plaque, a candy bowl, a cross, albums, national dresses, three blouses, an ikon shawl, a pillow case, two carpets, table centres, two embroidered table cloths, embroidered linen, an embroidered pillow case and pillow cover, and a table d’oyley. They are set beside Baltic work from Camp Mack, Camp Pegnitz and the Baltic camp at Bamberg, White Ruthenian straw boxes and Russian carving from Camp Mainleus, Jewish metalwork and candlesticks from the Ulanen-Kaserne at Bamberg and the Marktredwitz community, and Polish dolls and metalwork from Camp Coburg.

The catalogue’s introduction is an argument as much as a list. Its compilers set out to answer the charge that displaced persons lived in idleness on charity, describing over-crowded and run-down buildings, families sharing rooms, and constant inspection by army and IRO officers that left a displaced person, in their words, as much privacy as a goldfish in its bowl. Against that they set the camp kitchens, fire squads, camp police, building repairs, gardens and vegetable patches, the schools that had to be established and staffed, and the vocational courses, all of it managed by the residents and largely at their own cost, with many of the exhibited pieces made from scrap and with self-made tools.

The companion volume names the artists. Its Ukrainian contributors were Osyp Bobyns’kyi, Mykola Yaroshenko, born in Ukraine on 18 February 1919 and a student of the Kyiv architectural institute until the war stopped him, Yurii Kodak, born in 1916 and trained at the academies of fine art in Lviv and Kyiv, Leonid Kostiushko, born at Lviv on 25 February 1909, brought to Germany as a forced labourer in 1942 and by then cultural leader of the camp at Mainleus, and Yevsevii Lipets’kyi, born at Verbivtsi in northern Bukovina in 1889, a teacher of art at the Ukrainian high school in Chernivtsi until the Soviet occupation of 1940 drove him out. The catalogue calls Lipets’kyi the acknowledged cultural leader of the Ukrainian community in Bayreuth. Their subjects were the places they were living in: Bayreuth streets and churches, the Festival Theatre birches, Coburg, Kulmbach, Bamberg and Pegnitz, alongside portraits of UNRRA and IRO staff and a bust of a camp leader.

Books for learning and cultural survival

Bayreuth also appears on Ukrainian books produced during the camp years. A research bibliography records a 1947 manual of theoretical mechanics, a 1948 dairying handbook, a 1949 guide to practical pig husbandry and a 1948 volume of selected poetry. These were publications in the town’s Ukrainian milieu; their imprints alone do not establish that each was printed inside Leopold-Kaserne.

The range is striking: technical instruction and agriculture sat alongside literature. Such books could support interrupted education and help readers prepare for work after migration. Their survival also provides evidence of a community concerned with building a future, beyond the immediate administration of relief.

A postal service of its own

The camp post office began operating in June 1946. Ukrainian camp postal services handled the local stage of correspondence and developed their own stamps and cancellations, making surviving postal material a distinctive record of community organisation. The Bayreuth service belonged to a wider network that included Regensburg.

The postal history follows the movement of people. When the Bayreuth and Regensburg settlements closed and residents were transferred, new services appeared at Neu-Ulm in autumn 1949 and at Sedan-Kaserne in Ulm in May 1950. These links show why an envelope from a later camp can belong to the history of an earlier community.

A catalogue of the Ukrainian camp issues compiled by Borys Fessak covers sixty-six camp stamps and four souvenir sheets, with their colour varieties, camp cancellations and souvenir folders. Its publisher’s description names Regensburg, Bayreuth, Neu-Ulm and Ulm/Donau as the four Ukrainian camps that prepared such postage. The count of sixty-six covers all four camps together, not Bayreuth alone.

After the displaced-persons camp

The barracks answered an urgent housing need once the camp closed. In 1950 the building was converted into 68 flats for people who had been living in mass refugee camps, with room for three small businesses including a butcher and a bicycle shop; the Leopoldkaserne came before the Bavarian cabinet again as item XI of its protocol of 20 February 1951. Those later residents form a different population from the Ukrainian camp counts of 1946 and 1947. The barracks were pulled down in 1972 and nothing was put up in their place; the site became a car park.

Camp records themselves travelled abroad. The 1982 research guide records a box of Bayreuth DP camp archives at Oseredok, the Ukrainian Cultural and Educational Centre in Winnipeg. This is a separate archival trail from the administrative lists preserved in Germany.

A personal account of the camp is recorded in a scholarly bibliography. The reference list of a 2020 article in the historical series of the Ostroh Academy journal cites a six-sheet typescript memoir by Nataliia Palidvor-Sonevytska on the Second World War and the displaced-persons camp at Bayreuth seen through the eyes of a teenager. The citation does not say where the typescript is held.