Buckenberg-Kaserne

The former infantry barracks

The barracks were built in 1936 to plans by Karl Kölmel, head of the Karlsruhe district building office, and German troops moved in that October when the third battalion of Infantry Regiment 111 took occupation. The complex covered more than eighteen hectares, with its main entrance at the junction of Strietweg and the road later named Straße des 3. Husarenregiments. The surviving postcard shows the gate and a large accommodation block during the military period, before displaced families arrived.

A local compilation of documents on the air raids of 1944 and 1945 records that the light home flak batteries 29/VII and 35/VII were quartered in the Buckenberg barracks, and that the guns of such units, being light flak, could do nothing against high-flying heavy bombers.

A Ukrainian camp from August 1947

A correspondent of the Aschaffenburg Ukrainian weekly Nedilia walked out to the barracks in September 1947 and described a camp only weeks old. One more Ukrainian camp, he wrote, was born on 20 August that year, its people gathered from various Polish camps. He gives its number as 693a, the same assembly-centre code that the archival inventory records, and notes that Poles had been there before the Ukrainians and American soldiers after them.

His description is of six large blocks set around a central square, enclosed by iron railings, little damaged by the war and clean inside, at some distance from a city centre still in ruins. He puts 1,200 Ukrainians there, part of a group moved on from the Karlsruhe camp as that was turned into a transit camp for France. The left edge of the scanned column is cropped, so the sentence carrying the figure is incomplete, though the number itself is legible.

Schools, churches and clubs

The same report lists what the camp had put together within a month: an elementary school and a kindergarten, a Greek Catholic parish under Father Chopei and an Orthodox parish under Father Vurko, both already at work, and a theatre fitted out with much labour in a garage. A board beside the square, marked with the name of the sports club Zoria, carried the next football fixtures. The camp’s Plast troop had sixty members, and the co-operative sold apples, beer, books and newspapers.

The correspondent balanced the good air, the quiet and the space against the drawbacks: no way of earning, distance from any centre, and the camp’s own quarrels. He also noted that the camp police watched his newspaper seller, who nevertheless sold his whole bundle.

Commemoration on the camp square

By the autumn of 1948 the camp had a public life of its own. On Sunday 21 November 1948 it commemorated the 359 soldiers of the Ukrainian People’s Republic shot near the town of Bazar in Volhynia on that date in 1921. A symbolic cossack burial mound had been raised in the middle of the camp square, carrying a metre-high white cross that was lit by torches from the Saturday evening.

A solemn liturgy was celebrated in both of the camp’s churches, and at four in the afternoon detachments of veterans, young people and the camp police drew up in front of the mound with their flags and the banners of the youth association, followed by the camp school and the processions of both churches. A memorial service was begun by Father Kanda, the Orthodox parish choir sang under Father Zaiats, and the rector of the Orthodox church, Protopresbyter Umanets, proclaimed the eternal memory. General Sadovsky spoke, and the camp choir and reciters gave the concert that followed.

The same issue reports a lecture in the camp’s youth-association clubroom by Colonel General Mykhailo Omelianovych-Pavlenko on the Ukrainian-Polish war of 1918 and 1919, given to an audience of veterans and young people. Neither report names the barracks, so the identification with Buckenberg rests on this being the Ukrainian camp of Pforzheim in the archival record.

Different communities at different dates

The 2023 study describes approximately 1,700 people deported from Poland living here from January to mid-1946, followed by about 1,500 displaced people of Ukrainian origin from 1947. The authors distinguish these postwar arrivals from people forced to work in Pforzheim during the war. Their research therefore does not support treating every DP resident as a former local forced labourer.

The zone-wide table of Ukrainians in American-zone camps gives a Pforzheim row of 1,127 for the questionnaire collection of 1946 and 1947, only 9 in the UNRRA return of August 1946, nothing in May 1947 and 982 in the PCIRO return of December 1947. The pattern matches a camp that became Ukrainian only in the second half of 1947, but the row carries the town name alone and names no barracks.

The camp in administrative records

The inventory gives capacity of 1,250 on 31 October 1947 and associates the camp with UNRRA Team 520, assembly-centre codes 693 A and 691 A, and later BN 204. This capacity is a different measure from the historical population estimates. The referenced city-archive files cover official correspondence and DP accommodation, while the Arolsen references include lists and changes in Pforzheim’s camp population.

Later military use and surviving traces

The camp’s administrative closure falls between September 1950 and March 1951. French forces then used the barracks as Quartier Burnol from 1951 until 1996, the 3rd Hussar Regiment being stationed there from 1963. Most buildings were demolished in the summer of 2007, though the armoury, two entrance buildings and the former officers’ quarters survive in new uses.

Monumental stone sculptures were salvaged and stored; new archive-based research about their origins and political meaning was presented by the city archive in July 2025. These surviving objects belong to the barracks’ earlier military architecture.

A United States Army veterans’ website publishes contributors’ accounts of a later military use. One describes Buckenberg Kaserne as an old Wehrmacht barracks occupied by French forces after the war, a section of which eventually housed Battery D of the 3rd Battalion, 71st Air Defense Artillery, and states that it is not clear when that began. Another, who served there between 1981 and 1985, placed the administrative building on the west side of a barracks under French control since the end of the war and reported that the American portion was afterwards torn down. The site publishes recollections sent in by former soldiers rather than official records.