Bois-Brûlé-Kaserne

A former military compound

Aschaffenburg was rebuilt into a large garrison after conscription returned in 1935. Four new barracks complexes went up at about five million Reichsmark each: the Pionierkaserne on Schweinheimer Straße in 1936, then the Lagardekaserne in 1936 and 1937, the Bois-Brûlé-Kaserne in 1937 and the Artilleriekaserne in 1938, the last three all on Würzburger Straße. The two names commemorated engagements of the town’s Jäger battalion in 1914, at Lagarde in Lorraine and in the Bois Brûlé in Burgundy.

In the autumn of 1937 the first battalion of Infantry Regiment 106 occupied the new barracks, and by the outbreak of war the garrison had grown to about 3,500 men. In November 1944 instructors of the regiment’s replacement and training battalion drilled the local Volkssturm battalion there in the use of light infantry weapons. On Easter Sunday 1945 the third battalion of the American 157th Infantry Regiment took the Artilleriekaserne and then the Bois-Brûlé-Kaserne by five in the afternoon before pushing on along Würzburger Straße.

Its postwar camp identity was Assembly Centre 257, also written AC 91-257, followed by UF 307 from September 1948. The camp catalogue links it to UNRRA Team 119 and to the Würzburg area, and lists Polish, Polish-Ukrainian and Russian populations. These administrative descriptions sit alongside Ukrainian community surveys that identify Bois-Brûlé separately from Artillerie, Pionier, Jäger and Lagarde.

A growing Ukrainian presence

The UNRRA return of 24 August 1946 records 79 Ukrainians at Bois-Brûlé. The UNRRA return of 31 May 1947 gives 1,132, followed by 1,170 in the PCIRO figures compiled at the start of January 1948. The questionnaire survey collected by the Ukrainian central representation during 1946 and 1947 lists 1,300. The figures establish a substantial Ukrainian presence without treating the camp’s entire population as Ukrainian.

A recorded capacity of 1,420 dates from 31 October 1947. Capacity and resident counts answer different questions: one concerns accommodation, while the other describes people present when a particular return was made.

A city full of displaced people

The town’s military history records that by some estimates up to 20,000 displaced people were accommodated in Aschaffenburg, housed above all in the barracks but at first also in schools and private flats. A military government report of October 1945 described armed bands among a minority of the camp population and a serious crime problem in the district, followed by a raid on the Aschaffenburg camps in which 43 people were arrested. These are city-wide accounts of the camp quarter as a whole; the report names no individual camp, and none of its figures belongs to Bois-Brûlé.

An art lottery in the camp

A short report in the Ukrainian women’s periodical Hromadianka describes a lottery held in the Bois-Brûlé camp in which paintings by the well-known women artists L. Morozova and O. Liaturynska were offered as prizes. It reports considerable interest and a return of 520.60 marks in cash. Published in the 1949 double issue numbered 7 and 8, the notice provides a rare glimpse of cultural fundraising inside this particular camp.

The report belongs to the wider work of Ukrainian women’s organisations in displacement. The same page records that many active women had been transferred from the Aschaffenburg camps to both Mittenwald camps, and discusses the practical problems of emigration. It does not identify Bois-Brûlé as the origin of any particular transfer.

Part of a wider Ukrainian centre

Aschaffenburg hosted Ukrainian representative bodies whose work included legal and material assistance and support for resettlement abroad. Bois-Brûlé was one component of this local network. The city’s better-documented institutions belonged to other camps: the Ukrainian secondary school to Lagarde, and the surviving Greek Catholic parish reports of 1945 and 1946 to the Lagarde and Eger barracks and the vocational school. None of those accounts should be transferred to this compound.

Closure and a new military use

The camp inventory records closure on 7 August 1949, the last of the five Aschaffenburg barracks camps to close. The town’s barracks had by then served nearly four years as accommodation for displaced people, and in March 1949 the military government ordered the German services out of the Pionier- and Lagarde-Kaserne by 5 April so that troops could move back in. The Bois-Brûlé compound was rebuilt by the autumn of 1950 in 120 working days by a thousand workers at a cost of 4.5 million marks, and in 1952 it was renamed Graves Barracks after Staff Sergeant William E. Graves. Its 1954 photograph shows the later American motor pool, preserving the appearance of the site after displaced residents had left.

The surviving documentary record

Municipal archivists reorganised Aschaffenburg’s UNRRA records in 2021 and 2022, linking postwar investigations with surviving wartime documents. The camp catalogue points to the same city and collegiate archive for the registry office death books and a ten-page list of displaced people, and to a run of tracing-service documents for Aschaffenburg.