Fliegerhorst-Kaserne

From airbase to accommodation

The Fliegerhorst barracks stood between Sindelfinger Allee and the railway to Sindelfingen. Development of the site began in May 1936, at the same time as the new civil airport at Echterdingen, and the barracks buildings themselves were begun in spring 1937. The difficult, wet ground required concrete piles beneath the barracks. New facilities included accommodation, a command building, workshops, water supply from a new works at Aidlingen and sewage disposal through a treatment plant built jointly with Sindelfingen under a contract of 16 December 1937. The surviving municipal plan of April 1940 shows the physical setting before its postwar use.

A French unit took over the Fliegerhorst and its barracks on 22 April 1945. It first housed German prisoners of war there, then established an internment camp for civilians and a camp for about 3,000 people left without a home, in the majority Poles and Russians. The American army took over the Böblingen district from early June, and by July was installed in the Fliegerhorst and the tank barracks, adding a large vehicle repair works on the former airfield. These were distinct populations with different circumstances. The camp discussed here is the Polish DP accommodation at Fliegerhorst-Kaserne, listed as Assembly Center 607 and later WG 228, under UNRRA Team 506.

Two camps on the airfield

The municipal archive records 82 people in the Polish camp in July 1945, compared with 2,800 in the Russian camp. The later inventory gives the Polish facility a capacity of 2,050 and lists both Polish and Ukrainian nationalities, with an opening date of 15 October 1945 and closure between 30 September 1950 and 31 March 1951. These figures describe different dates and measures: the early census cannot be compared directly with a later accommodation capacity.

The Polish name therefore describes the camp’s administrative identity without exhausting the nationalities in its records. The available evidence does not give a separate Ukrainian population total. Böblingen does not appear at all in Stebelsky’s tabulation of Ukrainians in American-zone camps, so no published Ukrainian figure exists for this site. UNRRA looked after the camp initially, with the International Refugee Organisation taking over in 1947.

Team 506 at Böblingen also administered several camps in the surrounding district, and two of them were recorded as Ukrainian: Dätzingen, Assembly Centre 608, and Herrenberg, Assembly Centre 610. A further camp at Sindelfingen held Estonians and Latvians and one at Unterjettingen Czechoslovaks. Ukrainian residents of the district therefore appear under several separate administrative entries, and figures for one must not be carried across to another.

Families and medical care

Residents received meals and care from camp doctors and nurses at a sick bay inside the camp. Patients were also treated at the district hospital in Böblingen and the hospital in Sindelfingen, and some children of the Polish camp are documented as having died in the Böblingen hospital. The city archivist notes that hygiene in the camp was certainly poor, and that some displaced people lived outside it. Civil death registers preserve evidence of children from the camp who died of illnesses, including whooping cough, and congenital conditions.

A group of 32 children’s gravestones on the Old Cemetery remains the visible trace of this community. They are the graves of Polish children and of one German boy, made between about 1945 and 1950. Neighbouring children’s graves were later cleared, but these were protected as public graves under the 1965 federal law on the graves of victims of war and tyranny, and the weathered stones were restored or replaced in 1998 and 1999 after a proposal from Böblingen residents.

Homes beyond the barracks

The military authorities required the airfield DP accommodation to be vacated by 15 October 1950. The municipal history records 580 people remaining, to be housed in the places where the adults worked. This final movement was into local communities rather than necessarily overseas. It connects the history of the camp with the longer process of settlement and employment in postwar Germany. State-wide, Württemberg-Baden took on about 7,500 people of the so-called hard core at first, and later more than 10,000.

The Bundeswehr moved into the buildings of the former Fliegerhorst barracks in 1956, and the site became the Wildermuthkaserne. The last soldiers’ hostel of the Fliegerhorst, latterly used as accommodation for asylum seekers, was demolished in September 2004 during the redevelopment of the former airfield.

The surviving record

Administrative records can be traced through the ITS lists cited in the camp inventory, documents 81971100 to 81971566, and the Böblingen district archive. The cited district holdings are files 2618, 2619, 2679, 2715, 2725, 3201 and 7952 within OA/krBB/Hb 1. The city archive’s published account adds evidence from municipal civil registers, while the historical airfield plan supplies a view of the premises before families arrived. What is missing is any account of the community’s own life: no camp school, church, newspaper or association at this site has been traced in the sources read.